Blueblood: Hero of Equestria

Chapters

First Blood (Part 2)
Night's Blood (Prologue)
Night's Blood (Part 1)
Night's Blood (Part 2)
Night's Blood (Part 3)
Night's Blood (Part 4)
Night's Blood (Part 5)
Bloodstained (Part 1)
Bloodstained (Part 2)
Bloodstained (Part 3)
Bloodstained (Part 4)
Bloodstained (Part 5)
Bloodstained (Part 6)
Bloodstained (Part 7)
Bloodstained (Part 8)
Bloodstained (Part 9)
Bloodstained (Part 11)
Bloodstained (Part 12)
Bloodstained (Part 13)
Bloodstained (Part 14)
Bloodstained (Part 15)
Bloodstained (Part 16)
Bloodstained (Part 17)
Bloodstained (Part 18)
Bloodstained (Part 19)
Bloodstained (Part 21)
Bloodstained (Part 22)
Honour and Blood (Part 1)
Honour and Blood (Part 2)
Honour and Blood (Part 3)
Honour and Blood (Part 4)
Honour and Blood (Part 5)
Honour and Blood (Part 6)
Honour and Blood (Part 7)
Honour and Blood (Part 9)
Honour and Blood (Part 10)
Honour and Blood (Part 11)
Honour and Blood (Part 12)
Honour and Blood (Part 13)
Honour and Blood (Part 14)
Honour and Blood (Part 15)
Honour and Blood (Part 16)
Honour and Blood Part 17
Honour and Blood (Part 18)
Honour and Blood: Part 19
Honour and Blood: Part 20
Honour and Blood (Part 21)
Honour and Blood (Part 22)
First Blood (Part 1)
Bloodstained (Part 10)
Bloodstained (Part 20)
Honour and Blood (Part 8)

First Blood (Part 2)

Something felt distinctly wrong as the itching in my hooves grew worse. As I thought about it I found that this was all rather too convenient; in the vast labyrinth underneath the city, hiding from shape-changing monsters that desire nothing but the complete destruction of our way of life, we come across a small squad of Royal Guard who just so happened to be patrolling through the same tunnel as we were. It was possible, I supposed, but highly improbable. It was the sort of deus ex machina normally found in dreadful action-adventure novels.

As we navigated through the tunnels the nagging feeling of ‘wrongness’ was growing stronger. How did this Guardspony know where he was going? The earth pony’s silence was rather unnerving too. At the very least he would have attempted to strike up a conversation with Cannon Fodder, a fellow comrade-in-arms. The more I thought about t the greater my suspicions grew. At this stage they were merely suspicions, nothing without any grounding in evidence. At this stage in my life I hadn’t learned to trust the odd signs my subconscious used to tell me that something was wrong.

I decided to try and test out my suspicions and trotted up next to Spear Point. Now, I’m a rather tall pony myself, probably due to my distant link with the immortal, giant goddesses who ruled Equestria, but the good Sergeant towered a full head above me. His coat was purest white, in accordance with the Royal Guard’s tradition of dyeing its members’ fur. His eyes, however, seemed impassive and emotionless like his facial expression, which I found rather disconcerting. They seemed glassy, as if lacking life; even Cannon Fodder with his permanently gormless expression seemed more animate than him.

“So,” I said, trying to make it sound like I was trying to make conversation, “the 3rd Solar Guard? It’s a good regiment; I served alongside them during my Royal Guard days.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” he said flatly. “You served in the Royal Guard?”

I nodded, “1st Solar Guard, ‘Celestia’s Own’.”

“The best of the best,” he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice and a slight smile on his lips. He certainly looked and talked like a guardspony, right down to the tense but friendly rivalry between the regiments. I decided to push him a little further, knowing that Changelings are very good at imitating but could theoretically be caught out when asked about specifics.

“Hmm, 3rd Solar Guard, that means you must come from the area around Baltimare.”

He nodded.

“I’ve always wanted to visit Baltimare, have you seen the Statue of Harmony there? Of course you have.”

The sergeant hesitated a little before he answered, “Yes, you can see it from all parts of Baltimare.”

Got him! I lifted my sword up, pretending to inspect the keen edge of the blade but in actuality bringing it to a more favourable position to strike at the doppelganger.

“The 3rd Solar Guard recruits from Trottingham not Baltimare and the Statue of Harmony is actually in Manehatten. Everypony knows that.”

He stopped, looking at me incredulously in dawning realisation of his embarrassing and costly mistake. The Changeling hissed and his maw opened to reveal rows of sharp fangs that dripped sickeningly thick saliva as he prepared to lunge at me.

I was quicker and rammed the sword deep into his neck to be rewarded with a spray of sickly green ichor.

“Blueblood!” Rarity shrieked, evidently thinking I’ve lost my mind and killed a member of the Royal Guard.

The Changeling hissed and gurgled in pain before finally expiring. It fell in a collapsed heap on the ground like a coat dropping from a hook, and with a flash of green energy his true insectoid form was revealed to all.

Not wasting any time I turned and swung my sword in an arch, slicing cleanly through the other faux-guardspony’s neck. It still bore the same expression of surprise as its head pitched forward and rolled to the ground like a dropped hoofball and its decapitated body slumped to the ground in a fountain of green blood. A brief shimmer of green energy and it too returned to its original form.

“They... they were Changelings?” gasped Rarity. “Oh Celestia, how could they have infiltrated the Royal Guard? Equestria’s last line of defence has been compromised!”

I shook my head, “We don’t know that, it could have just been these three ponies. But we need to keep moving.”

Rarity nodded, somehow growing even paler than her pure shade of white as she stared wide eyed at the bloodied corpses before her. I’d have thought that as one of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony she would have been used to the sight of blood by now, but then again one as delicate and demure as she would probably never get used to it. Actually, I don’t recall the Bearers ever using lethal force in their adventures and instead preferred to use the power of friendship to overcome the odds. As far as I was concerned, a sharp blade did the trick just as well and without the uncomfortable process of having to form lasting attachments with people I can barely tolerate existing.

Rumbling emanated from down the tunnel, accompanied by the hideous sounds of chittering and shrieks of violence. Instinctively I stepped back to position myself behind Cannon Fodder and Rarity.

“What in Celestia's name is that?” Rarity shrieked over the din.

The Changelings came in a vast seething horde through the narrow tunnels as an unholy cloying mass of chitin, tattered wings, and razor sharp fangs.

Cannon Fodder stood firm, his face grim as he lowered his spear to meet the onrushing mob like an implacable rock before the incoming tide. He fought well, skewering the bug-like monsters on his spear and bucking like a mad horse. Yet despite his firm defence he was swallowed by the tide.

Rarity fared little better. Her face contorted in a mixture of fear and concentration as her horn lit with powerful magics. Gem stones from the walls around us were torn from their hiding places and circled in mid-air around Rarity, entrapped within a pale blue aura of magic. With a shout of exertion she telekinetically hurled the gems at the horde, felling a good number in the volley of lethally sharp jewels.

“Blueblood!” Rarity shrieked at me when she realised that I was standing frozen in terror. “Have you not a weapon? Then for Celestia’s sake I suggest you use it and FIGHT!”

I didn’t.

I ran away.

Yes, you read that correctly, the brave and noble Prince Blueblood, Hero of Equestria, bravely ran away in the face of almost certain death. I heard Rarity exclaim a stream of most unladylike language as I sprinted through the tunnels.

I don’t know for how long I ran, how far, or even where I ran to. All that was on my mind was preserving my own life. But after a while I gathered the courage to look over my shoulder and found no slobbering horde nipping at my tail. Exhaustion was starting to get the better of me; my coat was covered in a thick layer of sweat and grime and my legs were starting to burn with fatigue. I had no choice but to stop and recover.

There was a small alcove where I slumped down in an effort to hide myself, sucking in deep breaths of the stale cold air. I was lost. My special talent for subconsciously knowing exactly where I was and where I need to go wasn’t infallible; I needed to know my starting location and the approximate positions of local landmarks in order for it to work. In my flight I had lost track of everything and all of the tunnels and turnings blurred together in my panic.

I was lost, alone, and I had just abandoned the closest ponies I had to actual friends to almost certain death. The sensation of feeling guilt was unusual for me. I admit in my time I’ve done some rather unpleasant things; I was rude to Rarity in the Gala, I’ve duelled fellow aristocrats over the most facile of slights, and as a colt in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns I repeatedly bullied this purple filly egghead, but I’ve never once caused a pony mortal harm as a result of my selfishness.

I don’t know how long I sat there in the little alcove trying to recover, but it felt like several hours. Wiping my eyes on a fetlock I finally took a proper look at my surroundings. As far as I could tell, the way I was heading in my flight was going uphill. A thin draft emanated from that tunnel, hinting that there was likely an exit to the surface there. Feeling encouraged by this news and the promise of safety I pulled myself out of the alcove and picked up my sword once more before heading up the tunnel.

The chill of abject fear was worse now that I was alone. I even began to miss Rarity’s incessant whining and Cannon Fodder’s consistently unimpressed expression. My progress was slow as I placed one hoof in front of the other, peering around corners to check for waiting Changelings, and freezing at any out-of-place sound that reached my sensitive ears.

The tunnel turned to the left before levelling out. I followed my instincts, trusting in my special talent to guide me to safety. As it turned out, my special talent also hates me as instead of tasting the fresh Canterlot night air it led me through more winding passages, past crossroads and forks, before finally leading me to a small balcony area that overlook a large chamber.

If it weren’t for the mass of Changelings standing guard over a distraught looking Princess Cadence tied down to a sacrificial altar below me I’d have sworn loudly and profusely.

To this day I don’t know how my special talent for navigation quite managed it. Ponies tend not to have any conscious control over how their special talent works, with the possible exception of a certain purple, gifted unicorn I used to steal lunch money from. So it seems my special talent has a rather sick sense of humour; either trying to get me killed by leading me to the largest concentration of Changelings in the catacombs or trying to get me killed by encouraging me to perform some amateur heroics and try to save Cadence. [It is possible that, on a subconscious level, Blueblood earnestly wanted to make up for his previous cowardice but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to him]

I retreated a little into the tunnel, trying to avoid being seen. To my immense relief none of the Changelings so much as glanced up to see a rather frightened white unicorn in a ridiculous uniform above them. The chamber was fairly large, about the size of a medium sized classroom, with the altar on a raised podium in the centre. Half a dozen Changelings were congregated around the altar, chittering and mingling about doing whatever it was Changelings do when they weren’t actively engaged in trying to destroy Equestria.

The altar itself was a stone slab the approximate size of a pony. Princess Cadence lay bound by thick sturdy ropes. Beside the altar Rarity and Cannon Fodder were hogtied on the floor, looking injured and rather worse for wear but otherwise alive and well.

Rarity looked most indignant, as if the greatest problem she was facing was the fact that her dress was utterly ruined, her manestyle wrecked beyond repair, and her pristine white coat looking much like Cannon Fodder’s dirt-induced piebald colour. I noticed a ball gag lodged in her mouth, no doubt her attempt to coerce the Changelings into surrender through weaponised whining didn’t account for the fact they could render her mute with that simple device.

Cannon Fodder on the other hoof still had the same blank expression he always wore, as if his imminent death at the hooves of these monsters was nothing more than a slight inconvenience.

One of the Changelings stepped forwards. It was much taller than the rest, about the size of my Auntie Luna, and its eyes possessed greater intelligence and keenness than the mindless drones that surrounded it.

It was a Purestrain, one of the ‘commanders’ of the Changelings that broadcast the psychic web that bound them to the Hive Mind. They were intelligent, sapient, and, in my experience, rather irritating.

“You won’t get away with this!” shouted Cadence in impotent rage, though to be fair; there was little she could physically do at this stage other than shout clichés at the Purestrain. “My husband will be here, and he won’t be happy!”

“Save your breath, Princess,” said the Purestrain with a great deal of irritation in his snakelike hiss, as if he had been putting up with Cadence’s complaining for quite a while. No doubt with Rarity added to the mix he was very close to snapping.

“I thought our spell banished all of you from Canterlot!”

The Purestrain stepped up to the podium slowly and circled around the altar like a cat sizing up its prey, his draconic eyes fixed upon the shapely form of the Princess.

“Some of us hid under your puerile little city,” he hissed, “where the spell couldn’t affect us. Since then I’ve been planning for the return of my Queen to retake what is rightfully hers. Oh, she will reward me greatly for this.”

The Purestrain leaned in close to Cadence, and she turned her head away from his probably rancid breath. “You see, when my Queen took your image for your wedding it formed a firm magical bond between you two. You should be honoured, really, to have been touched by a true goddess. This magical bond still exists, though faint and fading, but with sufficient magic I shall bring our Queen forth from her throne to once more take your image and rule Equestria forever.”

In an abject fit of insanity I jumped. Perhaps motivated by some small sense of duty to Equestria and my goddess-like Aunties or more likely that the situation seemed so hopeless I was willing to risk my life for some vain hope. My life seemed forfeit either way, if I ran away I would be at the mercy of my now unreliable special talent and whatever other Changelings were still in the tunnels. Even if I did make it out nopony would believe my story; it would have to be my word against faux-Cadence’s who would most likely turn the accusation against me.

I landed on a surprised Changeling, the beast’s body crunched disgustingly under my hooves and it expired. I swung my sword in an arc, catching a second Changeling in a horrific laceration across its barrel. It hissed and chittered in pain before keeling over dead.

“Blueblood!” Cadence exclaimed in a mixture of surprise and relief.

There was only one chance. I had to kill the Purestrain and sever this Changeling cell from the hive mind. The hideous creature looked up in surprise, but soon a thin grin formed on its distorted face as I lunged forth with my sword.

I felt my stomach lurch as my momentum was arrested in mid-air. My blood-stained sword fell to the ground with a clatter as my legs windmilled uselessly in the air.

“I was wondering where you went off to,” the Purestrain said, his voice sickeningly sweet with smugness and sarcasm. “So good of you to drop in on us, I wouldn’t want you to miss this.”

I could only watch in pathetic, useless terror as the Purestrain’s jagged horn, a hideous mockery of a unicorn’s graceful organ, illuminated with a baleful green glow. He closed his eyes in concentration, and his ugly face distorted further in the exertion of the spell. The glow grew stronger as more and more magic fuelled the malevolent spell, tearing a distortion in the fabric of reality above Cadence.

The void hurt my eyes and my brain to look at, as the skein of existence itself was bent and torn in various unnatural ways in a swirling vortex of forbidden magics. The Purestrain grimaced in exertion, grunting monstrously as he fuelled more and more magic into this unholy spell. The tear grew wider and wider, and a hideous screeching sound of reality itself being torn asunder filled the chamber. Gazing into the bleak abyss I could make out two green glowing eyes with pure malevolent anticipation. There I gazed upon Chrysalis, the Queen of the Changelings, as she prepared to step through this ethereal bridge and a grim sadistic laughter echoed in the room.

I struggled frantically against the magical hold on me, but it was no use. I was secured as if tied by strong rope. All I could do was float there in mid-air and watch in impotent horror as the beast prepared to return to Canterlot and destroy it from within.

Pop.

The portal burst like a bubble. It disappeared as if it was never there to begin with. The horn-light evaporated too and I fell to the ground in a clumsy flail of limbs. It was all rather anti-climactic really.

“What?” the Purestrain shrieked in confusion. He suddenly locked eyes with me, “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” I protested. I was just as confused as the Purestrain; maybe he got the spell wrong. Unlikely, I don’t know quite how powerful Purestrains are with magic but it is likely that he spent a long time planning this operation and was therefore unlikely to mess up the spell.

The Purestrain leapt over the altar in a single bound. True to my first assumption, his hot breath was disgusting and smelt of rotten meat.

“Tell me how you disrupted the spell!” he shrieked louder.

“I didn’t! I can barely perform any spells at all!”

“It’s true,” said Cadence, there was a slight grin to her face as she saw her mortal enemy’s plans all turn to ruin before her, “he wasn’t very good in magic school.”

Well, that was hardly a fair assessment. Granted I wasn’t particularly good at the whole studying thing but I did reasonably well at sports such fencing.

The Purestrain scoffed, “No matter, I’ll merely take your place in Canterlot’s royalty and feed off your subjects’ love.”

“Good luck, he only loves himself,” said Cadence with no small degree of snark.

A green flash engulfed the Changeling commander, which soon faded to reveal an exact facsimile of me gazing back. I shuddered as I looked upon my perfect doppelganger; identical to the most minute details; even the little tiny imperfections in my fur and skin, my strong build, and devilishly handsome good looks. The faux-Blueblood grinned back at me, leaning uncomfortably close to my face.

“Eh, I’ve seen better,” I deadpanned.

I did something that in any other circumstances would be considered thuggish and unpleasantly brutal, something utterly below the holy station of my office as a Prince of the Realm and nephew to the living goddesses of Equestria. I head-butted him.

I heard a disgustingly wet ‘squelch’ noise as I found that, by fortunate coincidence, I had rammed my horn into the Changeling’s eye and buried it to the hilt. Something warm and sticky trickled down from my horn onto my forehead, staining my pristine white coat an unpleasant dark green. The faux-Blueblood shrieked in my voice and convulsed in frantic spasms, seeing myself in such pain was extremely disturbing.

I tugged my head back, but found my horn was still embedded in the creature’s brain. Feeling somewhat merciful I summoned a charge of magic and blasted through the monster’s skull. I have to admit that watching my own head explode in a spectacular explosion of blood, brains, and bone fragments was deeply unpleasant. The headless corpse twitched and then fell to the ground, and I soon followed it as the magical grip on my body died with the Changeling.

My limbs were shaking and felt numb; my stomach churned and threatened to send up the canapés I had eaten at Fancy Pants’ party. It was peculiar how the relative warmth and comfort of the party felt so distant at the time. I picked up my sword with my magic and turned to face the Changelings congregating behind me.

The mindless beings reverted to instinctive behaviour, seeing the pony that just killed their leader they turned tail and fled down the tunnels.

“Blue-y, would you please be a dear and untie me!” Cadence shouted, waking me from my stupor.

I stepped over the still-twitching corpse of the Purestrain; thankfully his body reverted back to his natural form so I didn’t have to look upon my own dead body. Still splattered with Purestrain brains all over my face I must have made for a hideous sight, and all I really wanted at this moment was to take a shower.

Cadence was freed easily, who rewarded me by leaping up and enveloping me in a tight bear hug. Rarity and Cannon Fodder were next, the latter mumbling a thank you and the former wearing a harsh scowl at me.

“You ran away,” she said, her voice dripping with venom. “Once again Blueblood you showed your true colours as the miserable cur that you are, leaving me and this brave stallion to face the Changelings on our own! But most importantly, my dress is ruined beyond repair!”

“Rarity!” shouted Cadence; her weary features were fixed in an expression of surprise. “Blueblood just saved us, the least you could do is show a little gratitude.”

She sighed and her expression softened somewhat, “But, you did come back for us, and in the end you were very noble. Perhaps there is hope for you yet, Blueblood.”

I was far too weary and tired to even think of an adequate response. My legs felt like jelly and were about to cave in underneath me and, despite my fatigue, adrenaline kept my heart pounding against my ribcage. My stomach clenched uncomfortably and felt as if somepony had somehow tightened a vice around it. The bleak surroundings were starting to get to me finally, even after the main threat to our safety had just been eliminated, the claustrophobia of the tunnels and my enforced captivity with Lady Rarity was making short work of my limited patience.

Truth is I was still feeling rather ashamed of my flight earlier. Though it all worked out for the best in the end, I can hardly consider myself a shining example of Equestrian royalty after I had just left a mare to almost certain doom to save my own hide.

“Let’s...” I gasped, my head feeling rather light and woozy after so much exertion. “Let’s just go.”

Fortunately my special talent deigned to behave itself and actually led us to the courtyard of Canterlot Castle. After explaining our situation to the bewildered Night Guards stationed around, who also dragged a tired looking Shining Armour out of the castle’s war room to be with his darling wife.

In the pure darkness of midnight the castle was silhouetted against the brilliant night sky, and illuminated by the pale light of Luna’s moon. The castle itself was a vast compound built into the tall mountain to which the entire city clung like a limpet on the side of a ship. Vast towers reached into the sky; tall minarets of white marble with purple and gold accenting that disappeared into the light cloud cover above.

The courtyard itself was illuminated by a few torches and a spotlight. We had dragged ourselves out of a hatch in the centre of the well-manicured lawn. The courtyard was maintained by a vast army of gardeners who fought an eternal war against weeds, without whose efforts the courtyard would descend into chaos and anarchy. Bushes were cut into pleasing shapes, and night blooming flowers, probably planted on Auntie Luna’s orders, were on display. Looming over us was a huge statue of Princess Celestia looking down with her characteristically warm and motherly smile expertly carved onto the stone.

I cringed somewhat as the two embraced tightly, such displays of affection in public are most unseemly. Worse still, she started gushing to her husband about how I heroically dived into battle and fought off the entire Changeling horde and Purestrain single-hoofedly and somehow disrupted their unholy ritual with powerful magic.

Before Shining Armour could direct his inquisition upon me, Rarity and I made our excuses and left for my personal suite in the castle. Being the Princesses’ beloved nephew afforded me certain privileges, chief amongst which was having my own little part of the castle to call home. I invited her along, mostly because I didn’t feel like being alone that night. Rarity’s tired eyes sparkled at the prospect of staying in the castle. Cannon Fodder, however, was ordered away by Shining Armour and the last I saw of him he was heading back to the barracks.

The Royal Guard, at least what was left behind before Equestria’s military was mobilised for war, were starting to form up to deal with the stragglers I’d left behind at Fancy Pants’ party. I mused that saving their expensive little hides and averting disaster would help boost my ailing position in the social hierarchy of Canterlot’s high society.

We slipped away as the happy couple were distracted. I had to admit it had been a very long time since I had taken a mare home, and I was even more surprised that Rarity agreed to though I assume she was just as weary as I was. Therefore neither of us would be up for the sort of debauchery that usually happens when I have female company.

My personal chambers were modest compared to the abodes of Celestia, Luna and Cadence, consisting of a small living room, a master bedroom, and a small guest bedroom. Since I rarely ever used these quarters, instead preferring to sequester myself in my ancestral estate elsewhere in the city, it was sparsely furnished. Even so, it was comfortable enough and the servants kept it reasonably clean and ready for the rare occasion I have reason to stay there.

I retired to bed early, but only after a brief but vigorous scrub to get the dried remains of Changelings from my fur, as I was unwilling and incapable of playing the host that night given the circumstances. Besides, I had a full day of work to look forward to in the morning and no doubt the full investigation to deal with. Rarity too said little and slinked off to the guest room to do... whatever it is she does. Rest most likely, but that night I slept with one eye open in case she turned out to be a Changeling and come for me in the night.

As it happened I survived the night, which is how I’m currently writing this ‘confession’ that you are currently reading, whoever you might be.

I contemplated throwing a sick day; I certainly felt like I deserved one, but on the other hoof without my inspired leadership the Equestrian armies would lose out on their valuable supply lines. How will our brave stallions and mares on the frontlines survive without tiny pieces of metal to hold sheets of parchment together?

I went through my morning routine robotically; though it was difficult without the servants around to assist me in the basic tasks that should be beneath a noblepony such as me. Usually one couldn’t move in Canterlot Castle without being mobbed by servants, but with near-total conscription for the war effort being enforced, good servants were rather difficult to come across now.

I left Rarity sleeping in my guest room. I decided against waking her, as she was most likely not a morning pony. Hopefully she would have had the good sense to make herself scarce once she does drag herself out of bed.

Fortunately my office in the War Ministry was located in the castle, along with nearly every aspect of the Equestrian government. Not really the best idea, in my humble opinion, as it meant we were one airstrike away from decapitating the entire state. Then again, I’m only a Prince...

I was slightly groggy and not paying attention to exactly where I was going. I couldn’t find a servant so I had to go without my customary morning cup of coffee to jumpstart my sleep-addled brain, therefore I was merely relying upon my somewhat temperamental special talent to lead me to where I wanted to go. Without Cannon Fodder there to handle the bulk of the pointless, meaningless bureaucracy I dreaded to think what the office would look like. The mares there, bless them, did their best but on the whole seemed to believe that gossiping was more important than processing paperwork.

Inevitably I wandered straight into something as my nose bumped into the cold steel of an armoured breastplate. Yelping in surprise I dropped back on my rear.

“Watch where you’re going, peasant...” my admonishments died in my throat as I finally looked up to see the stern visage of my Auntie Luna gazing down upon me as an exterminator would on a nest of termites. “G-good morning, Auntie,” I stammered.

“You will address me as Princess or ‘Your Highness’,” she said coldly. I was thankful that she didn’t employ the use of the Royal Canterlot Voice, at this range I would have been rendered deaf permanently. At the very least she finally learned to stop speaking in Ye Olde Butchered Equestrian so I can actually understand a word she’s saying.

For those of you unfamiliar with the darker half of Equestria’s ruling royalty, Princess Luna is bloody terrifying. At this stage she had just started to loosen up a little, but she still maintained a stern adherence to the ancient protocols of royalty and a rather aloof detachment from the affairs of us mere mortals. [My sister was rather upset at her absence from the Battle of Canterlot as she was busy patrolling Equestria’s outer borders, which explains her sour mood at this time]

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I got back up. Well today had gotten to a good start already, it’s not even time for elevenses and I’ve just insulted the pony who can make the moon crash into the earth on a mere whim.

She was an unnaturally big pony, but not quite as large as her elder sister Celestia. Yet despite the slight disparity in size, Luna was infinitely more imposing. Where Auntie Celestia was warm and comforting in a motherly way, Luna always seemed cold and distant as if my mere existence was an affront to her regal sensibilities. [It should be noted that Luna refused to believe Blueblood was even slightly related to us for the following decade] I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what it felt like for commoners when they spoke with me.

Her coat was a dark blue like a clear moonlit night, her body sleek and well defined with muscle, and her mane and tail had become ethereal in a dark imitation of Celestia’s rainbow. Peculiarly she was clad in armour, probably a ceremonial thing now that Equestria was at war. It didn’t help that her armour made her look even more like Nightmare Moon than usual.

“I have been told of your heroism,” she said, without breaking her seemingly permanent scowl. “I thought you to be a rather useless little colt; vain, arrogant, and soft, but you have proven me wrong.”

“Uh... thanks?” I said, not quite sure what to make of the thinly veiled insult masquerading as a compliment.

“Come with me,” she said.

I shook my head, “I have to get to work now, supply lines won’t manage themselves.”

“It was not a request,” she said coldly and turned about face to march off down the hallway. I sighed and followed her, not relishing the future task of having to explain my lateness to my immediate superior; the Minister for War.

Her iron shod hooves clopped loudly against the marble floor, drowning out my relatively weaker hoofsteps. I dreaded what she might have had in store for me, and if I had any indication of what exactly she had planned I’d have turned tail and ran and not stopped until I was safely across the sea in Zebrica. Evidently she had heard of the previous night’s misadventures, probably from Shining Armour who, in turn, got his evidence from Cadence and Cannon Fodder. If what I overhead last night was any indication, Cadence still believed wholeheartedly that I heroically waded in against impossible odds and freed her. On the other hoof, Cannon Fodder could be trusted to tell the complete truth, but then again I doubted the dim little unicorn was capable of understanding what was going on around him.

We stepped through into the War Ministry, through the vast nameless corridors that led off into offices and cubicle farms where hundreds of ponies spent all day going through the mountains of paperwork for military supplies to the frontlines. The office mares stepped out of Luna’s way, and I could imagine the sheer amount of gossiping and office politics that would go on after they saw their boss being carted away by the Night Princess. Oh, I’d never hear the end of it now.

“It has been centuries since Equestria last went to war,” said Luna finally, ending that damnable silence. “Even then they tended to be border skirmishes. The last great war we fought was against Nightmare Moon one thousand years ago.”

“Equestria will prevail,” I said, mindlessly parroting the latest propaganda phrase dreamt up by the Ministry of Misinformation. [A common nickname for the Ministry of Information, Equestria’s propaganda department]

“Indeed.”

We descended down some steps to an area of the castle I had never been before. Despite being practically raised here there were always parts of this ancient citadel that were off bars to me. As far as I could tell we were entering the bowels of the War Ministry, beyond the nice and comfortable world of supply management and into the meat of the grisly business of waging war.

In contrast to the bright and airy offices above, and indeed the rest of the castle, the war rooms were dark and foreboding. There were no windows, meaning the only light came from burning torches fixed upon the walls and iridescent magical orbs that floated about fifteen feet from the stone floor. Unicorn and earth pony guards snapped to attention as we passed them, looking as still as statues with the only signs of life from them were the slight swivel of their eyes.

“The Changeling threat is unlike any other our nation has faced,” Luna continued as she led me down the corridors. “Our armies are well-trained and well-equipped but inexperienced. We fight an enemy that has the ability to infiltrate our own, blend into the ranks, and therefore sow chaos and confusion amongst our armies. Morale is at an all time low. To this end my sister and I are creating a new institution that will monitor our armies for any Changeling infestation, will enforce strict discipline, and punish cowardice and incompetence.”

Which was all very good but what did it have to do with me? Already my hooves were starting to itch uncomfortably again, and I was rather getting tired of feeling that so frequently.

We came to a door finally, just as my legs were starting to ache with exertion. With a quick flicker of telekinetic magic, Luna pushed it open gingerly and revealed a room rather reminiscent of the interior of a fashionable clothing shop. It was a fairly large chamber with numerous mannequins arrayed like soldiers on parade, all wearing the same uniform I had never seen before.

“The Royal Commissariat,” said Luna proudly, waving a hoof triumphantly at the uniforms.

They were almost entirely black. Consisting of a black double-breasted storm coat with red frogs and lining, and opened up with wide lapels and a high collar. They had shiny brass buttons, crafted with the royal seal of Equestria’s diarchy. There was a red sash tied around the waist. Completing the ensemble was a high peaked cap, also predominantly black with red lining, but more noticeable was the winged pony skull badge in the centre.

“It’s all very nice, but why do you need me here?” I said.

Luna looked down on me and for the first time since she had returned to Equestria I saw her expression soften. “Last night you displayed the necessary qualities to become a commissar. You were loyal to your duties and courageous in the face of mortal danger; you were tenacious and didn’t give up; you were resourceful and employed quick thinking when it seemed all hope was lost.”

I hardly thought headbutting a Changeling Purestrain and accidently blowing out his brains counted as being ‘resourceful’.

“Furthermore, you proved to be remarkably level-headed. You could have stood your ground like any hot-blooded, testosterone-fuelled ‘hero’ but instead you retreated so that you might strike the enemy when he was at his most vulnerable.”

She leaned her head down to my level, and I gulped slightly as I already worked out exactly what she had planned for me.

“I want you to be the first of the commissars,” she said, her voice quiet but laden with the full weight of what she was about to explain to me. “You will don the uniform and go to the frontlines to be attached as regimental commissar to the 1st Night Guard; they are a new regiment who require the stern hoof of the Commissariat to watch over them. You will be responsible for discipline and morale; you will inspire the weak and guide the lost. You will also punish the incompetent, the cowardly, and the treasonous. You will embody the divine will of the Royal Pony Sisters and provide a perfect example for your troops to follow. Is that clear, Blueblood?”

I nodded, not wanting to spend an eternity exiled on the moon or some other celestial body for disobeying the divine will of my Auntie Luna. I didn’t have much of a choice but to accept and be wrenched away from the relatively safe life I knew and loved.

“Well, go on, put your new uniform on,” she said with a hint of childlike glee in her voice. Judging from the big pony skull on the cap I assumed she probably had some hoof in designing it, from what I could tell from speaking with Auntie Celestia; Auntie Luna was always into rather morbid things like skulls and spiders.

Resigned to my unfortunate fate I did as I was told, casting off the red dress uniform I had just grown used to and putting on the slightly ridiculous black commissarial uniform. She must have gotten my measurements from somewhere as the uniform fit perfectly, which made a change from usual Royal Guard uniforms which tended to come in only two sizes: too big and too small.

I looked at the grinning pony skull on the cap. “Princess,” I said tentatively, “my hat has a skull on it.”

Luna rolled her eyes, “It is to inspire fear; fear ensures loyalty you see.”

I put the cap on and then set it at what I thought would be a jaunty angle. Despite the grinning skull and the morbid colour palette, once I beheld my reflection in one of the full length mirrors in the room I thought it started to look rather dashing on my regal self.

“Skulls,” I muttered, “we are the good guys, right?”

The moon goddess ignored my quiet complaints, “Come, there is something else.”

From there we stepped back into the corridors. I followed slightly behind her, lost in my own thoughts of where exactly my life was headed now. I had some experience of frontline Royal Guard duties, but I never saw action (unless you count the Great Canterlot Snowball Fight of ’05). For me, life in the Royal Guard revolved around sitting in the officer’s mess drinking myself into unconsciousness and getting into duels because I insulted some other toffee-nosed aristocratic officer. Yet now, with total war on our doorstep and the fate of Equestria hanging in the balance I was to be dragged into brutal conflict and not only that but I would be directly responsible for the lives and well being of thousands of ponies.

I had never been responsible in my life! I suppose you might think otherwise, given the amount of power and prestige that a prince of the realm should have. Not so, I had very little political power and my position was hereditary and symbolic more than having any real purpose, which suited me just fine. I could have all the wealth and glory of being a prince without the difficult task of actually ruling.

Perhaps if I did such a bad job of leading/monitoring this Night Guard I could be demoted and bumped back into a nice cosy desk job. Or maybe I wasn’t actually expected to do any fighting on the frontlines and could instead sequester myself a couple miles behind our troops in a relatively comfortable tent. I had to rely upon my ability to lie and weasel my way out of things to survive. Of course, at that point I wasn’t aware of the sadistic games that fate likes to thrust upon me; whereby any attempt by me to move further away out of obvious danger merely pushes me into less obvious but more calamitous peril.

We came to another room, this one apparently some sort of weapons R&D laboratory of some description. It was small, but that was merely because of the vast banks of machinery and equipment lined up against the walls. Huge banks of thinking machines, like vast bookcases, lined the walls. Pretty red and green lights flickered in a sequence only understandable to a select few of ponies capable of comprehending such information. Another machine vomited forth a steady stream of parchment, printed with graphs and esoteric symbols that hurt my brain just trying to comprehend it.

“Sir!” Cannon Fodder called out, and I finally noticed him strapped to a chair and buried amidst a small but growing mountain of that parchment. There was a bowl helmet on his head with numerous wires that led off into the machines around us. “This mare is crazy, please let me out.”

I frowned, looking around for signs of this mysterious mare.

“Who?”

“Me!” A lavender unicorn with purple hair with red highlights burst out of the parchment pile. I recognised her immediately, the crazed look in the eyes of Twilight Sparkle on a study binge seared into my soul from early childhood when we were classmates in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. Her eyes were wide but the pupils shrunken into tiny points and her mane was even more unkempt than unusual.

“Twilight Sparkle,” said Luna, shaking her head. “I thought I told you to get some sleep and let our test subject rest.”

Twilight’s ear twitched and she cocked her head to one side. Her mouth was cracked into a disturbingly wide grin. “I know! But I couldn’t sleep because I had so many more theories and hypotheses to test out and I haven’t had a proper test subject in a long time!” The unicorn paced around an increasingly terrified Cannon Fodder, her voice babbling excitedly with barely comprehensible magical terms being thrown about the place haphazardly.

“Twilight,” Luna said more firmly, but the unicorn kept babbling and fiddling with Cannon Fodder’s bowl helmet.

Bracing myself for what was coming next I crouched down and plugged my ears with my hooves.

“TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”

The full force of the Royal Canterlot Voice sent the parchment flying to the back of the room along with the hapless unicorn. Two of the machines close to us started smoking and sending off sparks of electricity across their buckled surfaces. My ears were still ringing painfully as I pulled my hooves back and slowly stood up.

Twilight stumbled out of the parchment pile once more. Thankfully her eyes were back to normal and her expression was a little less manic than before; the Royal Canterlot Voice must have shocked her back into that strange new world called reality.

“Hehe,” she laughed nervously, “sorry, Princess, I got a little carried away.”

“Quite alright,” said Luna, her voice thankfully back at a reasonable volume. “You remember Prince Blueblood, don’t you?”

She finally noticed my presence and smiled insincerely, “Of course I remember Blueblood; we went to school together. You used to steal my Smarty Pants doll and play keep away with it.”

I was something of a naughty colt back in the day but a little schoolyard bullying was to be expected, especially on an awkward little egghead like Twilight. Yet now, years later, here she was with enough magical power in her horn to render me into small pile of ash with hardly any effort. She wasn’t the quiet, awkward, friendless little filly I remember but now a confident magic user who wielded one sixth of the most powerful artefacts in Equestria. Also rather attractive I might add, despite her low birth.

“I hope you don’t hold that against me,” I said, forcing a confident smile on my face. “Your brother did beat me up pretty hard after that.”

She smiled amicably enough, “That he did.”

Luna thankfully stepped forward before the situation could become any more awkward than it already was. “Have you confirmed our suspicions about this guardspony?”

I blinked, “Suspicions? Is he a Changeling?”

Twilight shook her head, “No, he’s a Blank. They’re extremely rare occurrences. It’s a one in a million chance that a unicorn is born with this ability.”

“What’s a ‘Blank’?” I asked in confusion. I had heard the term before, often used disparagingly to unicorns of poor magical talent like Cannon Fodder but never in the strictly scientific sense that Twilight was using.

“It’s a very rare genetic mutation,” Twilight continued, pacing around Cannon Fodder. “You see, the specimen here,” she pointed a hoof at Cannon Fodder who merely looked back with wide, terrified eyes, “acts like a magical black hole that absorbs the energy used for complex spells right out of the caster.”

“Meaning?”

Twilight rolled her eyes as if it should have been obvious. “Cadence told me what happened last night, but I was confused when I heard about the Changeling Purestrain’s spell just evaporating into thin air. I thought it might have been a miscast, but miscast spells usually expel the stored magical energy in the form of a violent explosion rather than just vanish inexplicably.”

I tapped my hoof to my chin thoughtfully, “So you’re saying Cannon Fodder disrupted the spell?”

She shook her head, “Not quite. Like I said, Blanks work like sponges that absorb magical energy when complicated spells are being cast, like the one the Purestrain tried to use to bring his Queen to Canterlot. Cannon Fodder simply sucked all of the magic out of the Purestrain’s spell before it could be completed.”

“I didn’t mean to,” said Cannon Fodder meekly, as a child would when being confronted over an accident he had caused.

“Of course you didn’t,” she smiled at her latest test subject, an act which only made the poor guardspony flinch in his seat. He had faced a Changeling horde without number, stared down a Purestrain, but trapped all night with Twilight Sparkle on a study-spree was a bit too much for him.

“Wait, if he sucks away magic then how can I still use my telekinesis and special talent?”

Twilight Sparkle reached up and removed the bowl helmet from Cannon Fodder’s head, to the guardspony’s evident relief. “The science isn’t exact, but such things like telekinesis and special talents are so common place and used so often we barely have to think about it to use them. Telekinesis is the first spell most unicorns learn and forms the foundation of nearly all further unicorn magic; therefore it’s become the most efficient spell in the book.

“The Blank’s abilities only seem to work above a certain threshold, as if telekinesis isn’t worthy of its attention. But when you start drawing on more magical energy above this threshold then the Blank just drains all of it away. From what I can tell in my research, the Blank’s magical null field has a radius of approximately five feet. It was very fortunate that the Purestrain happened to be close enough for it to take effect.”

As Twilight Sparkle removed the restraints Cannon Fodder leapt off the chair, his hooves skidding on the parchment and marble floor as he scampered towards us, though he soon regained his phlegmatic composure and bowed low before Princess Luna.

“Oh this was so exciting!” Twilight Sparkle squealed enthusiastically, clapping her hooves together. “Blanks are so rare and nopony’s ever written conclusively about them! Oh I wish you could stay, we can have such fun together experimenting on you!”

I had to feel sorry for poor Cannon Fodder there, reduced to a mere science experiment. Oddly, I had grown rather attached to this strange old stallion; he did save my life albeit in an entirely indirect fashion and without even being conscious of it. At the very least, wherever I was headed was bound to have a great deal of paperwork, paperwork being so prevalent in all areas of the Royal Guard, so having him around to deal with the deluge of parchment that was sure to come would be useful. That and having a magic-eater could prove useful if I ever came across a powerful mage.

Cannon Fodder merely looked up at me with pleading puppy eyes that seemed to say ‘please don’t leave me alone with the crazy purple one again’.

“I’d rather Cannon Fodder continue being my aide,” I said. I looked up at Auntie Luna, “If that’s acceptable?”

Luna nodded her head, and Cannon Fodder’s relief was palpable. “Very well,” she turned her attention to the prostrate Guardspony by her hooves, “Private Cannon Fodder, you will continue to serve as Commissar Blueblood’s personal aide and assist him in performing his important duties.”

The Guardspony nodded and slowly rose to his hooves, “By your command, Your Highness.”

“Aw,” Twilight’s ears wilted in disappointment as her new academic focus was now being wrenched away from her. “Well next time you’re in Canterlot we can have another study session together!”

“You will leave for the army gathering at Dodge Junction immediately,” said Luna to me, ignoring Twilight. “There you shall meet with the senior officers of the regiment; they will brief you on your new duties in preparation for the war to come.”

I nodded my head, sighing reluctantly and the new life thrust upon me because I had the good sense to run away from battle and accidently save the day. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad, I thought at the time, if I had any inclination of what a Commissar was supposed to do. All Princess Luna had done was give me some vague hints about enforcing discipline in the ranks, encouraging the weak and punishing the incompetent and cowardly. Well, frankly I’d probably have had to summarily execute myself if I followed those duties to the letter. They must have been truly desperate to recruit the likes of me; then again, little did I know just how desperate we were.

“When do I start?” I asked.

“Immediately,” Luna turned towards the door, “come, I shall brief you further on your new duties.”

Nodding my head in resignation I followed my Princess, trailed by a very relieved Cannon Fodder, down the hallway towards my new life. My entirely discreditable and life-threatening career had only just begun, and I had several more decades of being stabbed, shot at, punched, covered in green Changeling goo, and thrown off cliffs to look forward to.

Night's Blood (Prologue)

NIGHT'S BLOOD

Prince Blueblood and the Battle of Black Venom Pass

This next entry in the Blueblood Manuscript concerns his actions during the ill-fated Operation Enduring Harmony. If the incident at Fancy Pants’ benefit party was the genesis of his enduring fame, then it was the Battle of Black Venom Pass that solidified his reputation as a war hero.

Black Venom Pass and the apparent failure of Operation ‘Enduring Harmony’ has been the focus of much scholarly debate in recent years. In the wake of such a tragedy, many ponies seek somepony to blame; most notably the generals who commanded the armies, the politicians who gave the orders in the first place, and even themselves who cried out for vengeance in the wake of the Royal Wedding incident with apparent disregard for rationality and sense.

Likewise, ponies will always look towards somepony to deliver them from this dark menace; a figurehead who exemplifies the valour and sacrifice of the Royal Guard and who will always be there to save the day. This pony was Prince Blueblood, much to his irritation and horror.

This entry, therefore, is of particular interest as it shows that Blueblood most definitely does not see his actions on that fateful day as anything approaching heroic. Again, this is likely his insecurities and neurotic tendencies showing through, as even reading this spectacularly candid document should show that despite his insistence to the contrary, Blueblood did display a great deal of genuine courage.

Ultimately, this battle would have far reaching consequences for not only Blueblood, but for all of Equestria as well. To help set this particular entry in context and fill in any gaps left by Blueblood’s entirely self-centred account, I will continue to add annotations. For those ponies not familiar with Royal Guard battle drill I have prefaced this entry with an extract from von Pferdwitz’s seminal work ‘On War’ which will help provide the reader with a basic understanding as to contemporary Royal Guard battle tactics.

-H. R. H. Celestia

Extract from Von Pferdwitz’s ‘On War’ 6th Edition

[This work, first published in the wake of the Nightmare Heresy, is still required reading at the Royal Guard Academy. Its entries on battlefield tactics, strategy, and the political purpose of warfare are still highly relevant in modern warfare. Over the years the text has been amended to keep up with updates in weapons technology and developments in strategy. At the time of the Changeling War the Academy was using the sixth edition. The popularity of this work is, in part, due to its uncomplicated language, which avoids the florid tones and technical words of many other military texts, and is thus understandable for the lay-pony.]

As the principles of Harmony pervade Equestrian civilian life, so too do they work in our military affairs. In the civilian sphere each subspecies of pony provides certain skills that ensure there is plenty of food and goods for us all. The earth ponies grow, nurture, and harvest food; pegasi manage the weather to provide optimal growing conditions for crops; while unicorns employ magic to make all of our lives easier and more comfortable. So too on the battlefield does this harmonious interplay exist.

The most basic unit in the Royal Guard is the regiment. A regiment, in order to be effective, must contain earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns in roughly equal proportions. Each subspecies is organised into separate companies, so the earth pony company will consist of nothing other than earth ponies, the pegasus company should only have pegasi, and likewise the unicorn company will only contain unicorns. Yet on the battlefield an army should still consist of roughly equal proportions of subspecies.

To continue the civilian analogy, each subspecies has its own particular place on the battlefield. To the earth ponies falls the most important and the most brutal of tasks. As in the civilian sphere they have the most important role of growing food, and all other ponies merely assist the earth ponies in their sacred duties, so too does this arrangement exist in war. They are the mainstay of the Royal Guard; they are the ponies who will do the bulk of the actual fighting. They shall use their superior strength and endurance in the brutal struggle of close quarters combat, and it is here that ultimately battles are won and lost.

However, a detachment of just earth ponies will find itself outflanked by the airborne pegasi or blasted apart from a distance by unicorns. Therefore earth ponies must operate in harmony with pegasi and unicorns in order to succeed.

Pegasi should use their ability of flight to guard the vulnerable flanks of the earth ponies. Their superior speed will allow them to be used as rapid response units, used to plug gaps in the frontlines or exploit breakthroughs and run down fleeing enemies. However, one must be wary as pegasi stamina is not the equal of earth ponies, and therefore they cannot dedicate themselves to the same sustained fighting expected of the earth ponies. Therefore it is often wise to employ earth ponies as the ‘anvil’ upon which the enemy will become mired in close combat, and use pegasi as the ‘hammer’ to strike at the pinned enemy’s rear.

Unicorns, by virtue of their abilities in magic, should be employed to cover the earth pony’s advance. Arrayed carefully by an intelligent commander, a unicorn company can unleash devastating fusillades of magic missiles at the enemy. Inflicting a sustained barrage upon an advancing foe will invariably damage their morale and inflict losses upon them, which will help when it comes to the earth ponies’ business of close combat. Commanders who are prone to take risks may even employ unicorns to shoot accurately into the mire of close combat, but this is unwise as it may result in friendly fire incidents. One should not over-estimate the strength of unicorns, though the ability to strike the enemy from afar is appealing to many, they are still very much vulnerable to attack. Many a company has been routed when a missile barrage did not result in the destruction or flight of the enemy, but instead they were able to weather the losses and charge in.

A good commander, therefore, will employ the use of all three pony subspecies effectively and harmoniously in battle. Use earth ponies as a blunt instrument to batter the foe into destruction, use pegasi as precision scalpels to target enemy weak points and guard the flanks, and use unicorns to provide long range fire support as the two armies close in for battle. If a commander can understand these precepts and use them well in battle, then he shall almost certainly prevail. Harmony is what has made Equestria so prosperous and it is what shall make Equestria undefeatable in war.

Night's Blood (Part 1)

Life in the Royal Guard is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent trouser-ruining terror. That’s what Colonel Stiff Upper Lip told me on my very first day in basic training when I performed my mandatory Royal Guard service some five years before my induction into the Commissariat. Quite how and why exactly he wore trousers was a conundrum that I didn’t particularly want answered, so I just chalked it up to the usual eccentric senior officer nonsense that seems to be so prevalent in everypony with a rank higher than Second Lieutenant.

As I sat in my first class cubicle on the lengthy train journey to Dodge Junction, gazing listlessly out as the dull Equestrian countryside flittered past me at an obscene speed, I couldn’t help but think on those words and ponder just how accurate they were. Despite Stiff Upper Lip’s rather insane eccentricities, which included taking staff meetings while immersed in a bath carried by earth pony guards like a palanquin, he was rather insightful as to how life in the Royal Guard was lived.

Yet what he didn’t say was how that ninety-nine per cent was also spent in anxious anticipation of the one per cent. Considering he served when the purpose of Equestria’s armed forces was simply to stand next to Princess Celestia and prevent paparazzi from taking photographs of her consuming unholy quantities of cake [That happened precisely once and it seems nopony will ever let that go] and the occasional border dispute with Gryphons, the exact ratios of boredom and trouser-ruining terror may have changed somewhat since then.

I enjoy train journeys. They give one time to reflect and think, catch up on reading, or just ponder the great mysteries of life. All this provided you can secure a nice first class cubicle like me, if you’re packed into the cattle cart of third class then you can forget about that and instead concentrate on avoiding catching some hideous commoner disease. I, on the other hoof, took this opportunity to ponder where exactly my life had just taken a turn for the worse.

Even after only one night the newspapers were all filled with images of my handsome face, all proudly proclaiming me the hero of the hour who defeated another heinous Changeling threat to destroy Equestrian Harmony and steal all of our love. Bizarrely, even the Foal Free Press from Ponyville managed to snap a shot of me scrubbing Changeling innards out of my fur. While the attention was nice, and for once it was positive as opposed to having fruits in varying stages of decay hurled in my direction, I still felt a general sense of unease about it. Even then I had the lingering sensation that if I didn’t nip this trend in the bud ponies will expect more amateur heroics from me, and therefore foolishly force me into situations to demonstrate this alleged heroism. However, I still did not have any indication of where exactly my fraudulent reputation would take me, and if I did I would have done something about it rather than merely go along with the flow.

I had been stuck inside this train for several hours now, watching as the green and pleasant fields and forests of central Equestria slowly transformed into the sweltering plains and deserts along its south east border with the Badlands. Trees gave way to cacti, grass to sand, and herds of cows to roving tribes of buffalo. Cannon Fodder was in the buffet car, no doubt giving the other passengers a fright with his horrendous odour and insatiable appetite. I let him use my prodigious commissarial expense account, mostly because I wanted to be left alone for a while to brood.

It then occurred to me that with the warmer climate in the Badlands his body odour would become all the more fragrant.

I wondered if this latest venture was merely Auntie Luna plotting my death in an unusually elaborate way. As diarch of Equestria she could have just had me executed then and there; probably involving fire and brimstone from the heavens or the very earth swallowing me whole for whatever sins I dared to commit in her eyes (probably just merely existing). But no, it seems she wanted me to suffer by thrusting me into a new and frightening situation of which I knew nothing about.

On the wooden table before me were the briefing papers that Auntie Luna and her new Commissariat had so helpfully provided me, along with a drained cup of tea and the scattered remains of Cannon Fodder’s previous culinary escapades. It was an inch thick wad of parchment, written entirely in dense legalese that would have made even the most intelligent and studious lawyer give up and quit his job.

For the most part I had simply skimmed over it and found nothing that Auntie Luna hadn't already explained to me: the purpose of a commissar is to monitor a regiment for Changeling corruption, enforce discipline, maintain morale, oversee senior officer command decisions, and ensure that the political aims of the war are being followed. Exactly how I was supposed to accomplish all of this, however, was still a mystery. I suppose that was to be expected when I am the first of a completely new institution and given minimal training.

The first duty was easy. Before I grudgingly left the castle, Auntie Luna and Twilight Sparkle taught me a simple spell that would disrupt the illusionary abilities of a Changeling and show them for who they really were. I imagined it would simply be a matter of creating a schedule of mandatory scanning with this spell and teaching it to unicorns.

Enforcing discipline and maintaining morale would be infinitely more difficult, and the two duties I least looked forward to. I’m not exactly a people pony; I have trouble remembering names and I could barely manage my small staff of personal servants and maids on my estate let alone an entire regiment of nine hundred ponies. I supposed it was a matter of making the occasional motivational speech and doling out extra latrine duties for any naughty stallions. Probably something I could handle with reasonable enough confidence.

Overseeing senior officer command decisions was more complicated, seeing as how what I knew about military tactics and strategy could have fit on a postage stamp. As I understood it, however, from the vast tome before me and Luna’s ramblings I would simply be taking a supervisory and advisory role. That I probably could do better as it is far easier to sit back and criticise somepony for their decisions than to make those decisions.

As for upholding the political aims of the war, I was far less happy about that. Of course, had we known then what we now know about the true nature of Changelings we would have been far less sanguine about consigning an entire race to extermination. Hindsight, as the old saying goes, is always perfect and looking back upon this stage in the war, when ponies were baying for Changeling blood in vengeance for the attack on the Royal Wedding, it’s all rather embarrassing. The fact is that throughout this wretched war, the political aims kept changing on the fickle whims of politicians and the Equestrian public. This tended to make my job of making sure the troops knew exactly why they were sent halfway across Equestria to fight and die on some Celestia-forsaken desert rather difficult, as more often than not I had no idea either.

Despite mentally reassuring myself that everything would be perfectly fine my stomach still felt oddly hollow, as it was wont to do when I’m anxious. It’s an unpleasant, cloying, nauseous sensation in my gut that at once makes me feel hungry and sick at the same time.

Cannon Fodder returned from the buffet carriage just as we were entering Dodge Junction, his pouches and pockets stuffed with sandwiches, hay, and other snacks he had pilfered from the unsuspecting waiting staff there. Perhaps they were bribes to make him go away.

I watched as the rustic buildings of this tiny frontier town drift past us with a mixture of relief and heightened anticipation. While the train journey had given me some much needed time and space to myself, it was rather dull and strangely exhausting; sitting still and doing nothing for several hours except fret about how I’m about to die horribly is oddly taxing on a pony’s body. Above all I merely wanted to stretch my tired old limbs.

From my brief skimming of the briefing papers so helpfully provided by the War Ministry, I learned that Dodge Junction was a relatively new frontier town constructed precariously close to the Badlands. It was populated by a small number of ponies, probably all related to each other by this point, and had a slowly growing industry in the production of cherries. The fact that this town still existed was either testament to either the ingenuity of ponies to survive in the most inhospitable of environments or their sheer stupidity.

Army Group Centre was encamped on its outskirts, judging from the maps in the briefing files the encampment was approximately twice the size of the town and likely contained at least five times the amount of ponies. The encampment would be serviced by long supply lines that stretched across Equestria like arteries towards the heart. No doubt our rations would be supplemented by many, many cherries.

The train finally pulled to a halt at the station and the tinny voice of the announcer proclaimed that this was the end of the line. It certainly felt like it for me as I dragged myself off my seat, my joints clicking and cracking from several hours of disuse. My flanks were feeling somewhat numb after having sat upon it for so long, and was thus forced to perform a bizarre little dance to try and restore feeling in my rear and extremities.

If Cannon Fodder was even the slightest bit concerned by me flailing my limbs he made no sign and instead busied himself by fetching my luggage. It was rather difficult for him, lacking any magical ability at all, but after a brief fumbling with my trunk he managed to drag the large box out from under the seats and balance it upon his back.

“Ready?” I asked, getting somewhat impatient. I was to meet with an officer from my new regiment at the station and was eager to the get the invariably messy business of first impressions over with. Judging from my previous experience with the close-knit nature of the Royal Guard regimental system I was unlikely to be seen as anything but a meddlesome outsider. [The Royal Guard operates on the regimental system, meaning that the regiment is the basic unit of the military. Regiments generally recruit from a single geographical area, for example, the First Solar Guard recruits from Canterlot, the Second from the area around Ponyville, the Third from Trottingham etc. This helps soldiers form a close attachment to the regiment through a shared heritage and origin. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of creating inter-regimental rivalry and a distrust of higher authority beyond the regiment, particularly commissars.]

“Yes sir,” he replied blankly.

I shook my head and stepped out of my cabin. With non-essential travel greatly discouraged by the Equestria government I had the entire carriage to myself. There were a few individuals disembarking from the third class carriages behind us; probably either government bureaucrats or journalists I mused. I didn’t look forward to dealing with the press, but as political officer I wouldn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

I stepped off the carriage and onto the platform, and straight into another stallion wearing steel plate armour.

“Ooph, that’s one way to make an introduction!” the stallion said in an obnoxiously cheery voice as he stepped away and allowed me my personal space.

I straightened my neck to look as tall and imposing as I could, which wasn’t difficult given my stature and the death-black and blood red uniform complete with its leering skull. I put on my best stern expression and glared down at him. As royalty I have had plenty of experience in perfecting the ultimate look of complete and total condescension.

Unfortunately, it didn’t faze him the slightest.

He was a young earth pony, probably still in his late teens judging by his youthful good looks and peppy demeanour, shorter than me and wore a permanent grin on his face that I found rather insufferable. Not because of its relentless cheeriness, mind you, though it was tiny part of the reason, but rather the grin showed off his razor sharp piranha teeth. These were the results of Princess Luna’s blessing which she bestows upon all of her Night Guards, along with the uniform grey fur and the creepy draconic eyes with slit irises.

Luna evidently had a thing for eyes, for there was one upon the Night Guard’s breastplate gazing up at me in a most disconcerting manner. Despite the creepy baroque armour, sharp teeth, and unnatural eyes he looked like a regular youth. At first I took him for a mere ensign, the lowliest commissioned rank who have the dubious honour of carrying the regimental standards into battle, but I saw the rank pips on breastplate and saw that he was in fact a captain.

I noted that his cutie mark, like all of the Night Guards, was concealed by his armour.

“Uh, do I call your Commissar Blueblood or Prince?” he said, nervously rubbing the back of his head with a hoof. “Or even ‘Your Highness’? Or is it ‘Your Majesty’?”

I shrugged, to be honest I didn’t even know the correct etiquette, but at least this young idiot was making a clumsy effort to show deference to his social betters, “Either is acceptable, Captain...?”

“Oh, sorry!” The young captain snapped off a clumsily salute by smacking his hoof against the front of his helmet. “I’m Captain Red Coat of the 1st Night Guard, I command the Earth Pony company. The other senior officers can’t wait to meet you.”

Of that I had no doubt, but whether they would actually like me was another matter. Red Coat seemed naive enough to believe we’ll get along like one big happy regiment, but I doubted that the other officers and the nine hundred-odd ponies they commanded would warm to me quite so well. Granted, commissars like me weren’t as feared and universally reviled by the rank and file as we were much later (largely as a result of a few of my over-zealous colleagues), but my apprehension was only growing.

I bade him to lead me to the encampment and my new life, and he did as he was ordered with his usual energetic aplomb. Cannon Fodder dutifully followed me with my trunk, being ignored as usual but phlegmatically unconcerned with his apparent invisibility. Fortunately, he travelled light that day; he was already wearing his armour and had very little personal effects save for his collection of gentlecolt’s specialist literature and a small photograph of his mother who, to my eternal surprise, turned out not to be a walrus.

The inbred yokels who inhabited this tiny village gave us a wide berth as we stepped through their little settlement, watching us wearily with tired eyes. As I learned through experience where a large army makes its camp there comes opportunities and misery in equal measure for anypony unfortunate enough to live nearby. Businesses can make more money by selling things to the soldiers, but the influx of thousands of bored troops tends to send the crime rate soaring.

I only half listened as Red Coat exposited much of his life story to me. From what I can remember he explained that he came from a relatively well-to-do family in Trottingham, which compared to my glory and wealth meant he was only a slightly more wealthy form of commoner. He had always dreamed of a career in the Royal Guard but his family could only afford to buy him a commission in the Night Guard, which tended to go much cheaper than the Solar Guard. [At this point the Equestrian military still employed the dubious practice of the sale of commissions, by which entry into the officer class and subsequent promotion could be paid for in bits. This ensured a largely aristocratic and socially exclusive officer class who later found out the hard way that wealth does not equate to military competence.]

Nopony liked the Night Guard, especially not me; they were an entirely new corps created by Princess Luna as a resurrection of her ancient personal bodyguard from before the Nightmare Heresy and therefore lacked the thousands of years of tradition that the Solar Guard possessed. Their disturbing baroque armour and the creepy side-effects of Luna’s blessing only made them even less desirable. The immutable laws of supply and demand were in effect; nopony wanted to be an officer in the Night Guard, ergo the prices were dirt cheap, and so they had to make do with Captain Optimism.

As we walked through the town I noticed new propaganda posters pasted to ramshackle buildings. A particularly intimidating drawing of Celestia’s face implored us all to ‘OBEY’, while a simple red poster advised us all to ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’, and a third commanded us to report anypony suspected of being a Changeling spy to the relevant authorities.

It was not long before we came to the encampment itself. It was a vast sprawl of large tents constructed on the immeasurable empty plain outside the town. The tents themselves were positioned rather sparsely, serving mainly as temporary residences for the officers, meeting halls, war rooms, stores, administrative offices, and field hospitals. Most of the rank and file slept under the stars in a large field pockmarked with various stakes in the ground where individual guardsponies claimed a spot to sleep. Presumably the weather pegasi ensured that they did not get soaked during their slumber.

The camp itself was alive with frenetic activity. I had never seen so many ponies in a single place before, not even the Grand Galloping Gala, on the rare occasion that it all went according to plan without any cake or animal related disturbances, could compare to it. Literally thousands upon thousands of ponies lived across this plain, calling the scrap of earth they slept upon at night home. Solar Guard in their gleaming golden armour and pristine white coats marched drill in complete synchronicity and discipline to my left, while above I saw pegasi practicing aerial combat manoeuvres which left white contrails streaking across the cloudless sky. To my right I witnessed scores of unicorns practicing war magic upon cardboard cut outs of Changelings; blasting them apart with iridescent magic missiles.

War has a distinct smell. Even when there is no battle fought there is still that unique scent in the air. Actually, it’s not just one scent but rather a mixture of many unpleasant smells that combine to make one ungodly odour; the sheer number of so many ponies congregating in one single place for a long period of time tends to cause a few hygiene problems. It smells of blood and sweat, gunpowder, rotten meat, anaesthetic, ozone, and bodily waste, and despite everypony else getting used to it I never did.

More Solar Guard troops were chatting loudly around a campfire; some more were engaged in a tense game of Go Fish, while a group of aristocratic officers watched me with a mixture of disdain and curiosity. They probably recognised me; there were probably very few ponies who didn’t recognise the esteemed Prince Blueblood, nephew to the Princesses and most eligible bachelor in all of Equestria. It was most likely curiosity over the brand new uniform I was wearing, and disdain over my blissfully unaware Night Guard companion.

“They say this is the largest army ever assembled,” said Red Coat confidently. I highly doubted that, the Changelings were probably massing an even larger army just beyond the mountains that separated Equestria from the Badlands.

“It’ll all be over by Hearth’s Warming,” I said with false confidence, merely parroting the general optimistic feeling that the whole war will be a cakewalk. A couple of glorious battles and then we’ll all be sipping tea in Queen Chrysalis’ palace. Even a cursory glance at a history book would inform you that wars tend not to be that simple and involve quite a lot of misery and bloodshed.

“Well, I just hope it lasts long enough for us to get some of the glory, eh?” he said with a big, eager grin on his face that would have served well as the subject for a poster on a recruitment centre.

The 1st Regiment was the only Night Guard contingent in this army and had sequestered itself in a small dank corner of the encampment from which the Solar Guard regiments, of which there were three plus a Royal Artillery regiment, kept a wide berth from. It was, however, quite near a rather large and impressive tent that I assumed served as general headquarters for the duration.

The Night Guards themselves were either milling aimlessly around their side of the camp, engaging in the garrulous idle banter of soldiers or engaging in gambling activities. The ones on active duty were taking part in numerous training activities; the unicorns were practicing combat drill formations, changing positions at the command of an aggressively voiced sergeant to present the maximum firepower against the imaginary enemy. The earth ponies were testing their great endurance and strength with a hike around the circumference of the entire encampment and the town, while the pegasi were overhead.

I became aware of hundreds of pairs of yellow draconic eyes staring at me, like an electric feeling over my fur. I stiffened instinctively, doing my best to avoid their piercing gazes. It became eerily quiet as we stepped across the hard, dry earth; not completely silent, mind you, as the constant sound of frantic activity, chatter, and sergeants bellowing orders was always present, but simply subdued as I awkwardly became the centre of attention.

“Carry on, carry on,” said Red Coat to his troops, trying to diffuse the rather awkward situation. A handful went back to whatever activity they were performing before my arrival, but the air of tense scrutiny remained. I was the rank outsider; an officious bureaucrat sent from Canterlot to make sure everypony was doing their job correctly.

There was a group of three Night Guards congregating outside a tent. They were officers, judging by the silver and gold ornamentation on their baroque plate armour, who regarded me with varying degrees of hostility and curiosity.

“Is this him?” the closest one asked with a voice like sandpaper. He was a dangerous looking pegasus despite his slight physique and small stature. If it weren’t for the masculine blocky face I’d have probably mistaken him for a mare. Of course, if I did I probably wouldn’t survive the beating he’d give me. The air of menace about him was only worsened by the grotesque bat-like leathery wings upon his back, like a hideous mockery of a pegasus’ graceful feathers. The stallion moved like a cat; slow, deliberate, and extraordinarily gracefully, like he was ready to explode into sudden and terrifying violence at the slightest provocation. I despise cats, I think they’re creepy little beggars and I dislike individuals who happen to look like them even more.

I nodded in response, doing my best to meet his intense and emotionless stare. The chilling amber eyes seemed to penetrate through me, and I could tell he was sizing me up; analysing my physique and looking for weak points.

“If you mean Blueblood,” I said dryly, “then he has arrived.”

The stallion coughed out a word that sounded something like ‘ponce’, but I elected to ignore it.

“This is Captain Blitzkrieg of the Pegasus company.” said Red Coat amicably, pointing out the stallion helpfully with his hoof.

“And Major Starlit Skies of the Unicorn company.”

Red Coat indicated towards the second officer, who was an elderly unicorn more focused on the book levitating in mid-air in front of him than he was me. I cleared my throat, causing him to glance up from his raggedy old tome at the pony that dared to interrupt his reading time. His expression changed rapidly from irritated disdain to sudden slack-jawed anxiety, which made his thick bifocals shudder precariously on his snout.

“N-nice to meet you,” he stuttered anxiously, dropping the book to the dusty ground with a heavy thud.

“Likewise,” I replied.

Starlit Skies looked a little more relieved and picked up his book, grumbling in irritation over the dust covering the hardback canvas covers. I watched him with vague amusement as he retrieved a small cloth from the recesses of his armour and proceeded to very carefully wipe down the now dusty surfaces.

“Oh blast it, I’ve lost my place!” he despaired as he frantically flicked through the pages to find his lost position in whatever tome he was buried in.

I left him to it and approached the third and final senior officer of the regiment. He was a big, imposing pony that towered over me by a good number of inches. His entire body, from what could be seen under the impressively ornate and baroque armour, was a veritable mountain of impressive muscle that put any stallion to shame. At first he appeared to be sneering condescendingly at me, indeed the way he carried himself had a certain aristocratic air, but then I caught sight of the left side of his face upon which was a grotesque scar that marred his once handsome features. The puckered scar tissue had pulled the left edge of his mouth up, so as to give the impression of a malformed grin.

“Colonel Sunshine Smiles,” announced Red Coat.

“Ah, we’ve been expecting you,” he said, his voice surprisingly warm and welcoming with hints of the refined upper Canterlot speech, he even held out his hoof to shake, which I did. “Can’t say I’m entirely sanguine about your presence here, I’ve worked hard to ensure that the regiment is an effective fighting machine, but what the Princess wills we obey.”

I nodded; I wasn’t feeling particularly sanguine about this arrangement either. Actually, I was rather surprised that he used the word ‘sanguine’; guardsponies brought up from the rank and file tended to have rather limited vocabularies.

“I’m sure you have,” I said, looking around at the guardsponies around us and nodding in mock approval. “I think the Princesses want to test out their new institution on a good regiment before letting us loose on the Solar Guard. You have a fine body of troops.”

That seemed to placate him, and he smiled genuinely this time. I breathed a sigh of relief, wondering how many more lies and platitudes I’d have to produce to get out alive with this job.

“Aye, soon to be fine bodies of troops,” said Blitzkrieg derisively, and to my surprise the other officers chuckled at the morbid display of gallows humour. I joined in, if only to ease the tension.

***

All in all, I didn’t think the introductions went too badly, except for Captain Blitzkrieg who always looked at me as if he was planning the best position to stick a blade in my back. After a while Red Coat showed us to our tent and then left us to get settled in.

Looking at the interior of an officer’s tent brought back memories of my previous life in the Solar Guard. It was not particularly well furnished or elegant, but it was comfortable and that’s what mattered. The tent was spacious, intending to serve as my office as much as my sleeping quarters, and was divided down the middle by a long piece of cloth with a slit cut through the centre to allow entry beyond. This was the ‘front of office’ section with a large foldable writing desk dominating it, a collapsible filing cabinet up against a ‘wall’, and a bedroll for Cannon Fodder to sleep on. Excellent, not only would I have to contend with his scent and messy eating habits I’d also have to put up with his snoring too.

As Cannon Fodder busied himself unpacking everything and arranging his little area of the tent to his liking, no doubt concealing his pornography collection somewhere where I or some innocent clerk will stumble upon it, I went through the slit in the fabric to my quarters.

They were comfortable enough, if sparsely furnished. Of course, the nature of these encampments is that they’re designed to be temporary, so everything was constructed to be able to be folded away and carried easily when the army was to inevitably march into Changeling territory and begin this war in earnest. There was a sizeable cot for me positioned against the far wall, a decently sized wardrobe to be filled with all one of my uniforms, and a smaller writing desk in the corner.

I was grateful for the near solitude, disrupted only by the sounds of Cannon Fodder fiddling with his meagre luggage and exploring the environs of his new office.

As I had discussed with Auntie Luna and as described in the accompanying guidelines, this job was to have a lot of paperwork. I was to be singularly responsible for the discipline and emotional well-being of nine hundred stallions and mares. As I have learned through my previous employment in the War Ministry one can’t so much as cough in the Royal Guard without having half a dozen forms shoved under one’s nose to be signed in triplicate and sent back to the Ministry for processing, only for it to be lost, filed in the wrong place, or accidently immolated.

That was why I had elected to bring Cannon Fodder. His nigh-supernatural ability to process large amounts of paperwork effectively and accurately, probably due to his literal-minded personality and tendency to obey all of my orders as if Princess Celestia herself flew down from on high and delivered them, helped alleviate much of the burden on me. His offensive smell and slovenly appearance coupled with his dull personality ensured that only ponies with truly important things came to me.

I levitated my trunk over from where Cannon Fodder had unceremoniously dropped it off in the corner. Given our proximity to the frontlines I had elected to travel light, bringing only things that could be replaced or I wouldn’t mind missing if Changelings had burst into our encampment and, for some reason, decided to burn down my tent. Most of my possessions were irreplaceable; nobility does not buy new things, but instead we tend to inherit our possessions. My estate, for example, and most of its contents has been in my family for over a millennium. The only things I possessed that could truly be considered mine were my clothes; as much as I enjoy the time honoured traditions of inheritance I didn’t fancy wearing something that my great-great-great-great-grandfather died in.

I popped the trunk on the cot and opened it, levitating out a few books on Equestrian military history onto the desk along with my writing equipment and a handful of random trinkets I had some emotional attachment too.

There was a blue bow-tie. A rather silly little old thing, but it was something that my Auntie Celestia had given to me when I finally graduated from her School for Gifted Unicorns. I put it on nevertheless, supplementing my rather sombre uniform with a dash of bright colour and class. I also found a rose, preserved forever with a magical enchantment to never wilt and die. It was the one that Rarity had picked out for me at the Grand Galloping Gala [Rarity describes this event in rather different terms]. I still thought of that mare, and I realised at that point that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to her before Auntie Luna unceremoniously threw me on a train. Compelled by some similar sense of sentimentality I secured the rose to my lapel.

It was already starting to grow dark, as the train journey here had taken up the bulk of the day. I was feeling weary and exhausted in the only way an extended period of sitting down doing nothing can be. There was nothing more I wanted to do than lie back on my cot with a good book and a bottle of fine wine to wile the evening away, alas, that was not to be.

As I had finished arranging the various items on my desk, the sudden stench of body odour alerted me to Cannon Fodder’s arrival in my half of the tent.

“Sir, there’s somepony to see you,” he said, before pulling back through the partition.

I sighed, looks like I wasn’t going to get a moment’s rest after all, so I reluctantly followed my esteemed aide out into the front office area of the tent.

Standing by the desk was a unicorn stallion I hadn’t seen for at least five years.

“Crimson Arrow!” I said.

We had gone through officer training together and then served side-by-side in the 1st Royal Guard regiment. His deferential nature to me and eagerness to please his social betters was naturally endearing, though I have to admit I may have abused our friendship to gain certain favours or avoid performing duties I didn’t like.

He was of decidedly average build; his fur dyed a pure white just like the majority of the unicorns in the Solar Guard, and he bore a constant friendly expression that reminded me of an overly excited puppy. Then I noticed his uniform, it was the crimson tunic of an officer’s dress uniform, but the gold braid and metal pips along his collar marked him out as an officer of the general staff.

“It’s General Crimson Arrow now,” he said, still with that friendly grin on his face.

“Whoops, so you are,” I said jokingly, before snapping to attention and performing a curt salute.

Crimson Arrow’s grin only grew wider, “Bah, no need for that, technically I should still be bowing to you, Your Highness.”

“A general, how the bloody hell did they let you become a general?”

He tilted his head to one side curiously, “Oh, it’s not that hard to believe, I had the right connections and enough money to buy my way up the ranks. It’s a shame you left when your four years of service was up, you could have been Field Marshal by now.”

Ah, the usual mix of nepotism and money then.

I had to admit that ‘Field Marshal Blueblood’ had a nice ring to it, and the uniform did look nice, but I had enough of life in the Royal Guard and wanted to get back to my usual routine of doing precisely sod all in complete and total safety. But, as I had just recently learned, once the Royal Guard get their hooks in you they’ll always find a way of dragging you back.

“Anyway,” he continued, “Field Marshal Iron Hoof is hosting a small dinner party for the senior officers of Army Group Centre, so when I learned that my old buddy Blueblood was here I insisted you be invited.”

A dinner party with the Field Marshal? I couldn’t possibly turn that down; perhaps all I really needed after the past few days’ nonsense was to engage in the one thing I’ve been any good at – hobnobbing with my fellow aristocrats and high borns.

I instructed Cannon Fodder to hold the fort here, and after a brief explanation that it was only a saying and I didn’t want him to literally hold the encampment he nodded blankly and got back to work arranging his desk to his liking.

The Field Marshal had sequestered himself and the general staff of Army Group Centre in the town hall, having evicted the mayor and the town officials to make room for his own administrative team and commanders, which effectively put the whole town under martial law. It was quite some distance away in the centre of town, but the long walk allowed Crimson Arrow and me to catch up on lost time.

It seemed that Crimson Arrow had done pretty well for himself; his position in the Royal Guard had afforded his aristocratic family a great deal more pride and glory, elevating the Arrow estate from a minor family with little influence to one that was greatly expected among the Royal Court of Canterlot. They were an influential family which owed its success to me, in some convoluted way that, thankfully, Crimson Arrow wholeheartedly believed in. Subsequently, having the support of this now influential family would do wonders for my own standing back home, assuming I would ever survive for long enough to return to Canterlot.

Inevitably our chat turned back towards our time together in the Royal Guard. We laughed as we exchanged old anecdotes and memories of the not-strictly legal things we both got up to during our term of service. This, you see, was when the officer corps of the Royal Guard was nothing more than an institutionalised gentlecolt’s club masquerading as a military force. There was the time we sneaked into the 2nd Solar Guard Regiment’s barracks and stole all of Major Star’s medals.

“I wonder what happened to Stiff Upper Lip,” I asked as we finally reached the town.

“Dead,” he replied, “he led a charge into an erupting volcano.”

There was a rather awkward silence as I pondered the passing of one of the foremost and most insane minds in Equestrian military history.

“It’s what he would have wanted.”

It was pitch black by the time we reached the town hall. With a mandatory curfew in effect there was nopony out in the streets save for a few of the local militia standing guard and doing their hardest to look intimidating with their silly Stetson hats and home-made spears. [On the contrary, the Dodge Junction Militia has proven to be a rather effective civilian army. As a frontier town they are already experienced in defending their homes and livelihoods from hostile raids. Like many in the Royal Guard, Blueblood is rather dismissive of the civilian militias.]

Much like the other town houses and shops here, the town hall was a dilapidated old thing constructed with no regard to aesthetics or permanence. It was crafted out of wood and looked as if it was about ready to collapse. Overall it was a depressing affair, but still it was the largest single building and the inbred yokels who inhabited this town were probably rather proud of it. As Fancy Pants might have put it, it was ‘delightfully rustic’.

I was grateful to get inside though, and I was pleasantly surprised by the interior decor. Granted, it wasn’t anything on par with the grand ballrooms and estates of Canterlot that I was used to, but after that train ride and my time seeing nothing but tents in the encampment, some small amount of luxury was more than welcome. What was once the main meeting hall was repurposed into a war room which, in turn, was repurposed to a dining room for the dinner party.

A massive oak table dominated the chamber, upon which a large piece of fabric probably once used as part of a circus tent was draped in lieu of a table cloth. Plates and utensils had been set out, naturally, but the centrepiece of the whole ensemble was a small marble statuette of Princess Celestia standing triumphant over a beaten and cowering Changeling Queen. Apparently everypony here was absolutely confident of our victory, I, on the other hand, was rather more cautious about declaring our invasion a success before we’d even set foot in the Badlands.

The bare and barren walls of the chamber had been tastefully adorned with tapestries and banners of the regiments of Army Group Centre. I noticed how the 1st Night Guard’s dark and foreboding regimental standard stood out from the bright and colourful banners of the other regiments. For starters it was black, with a pale crescent moon tipped on his back and flanked by a set of pegasus wings, and the slogan ‘Virtutis Gloria Merces’ [‘Glory is the reward of valour’ in Ancient Equestrian] emblazoned upon it.

The senior officers of the three Solar Guard regiments plus the artillery regiment were already there, mingling amicably along to a pleasant soundtrack provided by a gramophone in the corner of the room. My hooves clopped loudly on the polished wooden floor as I stepped inside, and the idle chatter ceased.

Crimson Arrow stomped his hoof thrice and announced, “May I present His Royal Highness Prince Blueblood, and Royal Commissar to the 1st Night Guards Regiment.”

I puffed out my chest proudly and stood as regally impressive as I could. The effect was instantaneous, despite the grim uniform I was wearing, and the officers bowed or dipped their head down towards me. All of them bar one; standing in the corner of the room was a thin, wiry stallion of middle age. He wore the crimson of the Royal Guard dress uniform, but the white sashes and gold braid marked him out as Field Marshal: the supreme commander of Their Highnesses’ Armed Forces. His expression, from what could be seen behind his impressively enormous handlebar moustache was stern and emotionless, his eyes, however, were fixed upon me; judging and analysing me. I suppressed an involuntary shudder when I momentarily made contact with those intense, cold, blue eyes.

“Field Marshal, I assume,” I said finally, trying to diffuse the slight anxiety welling up within me. I saluted anyway.

The stallion nodded, “I am Iron Hoof,” he said in a refined Trottingham accent. “You must be this Blueblood fellow I’ve heard so much about, good show.”

There was something about that stallion’s character I found to be rather chilling. I couldn’t place my hoof on it at the time, and I had yet to learn that my gut instinct has the nasty habit of being right. Therefore I tried to push it out of my mind and slip once more into my refined dinner party persona that I had spent a lifetime cultivating.

I was in my element amidst the rarefied company of my fellow upper class ponies. Here was a society of elites, bound by the innumerable social laws that kept everything orderly and refined. There were no true friends here, however, merely tools to advance one’s social ambitions. Crimson Arrow, for example, in my tour of duty in the 1st Solar Guard I took him under my metaphorical wing and nurtured his family into one with considerable political clout, therefore he was beholden to me for his increased prestige and I could rely on his grateful support in future. In the facile parlance of modern middle management, it was time to ‘network’.

Unfortunately we had arrived rather late and there was no time for mingling. A bell was rung and we took to our seats, while servants, presumably in Iron Hoof’s employ, streamed through the door to serve dinner. They bore silver platters, upon which were a wide variety of fine foods and culinary delights – finest hay from the golden fields of the Mid-West Equestria, cherries from the cherry fields near Dodge Junction, apples from Sweet Apple Acres, and I even spied exotic guavas and kiwis imported from darkest Zebrica.

I couldn’t help but wonder if all of this wealth and opulence was appropriate in this state of total war. Granted I am the last pony to be preaching on the virtues of temperance, having recently just bought a solid gold statue of myself for my front lawn but in my defence at the time of writing this we are no longer fighting for our very survival.

At this stage in the war, the very early stage before we had even fought our first battle, it hadn’t quite sunk into our collective psyche just what total war means. For many of us, our only frames of reference were adventure stories written about the ancient wars of old Equestria or ancient texts. I had some inkling, but it was motivated by my primal need to stay alive and the vague feeling that wars are generally a bad thing.

I took my seat in the corner, next to Crimson Arrow on my left and Iron Hoof who sat at the head of the table. Opposite me was a young earth pony mare in an ill-fitting crimson dress uniform, judging by the rank pips on her shoulder straps she was a Captain in the 5th Solar Guard Regiment. Beside the mare, and diagonally left to me, was an older stallion of fine aristocratic breeding (i.e. inbred to the point of idiocy) whose rank pips signified him as the Captain’s commanding officer.

As we tucked into the first course of fruit salad, which was delectable as expected, I briefly glanced around the table to notice that a set of rather important ponies were missing.

“Are Colonel Sunshine Smiles and the others not joining us then?” I asked Crimson Arrow as the servants began clearing the dishes away and bringing in the main course of finest sun-dried hay.

“Oh, they never attend these social functions,” said Crimson Arrow, his mouth salivating a little as a plate of fresh hay was placed on the table before him. “We only ever see them during staff meetings, strictly business and no fun at all.”

“Besides,” the mare opposite me piped up suddenly, her voice cheery but refined, “could you just imagine what those ruffians would be like here? They clearly don’t belong.”

I tilted my head to one side curiously, idly curling some hay about my fork in the graceful manner taught to me by my regal Aunt. “Do you not send them invitations?”

“Oh we send them invitations alright,” she said, tossing her luxuriously blonde mane out of her eyes. “But we make it clear that they’re not welcome here.”

Arching an eyebrow, I decided it was best not to press further before I become embroiled in the class war brewing in the higher echelons of this army. At any rate, it seemed I was now representing the 1st Night Guard for this and, most likely, any future social events.

“They’re all commoners, you see,” she continued. “I’m sure you recall the last Grand Galloping Gala, how the most important social event of the entire year was ruined by those… those ragamuffins from country.”

“It was hardly their fault,” I said, “you can hardly expect commoners to understand the social mores of high society any more than you can expect a dog to. They were simply taken out of their comfort zone.”

The Captain nodded her head, pushing the hay around on her plate thoughtfully with her fork. “Which is why we can’t allow those brutish Night Guards here, we might be on the same side, dear, but that’s no reason to disregard the traditions of social class – the traditions upon which Equestria is built.”

“I don’t think I caught your name, Captain,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“Royal Lace,” she said, inclining her head towards me. “And I know who you are, Prince Blueblood, I dare say everypony should know Equestria’s premier bachelor.”

Oh dear, she was going to start flirting with me. In any other situation where my life was not in abject peril, and the anxiety of said peril not sitting in my stomach like a lead weight, I’d have happily taken advantage of this young and impressionable mare. The severity of my own situation coupled with my abject confusion over what I was exactly here for had put me off pursuing any such debauchery. Fear for one’s life rather helps put things into perspective, I find, and clarifies the mind greatly.

“Besides,” she continued, elegantly washing her meal down with the fine wine; Chateau le Chateau ’82 vintage if I wasn’t mistaken, “I hear that one of their number is a known criminal.”

“Really?” I leaned forward, for the first time actually interested in what she had to say. I probably should have looked at those briefing papers a little more closely beforehand if one of my colleagues was actually a lawbreaker.

She nodded, “Oh yes, the captain of the Pegasus company, I forget his name.”

“Blitzkrieg.”

“Yes, that’s it, such an ugly name. I heard that he was a gang leader in Trottingham, and when he was finally arrested they gave him a choice of either prison or serving in the Night Guard. I tell you, the Royal Guard is going to the dogs if we’re letting common criminals become officers.”

I nodded my head. From the very first moment I laid eyes upon Blitzkrieg I thought him to be a criminal, while I tend not to associate with the violent underworld hidden beneath some of the more densely populated cities there was an air of fierce menace about him. It wasn’t something I can exactly describe, but it was in his odd feline-like movements and the cold look in his eyes that implied that he had seen and perpetrated some awful things.

“Then there’s their Colonel with the ugly scar,” she rambled on. “There’s a rumour going around...”

“Come now,” said the Colonel next to her, thankfully interrupting her small rant, “it’s not nice to gossip about others.”

“Oh what utter rot, they’re only commoners, sir, these are the sort of ponies who eat fritters and hay fries and watch hoofball,” she said dismissively. The Colonel, rather than disciplining his young and naive subordinate, turned his attention back to the pony opposite him and continued their thrilling debate about cricket.

“Anyway, the Colonel with the ugly scar is rumoured to be ex-Solar Guard and a former noblepony, but something terrible happened and he was given a choice: accept a transfer to the Night Guard or be cashiered.” [Cashiered means an officer is stripped of their commission; since commissions cost a fair bit of money cashiering means the officer in question loses a considerable amount of bits. In theory, this was supposed to ensure that officers perform their role properly]

It made a degree of sense; it explained Smiles’ unusually aristocratic manner and possibly even the hideous scar upon his face. But my duties as Commissar probably involved quashing the spreading of such rumours, though I doubted that they would actually pay attention to any such edict I give out. These officers were already in a world of their own; nice, warm, and safe from the horrors they were about to be immersed into.

I tried to keep the conversation light, inquiring into the young mare’s life and background. She was from Vanhoover on the West Coast of Equestria; a cold and frigid place inhabited by a hardy stock of ponies with peculiar accents, I had the misfortune of visiting there once and I shan’t make that mistake again. Her father, I was pleasantly surprised to learn, was Baron Gold Acre, whose noble clan was in a tenuous alliance with mine at the time. He bought her commission into the 5th Solar Guard as a Hearth’s Warming present. Well, I could think of many things which would make more suitable gifts for Hearth’s Warming, but she seemed very happy with it.

As we continued eating and making small talk I felt more and more unease about the luxury around us. My thoughts soon turned to my own life. It was not a matter of if but when we would be sent into battle, to be baptised in the crucible of terrible, bloody war. Everypony else talked about it in animated tones; they were excited, as if a disturbing lust for violence, long repressed, had been awakened from deep within the pony psyche. The sensation of feeling that I was the only sane pony in the room, the only one who felt the true enormity of what we were about to undertake, was disconcerting.

The pony next to her was Colonel Imperial Blue, whom I recognised as being of one of the many offshoots of my own noble clan (the Blood clan). The Blue clan was just as powerful and notable as mine, and in past centuries had alternately been staunch allies and better enemies of the Bloods. In recent years it seems that the Bloods have been superseding their old rivals in terms of prestige, seeing as how we avoided the deleterious practice of inbreeding to preserve bloodlines, thus ensuring that we did not devolve into drooling morons. [Blueblood evidently has never had a close look at his own family tree then] His manner, however, was much like Royal Lace’s with his approach to the war; an almost foal-like enthusiasm for it that, frankly, worried me.

Field Marshal Iron Hoof, on the other hoof, was cold and distant and spoke little of himself. When he did utter phrases of more than three words it was solely on the war. He spoke of strategies in a dull monotone that I absolutely could not follow or pay attention to. Fortunately, I had mastered the practice of pretending to pay attention after many hours spent in dull meetings with bureaucratic officials and Auntie Celestia. It was merely a matter of nodding along and saying ‘how fascinating’ and variants thereof at appropriate points in the ‘conversation’.

The main course came and went, our plates polished clean of the fine hay. With our bellies stuffed full of expensive food we all relaxed, except Iron Hoof who remained as aloof and distant as usual though nopony seemed to particularly mind. Servants produced a crystal glass decanter of port, the dark crimson liquid sloshed in the cut glass receptacle as it was placed down upon the table. As the servant poured out the fine beverage in our glasses, and others gave us a fine chocolate cigar each, I mused that this must have been where all the servants in Canterlot had gone; Iron Hoof had pilfered them all.

Getting more than slightly drunk on fine wine and port, the atmosphere only grew more congenial and relaxed. It was not long before Crimson Arrow and I began regaling everypony else with anecdotes of our time together in the Royal Guard, mainly focusing on old Stiff Upper Lip’s eccentricities, which were rewarded with uproarious laughter. We talked about nothing of any particular worth; things I couldn’t possibly remember now even if I tried. Looking back it just feels so distant; looking back on my past life after all that I have been through and experienced feels like trying to remember a dream – thoughts are unclear and indistinct, swimming together to form merely vague ideas and feelings.

I don’t know whether it was the effect of the alcohol, but I felt I was starting to finally relax after a full night and a day of terror and cloying anxiety. I was even enjoying myself. This was a return to my old life; a life of luxury where the biggest threat to me was a simple social faux pas that could easily be amended by appearing at an appropriate charity or benefit event. It was a good life; filled with good food, good wine, expensive things, and good company. Well, perhaps not the last one so much, but the fawning adulation of lesser nobles was sufficient enough for me, if a little lonely.

Yet there was still the nagging feeling that this was merely temporary. Even through the slight haze of intoxication I knew that in the morning I would be sober, probably with a slight hangover, and there would still be a war on. No amount of alcohol and fine food and empty platitudes would change that fact.

So I left feeling rather empty. We walked back together and continued our banter, though we left Iron Hoof in the town hall.

The night was eerily beautiful. Out here, in the back end of nowhere where even streetlights are considered an expensive extravagance, the full glory of Auntie Luna’s night sky was made evident. The moon shone its baleful yellow glow down upon us, while billions upon billions of stars formed a glorious mosaic above us. I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole Nightmare Moon incident one thousand years ago could have been avoided if ponies had bothered just to look up once in a while, then again Luna was a relative teenager at the time and ponies of that stage of development tend to have their own unique, selfish view of reality.

We said our goodbyes and parted, making assurances that we ‘must do this again sometime’. Again, my sudden maudlin mood swing was probably just a result of the alcohol coursing through my veins, but I was feeling rather dejected as I picked my way around the sleeping guardsponies curled up on sleeping mats on the ground. In the grim moonlight they looked disturbingly like corpses, if corpses could snore.

After navigating my way around the sleeping ponies I reached my tent with little difficulty, except for one Night Guard who suddenly embraced my hind leg and wouldn’t let go until I kicked him awake. He apologised profusely when he recognised the menacing skull upon my cap and did his best to return to slumber, most likely doing so with one eye open from now on.

There was a warm, welcoming orange glow in my tent, which made the various objects inside cast black silhouettes upon the beige fabric like a Neighponese shadow puppet show. I could see two figures sitting together, one of them probably Cannon Fodder by the silhouette of his grubby uniform and peculiarly malformed crest upon his helm, and the other a Night Guard judging by the creepy dorsal fin in lieu of a Solar Guard’s crest.

I pushed my way through the flap into my tent, rather curious as to what was so important as to disturb Cannon Fodder during lights out. I also pondered the wisdom of using candles in a tent made entirely of flammable material, but then I realised that Cannon Fodder, being a Blank, has no magical ability whatsoever and therefore cannot summon even the simplest of light spells.

Cannon Fodder was sitting on his haunches upon the floor next to Colonel Sunshine Smiles. The two were in the middle of a friendly conversation when I blundered inside.

“…so the doctor said I’ll never be able to use my horn ever,” said Cannon Fodder, apparently explaining his entire life story to the Colonel who, against all reason, didn’t look like he wanted to end his life then and there. “They even said I should get it removed and live the rest of my life like an earth pony, but it just didn’t seem right.”

“Nothing wrong with being an earth pony, is there?” said Sunshine Smiles, his friendly grin made hideous by that malformed scar.

“Can I help you, Colonel?” I asked, noticing for the first time that my words were slurring together clumsily. I must have been a little more drunk than I first realised.

“No, no,” he said as he slowly stood up, “I was just having a nice chat with your assistant here, very interesting.”

Cannon Fodder smiled at the praise and nodded his head gratefully, while I blinked gormlessly; ‘very interesting’ is not a phrase that’s readily applicable to the quiet and thoroughly unimaginative colt here. Indeed, I selected him as my aide for those two precise reasons, among others such as his ability to soak up powerful magics like a sponge.

Sunshine sniffed at the air, “Chateau le Chateau wine, my, you have been having a good time, Blueblood.”

I arched an eyebrow, or rather I tried to. Given my slight intoxication it was a rather difficult gesture to do. The Colonel was full of surprises; not only did he have the necessary intelligence and education to understand and use the word ‘sanguine’, he was apparently enough of a wine connoisseur to tell what wine I had been imbibing through scent alone. Or perhaps I was so liquored up that I practically reeked of the stuff, far more than Cannon Fodder does of his usual dirt-induced fragrance.

“You should have come with us,” I said, taking my cap off and placing it on the desk. A quick glance at the clock there showed that it was approaching midnight.

He shook his head in response, “No, no, I know I’m not welcome there anymore,” he said somewhat forlornly. “You want to know how I got it?”

I blinked, “Pardon?”

“My scar.”

I hadn’t realised I had been staring at it. I flushed a little with embarrassment at having been caught in such an act of discourtesy, but then it was rather hard not to stare at the puckered, damaged tissue that ruined what might have been a handsome face at one point.

“Shaving accident?” I said and instantly regretted saying it. I cringed and looked away, expecting a slap or some torrent of abuse. Instead, the Colonel merely smiled back; a genuine smile that still looked rather sardonic thanks to the scar.

“That’s it, I cut myself shaving,” he said amicably with a slight, albeit forced, chuckle. He patted me on the shoulder as he made to leave, “Good night, Prince.”

He then left, leaving me and Cannon Fodder alone in the tent. My aide crawled onto his sleeping mat and fell asleep almost instantly. I, on the other hoof, found sleep rather more elusive. It might have been the alcohol muddying up my sleep cycle, or the constant, unending anxiety that kept my brain turning when it should be resting.

There was a known criminal and fallen noblepony leading the regiment and me; a useless, talentless, cowardly hack who once accidently saved the day once while trying to run away. With that combination of inspired leadership I didn’t have much hope for the future of the 1st Night Guard regiment. In fact, I didn’t have much hope for the future of the entire Royal Guard itself. I didn’t know much about the average soldier, but on the whole they appeared to be well-drilled, well-equipped, and well-trained, but their leaders were an unknown quantity. At the dinner party I saw an officer class that was wholly inept and even unconcerned about the business of leadership; to them war was a game, and they were unaware, as I was, of the brutally high stakes that were to come. They existed in blissful ignorance and I envied them. It was a formula for military disaster; one didn’t have to be Neighpoleon to understand that.

Sleep that night, when it did eventually come, was restless.

Night's Blood (Part 2)

The following day I attempted to settle into a routine, though it was made rather difficult with the slight hangover I was experiencing. It felt like there was a small family of Diamond Dogs living within the confines of my skull and they weren't being particularly good house guests. With this in mind I set about trying to work out what exactly I was supposed to be doing.

I left Cannon Fodder once more to look after the front office, and he seemed rather happy to get on with his duties. In the absence of any particular orders I had decided that the best use of my time, other than lying on my cot and praying for the end of this headache, was to follow and shadow the senior officers. That way, I had hoped, I would be able to understand how the 1st Night Guards regiment operated. Most importantly, however, I thought it would be the option would look as if I was actually doing some work while putting the minimum amount of effort into it.

The encampment was in the process of dragging itself awake. Tired ponies who were on guard duty over the night slumped back to be replaced by fresh and alert guards. A few paused to exchange the sort of rough and vulgar banter the rank-and-file love to indulge in, before returning to their duties or crawling back onto their assigned bedroll to make up for lost sleep. The majority of the troops were lining up at the canteen tent to receive the first of their daily rations; a breakfast of oats in a feedbag.

The early morning sun was just cresting over the eastern horizon, over the vast flat plains that characterised this wretched little corner of our beatific realm. The sky itself was tinged a lustrous orange and gold, giving away to light blue, and finally darkness over the west where Luna's moon was making its descent over more empty and boring plains. The cool morning air helped clear my head slightly, though it still felt like my brain was immersed in a tank of thick, viscous fluid that was attempting to leak out of my ears.

I grabbed a quick feedbag of oats from the canteen, which was basic, nearly edible stuff in stark contrast to the opulent dinner I had the night before. The sight of me queuing up with the rank and file probably made for quite a sight, and indeed many of the soldiers stared in slack-jawed amazement as I, Prince-Commissar Blueblood, had deigned to line up with them for my daily ration of oats. In actuality I was cringing inside for being so close to so many unwashed commoners for an extended period of time, but I was rather hungry and I couldn't find the officer's mess. At any rate, showing the common guardspony that I was willing to tolerate their company and food for even a short while would evidently improve my standing in their eyes. This would prove useful later, for in the bloody crucible of war the troops were more likely to try and help me stay alive if they felt they liked me.

My hunger sated for now I went for a long walk around the Night Guard's portion of the encampment. The breakfast had helped in some small way to ameliorate the hangover, but it still felt like my brain was attempting to escape via my eye sockets.

A platoon of unicorns was performing magic missile drill, so I went over to take a look. They were arrayed out on a firing range, which was just a large space cleared out and surrounded by sheets of corrugated iron in a bid to prevent any stray shots from hitting any wandering ponies. The firing range was built in a way so that the unicorns would be aimed out of the encampment, so in theory if there were any misfires or if somepony accidently punctured a hole in the corrugated iron shielding the missile just go straight across the plains and harmlessly run out of energy or hit a cactus.

By the side of the firing range was an array of clay pigeon traps, the sort of machines that fire small discs into the air and one has to try and shoot them out of the sky. I attempted this ‘sport' a while ago and failed miserably; my horn-to-eye co-ordination is pretty terrible and I accidently shot the head off one of Auntie Celestia's statues the first time I tried my hoof at it in the castle gardens.

The unicorns came up to the firing line in groups of five at a time, where they did their hardest to shoot the flying discs out of the sky. Results were varied, I guessed about three out of the five could hit their target before being sent to the back of the queue. I spotted Starlit Skies sitting off to the side next to the clay pigeon traps, still engrossed in his dusty old book while a Lieutenant and five other guardsponies worked the machines. With little else to do I approached him.

"Still reading that old book, Major?" I asked and the poor old pony practically jumped out of his fur, though this time he kept a hold of his book.

"Oh, Commissar, it's you," he said and inclined his head towards me in a sort of half-hearted bow.

"What is it anyway?"

The old unicorn wiggled his nose, which made the glasses perched upon his snout jitter until they had been adjusted into a more comfortable position. This odd gesture, combined with his friendly expression and calm demeanour, was very much disarming and helped alleviate much of the anxiety I felt about his appearance as a Night Guard.

"It's ‘Fancy Mathematics' by McIntosh," he said as he held up the book for me to read the faded title on the spine of the book. "It's a fascinating book; McIntosh's insights into the application of mathematics in everyday life are most interesting, revolutionary even! There's an entire chapter dedicated to working out how many apple trees a single pony can harvest in any set period of time, the formulae even factors in such concepts as exhaustion-induced insanity."

I nodded blankly. Truth was I didn't care much for maths, or indeed anything remotely cerebral as I must admit that I'm not a terribly bright stallion. My understanding of mathematics never truly progressed further than ‘I have five apples and eat three, how many apples do I have left?' The answer, in case you're wondering, is ‘not enough for your pastry chef to make an apple pie'.

"Not exactly required reading for the Royal Guard, is it?" I asked. "Shouldn't we be concentrating on our duties?"

He looked up, his normally whimsical expression growing rather grave as he slammed his book shut dramatically and I wondered if I may have over-stepped my mark a little. Mirthless amber eyes glared at me through the distorting lenses of bifocal spectacles.

"Mathematics is the foundation of all knowledge," he said in the manner of a teacher lecturing a particularly slow young colt. "All of the laws of science and philosophy all rely upon the irrefutable fact that two plus two equals four, from there, all understanding flows."

I frowned at him and cocked my head to one side curiously, looking at the strange old stallion sceptically. I'm not a particularly deep thinker, as many ponies will readily attest, despite my expensive education in the most prestigious school in all of Equestria, so epistemology is hardly something I could get my head around.

"Don't believe me? I'll show you." He turned to the Lieutenant in charge of the stallions operating the machines, "Mind if Blueblood and I have a go?"

The Lieutenant, a young unicorn mare who would have been otherwise attractive if it weren't for those infernal shark teeth and eyes, nodded and barked some orders at her stallions. The firing line was cleared of ponies in short order, so I reluctantly took my place there just to go along with whatever point that Starlit Skies was trying to prove to me.

"Pull!" he cried, and a clay disc was sent hurtling through the air.

I adopted the stance; legs spread wide to absorb the recoil, and summoned the magical charge in my horn. I took aim, fired, and missed completely.

"A worthy effort," he said, lying through his teeth as I missed the stupid thing by a country mile. I wanted to blame all of the Night Guards around us giving me stage fright or the throbbing sensation in my head, but I knew deep down it was all down to me being a rather terrible shot. Besides, I couldn't see the point in focusing so much on accuracy; unicorn battle doctrine focuses on massed sustained fire on a large formation of enemies, not accurately shooting any small, flying discs of clay that the Changelings might suddenly decide to hurl at us. I supposed practicing precision shooting helped encourage discipline and hone a unicorn's control over his magical abilities.

I looked behind my shoulder to see him drawing complex equations and sums in the dirt with his hoof.

"Pull!"

I snapped back to the task at hoof. The disc sailed lazily through the air above me, so I let loose with a salvo of shots in the vague direction of the flying disc and was rewarded with seeing shatter into tiny pieces with only the fifth shot or so. Feeling rather pleased with myself I looked back to see Starlit Skies trotting up next to me.

"Not bad," he said, "but you guessed; you didn't think. You just pointed your horn in the vague direction of the target and hoped for the best. But if you bothered to take in such variables like the speed and direction of the target, wind strength and direction, gravity, and even the curvature of the earth into the equation then you can hit the target every - pull!"

A disc soared into the air. With supreme confidence Starlit calmly took aim and fired, blasting the target out of the sky.

"...single - pull! ...time - pull!"

Two more discs were similarly hurled into the sky and they too were blasted out of the sky with frightening precision. The crowd of guardsponies cheered and stomped their hooves in applause, which made Starlit Skies grin widely and bow graciously to his ‘audience'.

"How did you..." I muttered, for the first time in my life I was completely and utterly speechless. I gave up trying to complete the question, instead letting my jaw hang and flap uselessly. It must have made for a rather embarrassing sight, but I wasn't at all worried about that for the moment as my hangover-stricken mind ground to a halt trying to comprehend how this old stallion could perform such a feat of perfect shooting accuracy.

He merely smiled at me and patted me on the shoulder, "Maths, lad, maths."

I turned to leave in an irritated huff, ever the sore loser, but stopped just short of Starlit Sky's scrawled diagrams and calculations marked in the dust. I might as well been staring at Haygyptian hieroglyphics for all the sense it made to me; arcane symbols were interspersed with large numbers and peculiar squiggles that looked as if they were part of some eldritch spell to reawaken the Old Ones as much as a simple mathematical formula. Shaking my head I trotted off, stamping over the drawings as I went.

As I wandered aimlessly around the camp, doing my best to look as if I knew exactly what I was doing and where I was going. Fortunately, I managed to stumble across the quartermaster's store room in the course of my meanderings and decided to address a situation that had just started bugging me. Since my unexpected and unwelcome induction into the Commissariat I had yet to be issued with my armour, meaning I had to trudge around in this ridiculous dress uniform that, while stylish, would offer no protection from the rending claws of the Changeling hordes.

The store room was simply a massive tent filled with enormous racks of Night Guard plate armour, spears, kitbags, and various other detritus and equipment that a Night Guard might need over his long career. In front of all that was a simple wooden desk, at which a unicorn stallion sat hunched over a massive stack of parchment. Ah, the joys of mountains of paperwork, I knew them all too well.

Confidently I stepped up to the desk, smiling politely but not too friendly, and he ignored me. Instead he was intent on scribbling something down on the parchment in an illegible script that looked as if a spider had been dipped in ink and left to thrash out its death throes on the paper. The pony was wearing full Night Guard plate armour, though it was covered in messy splotches of ink, despite his non-combatant status as a mere office drudge worker. The Royal Guard's tendencies to make its white collar administration workers wear the same combat gear as frontline infantry is a little perplexing. [There is some reasoning behind this convention; if the encampment were to come under enemy attack the ‘office drudge workers' would be capable of defending themselves]

I cleared my throat and the quartermaster looked up. "Can I help you, sir?" he said in a voice that implied that whatever I had just interrupted was of the utmost importance and therefore my interruption was a grievous sin. It was probably just that shipment of paperclips I had been working on before my transfer out of the War Ministry.

"Yes, I'd like to collect my armour," I said.

He looked up and down at me, "You're wearing it."

I blinked at him incredulously, wondering if he was genuinely afflicted in the head or being deliberately obtuse; either seemed probable. "No, I'm not."

He shook his head, "Yes you are."

"Look here," I said, tapping my hoof impatiently on his desk, "have you not eyes? Can you not see that this is my dress uniform for ceremonies, semi-formal functions, and other fancy occasions? Now, I'm sure you understand, it's only a matter of when rather than if I go into battle and I would much prefer to do so safely encased in shell of steel armour."

"Hooves off the desk, please," he grumbled in irritation and pushed my hoof back. He then grabbed a sheet of parchment from the mass upon his desk, cleared his throat as if he were about to speak sacred words of wisdom from a holy text, and read aloud, "A Commissar's combat uniform consists of one black double-breasted storm coat with red frogs and yellow epaulettes; one crimson sash tied about the waist; one black peaked cap with a winged skull insignia upon it, and one Pattern ’12 sabre."

"I see," I hissed at him, slowly removing my cap with my magic and holding it out in front of the little bureaucrat in front of me. "What's your name?"

"Uh... Pencil Pusher."

"So, Pencil Pusher, you're telling me that when I wade into combat the only thing stopping my royal skull from being cracked open and my princely brain being scooped out is this piece of starched cloth?"

He shrugged, "That's what Princesses' Regulations say."

"Well, I'm a prince," I said, putting my cap back on carefully upon my head and standing as tall and regally as I possibly could. "I demand a suit of armour."

"Sorry, the Princesses outrank you, no can do."

Of course they did, I was forever living my life in Auntie Celestia's shadow. Until that precise moment I was rather happy with my station in life, providing the perfect compromise between the prestige and grandeur of minor royalty but with relatively little actual responsibility. It was only in dealing with the omnipresent and all-powerful ‘Princesses' Regulations' did this become rather grating, especially in the face of common sense.

A small queue of guardsponies was beginning to form up behind me, some waiting rather impatiently to get their uniforms mended.

"Well," I said, trying to come up with another argument, "I am the Commissar assigned to this regiment and therefore represent the divine will of the Princesses, and for all intents and purposes I am the Princesses so on their behalf I order you to give me a set of armour."

The guardspony behind me snickered, "The Commissar is a princess."

I looked over my shoulder and shot the Night Guard a harsh glare, which caused him to whimper and flinch away from me as if I was about to smite him with holy fire.

"Sorry, doesn't work that way," said Pencil Pusher as he shook his head apologetically, a gesture I took to be insincere. "You embody the divine will of the Princesses in spirit only, not physically. Regulations say you wear what you're wearing now into battle and nothing more."

"Not even a helmet?"

The quartermaster glared at me, and I stiffened in response. I was not used to a pony saying ‘no' to me, unless they happened to be either my mother or Auntie Celestia, and quite often pulling rank on any imbecile foolish enough to contradict me or deny me was enough to make them see sense. Quiet indignation rose within me at this irritating little pony and I wanted nothing more than to reach over and ram my silly hat down his throat, but I relented.

It was official; Princess Luna wanted me dead in the most contrived way possible. Oh, it was not enough that she could simply vaporise me, she wanted me to suffer while maintaining the pretence that I would die for Princesses and Country and thus keeping her bloody hooves clean.

"Now if you'll excuse me, Prince, there are other ponies who require my services." He shooed me away with irritated gesture with his hoof and went back to scribbling down on his parchment.

I left in an irritated huff, resigned to the fact that in order to survive I would just have to stand behind all of the heavily armoured ponies and pray that they last long enough. Perhaps I could conceal a small breastplate beneath my tunic and somehow line the inside of my cap with steel, but then again tampering with my uniform might be against Regulations and I would therefore be punished for trying to protect my own life. Such was the peculiar hypocrisy seen only in the Royal Guard.

I trudged back to my tent and whiled the rest of the morning by going through the paperwork that Cannon Fodder had deemed worthy of my attention. There were a hoofful of routine reports; a few letters from the War Ministry in Canterlot congratulating me on my promotion, and a few incident reports I had to process. They were all very everyday things; in any situation where a large number of young ponies, barely out of their teens, are forced into constant contact with one another and are left bored for extended periods of time there's bound to be a few behaviour issues. They were largely harmless, nothing that would negatively detriment the war effort: instances of gambling, a drunken brawl, general insubordination. If these things weren't happening on a daily basis then there would be cause for concern.

Lunch finally came at noon just as my stomach started complaining noisily about empty void within. I had still yet to find the officer's mess; a haven of peace and relaxation from the daily grind and monotony of work, where the aristocratic officer class can indulge into a little luxury. My instinctive knack of subconsciously knowing where I needed to go at any given moment pointed me towards the canteen where I had retrieved a basic breakfast from, so I theorised that the mess was within that general location. It made some sense, despite being in rather close proximity to the commoners it was also rather close to vast food reserves.

When I told Cannon Fodder he could go for lunch he shot off towards the canteen like a rocket, leaving me to take yet another leisurely walk in the vague direction my special talent was telling me to go. The canteen became a veritable bustle of activity as the lunch troughs were brought out. Hundreds of rows of troughs stood outside of the main kitchen tent, while members of the Catering Corps shovelled oats, grain, and other unidentifiable vegetable mush into the waiting troughs. Upon being filled Night Guards dashed hungrily to the troughs and proceeded to gorge with all the grace and poise expected of such low borns, though I couldn't blame them; basic food that is filling and also tolerable is the fastest way to make a soldier relatively happy.

I circled around the canteen for a bit, watching the Night Guards eating. With their menacing fangs and amber draconic eyes they reminded me too much of predators attacking a huge meat beast. They chattered loudly, and I caught snippets of conversations about the war, Changelings, a game of cards that was scheduled for tonight, and, rather touchingly, of home and those left behind.

I thought of those I had left behind; every soldier inevitably has to leave somepony behind as they're shipped off to the frontlines. There were the obvious faces in my mind - my mother, sisters, Auntie Celestia, even Auntie Luna though she would never admit to being part of my family until much later; but oddly I saw Rarity amongst them. I berated myself mentally for letting her go; for my boorish and snobbish nature towards her in the Grand Galloping Gala had all but scuppered any chances of me developing any sort of lasting relationship with this mare. It occurred to me that I never got the chance to say goodbye to her before shipping out, I never got the chance to say goodbye to anypony except Luna.

"Oi, Blueblood!" a harsh Trottingham accent awoke me from my stupor, and I looked up to see Captain Blitzkrieg with the entire officer class of the 1st Night Guard digging into their own separate trough.

Feeling a little perplexed at seeing officers dining with the common troops, I trotted on over towards them.

"Was the ground really that interesting?" Blitzkrieg asked jokingly with a none-too-friendly grin on his sunken features.

I shook my head, "No, no, I was just thinking."

"Ah, contemplating our navels are we? Well don't strain yourself too hard; the Royal Guard doesn't like its members thinking too hard, not good for morale you see."

Colonel Sunshine Smiles was next to him. He glanced over his shoulder to see me and then scooted along a bit to allow me room. I could only stand perplexed at the sight before me. Officers, the ponies meant to be gentlecolts as much as military leaders and fighters, were amongst the common guardsponies and eating from the same troughs as they were.

"Aren't you joining us, Commissar?" asked Smiles, his muzzle was covered in crumbs.

"Where is the officer's mess?"

"You're looking at it, mate," said Blitzkrieg with his mouth full of feed, I cringed a little at the sight of the partially chewed food dribbling down his angular chin.

"We prefer to eat with the stallions," said Sunshine with a nonchalant shrug.

"I must say…" I paused, struggling to express my discomfort in an as tactful manner as possible to avoid turning my new colleagues against me, "…this is most irregular."

"You mean it's not the namby-pamby, wine-sipping, fairy prince things you're used to," said Blitzkrieg derisively. "Celestia forbid you have to live like a real stallion for once."

I moved closer, ready to ram the impudent little pegasus' head into the trough before Sunshine turned and raised a hoof to stop me. Had I been able to get closer to Blitzkrieg he'd have likely snapped my neck or sunk a blade into me before I even had a chance to place my hooves on his disturbingly skull-like head.

"Blueblood, I understand that this might be a bit of a culture shock to you," said Sunshine sternly, as if explaining this to a child. I huffed in irritation. "I understand that you're used to a life of luxury where ponies go out of their way to appease you. But you're in my regiment now and prince or not everypony shares in the same hardships."

With a sigh I shook my head despondently and approached the trough. I supposed it wouldn't be so bad, and thinking about what the Colonel had just said made a degree of sense; if the stallions see that their officers are sharing in their same hardships, if somewhat superficially at least, then it would raise morale. As political officer it was my duty to maintain morale, so this cheap little publicity stunt should go in some small way in helping the troops feel as if I was one of them.

I did not, however, shove my muzzle into the trough and gorge like a common mud pony [A rather outdated derogatory term for earth ponies, I have frequently asked Blueblood to stop using it] but instead levitated each morsel of the thick, grungy feed and nibble upon it with the grace and elegance that only a unicorn can muster. It still raised a few eyebrows amongst those around me who preferred the more direct route, but even in total war I would not sacrifice good table manners.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Brown stew,” said Sunshine Smiles, wiping his muzzle with his hoof.

I arched an eyebrow, “What’s in it?”

“Brown,” he said laconically. At that point I decided I was better off without knowing.

***

From there I managed to settle into a comfortable daily routine. It was primarily dominated by conducting vast amounts of paperwork; again usually processing and passing judgement upon a few miscreants. Sometimes I would be brought out to deal with a matter personally, for example there was the incident when one of the stallions had been caught sleeping with a married mare from Dodge Junction who was then punished by flogging him in front of the entire regiment.

I intended to run a disciplined regiment, and Sunshine Smiles supported me on this despite his rather lackadaisical approach to tradition. We had agreed on a ‘carrot-and-stick' approach to maintaining order in the regiment: the stallions would be rewarded for good behaviour and for working hard so I instituted extra rations and time off for those who excelled; but those who broke Princesses' Regulations would be punished to the fullest extent possible. That is, without resorting to my powers of summary execution.

The idea of summary execution appalled me and likewise the other officers, so we quietly agreed never to discuss it except in the most grievous of circumstances. As for me, I couldn't think of a worse way to endear myself to the rank-and-file than flaunting my authority to kill any single one of them for whatever charge I felt appropriate. While I was not there to make friends with the common soldier, I wanted them to at least like me enough to try and protect me when the shrapnel and magic missiles start flying.

I brought up topic of the risk of Changeling infestation in the ranks, and the officers were understandably worried about that. Therefore I taught the Changeling illusion-breaking spell to Major Starlit Skies and the rest of the unicorn officers with minimal trouble, aside from one small accident where Ensign Gleaming Spear was temporarily turned into a chicken. We then set up a weekly screening schedule for everypony in the regiment, starting with me to reassure the stallions that the effects of the spell were harmless. I was relieved to find out that I'm not secretly a Changeling.

Another one of my new duties was educating the soldiers about their role in the wider war, one that I did not launch myself into with any particular relish. The stallions were rather ignorant of the aims of the war and, I confess, so was I. In our daily sessions where I held large seminars we all agreed on the vague goal of ‘punishing the Changelings for attacking Canterlot', but beyond that we could come to nothing else concrete. The Ministry of Misinformation tried to be helpful by giving me a load of pamphlets and reading material to hoof out and discuss, though I suspect these ended up being used as toilet paper. Not that I could blame the soldiers exactly, as the pamphlets were full of hilariously bad mistakes and lavatory paper was always in short supply. I recall one pamphlet described the Changelings as being ‘scared of loud noises' and another about how they will sacrifice our foals to their dark queen-goddess. Even the common uneducated hoof-soldier could see this as the transparent, empty propaganda it truly was.

After a while I gave up on these seminars. Either through my ineptitude or the incompetence of the reading material given to me it became clear that these just weren't working. Instead, I transformed these seminars into a free and open platform for the troops to voice any concerns they might have to me. They were rather shy at first, not trusting the bizarre prince in a ridiculous uniform asking them ‘how does the war make you feel?' but eventually they began to open up to me and I did my best to address their concerns and questions. Besides, I supposed the best way to accurately gauge morale is to actually ask the troops. The officers of the regiment were largely receptive when I approached them with my findings on the troops’ morale, as most had a close relationship with their troops anyway. All of the officers, that is, except Captain Blitzkrieg.

It was after the first week when the incident happened. The novelty of being the first Commissar had worn off for all involved by now and, while I wasn't fully integrated into the regiment, the vast majority of ponies didn't regard me with barely concealed contempt any longer. The officers were especially pleased when I took over the discipline roles from them, allowing them to concentrate on the more important task of preparing the troops for battle.

On a balmy Monday morning I was dictating a letter to Cannon Fodder to send to Princess Luna, complaining about the poor quality of the latest batch of ‘educational' pamphlets that had been delivered to me to disseminate amongst the troops.

"…the poor quality of these pamphlets extends not only to their content but also in their presentation," I said as I paced up and down the front office area while Cannon Fodder furiously scribbled down the words with messy mouth-writing, "in ‘On the Barbaric Ways of the Changelings' I have counted no fewer than thirty-seven spelling errors. I have enclosed a copy of the said pamphlet with this letter with the errors clearly marked out in red pen. Such poor workhorse-ship is most unbecoming of Their Highnesses' Royal Guard…"

"Commissar!" a Night Guard Pegasus blundered into my tent in a flail of hooves and batwings. He arrested his movement just before he could barrel into me, and snapped off a clumsy salute.

I yelped in surprise and flinched back, knocking over the table. As Cannon Fodder quietly righted the desk and scooped the papers, quill, and ink pots I regained my composure quickly and looked sternly at the intruder.

"You must have a good reason to interrupt me," I said, making my irritation as obvious as possible.

"Sorry, sir, it's very urgent," he said. The pegasus' amber eyes flittered back and forth between me and the entrance flap nervously, his heaving chest and heavy breathing, coupled with the rank sweat pouring down his coat, implied he must have rushed to get here so I was therefore inclined to believe him.

"Well spit it out then!"

"Captain Blitzkrieg," he gasped between sucking in deep breaths of air, "he's arguing with one of the Solar Guard officers, sir, thought I should fetch you; seemed important."

I swore loudly, which made even the pegasus blush. Yes such language was conduct unbecoming of an officer, a gentlecolt, and a prince of the realm, but I had been dreading this moment ever since I had lain eyes upon Blitzkrieg. Every regiment has its own gang of troublemakers, usually they're resigned to a small group of malcontents in the rank-and-file who need a good flogging to beat some sense and discipline into them, but to have one as a senior officer was dangerous.

After apologising for my language I ordered Cannon Fodder to finish drafting the letter to Princess Luna, a task which would take him quite a while considering he didn't seem to particularly understand the meaning of the letter, before ordering the pegasus to take me to Blitzkrieg. I had to prevent an incident between the Solar Guard and the Night Guard, one which could spell disaster for Army Group Centre before we had even packed up our things and marched into Changeling country.

The pegasus, whose name I found out to be Storm Rider, gave me an a précis account of what happened. Apparently there had been some altercation between Blitzkrieg and the unicorn captain from the 3rd Solar Guard regiment, Clear Heavens, which invariably led to blows being landed. Clear Heavens insisted that it was too difficult to tell who had thrown the first punch, but I was reasonably certain it was Blitzkrieg. The pony was a powder keg, if you pardon the cliché, though compared to the other officers I spent little time with him I could tell he had a significant attitude problem with outside authority. Coupled with the vocal elitism of the Solar Guard it would have only been a matter of time before it all broke out.

We came to the edge of the Night Guard area of the encampment where a large group of ponies were congregating. They were cleanly divided into two groups; the bright and shining Solar Guard and the dark and mysterious Night Guards facing off with one another. Storm Rider barked a few orders and pushed ponies out of my way, apparently taking my order to bring me to the scene of the altercation as bestowing commissarial authority upon him. At any rate, upon seeing my stupid peaked hat the crowd soon parted to let me through/

At the centre of this crowd was Blitzkrieg and Clear Heavens being held back by their respective guardsponies. Clear Heavens had blood leaking out of his nose and staining his white coat and golden armour a crimson red, while Blitzkrieg snarled at his opponent like a caged animal and screamed for his stallions to let him go. Thankfully, the pegasi had more sense than that.

The baying crowds fell silent, save for Blitzkrieg who was still crying bloody murder, as I approached.

"You have two minutes to explain before I have the both of you flogged," I said slowly, allowing the full weight of my words to sink in. "One hundred lashes, each." It was a veritable death sentence for anypony unblessed by the Royal Pony Sisters, but it would be excruciatingly painful for the both of them. [The blessings my sister and I grant to all of our Royal Guard not only change how a pony looks but grants them superior strength and endurance, allowing them to survive things that might kill or maim any other unblessed pony.]

Blitzkrieg responded by spitting bloody saliva on dusty earth by my hooves. "Do your worst, I've been flogged harder than any of you pansies for less."

I sighed and shook my head, "Blitzkrieg, why don't you just tell me what happened?"

The pegasus pointed an accusing, unshorn hoof at the bloodied Solar Guard officer before him, "He called Princess Luna ‘Nightmare Moon'."

There was an awkward pause as I tried to digest what exactly was going on. This fight was over a bit of foalish name calling?

"So?" I asked.

Blitzkrieg spat again. "I knew you'd take his side, you snobs are all the same. The Princess saved me from a life in jail. I was a bad colt before I joined up; rape, murder, extortion, drugs, you name it I've done it, dealt it, or bucked it, or all three at once. Then they caught me, they were going to lock me away forever, but Princess Luna came to see me when they passed judgement and told me I can either go to prison or have a second chance by serving in her armies. So I served here, it took me two bucking years but I made it, two years of gits like you and this dickhead [Derogatory term for unicorns, since their horns are supposedly phallic symbols] looking down on me. I owe her my life, she saved me"

So, the rumour was true after all. I was not only dealing with a known criminal, but a rogue and blackguard of the highest order. I don't know what Luna was drinking or smoking when she thought that this was a good idea, possibly she was incredibly desperate for new recruits given the historical unpopularity of her Night Guard compared to the golden Solar Guard. Perhaps she saw something within this beaten old Trottingham pegasus that could be used as potential for a good officer.

I nodded, trying to keep my expression friendly but otherwise neutral. "So you hit him?"

"Yeah but he hit me first, slapped me around the face like a filly. I've been hit harder by whores."

"Is this true?" I asked Clear Heavens.

"I challenged him to a duel," he said, wiping the blood from his nose. "And mark my words, Your Highness, one day Nightmare Moon's going to be all ‘the night will last forever' again and these animals, her flunkies, her slaves, will turn on all of us when we least expect it."

"You challenged him to a duel?"

Blitzkrieg blinked gormlessly, "What's a duel?"

"See?" Clear Heavens shrieked incredulously. "How can you claim to be an officer in Her Highness's Royal Guard if you don't know what a duel is? He insulted my honour and that of my regiment; I will not lower myself to repeat his hateful words."

"It's a fight to resolve matters of honour," I explained, trying to use as simple terms as I could, "it's a tradition amongst officers of Their…" I pointed a hoof at Clear Heavens and he paled a little, "…Highnesses' Royal Guard."

"Oh, a fight, I can do that!" said Blitzkrieg with sudden enthusiasm, like a child learning a new word.

"You imbecile," said Clear Heavens, "it's not a simple brawl, it's a refined tradition to restore honour. You have insulted the honour of the 3rd Solar Guard regiment, and I demand satisfaction."

I applied hoof to forehead and rubbed my aching temples. A duel, that's just what we needed. I had no doubt that in a brawl Blitzkrieg would invariably come out on top, I had seen him training before on the parade ground and he was quick, brutal, and had no compunction about going for areas considered off-limits by other, more sporting stallions. But in an honourable duel he would be wiped out. Clear Heavens was a fencer and would most likely pick swords, as a unicorn he would have the advantage over the pegasus' unfamiliar mouth-held blade.

Despite my misgivings about him, with the offensive into Changeling territory looming fast I couldn't afford to lose the regiment's pegasus captain. Reluctantly I stepped between them.

"Captain Blitzkrieg is in no condition to fight a duel with you, I will take his place," I announced clearly.

[It seems rather incredulous for ponies these days that officers of the Royal Guard were allowed to duel one another to the death. As Blueblood had explained previously, the Royal Guard, up to this point, was more like a socially-exclusive club for young aristocrats to spend their early adulthood while pretending to perform duties to the Twin Crowns of Equestria. Before the abolition of duelling in the subsequent Twilight Sparkle Reforms (which will be examined later in this manuscript), the practice was even enshrined in Princesses' Regulations. Since the matter was of regimental honour, it was perfectly legal for Blueblood to stand in for Blitzkrieg.]

"You what?" Blitzkrieg blurted out. "Listen, mate, I appreciate you trying to help me now but I can handle my own fights."

I shook my head and approached the restrained pegasus. "No, this isn't some pub brawl. You don't know how to use a sword, you don't know how to fence, and he's likely going to kill you."

He glowered at me, and those intense amber eyes seemed to burn into my soul. I flinched back slightly, unable to meet the harsh glare. "This is my fight," he said, slowly and calmly but with brutal venom behind those words, "this is my fight, not yours."

"You're in the 1st Night Guards, this is our fight," I said. "Listen, you said Princess Luna gave you a second chance, do you want to disappoint her by throwing it all away in some stupid fight you can't possibly win?"

Blitzkrieg bowed his head and stayed silent for a moment, apparently deep in thought, though the scornful expression on his face never faded. After a while he looked up and stared at his opponent, who was already picking out thin rapier blades offered to him by his orderly. "You think you can win?"

I nodded, while in reality I sincerely doubted it. I was out of shape and it showed, despite my new exercise regimen to bring me back up to the peak of physical fitness I was still showing an embarrassing amount of pudge. Yet out of all of the officers I was probably the most experienced fencer available, I wasn't sure about Sunshine Smiles but again his lack of telekinetic magic to hold the thin rapiers would put him at a massive disadvantage. Naturally, in accordance with the way fate tends to conspire against me, it fell upon me to uphold the regiment's dubious honour.

"Alright," said Blitzkrieg finally, "fight like a Night Guard and show me what a namby-pamby, wine-sipping, fairy prince can do."

The crowd formed a ring around us; the field of honour where this rather silly little argument would finally be sorted. I didn't want this, but not even I could very well disregard the sacred traditions of duelling. To use my commissarial authority to call off this farce would only breed further resentment with the Solar Guard, who would feel that I cheated them of their honour. Irritatingly I found myself trapped once more in the social traditions that bound the upper class together, rather than using them for my own advancement.

Therefore I reluctantly took my place on the field of honour and disrobed. The ancient strictures of unicorn duelling dictated that no armour and no clothing of any sort be worn on the field of honour, as doing so might give one unicorn an unfair advantage. Combatants were also forbidden from using any magic other than that necessary to hold our weapons aloft and use them. Anypony unscrupulous enough to use any other spells would be branded a dishonourable cheater forever, a fate akin to death for the prideful aristocracy to which I belonged. The idea behind all of these rules was to ensure an as fair a fight as possible, with only the combatants' skill the deciding factor.

My discarded clothes and cap were given to Storm Rider, who held them reverently as if they were the sacred vestments of Princess Celestia herself. Clear Heavens' adjutant offered me a rapier, which I enveloped via the hilt with my magic telekinetic aura. I gave the blade a few testing swings with my magic. As expected it was a well-balanced blade constructed perfectly for the refined art of duelling, in a real battle the needle thin blade would snap far too easily and couldn’t possibly penetrate steel armour or Changeling chitin.

Clear Heavens removed his armour and took his position opposite me, holding his weapon in a soft green aura he brought it up to his face and kissed it. I rolled my eyes at the ridiculous, clichéd gesture and simply raised my sword in a guarded defensive position.

Without his armour Celestia's Blessing faded away; his pure white coat returned to its natural pale blue colour, and his white mane exploded into a luscious blond. I suppose he might have been considered a rather handsome young stallion, if it weren't for the scuffs on his face, the blood dribbling out of his nose, and the expression of pure, aristocratic contempt. His cutie mark was a sun emerging from behind a white, fluffy cloud.

As far as I could remember, he was of a minor aristocratic clan that owned a small scrap of land around Los Pegasus, his father was probably a baron or some other low rank of some description. In peacetime he wouldn’t have been worthy of my time and attention, unless he had insulted me directly or had powerful ‘friends’. He was just another upstart minor noble; a bottom feeder amongst us sharks. Unfortunately, this was not peacetime and I simply couldn’t ignore this duel – honour had to be satisfied.

"We will duel to the death or until one of us submits," he said gravely.

"In accordance with tradition," I replied. I'd rather it didn't come to killing, and I didn't particularly want to die at the end of some impudent minor aristocrat's blade over some trivial little argument like this. Dying at the hooves of this upstart whelp would have been as embarrassing as it was inconvenient. Come to think of it I didn't want to die at all, which made me one of the rather more sane officers in the Royal Guard at the time.

Captain Royal Lace of the 5th Royal Guard stood in for a referee to ensure a good, clean, honourable fight. The young mare's infatuation with me had rather grown, though it merely extended to displaying certain subtle hints that I pretended not to notice. Unfortunately, it seemed that she had taken that to mean I was playing ‘hard-to-get' and redoubled her efforts. Even on the duelling ground she winked and batted her eyelashes at me. At least it meant she was on my side, whatever good that would do me.

Of course, my possible imminent death at the hooves of this duellist was of more concern at that moment. From the way he held his sword I could tell he was intimately familiar with it, probably trained from a young age in the rare art of fencing. Though I was a keen fencer, if somewhat out of practice, I had never fought a proper duel before. Fortunately, my standing as Princess Celestia's nephew tended to dissuade the more pompous upper class nobility from offending my honour. Here, however, duelling was a firm tradition amongst the officer class, even a method of promotion in some extreme cases.

Royal Lace held a small, white hoofkerchief and I watched it nervously out of the corner of my eye. Internally I was berating myself for even getting involved like this; it might have all just blown over if I hadn't interfered. Sure, there might have been a big brawl, some ponies would end up hospitalised for a bit and I'd have to order floggings all around for everypony involved (once they recovered and were discharged from the field hospital), but it wouldn't have involved me getting into any mortal danger.

The thin square of white fabric wafted delicately down to the ground, signalling the duel had begun.

Clear Heavens leapt towards me with unexpected ferocity, blade thrust towards me to impale me upon its length. I barely had enough time to bring my own blade up to deflect the attack. His blade clashed with mine in a shower of sparks as steel met steel, and I pushed his weapon to the left. It was too predictable a move and he saw that; rather than resisting me by pushing back on his weapon he suddenly pulled back, causing me to stumble forward in surprise, before lashing out with a wide sweep.

I darted back but the tip of the blade nicked me across the chest, leaving a long but shallow wound that wept blood onto my white fur.

It suddenly became very hot, and sweat trickled over my nude body and matted my previously clean and sweetly scented fur. In the heat, either from the oppressive sun or my own fear, my blond mane became matted and fell across forehead and eyes in bedraggled clumps. I felt sick, with a nasty hollow feeling in my chest despite my heart hammering away behind my ribcage. I wanted nothing more than to pull away and vomit in peace.

With a bestial whinny of rage he lunged forward again and again, and each time I barely managed to block the onslaught of thrusts and slashes against me. From the crazed look in his cold blue eyes and the menacing snarl upon his face I knew he truly meant to kill me. Such was the wrath of a minor noble scorned, desperate to wash away Blitzkrieg's insult upon his honour with my blood.

His thirst for revenge was to be his downfall; he grew over-confident, hacking and slashing with little refinement or thought behind his assaults. I reacted defensively, stepping back closer to the baying crowd of roaring guardsponies, to lull him further into his confidence. It was a dangerous tactic to encourage such ferocity in my opponent, for I feared I would not be able to keep up with the brutish tempo of his onslaught of thrusts and slashes.

His attacks became clumsy, no doubt feeling the magical strain of thrashing his weapon around like that. He swept his blade wide and I saw my chance. I dived under the sweeping arc and rolled to the right, before lashing out with my blade and striking his unprotected chest. The blow was shallow and by no means fatal; I didn't want to kill him, though I could have easily forced the blade between his ribs and punctured his lung and heart.

My opponent hissed and flinched back, swinging his blade down, which I blocked easily. Leaping to my hooves I pushed my weapon away and then violently reversed its momentum. The sudden burst of magic to change the sword's direction of movement sent a sharp, stabbing ache into my horn. The hilt of my sword smashed into Clear Heavens' horn, shattering his attention with the sudden agony known only to unicorns. [For the benefit of pegasi or earth ponies who may be reading, a unicorn's horn becomes extremely sensitive when ‘lit' with magic. It is said that being struck in this manner is the worst pain imaginable, often likened to childbirth or being kicked in the groin.]

Clear Heavens recoiled back and his concentration faltered enough for the magical hold on his weapon to disappear. Seizing my chance, I grabbed up his sword in my aura and held both blades threateningly at his neck. When he had quite recovered from my rather underhanded attack he stiffened at the sensation of two, needle sharp points pressing against the nape of his neck. History seems to forget about that particular cheap blow, Celestia forbid that ponies learn that their favourite hero had to resort to a vulgar horn attack to save his own wretched life.

He glowered at me, looking battered, bruised, and exhausted from the brief fight. Closing his eyes he stiffened and awaited for the inevitable to come, muttering a prayer to Celestia to receive his soul.

"Do you yield?" I asked, not wanting to kill an unarmed pony.

He remained quiet, silently murmuring his prayer.

I flicked one of the blades up, slashing a thin red line upon his left cheek. The stallion gasped at the sudden pain. "Do you yield?" I asked again more forcefully.

He opened his eyes and stared into mine, blood trickled down from the open wound in his cheek. "Is this what has become of you, Prince Blueblood? Associating with criminals and wretched commoners with ideas above their station? Look at them, they are the worst dregs of Equestrian society, deluded to believe that they are worthy of serving alongside us. Worse still they follow the Princess of the Night; Nightmare Moon, and mark my words ponies, it will only be a matter of time before she turns on our beloved Celestia..."

I had quite enough of the rant, so I slashed his other cheek with the other sword. He yelped in pain, touching his hoof to the wound.

"Do. You. Yield?" I growled, and pushed the two blades a little more forcefully against his neck, not enough to break the skin mind you but just enough to give the illusion that I was quite prepared to kill him.

"Y-yes," he finally gasped, bowing his head low in defeat.

With an audible sigh of relief I dropped my weapons to the dusty ground as a wild cheer rose up from the Night Guards behind me. Honour satisfied, the Solar Guard dispersed back to their duties with only Clear Heavens' adjutant remaining to collect the discarded weapons.

Royal Lace gave a graceful, feminine giggle of approval and clapped her hooves together. She trotted over to give me, the victorious stallion, a kiss on the cheek with a vivacious chuckle before cantering off once more. I was rather too exhausted and happy to be still alive to notice or care at the time.

My legs felt like jelly as relief washed over me, and all of the aches and pains that had been suppressed by the primal need to survive came flooding in as they do after every fight I've been in. My shoulders ached, and pain flared there when I tried to move my front limbs. There was a stinging pain across my chest where I had been slashed, and only just then did I look down and realise that the wound I had suffered was a damn sight more serious than I had initially thought. It was bleeding quite a lot now, and I felt rather woozy just looking at the crimson fluid staining my white fur.

"You sure showed them, Blueblood," said Blitzkrieg, patting me on the shoulder with enough force to almost send me toppling over. "Maybe you're alright, for a ponce, oh..." his jovial expression suddenly turned serious as he saw the rather large wound on my chest, "... I'm taking you to the hospital."

"It's-it's," I gasped between ragged breaths, "it's only a flesh wound." I despise that cliché, but it sounded like the sort of thing a hero would say at a time like this.

Blitzkrieg shook his head, "Well, they're all bloody flesh wounds, ain't they? Come on, best get it looked at, sir."

The thin, wiry pegasus sudden crawled beneath my undercarriage and, with unexpected strength, lifted me up before I could protest. I flushed with embarrassment as he carried me, much like a mother carries her foal, to a huge tent marked with a red cross that served as the regiment's field hospital. The Night Guards swarmed after us, congratulating me on my victory, a few of the braver ones shaking my hoof. I tried to look dignified, accepting their praise with well-practiced false modesty, but it was rather difficult to do so when carried in such a way.

The hospital was welcoming and an attractive nurse with a shapely flank led us to an empty bed for me in the main ward, though Blitzkrieg still insisted on carrying me. If it weren't for the exhaustion and possible blood loss I would have found his newfound dogged attachment to me rather strange, having leapt from vocal resentment of my very existence to willingly carrying me over for medical attention in the space of a few minutes. Then again, as a former violent criminal he probably just admired my fighting prowess.

I was attended and treated quickly; the nurse declaring it to be ‘just a flesh wound' barely worthy of her attention and applied a quick healing spell before bandaging me up. Despite this, I was instructed to remain in the hospital for a short while as the spell slowly repaired my damaged body.

The field hospital itself was mostly empty, with the vast space of the main ward inhabited by a small hoofful of guardsponies who had been injured in accidents. I felt a pang of despair when I thought of how much longer this relative quiet here would last, as sooner or later, when this war starts in earnest, the empty beds would be filled with the wounded and dying.

Blitzkrieg sat by the side of my bed, with an oddly soft expression on his usually hard features. The pegasus Storm Rider appeared bearing my uniform, which he placed on the end of my bed and left to return to his duties. Captain Blitzkrieg smirked and picked up my absurd cap with his hooves, examining the ridiculous thing.

For a while we sat in an awkward silence, neither of us quite certain what to say to one another given the rather intense events we had just been through. The pain in my chest started to dull, though the ache in my joints and muscles was still prevalent. I remember wanting a shower, for some reason the fact I was covered in a grimy mixture of sweat, dust, and blood made me feel extremely uncomfortable.

"You don’t have to stay here with me,” I said when the silence started becoming too unbearable.

“Pfft,” Blitzkrieg shook his head and tossed my cap back on the bed, “I want to make sure you’re alright.”

“I didn’t think you cared,” I spat with no small degree of venom. I didn’t like the stallion and I made little to no effort to hide it other than that strictly necessary to continue doing my job. He was a criminal. He might have been given a royal second chance by Princess Luna, but I wasn’t about to trust the judgement of a madmare who had been locked up in the moon for a thousand years. The last time she practiced jurisprudence dunking mares in rivers and seeing if they drowned was an acceptable way of finding out if they were witches.

The stallion was a killer, a scoundrel, and a rogue, and as far as I was concerned there was nothing he could do to change it.

If he detected my hostility he didn’t show it, but instead patted me on the shoulder as if we were the best of friends. “You might be a pompous, stuck-up, fairy prince, but you’re our pompous, stuck-up, fairy prince now.”

I blinked gormlessly back at him, not quite sure what to make of the frankly bizarre statement. “Uhh... thanks?” I said blankly.

“We look after our own here.” He looked like he meant it, as there was an oddly sincere look in his amber slit eyes. While I’m not the best judge of character, I supposed there was some primitive loyalty at work with the criminal pony. A peculiar, ancient, tribal mentality that meant just because I fought and humiliated a rival I was somehow accepted into his ‘gang’. Then again, such primitive camaraderie was how the Royal Guard’s regimental system operated; I suspected that he merely swapped his old gang for the 1st Night Guard Regiment.

Cannon Fodder appeared, much to the consternation of the nursing staff who probably assumed that his distinctive scent carried with it all manner of diseases and pestilence. He slogged lazily up to my bed with in his usual manner of not appearing to be even vaguely aware of the rest of the world around him, upon his saddle he carried a sheet of parchment I took to be the letter I left him to work on. My clumsy adjutant pushed his way past stunned nurses moving to and from patients, proudly announcing he was on ‘commissarial business’ and couldn’t be detained. Somehow, along the way, his bull-headedness and literal-mindedness helped him to decide that being my assistant meant he was part of the commissariat and therefore possessed of the same privileges I was, or at least the privileges he thought would be useful to him in carrying out his duties. His duties, of course, were doing whatever I told him to do.

“Sir!” Cannon Fodder snapped a relatively smart salute as he approached the bed. “Colonel Sunshine Smiles sent me to tell you that...” he paused, his brow furrowing in concentration as he struggled to remember whatever it was that the Colonel told him to say, “...that Captain Shining Armour and the 1st Solar Guard have arrived at Dodge Junction and that you need to come for a big meeting with the General Staff.”

So, it had finally begun. The moment I had been dreading since I first read of Equestria’s formal declaration of war in the newspaper some weeks earlier; I was to be going into battle very soon. The arrival of the 1st Solar Guard, the so-called elite of Their Highnesses’ Armed Forces and my former regiment, meant that the mobilisation of the Royal Guard was finally complete and the war can finally begin in earnest.

It was to my eternal surprise that the War Ministry had managed to mobilise the army in such a short space of time. My own conservative estimates ranged from about a month to several years, but evidently this had been planned for in the darkened recesses of the Ministry’s dungeons for quite some time now. It was rare in the military for something to go according to plan this way, but, as I later found out, plans always go wrong in the army but only after lulling everypony involved into a false sense of security by making us think that the plan is working. Victory, it seems, merely belongs to the side that can recover the fastest after things inevitably go pear-shaped.

I remember feeling oddly excited, which was strange given my cowardly nature and concern over my general well-being. Perhaps I was merely looking forward to hearing the suicidal ‘Grand Plan’ that Field Marshal Iron Hoof had been concocting in his lair, or just eager to get the whole messy business over and done with so I could go home and pretend this all never happened.

Ignoring the pain in my chest and the verbal protests from Blitzkrieg and the nurse I dragged myself out of best and dressed myself rather clumsily. I wanted to look at least slightly presentable despite still being covered in sweat and dust, my hair matted and uncombed, and my fur dirty and un-brushed. It would have to do.

“No, I don’t need to be carried this time,” I said, warding Blitzkrieg off with a hoof.

The pegasus chuckled and shook his head, “I ain’t doing that again; you’re bloody heavy, you are.”

I started to limp my way down the ward, when I remembered the letter on Cannon Fodder’s saddle.

“Cannon Fodder,” I called and he snapped to attention. “I want to add a postscript to the letter, ‘PS. Duelling is a bloody stupid tradition that must be abolished immediately’.”

A/N - Another chapter, not particularly happy with this one but here it is. Part three will come later and will hopefully be better than this one.

Night's Blood (Part 3)

If there’s one thing that the Royal Guard does extremely well, and it is the only thing mind you, it’s putting on a show. The 1st Solar Guard arrived in style, marching down the main thoroughfare of Dodge Junction with all the pomp and grandeur as if they were parading through the wide streets of Canterlot.

I had joined Field Marshal Iron Hoof, General Crimson Arrow, and the senior officers of Army Group Centre in front of the town hall/general headquarters as the Regiment paraded past us. Approximately nine hundred ponies, their coats pure alabaster white and their golden armour gleaming in the bright noon sun, marched past us.

The procession was lead by the regiment’s ensigns; the lowest of the commissioned ranks and given the honour of carrying the regimental banners, thus making them excellent targets. At the head was the flag of Equestria itself, which displayed a stylised Princess Celestia and Princess Luna chasing one another around a sun and moon. The cerulean banner was the largest one carried and it fluttered proudly in the quiet midday breeze. As the most prestigious regiment in the Royal Guard they were allowed to carry the flag of the kingdom into battle, symbolising the unconquerable spirit of Equestria or something to that effect.

The banner of the regiment was carried just behind the first one; it bore the device of the blazing sun cradled in a crescent moon fixed upon a white kite shield which was upon a field of crimson red looking much like the colour of dried blood. Stitched upon the flag were many scraps of parchment, upon which the many battle honours of the regiment were scrawled upon in fading ancient ink. To read the names on the flag was to read of the greatest battles in Equestrian history that have ensured the survival of our great nation and its dominance upon the world: Ghastly Gorge, Canterlot, Gryphonburg, Horse’s Drift, Hollow Shades, Canterlot again, and dozens of other words that would make Twilight Sparkle squeal with excitement and dash to the library for a forty-eight hour history-studying binge. The regiment’s motto, ‘Solaris Irati’ [Fury of the Sun], was emblazoned around the sun/moon device.

I had carried that same banner four years ago, upon purchasing my commission after completing basic training. My ‘official’ autobiography goes on at length at how much of an honour it was to carry the very symbol of the prestige of the regiment, to the extent that this single entry takes up an entire chapter, but in all actuality all I can remember was how monstrously heavy that damned, infernal flag was.

Behind him still were two more ensigns who carried long pennants that bore the cutie marks of former Captains of the Guard, some of which were thousands of years old and dated back to the first founding of Equestria when the Royal Guard was established by Commander Hurricane. Captain Shining Armour’s kite shield cutie mark was the latest addition to the banner. [It should be noted that the 1st Solar Guard has a rather unique rank structure. While it clearly follows that of the rest of the Royal Guard, the commander of the regiment, normally known as a Colonel in other regiments, is called the ‘Captain of the Guard’. This represents his unique status as not only commander of the regiment but also the ceremonial commander-in-chief of the Royal Guard and head of my personal bodyguard. The Changeling Wars represents one of the very few times that the Captain of the Guard left my side and led the regiment into battle. This little fact tends to confuse popular historians and armchair generals.]

Behind them was the regimental band, the 1st Solar Guard being one of the few regiments considered important enough to have one. Two dozen stallions from all three pony races performed a rousing rendition of ‘Rule Equestria’ on a wide assortment of brass instruments. Well, they didn’t so much perform the song as much butcher it utterly but they made up for their lack of musical skill with sheer exuberance, much like how most of the Royal Guard does everything else actually.

The soldiers marched on past us. In a large city like Canterlot such an event would have been greeted by packed crowds waving little Equestrian flags and singing ‘Faust Save The Princesses’. Here, however, the population was barely in triple figures and the majority of them were out working the cherry fields, enjoying a hoe-down, fornicating with relatives, or whatever it is these rural inbred folk do for fun. There were only about half a dozen tired looking militia ponies watching how the real soldiers do their work, before they apparently got bored and wandered off to do something else. They probably had an all-important barn full of cherries to guard.

The procession halted and thankfully so did the music. Shining Armour, looking resplendent in his imperial purple armour with gold highlights, stepped out from the formation with his Major and two Captains in tow behind him. He marched towards, halted, snapped to attention, and saluted us.

“’Celestia’s Own’ is reporting for duty, Field Marshal!” said Shining Armour with his usual youthful enthusiasm.

He was a stallion roughly my age, though probably a few months younger than me, but he often acted like he was in his late teens. Being Canterlot’s resident pretty boy it was only natural he became the poster child for the Royal Guard, at least until I came along and supplanted him as the face on the recruitment posters.

Quite how this young commoner was hoof-picked by Celestia herself to command the most prestigious and elite of regiments in the Royal Guard was beyond my reckoning, far be it from me to doubt Auntie ‘Tia’s judgement but he was hardly officer material. [Naturally it hadn’t occurred to Blueblood that I selected Shining Armour purely on his merits as a commander and not because I gave a distant ancestor of his a scrap of land to own.] Granted he had married his way into royalty, earning himself the title of prince but never actually using it, and his younger sister was Celestia’s favoured personal protégé, but as far as I was concerned a commoner was always a commoner. The fact that we regularly got into schoolyard fights when we were just colts might have shaped some of my resentment towards him, as well as the fact he made off with my regal cousin. This, of course, was before I discovered that he more than earned his commission and status, and before that fracas with the Crystal Empire. [I would hardly call what happened with the Crystal Empire a mere ‘fracas’.]

Field Marshal Iron Hoof saluted in response. “Welcome to Dodge Junction, Captain,” he said with little to no inflection.

“Indeed!” said Crimson Arrow exuberantly, stepping forward to shake Shining Armour’s hoof. “We’ve been waiting so long for you, can’t get this show started without my old regiment, eh?”

“So sorry to have kept you all waiting then!” replied Shining Armour, grinning widely. “We had some trouble with Changelings in Canterlot before mobilisation. Blueblood sorted it all out for us, didn’t you?”

He suddenly fixed me with an oddly ambivalent expression on his face. I couldn’t blame him, however, as on the one hoof I was once the colt who mercilessly picked on his beloved younger sister to the point of tears, while on the other hoof I had accidently saved his wife. Hopefully he would remember the ‘saving his wife’ part more.

“I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time,” I said, telling the truth for a change though not mentioning the part when I ran away to save my own skin; that would not look good in front of all of the guardsponies and officers. “How is my cousin doing? Is she taller than you yet?”

The Captain of the Guard snickered, “Not just yet! Princess Celestia said it would a few more years though; alicorns don’t really stop growing, do they? She’s doing as well as can be expected, it’s a shame I’ve had to leave after such a short time but duty calls. She asked me to deliver a message to you.”

“Oh?” I cocked my head to one side curiously, and Shining Armour grinned back at me.

“She said ‘look after Shining Armour for me, make sure he comes home’.”

I snickered in response, “Oh, I don’t think the brave and dashing Shining Armour needs somepony like me watching his back all the time.”

“Yeah, but you know what she’s like; worries about everypony and everything.”

One of the draws of joining the Royal Guard, according to the ponies who run the recruitment offices dotted around Equestria, is to experience brand new things that one would never be able to experience in the civilian sphere of life. At that precise moment the Royal Guard had enabled me to experience something I would never have been able to as a civilian; tolerating Shining Armour’s company. Usually he’s very hostile around me, yet now he was being friendly and approachable. He even appeared to be speaking to me as an equal; I supposed that after marrying Princess Cadence he was technically equal to me.

“While I’d love to allow this happy reunion to go on,” said Iron Hoof with a very slight inflection of annoyance creeping into his unnervingly monotone voice, “we do have a war to plan, if you’d all like to follow me please.”

Shining Armour grunted in annoyance and turned back to face Iron Hoof, “Of course, the sooner we can get this war over with the better. Lead the way, Field Marshal.”

Looking somewhat relieved, the moustachioed Field Marshal led his officers inside. I overheard Red Coat muttering something about ‘hoping it wasn’t over too soon’ but I ignored it, soon enough he would be eating those words. Shining Armour paused to instruct one of his lieutenants to lead the regiment to the main encampment and await further orders.

Shaking my head despondently I stepped inside and took my seat roughly in the middle of the central table where I had previously dined so opulently with the other officers. Much of the decoration that was there the previous week was gone; the table was bare, the triumphal statue of Princess Celestia was absent, and the banners returned to their respective regiments.

Shining Armour, to my surprise, took the seat on my right, while Sunshine Smiles sat down to my left. Opposite me was Colonel Rising Star of the 3rd Solar Guard, whose subordinate I had just duelled not an hour earlier.

Most of Rising Star’s face was covered by an impressively bushy moustache and mutton chops, while his eyes were covered by the brim of his battered old pith helmet. He was an elderly earth pony, judging from his greying facial hair and mane, and from what I had heard he was he was a veteran of the Zebrica frontier wars against the Gryphons, which would have put him in his mid 70s at the best estimate.

I noticed that Clear Heavens was conspicuously absent, and instead a young lieutenant was sitting in his place.

“Are you alright, Blueblood?” said Shining Armour, looking over my somewhat battered and grubby form before his eyes settled on the bandages just visible under my open collar.

“Fought a duel,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Regimental honour, you see.”

Shining Armour made a disgusted face, “I don’t like duelling; too many good officers get themselves killed that way.”

I smirked, nodding my head. “Yes, I agree, but I didn’t have much of a choice this time; Princesses’ Regulations you see.”

The Captain of the Guard looked surprised; I was agreeing with him on something! Tartarus had just frozen over and pigs all over Equestria had just sprouted wings and were performing sonic rainbooms. I have to admit seeing that expression on his stupid ruggedly handsome features was well worth having to sit next to him. It wasn’t a face he made often, for most of the time he just grinned inanely.

“Bah, Clear Heavens was a fool and a rather vulgar colt,” said Rising Star, his moustaches quivering and flapping with every movement of his upper lip. I caught myself leaning forward to see if I could see crumbs and bits of food stuck in that impressive yard brush on his face. “Doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, eh? But the stallions like him and he keeps a relatively good company. His father’s a baron, you know.”

I nodded silently in agreement, thinking that this Rising Star fellow probably should have retired from the Royal Guard a few decades ago. I couldn’t imagine the poor old sod leading a troupe of filly scouts on a cookie sale around the Canterlot suburbs let alone an entire regiment into battle.

“But he’s eager,” he continued. “Eager to give those damned Gryphons a good thrashing, eh? I wager we’ll be sipping tea with the Princess in Gryphonburg before the month is over.”

“But it’s the Changelings we’ll be thrashing,” said Shining Armour in exasperation, “not the Gryphons. They’re our allies now, remember?”

The elderly stallion looked confused for a moment, as the gears in his mind creaked into life and he suddenly remembered that he isn’t sitting on the frontier of some Celestia-forsaken jungle in Zebrica fighting over some red line on the map. My heart sank as I watched him, not only was his body old and decrepit but also his mind was senile. He shouldn’t have been there. I ventured that over half of the officers sitting at this table were unfit to be in charge of even a foal’s lemonade stand.

Shining Armour shot me a look. It’s strange how much information could be shared in just a look; the expression upon a pony’s face can say much more than words ever could. The weary expression in his eyes said ‘I know, Blueblood, I know how you’re feeling, and there’s not a damned thing either of us can do about it now’. He probably had to put up with this abject insanity for the entirety of his military career, and I was surprised and relieved to discover that the near decade he spent amongst these imbeciles hadn’t eroded the stallion’s sanity. It was strange how ordinarily I’d have joined in with their aristocratic posturing, being a noblepony par excellence myself, yet my painful awareness of the dangers we were about to plunge into, largely a result of my selfish desire to preserve my own life, meant I couldn’t take part in their blissful ignorance.

At the far end of the huge table was a large white screen propped up like canvas on an easel on wooden planks. Field Marshal Iron Hoof and General Crimson Arrow took their positions either side of this screen, and as the gruff Field Marshal cleared his throat an expectant silence fell across the hall. I leaned forward in interest; finally I was to know what on Tartarus we were doing on this forgotten scrap of Equestrian soil.

Iron Hoof’s horn lit with a pale green aura and the screen rippled with colour, before settling into a map of the south eastern border of Equestria and the Badlands. I had heard of this particular spell before, apparently it was popular with school teachers, lecturers, and middle management in corporations as a means of displaying presentations through pictures and text projected onto a white screen. I had no idea how it worked, of course, but knew it revolved around something called ‘power points’.

“Mares and stallions,” Iron Hoof said gravely, “welcome to Operation: ‘Enduring Harmony’.”

For the second time that day I applied my hoof to my forehead. ‘Operation Enduring Harmony’, that’s what this invasion was going to be called? It was a bloody stupid name concocted by politicians back in Parliament probably, who, as ever, wanted an impressive sounding name to this military operation to galvanise the support of the masses behind them. They were turning this infernal war into a PR exercise, and no doubt they’ll take the credit when we inevitably drag Chrysalis’ rotting, bloated carcass back to Canterlot. They probably needed an entire select committee of at least thirty PR specialists, each paid in enough bits to fund a scholarship for a foal in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, just to come up with the damned silly name in the first place.

That’s what happens when you dabble in democracy, ponies elect morons. [But unlike aristocratic ‘morons’, they get unelected just as easily.]

“The invasion and pacification of the Badlands will take place along three fronts, East, Centre, and West, and spearheaded by their respective Army Groups.” Three red arrows appeared on the map. “The main offensive will come from Army Group Centre, that’s us, through Black Venom Pass, while Army Groups East and West will guard our flanks from the Hayseed Swamps and Appleloosa respectively.”

The image on the screen flickered and zoomed in on the larger centre arrow symbolising us. The Badlands were protected on all sides by a vast mountain range, except the south but one would have to cross the treacherous San Palomino Desert to bypass these nigh impassable mountains. An invasion force would therefore be forced to use one of the many narrow passes and valleys between the mountains in order to penetrate into Changeling Country.

“Our first objective is to capture this: Black Venom Pass.” A red circle appeared over the said pass. “This is the only path wide enough for any army large enough to conquer the Badlands to go through, all others are simply far too narrow or too treacherous to even consider crossing. The army that controls this pass controls nearly all troop movement between southern Equestria and the Badlands and it is therefore imperative that we capture it immediately. Once a hoof-hold here has been secured and supply lines have been established we can strike inwards to the Changeling hives and eradicate them one by one. Victory, therefore, hinges upon us seizing and holding this pass. From there, the annihilation of the Changeling threat is all but assured.”

The screen flickered once more, and zoomed in even closer to the pass to show an aerial photograph of the pass itself. It was only a few miles long and a couple of hundred yards wide, flanked by steep inclines to the east and west and opening up to the south into the harsh wastes of the Badlands. The inclines were by no means uniform, and often broke out into numerous ridges and cliffs. At the northern mouth of this pass was a large structure built into the side of this cliff, while at the opposite southern end was a massive black smudge that looked ominously like an enormous formation of Changelings.

“This is the citadel of Maredun,” he said, illustrating the structure, “an ancient castle built by the pony civilisation that used to live in the Badlands before the Changelings, now derelict. Pegasus reconnaissance has shown the castle to be mostly intact and certainly defensible by a large army, and records indicate the underground barracks large enough to support a single regiment of the Royal Guard.

“This operation will be led by General Crimson Arrow, and conducted by the 3rd Solar Guard, the 16th Artillery Regiment, and the 1st Night Guard. The 1st Solar Guard will act as the strategic reserve. The 3rd Solar Guard will advance to the southern mouth of the valley and clear the Changeling army there. The 16th Artillery will set up its cannons along this ridge here...” another red circle appeared on the western ridge, “... to cover the advance of the 3rd Regiment, while the 1st Night Guard will be positioned further down the incline to protect the artillery or provide reserves for the 3rd Regiment if required. The 1st Solar Guard will be stationed here at Maredun, where General Crimson Arrow will set up his headquarters and direct the battle from there. Any questions?”

[It should be noted that Blueblood is not blessed with a particularly long attention span, especially when the topic of discussion is not directly about him. While his summation of Field Marshal Iron Hoof’s plan for the war and for the Battle of Black Venom Pass is largely accurate, he does miss out on much of the finer detail on the plans themselves. This description, however, is sufficient for the narrative of Blueblood’s memoirs. Readers who wish to learn more are welcome to read the minutes of this meeting in the Royal Guard’s archives provided one has sufficient security clearance.]

The officers posed their questions, and I remained silent for a moment. At the time it seemed like a reasonable plan, if somewhat overly cautious. Holding back the 1st Solar Guard as reserve seemed somewhat peculiar to me, as being the so-called ‘best of the best’ they should have been sent in to spearhead the attack. Then there was the absence of the 5th Solar Guard, who presumably would remain behind at Dodge Junction. Surely, considering the apparent importance of this operation to the entire war effort, one would want to commit the entirety of their force to ensure complete and total victory. At any rate, Iron Hoof seemed supremely confident in his plan and for a time it did well to assuage my fears.

The questions were fairly mundane, asking about the exact troop movements, projected casualty numbers, estimated resistance and so forth. There was a quiet ‘buzz’ about the place, as if an underlying tension in the air. The ponies around me were all excited, except for Iron Hoof who never got excited about anything and Sunshine Smiles who seemed rather deep in thought, the event they had been waiting for and looking forward to was finally coming; we were going to war.

Then it all took a rather ugly turn for the worse. At the far end of the table closest to the projection screen were the officers of the 16th Royal Artillery Regiment. Unlike the Solar Guard they were clad in black lacquered armour and their fur was a pale grey instead of purest white, since their trade revolved entirely around things that explode with a lot of smoke it made sense they didn’t operate wearing gleaming gold armour that would be easily stained by soot. Colonel Shrapnel, who seemed rather aloof and distant, even more so than is standard for a Royal Guard senior officer, stood up.

He was an earth pony, as were most of the artillery crews as earth pony strength and endurance was needed to haul the heavy iron cannons and their ammunition around, with a strong muscular body. His fur was patchy, and the skin underneath lined with horrific burn marks from when an improperly loaded cannon exploded. Dangerous business, cannons, just as likely to kill their handlers as they were the enemy if they weren’t careful.

“I want to voice our concerns,” he said in a voice that sounded like sandpaper rubbing on wood, “about the presence of the Night Guards operating as our picket line.”

After some slight hesitation, Colonel Sunshine Smiles rose to his hooves. I saw the ponies around us grimace at his fearsome visage, for the scar upon his face made the stallion rather more intimidating even if it weren’t for his armour and fangs.

“I can reassure you all,” he said slowly, “that our regiment is highly trained and prepared for combat, the 16th Artillery needn’t fear Changeling assault with the 1st Night Guard watching over you.”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt as to your fighting prowess,” said Shrapnel, tapping a hoof on the table, “I’m more concerned about where your true loyalties lie.”

“Aye!” Major White Castle of the 3rd Solar Guard, who sat opposite the Night Guards officers, pointed accusingly at our direction. “Nightmare Moon! They’ll betray us all again!”

Captain Blitzkrieg snarled and lunged over the table, only for his forward momentum to be arrested as Major Starlit Skies seized the pegasus’ tail and dragged him down onto the desk. He hit the wood with a surprised yelp and with a flail of limbs and black leathery wings.

“You take that back!” he growled at the Solar Guard Major, who shuddered at the sight of the pegasus’ fangs. “Nopony insults Princess Luna! Nopony!”

“Calm down, kid,” snapped Starlit Skies in the manner of a school teacher admonishing a student as he hauled the limp Blitzkrieg back over the table to his seat.

I had quite enough, so I stood up and planted my hooves on the table. “In case you ponies haven’t noticed we’re all on the same side here.”

“Aye, that’s what they want us to think,” scoffed White Castle. “Maybe they’ve gotten to you too, Prince, you are, after all, Nightmare Moon’s beloved nephew.”

I blinked back incredulously, “I’m Princess Celestia’s nephew too.”

To my eternal surprise, Shining Armour stood up next to me and slammed his hooves on the table, causing the ancient antique furniture to wobble precariously. The ponies around us gasped in shock at such a scandalous and vulgar display from the Captain of the Royal Guard. His chest was heaving with barely controlled indignation as I saw a near decade of having to put up with this petty bickering finally coming to a boil.

His face was contorted into a rictus-like scowl similar to the look I saw him give to his younger sister when she was doing her best to ruin his wedding, though to be fair on Twilight she was right. A vein on his forehead throbbed as he snorted aggressively, glaring at each and every officer in the room who cowered under the gaze of their ceremonial commander-in-chief.

“You’re all behaving like foals!” he shouted, stamping a hoof on the table to punctuate the statement.

“We don’t have the time for this,” said Field Marshal Iron Hoof firmly.

Shining Armour glowered at the Field Marshal before relenting and slinking back into his seat, snorting in indignation and sulking like a foal denied his favourite treat. The other officers looked apologetic and muttered under their breath as they retook their seats, except for Shrapnel who continued to stare in our direction.

There was something off about that particular stallion, but I couldn’t quite put my hoof on it. In hindsight I can remember the glassy, vacant look in his dark eyes as being massive warning signs, but at the time I ignored it. To this day I wonder if disaster could have been averted if I had voiced what the tingling sensation in my hooves was telling me, but I also fear that it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Iron Hoof clopped his hooves together and his servants, who were waiting in the recesses of the room, handed out thick envelopes to each officer in the room. These were the official detailed orders, listing exactly what each unit was to do at any given time according to a strict schedule. Such was Iron Hoof’s style of command; he loved his timetables and wanted everything to go according to his grand plan. As I have alluded to earlier, things never go to plan in war.

We left hurriedly, with officers darting back to the encampment to enact their orders with their usual enthusiasm. The feeling in the air was electric; it was finally happening, the battle that would decide the fate of Equestria, the thing for which we had been preparing for so long, and I couldn’t join in with that excitement. As I briefly looked over my orders I started getting that sick feeling in my stomach and the itchy feeling in my hooves once more. This would not end well, I thought.

Before I left, though, I saw Iron Hoof take Crimson Arrow to the side and tell him that, in no uncertain terms, the success of this mission relied upon following his plan to the absolute letter and with no deviations.

My orders were relatively simple; just stick with the Night Guards and make sure they do their job properly. It had occurred to me that if the regiment had wanted to rebel and throw their lot in with Nightmare Moon they could easily just kill me; though quite why they would want to throw their lot in with a mostly dead part of my Aunt Luna’s psychosis was something that eluded me, yet a seemingly popular belief for the Solar Guard.

Red Coat was ecstatic, looking much like a foal on Hearth’s Warming who had just seen a suspiciously scooter-shaped present under the Harmony Tree. He practically skipped merrily along back to the camp, chatting happily to Colonel Sunshine Smiles who, to his credit, did not cave in the irritating youth’s skull with his over-sized muscular hooves. The Colonel seemed a little more quiet and pensive, and I noticed that his facial muscles around his scar twitched.

I saw Starlit Skies taking sheets of parchment out of his envelope with his magic, inspecting the orders carefully and checking a gold pocket watch carefully. Warfare, as he would later explain to me in another one of his lectures, is all about timing; the movement of regiments, companies, platoons all according to a strict schedule, and waiting for the opportune moment to strike when the enemy is at its weakest. His pocket watch, I noticed, was an incredibly complicated affair filled with assorted dials and numbers that made sense only to him.

Blitzkrieg was oddly jittery, not happily excited like Red Coat yet not introspectively quiet like Sunshine Smiles and Starlit Skies but merely anxious. His thin body was tensed under his armour, and I could see that rather than being mere skin and bone his body was in fact packed with toned but slender muscle. He looked like an elastic band ready to snap.

“Bah, it’s a shame I’m going to miss out on all the fun,” said Crimson Arrow as he stepped up alongside me.

I frowned back at him, “Fun?”

“The fighting, Blueblood, you’re going to be there in the thick of it and I’ll be stuck in that wretched old ruin watching from afar.”

Oh how I envied that poor bastard. He was going to be sitting there in relative comfort and safety while I risked my life for Princesses and Country, and he thought that he was the one who had gotten the short end of the stick. I considered suggesting we swap places, or that I keep him company in that dreary ruin, but I couldn’t think of an appropriate justification for doing so at the time.

“You’ll still get the credit, of course,” I said amicably.

“Oh yes of course, but it’s not quite the same is it?” he said in annoyance. “At any rate, I should invite you for a celebratory dinner once we achieve victory in the field, but I must dash now, toodles!”

As he trotted off to... wherever it is he was supposed to go I resigned myself to the fact that there was no way I could possibly worm my way out of this. I supposed I might be able to attach myself to the unicorn company; they typically spend battles flinging magic missiles at enemies from a comfortable distance. Considering that the regiment’s unofficial motto was ‘get stuck in’ I didn’t think that doing so would last that long, sooner or later I’d be finding myself in the brutal maelstrom of close quarters combat. At least in this case I’d have numerous heavily armoured ponies guarding me, and not a whining seamstress who faints at the sight of dirt.

***

The army mobilised fairly quickly, which was to be expected given the obviously temporary nature of the Dodge Junction encampment. It had taken them only a full day of preparation whereby equipment was checked, final letters to home were written and sent off, and much revelry enjoyed by all. Indeed, despite my advice not to, Colonel Sunshine Smiles had decreed that the ponies be allowed to have beer imported from Trottingham before the battle to keep their morale up. Trottingham ale, if you are lucky enough never to have tried it, is served at a lukewarm temperature and is also the colour of mud, so I respectfully declined. The night, however, did become interesting when I had to deal with the after-effects of such revelry when a couple of guardsponies somehow received more beer rations than they were allowed to and embarked on a night time raid of Shining Armour’s tent. I offered to have them all flogged for this, but the Captain of the Royal Guard insisted that ‘colts will be colts’ so I just put them on extra latrine duty instead.

I had elected to spend the rest of what could have been my last night alive alone in my tent anxiously fretting about how to get myself out of this. I came out blank; the orders given to me were clear and there was no arguing with a pony as bull-headed as Field Marshal Iron Hoof, who would broker no alterations to his precious plan. Crimson Arrow, however, simply didn’t want to deny me the pleasure of risking my life for Equestria when I offered to stay with him and provide ‘tactical advice’ for the battle.

We moved out in the morning as a long snaking column, with the unicorns taking up the front and rear while the earth ponies took the centre so that, in theory, they would be protected from ambush by the unicorns who would mow down any would-be attacker with magic missiles. The pegasi ran aerial reconnaissance, using their speed and ability of flight to range far ahead of the advancing column and report back on the terrain and possible enemy action.

The journey was quiet, though the atmosphere was still tense. I marched with Colonel Sunshine Smiles and Red Coat at the head of the regiment. With their superior earth pony strength and endurance they were hardly breaking a sweat, while the two hour march had left me with a burning ache in my legs. All of my efforts in cleaning myself before battle (so that I might look pretty when I die), scrubbing the sweat and dust, rubbing fragrant oils into it [And Blueblood wonders why ponies call him a ‘ponce’], and styling my mane, was wasted as once again I was covered in mucky sweat and dust kicked up by thousands of pony hoofsteps.

The afternoon sun beat down upon on us, and the heat was becoming almost unbearable which made the day’s march all the more difficult. I was even becoming thankful for my ridiculous cloth ‘armour’ as the plate armoured ponies around me looked as if they were suffering more from the heat than me, though given the choice between temporary dehydration and permanent death I think I’d still pick sweating under thick steel plates any day.

Cannon Fodder was quiet, taking the impending battle as if it were a pleasant day out. Nothing, except for Twilight Sparkle, seemed to faze my phlegmatic aide, and I started to envy the poor sod. He was a pony for whom things just happened; there was no consideration as to the reason why these things happened or any attempt to change his fate, but merely a quiet and resolute acceptance of it. Unlike me, who fretted over every single decision and event because of my utmost desire to not die.

The mountains loomed heavily over us. Looking up we could see them stretching up into the sky, forming a natural barrier between civilisation and the dark barbarism of the Changeling race. Their steep inclines, snow-capped peaks, and treacherous jagged rock formations would stop any advancing army foolish enough to attempt to cross the mountains, all except for Black Venom Pass.

The pass appeared as a cleft in the mountains, like a tunnel carved out of the immortal rock by some unknown and eldritch power. It was said that an ancient pony civilisation once lived in the territory that we now know as the Badlands, and it was they who had cleaved the pass in the first place and built the citadel which General Crimson Arrow and the 1st Solar Guard would appropriate for their uses. Quite what happened to this ancient civilisation and where the Changelings had came from was not known at this point, but if we had known the truth then perhaps we would not have been so eager for war.

The citadel was built into the side of the mountain range, upon one of the many ridges that lined the valley. Tall, forbidding walls built out of grey stone rose from the ridge, forming numerous courtyards surrounding the keep built straight into the side of the mountain. There were a number of tall towers, many collapsed or on the verge of collapse, from which artillery and unicorns could direct fire down into the valley below. Castles of this period were built according to the principle of luring the enemy into killing zones in these courtyards. The aim, therefore, was not necessarily to keep the enemy outside the walls, though it would certainly help if they were, but to force them into these areas where they can be whittled down by artillery fire and infantry before they can reach the keep.

The 1st Solar Guard, along with Crimson Arrow and his general staff, peeled off from the formation to ascend up to the castle. Despite the relatively expansive width of the valley, I found the tall mountains either side of us to be rather claustrophobic. A Royal Guard army would never be able to march over the mountains, but I was not so certain that the Changelings would encounter quite the same difficulties. Travelling in this column formation made us incredibly vulnerable; a lightning assault down the middle would divide the army into two, cutting off the two halves and allowing each to be encircled and destroyed at ease. The fact that the pegasi continued to report that the mountains were clear and the Changelings had yet to move from their position at the opposite end of the pass was rather unnerving. Surely they would have made their move now; strike us down at our most vulnerable.

Yet they didn’t. The plan was going without a hitch, which I found to be rather more disturbing than if the Changelings were to suddenly charge upon us.

We came to the ridge, which was more of a large plateau with a slight upwards slope. Climbing up the mountain side to reach this plateau damn near killed me as I dragged my unfit, flabby body up the steep incline. I remember thinking that I had to be the absolute pinnacle of pony physique by the end of the day, considering the massive workout I just had and assuming I would survive the battle, and I wished I’d inherited more of the tough earth pony stamina from Celestia’s bloodline. [Though the alicorn bloodline has been somewhat diluted in Blueblood’s case, there are still definitely elements of earth pony and pegasi traits in him (since alicorns such as I possess traits of all three races). In fact, Blueblood is being rather tough on himself, being rather stronger, larger, and tougher than most other unicorns.]

As we reached the edge of the plateau, overlooking the 3rd Solar Guard marching through the valley below us, the 16th Royal Artillery lumbered further up the plateau to their firing positions. The plateau itself was on a shallow slope that led up to a ridge upon which the artillery was to be deployed, thus giving them a commanding view of the battlefield below.

With a feedbag of oats over my muzzle and a mug of strong tea I watched the 3rd Solar Guard below us stop and then adopt the standard battle formation; unicorns arrayed at the front across the entire width of the valley and earth ponies behind, the pegasi had landed and taken up formation on the flanks and rear of the earth ponies. The idea behind this was the unicorns would lay down a fusillade of magic missiles upon the enemy and would continue to do so until the foe ran away, got too close, or the unicorns got too tired, at which point the earth ponies would wade in and finish off the Changelings left alive. At least in theory, but thus far in Equestrian military history this fairly standard infantry tactic had worked quite well against an opposing army polite enough to simply line up and let themselves get slaughtered.

Presently, sergeants barked orders to their squads and the ponies scrambled to their hooves and returned to formation. The 1st Night Guard took up a similar formation to that of the Solar Guard down in the valley below; unicorns at the front, earth ponies somewhere in the middle, and pegasi guarding the flanks, all aimed down at the valley below. I reluctantly dragged myself off the ground like a teenager being told to wake up and go to school, and then rejoined the senior officers congregating at the heart of the Night Guard’s formation.

The plateau was perfectly positioned, as from here we could see the entirety of the battlefield. At the southern mouth of the valley lay the Changeling army, looking much like an ugly black and green smudge on the sandy landscape distorted by the haze and mirages. They couldn’t have been more than a thousand yards away from us, and well within range of the cannons and mortars being lugged into position behind us.

“Remind me why we’re needed here,” asked Red Coat. The young earth pony couldn’t keep still; he was always fidgeting anxiously as if he urgently needed the toilet.

“In case the Changelings sneak around and attack the artillery up there,” explained Sunshine Smiles. “I know you’re eager to be down there, but we have our orders.”

The young stallion stamped at the ground in irritation, “I know, I just don’t want to miss out.”

As if on cue the artillery behind and slightly above us opened fire, sounding like the rumble of nearby thunder as the iron cannons spat flame and iron at the enemy. I winced as I saw the cannon shots scream over our heads and impact into the mountainside opposite us, sending up clouds of dust and dry earth. I also noted how precariously close they were to the rear ranks of the 3rd Solar Guard. My hooves itched uncomfortably; something was most definitely wrong.

“The artillery isn’t supposed to start for another fifteen minutes,” said Starlit Skies as he trotted over towards us, checking his over-sized and overly complicated pocket watch. He gently tapped the glass as if that would somehow make the relevant dials make sense. There was a concerned expression on his normally calm and friendly face, which I found rather unnerving.

“Maybe they’re just calibrating their guns,” I said with a shrug and a nervous glance over my shoulder at the artillery positioned just behind us. I hoped, prayed, that I was right.

“Aye,” said Sunshine Smiles, “the cannons haven’t been used in decades, probably just warming the barrels up or something.” That helped alleviate some of my concerns, though the sickening sensation of anxiety refused to go away. I knew very little of how artillery worked, though I knew there was probably more to it than simply loading the cannon, pointing it, and then firing it. It had something to do with maths, physics, or something else I couldn’t possibly comprehend, but I was sure Starlit Skies would be able to give me a lengthy and in-depth lecture on the subject later.

The cannons fired again. I watched in horror as a cannon ball ploughed straight into the rear ranks of the 3rd Solar Guard’s pegasi, killing a couple and sending the formation scattering in panic. A few more impacted harmlessly into the cliff side, but another bounced straight into a platoon of earth ponies. The regiment lost all semblance of coherency as the rear ranks surged forwards to try and escape the artillery fire, forcing the other ranks forwards into the waiting jaws of the Changeling horde.

I turned, rearing on my hind legs and waving my forelimbs at the artillery regiment. “Adjust your aim!” I shrieked at them pleadingly. “Friendly fire! Adjust your bucking aim!”

Another cannon fired, the sound of its roar carried along the wind, and I was hurled to the ground by a rough force from my left. I grunted as I hit the ground and Cannon Fodder, who had shoved me out of the way, landed on top me. The iron ball hit the ground a few feet away from me, showering me with dirt and dust, and then bounced straight over me to bury itself in the dry earth just behind my cowering form.

“They’re firing on us!” I screamed, stating the blindingly obvious but I think I could be forgiven for that given the circumstances. Cannon Fodder, his expression only showing a slight bit of concern, rolled off from on top of me.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, and I blinked at the bizarre little apology for saving my life.

Another shot smashed into a platoon of earth ponies a few hundred feet away, mangling bodies and reducing them to offal and scraps of meat. I heard whinnies of pain and the voices of gruff sergeants and officers as they struggled to keep the survivors under control and restore order. There, as I struggled back up to my hooves and gazed up at the cannons pointed straight towards us, I saw the treachery that wormed its way into the heart of Army Group Centre – the 16th Royal Artillery had been infiltrated by Changelings.

The senior officers were frozen by fear and indecision. The Colonel was shivering slightly, his muscles tensed and quivering underneath his armour and his mouth gaping wide open in abject disbelief. I grabbed my fallen cap from the dusty ground and placed it on my head before cantering up towards him.

“Orders!” I shouted in panic. “Your orders, Colonel!”

Sunshine Smiles didn’t appear to hear me; instead he only stared up at the cannons spitting death in our general direction. Despite their few lucky shots before, it became obvious that the Changelings that had obviously infiltrated the artillery regiment’s ranks had little to no idea how to operate their cannons. Most of the shots went wide or fell short of us, and I witnessed one cannon exploding due to improper loading.

“Bucking do something!” I shouted, forcing my face against his.

The big earth pony blinked at me a few times, before shaking his head as if to shake the stupor out of his mind. He pushed his way past me with the confident swagger of a born leader, with determination in his eyes where there was once doubt.

He called the senior officers over to him, but I couldn’t help but think that all it would take was one lucky cannon ball to singularly wipe out the top leadership cadre of the whole regiment in one go. Reluctantly I joined in the huddle.

“We need to take that ridge,” he said authoritatively, even if he was stating the obvious. “The earth ponies will advance with me and Red Coat. Starlit Skies, I want the unicorns to maintain a constant rate of fire on the artillery to keep the gunners away from them, but make sure you don’t accidently hit us when you’re firing over our heads. Blitzkrieg, keep the skies clear, if you’re feeling confident you can take a platoon to harass the gunners but make sure you keep out of the unicorn’s way. Is that all understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aye!”

Starlit Skies and Blitzkrieg both saluted and then cantered off to their respective duties. Orders were disseminated down via lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants, and corporals, and soon the first fusillades of iridescent white missiles were hurled in the general direction of the artillery. The regiment’s pegasi took to the skies and circled above us protectively, while the earth ponies were turned around to face the enemy.

The artillery fire became more sporadic, coming in volleys of twos or threes that mostly fell short. It seemed that the unicorns’ firepower was doing its job in forcing the Changelings to take cover. Then again, the average Changeling drone had very little in the way of self-preservation instincts when under the thrall of the tyrannical Hive Mind.

“Commissar,” he said, turning to me. “I’d like you to stick with the earth ponies.”

I blinked, “But I’m a unicorn!” I protested, tapping the obvious horn upon my forehead.

“Aye, but I think the earth ponies would benefit more from your inspired example if you’re there to lead them into the fight.”

“Very well,” I said, internally disappointed that I wouldn’t be spending the battle a nice and safe distance away from the slathering hordes of over-sized magic bugs. This was it, no more worming my way out of it, no more lies, excuses, and dissembling; I was going to fight.

“Sir,” Red Coat muttered. The young stallion’s face had blanched to an unnatural and unhealthy pale colour beneath his ashen grey coat, his eyes were wide with pupils reduced to the size of pinpricks, and his body trembled uncontrollably. “I-I...”

Sunshine Smiles patted him on the shoulder, “Just stick with me, lad, and I’ll promise you’ll be okay.”

He nodded tentatively in response and then trotted off, stumbling once or twice as his legs gave way to his fear, to deliver his orders to his subordinates.

My mouth had suddenly become incredibly dry as I stepped away and took my place by an earth pony platoon close to Red Coat. Cannon Fodder took his usual place next to me, and I decided that with his unique ability to suck out a unicorn’s magic that staying with the earth ponies was probably for the best.

“Company advance!” the Colonel cried out, wasting no time with giving any of those ridiculous speeches that films and books seem to think happen with every battle. A heroic speech in the midst of war certainly looks and sounds impressive, but simply leaves more time for the enemy to reload their cannons and shoot us. "Get in close as quickly as possible and start killing. Disperse formations! Do not bunch up! For Luna’s sake, do not bunch up!”

A drum sounded somewhere in the formation, rolling out a steady marching rhythm, and the regimental banners were unfurled and held aloft by the ensigns. As one the company marched forwards, the platoon formations spreading out somewhat until there was at least one pony length between each guardspony, which would minimise casualties from cannon fire.

We moved damnably slow at a standard marching pace to the tune of that distant drum. The enemy was only a few scant hundred feet away, almost close enough to smell the sickening ichor and corruption of the Changeling race wafting on the light breeze, so bloody close and yet so damnably far. Each step brought us inexorably closer to the foe, but it felt like an eternity. It has always been said that the advance was the hardest part of any battle, and I’m inclined to agree. In the brutality of close quarters combat there was no time to think or consider mortality, but here, as we march so slowly into the killing ground, there was every opportunity to consider that in the next instance I could be dead with a cannon ball where my pretty head once was.

The guardspony next to me muttered a prayer over and over, growing in intensity and volume as we neared the enemy. “Princess Luna, Mistress of the Night, deliver me not unto the fires of Tartarus but unto Thy Eternal Night. Princess Luna, Mistress of the Night, deliver me not unto the fires of Tartarus but unto Thy Eternal Night...” he intoned again and again until a sergeant told him to shut up and ‘stop annoying the Commissar’. [It should be noted that ‘Eternal Night’ in this prayer, which predates Nightmare Moon by a good few centuries, is a poetic description of spending the afterlife in the embrace of my sister and I.]

The unicorns’ missile fire settled into a consistent barrage, with simultaneous blasts of destructive magic hurled at the enemy’s direction; such was the mathematical precision drilled into Starlit Sky’s unicorn company that I heard the distinctive ‘snap’ sounds of the air being displaced by the magical discharge as a single heavy reverberation, rather than as a series of individual discharges. The barrages came like clockwork every fifteen seconds, and they certainly did their job by keeping the Changelings’ heads down but to my rising terror I saw that the enemy had learned to time the loading and firing of their weapons in the fifteen second gap between the fusillades.

I could make out the pony-shaped insects, having shed their now useless disguises, packing their stolen cannons with magically charged gunpowder and heavy iron cannon balls. They were clumsy, only having a basic idea of how these weapons worked, yet as we marched closer and closer it mattered less and less how well they could aim their guns. My heart sank when I saw them load one of the most heinous weapons ever developed by ponies: canister shot. [Rather than being loaded with a single round shot, the cannon is instead packed with a large number of ball bearings and shrapnel. While inaccurate, canister shot has a horrific effect on large infantry formations.]

Ahead of me I saw the black barrel of a cannon levelled down towards me. The gunner lit the fuse and the gun spat fire with a thundering explosion that shook the earth beneath my hooves. I hissed as I felt a sliver of shrapnel scrape along my shoulder, mangling a rather ugly wound in me. The pony next to me virtually exploded and showered me with a spray of blood and flesh.

He simply collapsed in a bloodied heap, like a marionette that had been severed from its strings. The mangled remains of the pony who, not a few minutes earlier, was praying so fervently for my Auntie Luna to accept his soul, lay in a crumpled pile amidst his shattered and buckled armour. The face was unrecognisable; the flesh virtually stripped from the shattered bone, his chest torn open where the armour had failed to protect him.

The platoon marched on.

I vomited.

There, lying before me, I saw that all a pony ever was, and will be, is blood, organs, flesh, and bone wrapped up in a fragile sack of skin. All the stuff that had previously seemed so valuable to me; social class, hierarchy, manners, parties, and all of that upper class aristocratic nonsense was once my very reason for living, all of that just didn’t seem so important anymore. Gazing down at the broken and mangled pile of meat that was once a pony, everything else around me seemed to fade away. The roaring thunder of cannons became unclear and indistinct, as did the cries of the wounded and dying and the shouts of officers trying to keep order, as if I was suddenly immersed underwater.

With the sick dribbling down my chin and the bitter taste of vomit stinging my dry throat I looked up, dazed and confused as the ponies continued to march towards their deaths. I saw an earth pony decapitated by round shot and another platoon’s entire front rank was eviscerated by shrapnel, yet still they marched onwards over the bloodied remains of their comrades.

“Commissar!” Cannon Fodder yelled at me. I glanced up, seeing him waiting a few yards from me and waving a hoof.

I stumbled forth after him, breaking into a weak and clumsy trot to try and catch up with them. Bodies littered the field; their features shredded beyond all recognition.

A wounded pony cried out and I stopped. His face was an utter ruin, but still he cried out for a medic, Princess Luna, his mother to save him before finally expiring in a pool of blood. The last thing that pony saw before ascending into Luna’s Eternal Night was my face and that sick, grinning skull on my cap.

As I write this I cannot recall their names or remember their faces, and it shames me.

Leaving the bodies I cantered back to my position with Cannon Fodder by my side. Bloodlust was reaching a boiling point in the earth ponies; for they had been subjected to this artillery bombardment with no capacity to respond in kind. They snorted and growled, stomping forth as if having to restrain themselves. They wanted vengeance and they wanted Changeling blood. I wanted it too. I wanted to get close, I wanted to kill and kill again. I wanted to avenge those two ponies. It seems incredulous given the normally placid, harmonious, herbivore nature of ponies, but the most animal, base instinct within us had been stirred.

To paraphrase an important pony, for he must be important if his words were recorded for posterity, ‘artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl’. Well, I now pray nightly that the immortal soul of whoever said that is burning in the eternal fires of Tartarus, for I had seen the effects of artillery upon a pony’s physical body and concluded that there is absolutely no dignity to it. [The words are attributed to General Crack Shot, whose bombardment of the city of Gryphonburg during the thirty minute war successfully forced the Grpyons surrender at the cost of dozens of Gryphon civilians. This is not an event I remember with any particular pride.]

We were close now, damned close. Close enough to see the glassy, vacant eyes of the Changelings. The unicorns behind us ceased firing lest they accidently hit us. The smell of ozone, blood, vomit, gunpowder, sweat, and excrement assaulted my nostrils and made me gag. The smoke wafted down towards us, stinging my sore eyes and thankfully concealing parts of our formation.

Sunshine Smiles darted forth, rearing on his hind legs and flailing his fore hooves and whinnying in rage. “Into them! Charge!”

Author’s Note: This was originally going to be a single chapter, but I’ve had to split it into two. I’ve never written a battle scene before, so I’m hoping I’ve pulled it off. Not sure if this warrants a gore tag, though. I probably need to get myself an editor at some point

Night's Blood (Part 4)

The earth ponies of the 1st Night Guard surged forth after their Colonel as an ash-grey and steel wave. Even the unfeeling, unthinking Changeling monsters quailed at the sight of the slathering horde of fanged ponies, bellowing cries of rage and vengeance, bursting through the dense gunpowder smoke that shrouded the battlefield like mist. I don’t know if they truly inspired fear in the common Changeling, but they as sure as Tartarus terrified me.

I was just behind Colonel Sunshine Smiles as he leapt over the barricades, crushing a Changeling drone beneath his iron-shod hooves and impaling another upon his spear. I drew my blade and followed with nearly three hundred ponies, overcome by bestial bloodlust, on my flank. Like a river bloated by flood waters bursting its banks, the Night Guards washed the barricades and artillery crews away in a wave of heavily armoured pony bodies and spear points.

I hacked left and right, my sabre slashing deep into the chitinous Changeling armour and digging into the soft flesh contained therein. The Pattern ’12 Sabre was not a subtle weapon by any stretch of the imagination; it had been designed with a single purpose in mind – to kill Changelings. It was a heavy, brutish sword designed to hack into Changeling chitin and cleave flesh, with none of the poise and elegance of the lighter duelling swords I was used to.

The beasts screeched as they died in a flail of desiccated limbs and a spray of thick, green blood, cut down mercilessly in the brutality of the Night Guards’ assault. Around me the battle raged; more and more ponies flooded over the ridge and into the plateau, eager to avenge their comrades slaughtered by the cowardly artillery pieces. They fought viciously, reminding me of the tales of the infinite black legions commanded by Nightmare Moon during her indignant temper tantrum one thousand years ago, with such aggressive spear thrusts that many had their shafts shattered by their enthusiasm. Those who were weaponless tore into the Changelings with their fangs, tearing out throats, eyes, and chunks of chitinous flesh. [It is a tradition in the Night Guards that those who don’t break their spears in combat aren’t fighting hard enough.]

Time seems to slow in battle; probably as a result of the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I was aware of every drop of blood and ichor that sprayed around, and spittle flying from the slathering maws of Night Guards. I could hear every shriek of pain, grunt of exertion, dying gurgle, and cursed battle cry. Directly ahead was a Changeling drone lunging at me, while another was scampering up to my vulnerable left flank. Deciding I could ignore the one on my left for the time being, and that the razor sharp fangs heading straight for my jugular was the greatest threat at the time, I brought my sword up rapidly directly into the Changeling’s path. The blade sank into the open, drooling maw, forced through by the inexorable momentum of the drone’s lunge until the ichor-slickened blade emerged from the back of its head. With that threat taken care of I pivoted on my front legs and lashed out with my hind limbs, bucking the slower beast in the face and sending it cartwheeling into the dust with a sickening ‘snap’ of its neck breaking.

As I landed, I felt a sharp stinging pain just above my right cutie mark. A Changeling drone, hitherto unseen, had sunk its fangs into my rump, yet before I could react a spear wielded by my aide skewered it in the neck. Thankfully it let go of my precious flank and fell to the ground dead.

“This one got a bit frisky, eh sir?” Cannon Fodder grinned as he shook the body free from his blade.

I laughed, mainly at the absurdity of it all as this strange little pony, who would continue to save my wretched little life time and time again, cracked weak jokes in the midst of battle. I tugged my sword free from the first Changeling and followed the Night Guards as they pushed the Changelings back.

Bodies rained from the skies. Above us the pegasi and airborne Changelings duelled in a macabre dance; clashing in a mess of flailing hooves, gnashing fangs, and flapping wings before the loser plummeted to the ground to be dashed to pieces on the unforgiving ground and trampled upon by the seething masses. I witnessed pegasi dive into the swirling maelstrom to assist any earth pony who looked to be in trouble. Captain Blitzkrieg screamed from the skies just before me, crushing a Changeling I would have never seen coming for all the smoke and press of bodies, and tearing its throat out before taking flight once more.

To my right, I saw Colonel Sunshine Smiles, having lost his spear, tear a two pounder cannon from its gun carriage and use it to bludgeon Changelings to death as a club to surprising effectiveness. Underneath his armour and sweat-streaked fur, powerful muscles bulged and strained with the immense weight he was wielding like an oversized cricket bat made of iron. Red Coat stuck close to him like a limpet, his movements were frenzied and certainly aggressive, though his spear thrusts were exceedingly clumsy and avoided even by the mindless Changelings.

Behind us the unicorns were marching up to add their weight into the battle. Of course they had ceased firing, lest they accidentally hit us, and instead drew their short swords ready to join in the carnage if it looked as if the earth ponies couldn’t handle it. It was unneeded, of course, for the Changeling numbers dwindled as the earth ponies and pegasi completely encircled the outnumbered Changeling formation and closed for the kill.

The battle ended abruptly with the dying shrieks of the last Changeling, who fought until the end with the habitual lack of concern for self preservation that characterises their misbegotten kind. It all felt rather anti-climactic to me, but then I had no inkling at the time that this was merely the beginning of what would make my discreditable career. The Changeling force here had been small; a bare skeleton crew to man the cannons and divert our attention from what was going on in the wider battle, and their little suicide mission had worked.

I felt exhausted as the last dregs of adrenaline slowly left my body. My coat was covered in dust, my uniform ripped and covered in pony blood, Changeling ichor, and thankfully unidentifiable body parts. The shrapnel wound in my shoulder stung, as did the bite marks on my flank that leaked crimson onto my attractive cutie mark. They say mares like scars, but most likely not in that location.

As I limped back towards where the gun line once lay, the regiment dispersed to rest. The earth ponies roved across the battlefield, finishing off the wounded and the dying. I watched them conduct their grim business; there was no point in taking prisoners, for these were simple mindless beasts under the thrall of their tyrannical Hive Mind. I stepped gingerly around the eviscerated corpses around me. Casualties had been light, and the majority of the dead bodies were those of Changelings, but there were a sizeable number of guardsponies lying ripped to pieces or ripped open by Changeling fangs.

Combat medics, identifiable by the white circle with a red cross emblazoned upon their helmets, moved across the field, lending their valued aid to wounded ponies and delivering the Eternal Night to those beyond saving. [Night Guard euphemism for euthanasia.] Picquet lines were set up around the field to guard for any Changeling counter-attack, though it seemed rather unlikely at the moment. ['Picquet' is a somewhat archaic alternate spelling of 'picket' when referring to the positioning of sentries.] Other earth ponies took the opportunity to set up their portable burners and kettles to start brewing cups of tea. I smirked as I observed them taking part in that most sacrosanct of all Trottingham traditions; taking a few minutes out of the afternoon for a nice cup of tea, even amongst so much bloodshed and violence. I wagered that if the Changelings did launch a counter-attack the ponies would have waited until they had finished their tea before fighting back.

Colonel Sunshine Smiles sat by the ruined barricades, resting upon the two pounder cannon he had been wielding as a club not long before, and directing orders to a handful of lieutenants who saluted and scampered off to finish their duties. His armour was scratched and battered a little, but otherwise seemed intact though his helmet had a rather large, hoof-shaped dent in it and thus lay on the ground by his hooves.

Captain Red Coat lay slumped on the ground next to the cannon, gazing blankly off into space with unfocused eyes. He suddenly looked old; where before there was youthful exuberance and enthusiasm, now there was only the haunted gaze of a young pony whose dreams had just been utterly crushed by his first time in battle. I knew he was only seventeen years old, but he looked to be about forty as he stared blankly across the field of dead bodies. His armour was scratched heavily, his hind leg bound up in a bloodstained bandage, and his left eye closed shut by an enormous purple bruise.

An ensign stood beside them, holding the regimental standard aloft proudly. The flag was battered, damaged, but still defiant and victorious as it fluttered gracefully in the soft breeze. I noticed that the pony carrying it was not the one who first carried it into battle; he had killed by a cannon ball in that first, hellish advance up that ridge.

Starlit Skies joined them, looking animatedly at the cannons and mumbling incomprehensibly to himself in excited tones. The unicorns had escaped the brunt of the fighting, though they had suffered a few casualties in the bombardment. The strain of all of that magical discharge, however, took its toll on them, as the sustained barrage of mage fire sapped their energy leaving them exhausted. Despite his exuberance, his gait was dragging and slow and there were noticeable dark bags under his bloodshot eyes.

A sudden wave of hideous body odour cutting through the general unpleasant reek of blood and gunpowder alerted me to Cannon Fodder’s return long before he stumbled into view. He gave me a large mug of hot tea he had procured from one of the guardsponies, which I accepted gratefully as my throat and mouth was as dry as the barren desert we were fighting over. The calming effect of a nice cup of hot tea, despite the warmth of Celestia’s sun beating down upon us, was oddly relaxing after the brutality of the battle we had just fought. Eventually the frantic hammering of my heart against my ribcage, which felt as if it was trying to leap out of chest via my oesophagus, died down as my breathing returned to what could safely be considered ‘normal’. This, however, was all replaced by the return of the unpleasant, cloying, slightly sick sensation in the pit of my stomach that was hitherto suppressed until just recently.

Captain Blitzkrieg landed next to me with a clumsy flutter of his membranous wings and slumped to the ground, panting heavily and his fur covered with a sheen of rank sweat. I attributed his clumsiness and the lack of his usual unearthly feline grace to the sheer exhaustion he must have been feeling far in excess of anything I or the earth ponies around us must have been feeling, for pegasi are capable of quick bursts of frenetic and violent energy but inevitably pay the price for it with overwhelming fatigue. That, of course, didn’t stop Blitzkrieg sneering up at me, despite being sprawled on the dusty ground in a less than dignified manner.

“I see you got yourself a love bite, Prince,” he jeered, pointing at the bite on my cutie mark. “Even the Changelings can’t resist a bit of the royal flank, no wonder you’re Canterlot’s most eligible bachelor.”

“Yes, yes, laugh it up,” I said, ignoring the titters and chuckles from everypony around me, except Cannon Fodder who didn’t seem to get it. “You’ll be doing latrine duty until Tartarus freezes over.”

The pegasus snickered and retrieved a large chocolate cigar from one of the pouches hidden inside his armour. “Bah, those Changelings were pansies,” he said, snickering to himself. As he spoke the cigar dangling from his mouth wagged like the tail of an overly excited dog. “Those muppets wouldn’t last two minutes in a Trottingham street brawl, even our namby-pamby prince managed to survive.”

“How long until the pegasi recover?” asked Sunshine Smiles.

“Hmm,” Blitzkrieg nibbled on the end of his chocolate cigar thoughtfully, “Give us an hour’s rest and some food and we’ll be back to fighting strength. Why? Are we going somewhere?”

“We’ll need to move out very soon,” he said and pointed out to the valley below.

Blitzkrieg reluctantly dragged himself to his hooves and slinked, cat-like, over to the edge of the shallow ridge. The plateau below was still littered with the mangled remains of ponies hit by artillery fire, and the dry earth was streaked with crimson red blood. Above us the carrion birds; crows and vultures, soared lazily overhead, casting their baleful shadows upon the ground. A few would land to pick out scraps of ruined flesh from a dead body, ripping out the softer tissues such as the eyes or the tongue. I noticed how they would avoid feeding on the Changeling corpses; I supposed even vultures had some standards.

“By Celestia’s left arse cheek,” he gasped. His lower jaw hanged loose, as if he had lost all motor function in his face, which caused the chocolate cigar he had been enjoying to slip out and hit the ground ruined.

Curiously I clambered up next to him, wondering what qualities my divine Auntie’s left buttock had over the other. Upon seeing what the problem was I was far less eloquent than the good Captain.

“Buck.”

There, at the southern mouth of the valley, was a vast grey-green smudge that encompassed the entire width of the gorge and spilled out into the vast empty plains of the Badlands. Just beyond where the valley opened, surrounded entirely by the sea of grey and green, was a small beleaguered island of gold and white. The 3rd Solar Guard, or at least what remained of that regiment, was trapped and encircled utterly by a Changeling horde seemingly without number.

The Changelings’ plan was unveiled in all of its cunningly hideous glory. The enemy had successfully infiltrated our artillery regiment, and by firing upon the rearguard of the 3rd Regiment they had forced the Solar Guard straight into the Changeling army to escape the artillery barrage, thus encircling the panicked and disorganised 3rd Solar Guard. The infiltration of the artillery regiment was only intended as a means to force the Solar Guard into a trap and to distract the Night Guards from coming to the rescue of their trapped comrades; their entire purpose, therefore, was a suicide mission, which explained the relative ease with which they were finally dispatched.

It put us now in a rather difficult situation. The Night Guards could either retreat back to Maredun to hold off the Changelings there, consigning the entirety of the 3rd Solar Guard to destruction, or we could charge straight into the vast, slathering horde of Changelings and try and mount a rescue. I, for one, believed that the latter option was the best course of action. One might be somewhat confused by this, given my admittedly cowardly nature and entirely rational fixation on my own self-preservation, to advocate heading straight into another battle. Indeed, one might have assumed I’d like to run away back to Maredun and hide behind those thick stone walls. Well, as far as I could see the great citadel of Maredun offered only slight protection; the walls were broken and shattered, the gun ports unmanned, and the garrison unfamiliar with the layout of the fortress. The status of the walls, however, was a moot point considering all Changelings could just fly straight over them even if they were all intact. If I was trapped inside the citadel then there would be no chance of escape or retreat back to Dodge Junction where the 5th Solar Guard was still encamped.

No, looking at it rationally as I did, mounting a rescue of the beleaguered 3rd Solar Guard offered the best hope. The high mountains offered greater protection from being outflanked, thus keeping our retreat path mostly clear. Furthermore, rescuing the regiment would put even more live bodies between me and the slathering hordes of bug monsters. I’d sooner take a small chance of survival, no matter how slim, over a futile last stand any day. The trouble with last stands is that, no matter how heroic they appear and how dramatic they may be in the cheap adventure novels the general public seem to enjoy, they inevitably involve everypony being wiped out.

“Sirs,” I heard a thick Appleloosian accent just behind me. Turning around I saw a bombardier of the 16th Royal Artillery, his grey coat and black armour was stained with the peculiar green gunk the Changelings use to bind up prisoners and render them immobile, saluting the officers. “Bombardier Bramley Apple, sirs. Ah’m a might glad ya’ll came to our rescue.”

I looked past the Bombardier to see the gunnery crews of the 16th inspecting the re-captured cannons, all of them with traces of the Changelings’ goo stuck to their armour and fur. Judging by the size of the mob that moved around between the resting Night Guards, each thanking their rescuers gratefully and exchanging food, tea, and candy sticks, only about a third of the original battery had survived.

“What exactly happened here?” asked Sunshine.

“Ah can’t rightly say,” he said, nervously rubbing at his stained armour. “We set up along this here ridge, regular as clockwork, then next thing Ah know there’s Changelings everywhere an’ Ah’m wrapped up in this gunk with mah Lance-Bombardier.”

“What happened to the officers?” I asked, faintly wondering what happened to Colonel Shrapnel.

“Changelings, sir,” he said as he waved a hoof at the bodies around us. “All of the officers were Changelings in disguise. Ah don’t know how we didn’t notice, but then who’s gonna notice another bunch o’ officers acting weirdly. Uh, present company excepted, sirs.”

Colonel Sunshine Smiles nickered and grinned, lightly patting the somewhat terrified Bombardier on the shoulder amicably. The friendly gesture surprised the young lad, who probably wasn’t used to the idea of officers being so forward with the common rank and file. “Bombardier Bramley, I’m placing you in temporary command of the battery, get as many of your guns as serviceable as you can as quickly as possible. Can you do that?”

Bramley Apple smiled broadly and nodded his head excitedly, giving the impression of a very happy puppy. “Yes sir! The gunners will be a might pleased to have a crack at the enemy.”

“Excellent, carry on.”

The Bombardier gave an enthusiastic salute and scampered off to bellow orders at his underlings in the same loud and colourful manner that all non-commissioned officers tend to do, often supplemented with blows to the head and threats of further violence. The newly-freed gunnery crews leapt to their duties with renewed vigour, eager to avenge themselves for their embarrassing capture by delivering death in the form of heavy iron cannon balls at the hated enemy. The majority of the cannons had survived the attack; a handful had been wrecked beyond repair by poor loading by the Changelings and a few more were thrown off their carriages in the Night Guards’ assault, but thankfully the majority of which could still be manned and fired by a skeleton crew of gunners. Though with only a third of the artillery regiment’s gunners still alive the crews had to be spread somewhat thin across the cannons, so the tricky and back-breaking business of loading the things would take far longer than we would have otherwise hoped. Still, having some artillery support would help with whatever insane plan Sunshine Smiles was plotting.

“I want a pegasus to send a message to General Crimson Arrow,” said Sunshine Smiles, taking out a notepad and a pencil. He once told me that these are the greatest weapons in the Royal Guard’s arsenal; I’d have just settled for a large artillery piece myself, but I think he was trying to make some sort of poetic point about the importance of communication in the military.

He dropped the notepad on the floor and scribbled his message down on it with surprisingly elegant cursive script.

“Changelings infiltrated 16th Artillery. 1st Night Guard has retaken ridge. Artillery serviceable. 3rd Solar Guard surrounded. Request reinforcements to mount rescue.”

Blitzkrieg shook his head with a scowl forming on his features. “No can do, sir, unless you’d like one of us to walk there.” He flexed out his bat-like membranous wings, wincing slightly at the pain in his shoulder and back muscles. “That and I don’t think any of those bastards would lift a hoof to help us if it were us down there, sir. I don’t like it, but I’ll do as I’m told like a good little guardspony.”

Considering that the average competence of a Solar Guard officer at that time wasn’t particularly high coupled with their chronic elitism, our pegasus Captain was probably right. They had shown themselves to be so clouded by their ideas of class and hierarchy as to override basic, common sense. I admit that I’ve never been the most egalitarian pony; I believe that the best society is one modelled on a strict hierarchy – the aristocracy rule and the great unwashed masses shut up and do as they are told, but even then I recognise that social status does not necessarily correlate with military competence.

“Starlit Skies.”

The unicorn Major looked up from inspecting a particularly large six pounder cannon that had been affectionately named ‘Bertha’ by its crew. “Sir?”

“Can any of our unicorns teleport?”

He shook his head sadly, “Not at that range, no.”

“We’ll send an earth pony runner then,” said the Colonel. “Red Coat!”

The young earth pony captain didn’t hear, for he was staring blankly across the valley into the swirling battle just below. His face was a rictus of fear, and his body quietly shivering. The 3rd Solar Guard were fighting bravely, indeed it was a miracle that they had continued to survive for so long, but I feared that they would get overrun if they didn’t get relieved, and soon.

“Red Coat!” the Colonel called again, and the young stallion jumped in surprise.

“Sir?”

“Go and fetch an earth pony runner.”

“Sir!” Red Coat saluted clumsily and galloped off, tripping once or twice over a body or piece of battlefield detritus, in search of an appropriate guardspony for the job.

I cleared my throat and approached Sunshine Smiles, “With your leave I’d like to accompany the runner to headquarters.”

The Colonel blinked gormlessly at me for a few times. I tensed, hoping he didn’t see my barely concealed plan to get to Maredun, suddenly discover something very important I had to do there, and find that I couldn’t simply accompany the regiment on their suicide mission after all. Actually, I could have just pulled rank on the Colonel and just go with the runner, but I decided that making him feel like he had some say in the matter would invariably help improve our relationship, such as it was.

“Just in case the General needs some convincing,” I said, not knowing just how prophetic those words would be. “He can be a bit stubborn.”

He nodded in response, “Very well. Oh, and tell them we need some more spears.”

Finding an appropriate volunteer was relatively easy, as it simply involved a matter of finding a pony who looked relatively healthy enough and ordering them to volunteer. In the end I was lumbered with a young mare named Marathon, a slightly stocky looking thing who looked rather more masculine than I’d have preferred, though that might have been a result of the Royal Guard training and the armour; one was unlikely to find the next Fleur-de-Lis in the ranks of the common soldiery. That said, the rear barding did well to conform to the shapely, muscular flanks which swayed ever so wonderfully as she jogged.

With the scrap of paper safely tucked away in Marathon’s armour, we set out. Cannon Fodder, as ever, accompanied me. Considering he had saved my life twice now, the first being the incident in the Canterlot catacombs, I was unwilling to part with him for any extended period of time. His odour and lack of social skills would be something I’d just have to get used to then.

We headed down the slope into the valley and set off at a brisk trot towards the great citadel, praying that we would not be seen by any flying Changeling patrols. As luck would have it, the Changelings were rather more concerned with the battle to our south than three lone ponies running in the opposite direction.

It was about halfway when my limbs started to burn with the exertion, and breathing required an almighty effort to perform. Even Cannon Fodder, who seemed to be rather immune to these sorts of things, looked as if he was feeling the strain. Marathon seemed more than happy to keep going, but became rather disappointed when I ordered a break to be taken to allow Cannon Fodder and I some time to recover. While I should have been happy trotting along, in the opposite direction to the massacre just less than a mile away, watching her toned flanks bob up and down, my tiredness was soon outweighing any possibly pleasure in observing this young mare.

“Hmmph,” she huffed, “I’ve never had to stop during a race before!”

I blinked up at her as I lay sprawled on the ground, struggling to catch my breath. “This isn’t a race, guardspony.”

Marathon scoffed. “I swear you unicorn pansies have no stamina at all,” she said as she jogged on the spot, before stopping as she suddenly realised just which ‘unicorn pansy’ she happened to be speaking to. “Uh, not you, sir.”

I smirked, “Of course.”

“It’s just running is my special talent,” she continued, being a rather talkative pony, not that I minded as some light conversation helped take my mind off my possible imminent death. “I’m the three times champion of the Running of the Leaves in Ponyville!” [A quaint tradition in Ponyville where the stampeding hooves of the running ponies causes the autumn leaves to fall from trees.]

“Ponyville?” I asked, realising that she definitely did not speak with that distinct Trottingham accent. “Do you know Rarity, perhaps?”

“The fashion designer? Yeah, I know her. I commissioned her to design me some new jogging clothes; they certainly looked fancy but not nearly aerodynamic enough for competitive running.”

The break lasted five minutes, where Cannon Fodder and I drained a bottle of water between us, before we headed off once more at a thankfully slower pace. By now the sun had descended past the western mountains and cast us in a deep shadow, and a refreshing cool breeze was blown through the valley from the north.

The great citadel of Maredun, with its ruined towers and walls, loomed ahead of us, beckoning us in with its promises of safety. Gaps in the curtain walls had been filled temporarily with sandbags, and eagle-eyed sentries, resplendent in their gleaming gold armour, gazed watchfully out into the valley below. The great banner of Equestria, which had been gifted unto Celestia’s Own 1st Solar Guard, flew from the tallest tower in the keep, while lesser banners fluttered in the breeze on the smaller turrets and towers.

We cantered up the winding pathway to the main gate. The slope that lead up to the castle was at too high an angle for anypony to even attempt to climb, and the sheer rock provided no hoof-holds, so the only way anypony could reach the gate was through a winding road that zigzagged its way up. While this certainly made an excellent defensive feature against any enemy unlucky enough not to be blessed with the ability of mass flight, I doubted it would prove particularly effective against the Changelings.

We galloped up through the winding pathway to the first set of gates which the sentries, upon recognising my distinctive, albeit damaged, uniform, opened for us and allowed us entry. There were three courtyards, each designed to form a killing zone from which unicorns from the walls and towers could pour a monstrous amount of firepower into the yard below and, failing that, it would be large enough to allow several platoons of earth ponies to engage the foe in close combat.

The 1st Solar Guard were already mobilised and ready for combat; assembled in combat formations in each of the courtyards and prepared to march out at a moment’s notice. They stood still to attention, with the only indication that they were not perfectly crafted statues being the swivel of their eyes and the fact they were breathing. We ignored them, galloping through each of the courtyards, up narrow staircases and through wrought iron doors into the keep itself.

The dust of ages long past was disturbed as we entered into the main entrance hall. While it must have once been a grand hall, adorned with the banners and standards of the ancient civilisation that once called this place home, it was still designed with a military purpose. The walls that supported the high ceiling concealed numerous slits for bows and unicorns, forcing the enemy to run a gauntlet of withering fire before they could make their way into the narrow corridors of the fortress.

Makeshift braziers and magical lamps lit this hallway, casting deep black shadows from the crumbling pillars. This place hadn’t been inhabited for over a thousand years, perhaps more. It was even rumoured this citadel had been built even before the founding of Equestria, when ponykind was split into numerous petty kingdoms that vied with one another for power and influence.

A sentry by the name of Arrow Heart led us through the narrow corridors, the dim lighting granting a distinct sense of foreboding as we trotted through the sepulchral hallways, to wherever it was that General Crimson Arrow was staying. We reached a set of stairs, which we climbed while Marathon was berating me for being a ‘pansy unicorn’ like a high school gym teacher screaming at a fat colt. I ignored it, but made a mental note to put her on extra sentry duty once this had all blown over.

As we ascended the stairs I could hear the sounds of a very vocal argument between Shining Armour and Crimson Arrow emanating from just above us.

“If you step one hoof out of this fortress I’ll have you court-martialled for insubordination!” shouted Crimson Arrow.

“Better insubordination than leaving fellow guardsponies to die out there!”

“The 3rd is a lost cause; I’ll not risk any more ponies in this futile endeavour.”

I heard a hoof stomp, “I can’t believe you’re being so callous about this!”

The main war room was on the third floor. It was a large, expansive hall with a huge window, the glass long since shattered and eroded by the millennia of decay, which commanded a wide view of the valley below. With the window gone the room was exposed to the elements; the grey stone pillars had been eroded by wind and sand had seeped in to pool in the crevices and corners of the room. The centre was dominated by a large, foldaway table that the general staff must have brought along with them. Strewed about it were various maps and mathematical equipment such as rulers and protractors.

Shining Armour and Crimson Arrow stood by the gaping hole where the window once lay, joined by Colonel Rising Star and a number of military aides from the general staff whom I did not recognise. The Captain of the Guard looked enraged, his body quivering as if struggling to hold back his anger, while Crimson Arrow looked far less confident. In fact, if I didn’t know any better I’d have said that the young General was nervous. His eyes were wide and constantly darting over to his aide to plead for advice and assistance in the insane responsibility now placed upon his shoulders.

“I’m being realistic,” the General insisted, his voice stammering with indecision, “we need to hold the Changelings here at Maredun before they spill out into southern Equestria. That’s what the plan says.”

Shining Armour shook his head emphatically, “Maredun is in no position to endure a siege,” he said more calmly this time, no longer shouting or raising his voice, “the walls have gaping holes and once the Changelings get in there’s no retreat from here. We can hold the Changelings at the mouth of the valley, let me mobilise my regiment and lead the 3rd in an organised retreat into the valley. The Changelings’ advantage of numbers will be blunted in the tight confines of the gorge.”

I cleared my throat loudly, and the ponies in the room stopped and looked in my direction. General Crimson Arrow’s thick eyebrows shot to his forehead upon seeing me; no doubt I made quite a sight with my dusty, dirty, blood-stained uniform.

“Forgive my appearance,” I said dryly, “but considering what we’ve just been through I think I can be excused for being a bit unclean.”

“What is it?” spat Crimson Arrow in annoyance. “Why aren’t you with your regiment?”

“We’re here to deliver a message,” I replied, then noticing Colonel Rising Star of the 3rd Solar Guard standing by the window. “Why isn’t Rising Star with his regiment?”

The elderly pony snorted, which made his impressive facial hair quiver, “You can’t expect me to be out there! I might get hurt!”

I frowned, “Then who did you leave in charge of the regiment?”

“Captain Clear Heavens,” he said with a degree of pride in his raspy voice. “I know he’s a bit impetuous and enthusiastic, but he so wanted this chance to prove himself.”

I have very rarely ever been so stunned into silence, but this was one of those times. Of all the officers in the Royal Guard that I had hitherto had the misfortune to meet, Clear Heavens was probably the one I’d have considered to be least qualified to lead a regiment into battle. Indeed, it became all rather clear now; the reason the 3rd Solar Guard had advanced so far out into the Badlands and allowed itself to get so thoroughly encircled was down to his idiocy. To be fair, the only time I had met him was during that rather unpleasant duel we had fought, but already I was beginning to regret letting him live.

The General ignored him, “Well, spit it out then! What’s the message?”

I nudged Marathon over, who seemed to have developed a minor case of stage fright in the presence of so many officers. She took the scrap of paper out clumsily and started to read it aloud, only for Crimson Arrow to rudely seize the note out of Marathon’s hooves with his magic and bring it over to read. The usually confident young mare yelped and flinched away from the magical aura.

The scowl on Crimson Arrow’s face only deepened as he read the note intently, while Shining Armour peered awkwardly over the General’s shoulder to see what all the fuss was about. I stumbled over to the map table and leaned against it for support, silently wishing for a glass of very strong alcohol to make what we were about to do seem a little less insane. Granted it was the only sensible course of action I could see, however, it seemed the General didn’t see it that way.

“No,” said Crimson Arrow as he screwed up the note into a ball and tossed it out of the window, thus showing just what he thought of Sunshine Smiles’ master plan. “It’s suicide,” he continued, turning away from us to watch the battle from the window.

The citadel was constructed on a ‘peninsula’ in the valley where a large area of the mountains protruded into the gorge, thus providing a commanding view of the entire valley. At the southern end we could still see the vast, cloying mass of Changelings and the faint smudge of the 3rd Regiment.

“Staying here is suicide,” insisted Shining Armour, “and I refuse to let fellow guardsponies die simply because you’re too timid.”

“There’s no saving the 3rd Regiment,” he retorted, not taking his eyes off the smudge in the distance. “Being a leader means having to make the tough decisions, and sometimes the most unpalatable choice is the best. We will remember the sacrifice of those brave ponies, but I will not risk the rest of the army in this foolish endeavour.”

“One thousand ponies,” Shining Armour punctuated the phrase with a stamp of his hoof, “that’s how many you are leaving to die out there.”

“Acceptable losses,” said Crimson Arrow coldly.

“That’s enough,” I said. I had been content to stand back and allow the two to argue, but the urgency of our task was starting to weigh heavily on me. If I had allowed them to bicker more, then the 3rd Solar Guard would be completely overrun before we had any chance to do anything about it, or Crimson Arrow would just pull rank and have Shining Armour court-martialled for insubordination, which would mean the only somewhat competent officer in the entire Solar Guard would have his entire career ruined.

An awkward silence fell as all eyes fell upon me. Granted, I was largely used to being the centre of attention as it comes with being a prince of the realm and damned handsome, but here in this strictly professional setting it was rather unnerving. The fact that my next few words could mean life or death for hundreds of ponies, or indeed determine the fate of Equestria, did little to help me.

“I’m with Shining Armour,” I said, much to the combined shock and relief of the Captain of the Guard.

“Too bad,” said Crimson Arrow, sounding more like a petulant child being denied a treat than a military commander, “I’m in command here.” The annoying thing was that he was absolutely right. The Royal Guard prides itself in its strict command structure; a pony doesn’t so much as sneeze without written consent from his superior officer, signed in triplicate, and then sent off to the War Ministry to be recorded for posterity.

“Not anymore,” I said, not quite thinking. Little did I know that the next sentence out of my mouth would be the one that would contribute greatest to my fraudulent rise to fame, but still an element of anxiety crept into my voice. “By the power invested in me by Their Royal Highnesses and Their Royal Commissariat, I hereby remove you from command.”

“Very funny, Blueblood,” said Crimson Arrow sarcastically and with absolutely no mirth. “I know you can’t do that. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a battle to run.”

Or not run, as far as I could see.

I felt an ice cold shudder, which I quickly repressed with the ease of a practiced dissembler. I had been attached on a regimental level to the Night Guards with authority to watch over command decisions, but I did not know whether that power extended to the general staff either. It seemed like a rather inappropriately large amount of power to be gifted to one pony, particularly one as self-centred and cowardly as I, but for some peculiar reason Auntie Luna appeared to believe I was possessed of enough strength of character not to let it all go to my head.

I drew my sword; twenty-eight inches of Equestrian steel caked and clotted with dried Changeling blood levitated just before me. The sound of steel grating on the scabbard echoed through the ancient chamber, having the desired effects of silencing the quiet murmurings of the military aides and making tiny beads of sweat form on Crimson Arrow’s brow. [Note that most swords being drawn from their scabbards tend not to make this familiar sound, despite what adventure novels may have told you; however, in the creation of the Commissariat my sister insisted that a commissar’s scabbard be altered to make this sound. Luna has quite a flair for the dramatic and understood that a commissar’s role is as much about psychology as it is about fighting.]

“No, you don’t; I’m relieving you of command,” I said firmly. “Your caution will result in the capture or deaths of nearly a thousand ponies out there and many more if we fail to stop them at the valley. I cannot allow you to continue this course of action.”

“You can’t do this!” he cried, stamping a hoof in frustration, but there was a look in his eyes that made me shudder; betrayal. “This is mutiny! I’ll see you hang for this!”

He was my friend, well, possibly one of the closest things to a friend I would be allowed to have in the aristocracy. I suppose ‘an acquaintance with whom I can tolerate being near for an extended period of time’ might have been more appropriate, but I still felt some twinge of sadness for what I was doing to the poor lad. I couldn’t quite blame him; he was young and naive, and unexpectedly thrust into a situation where he was given so much responsibility. Knowing him as I did, he felt that this battle belonged to him and him alone; this was his chance to prove he could command without anypony interfering and thus seemed to think taking the advice of other ponies to be tantamount to giving up. For the sake of those guardsponies down there in the valley, and for averting defeat, I pushed that small sliver of empathy out of my mind.

“He can,” said Cannon Fodder to the surprise of everypony in the entire room. “Princesses’ Regulations; the Commissar can relieve any officer of command deemed to be incompetent, cowardly, corrupt, or otherwise incapable of conducting their duties subject to a later inquiry.”

“I wasn’t asking for your opinion, guardspony, you will speak when spoken to.”

“Actually, he’s right,” said one of the aides, a middle-aged mare with enormously thick rimmed glasses. “The Commissariat has total power over every aspect of the Royal Guard’s command structure.”

“Blueblood...” gasped Crimson Arrow disbelievingly. “I thought we were friends.”

“It’s Commissar Blueblood,” I said, flicking the sword towards him to emphasise the point. I was hoping that he wouldn’t pull that ‘friendship’ card and make this harder than it already was. I felt somewhat sick, but I knew that ultimately this was the right thing to do. “I’m sorry,” I added.

The General huffed in indignation, steam snorting out of his flared nostrils in anger, before he turned on the spot and stomped off out of the room via an arched doorway on the far west end of the weathered hall. The aged yet sturdy door slammed shut behind him with a resounding 'thump', and an awkward silence descended on the room as we all gazed nervously at each other.

“Well, now what, Commissar?” asked one of the tacticians, his voice dripping with sarcasm, which I ignored in favour of getting on with this grisly business.

“Come on,” I said to the assembled crowd as I sheathed my sword with a steely, grating rasp, “we’ve got a job to do.”

Night's Blood (Part 5)

The 1st Solar Guard mobilised quickly, and within only ten minutes the entire regiment was marching down the valley. Shining Armour’s plan, as much as I could remain actively alert and listening when he explained it, was for his regiment to link up with the 1st Night Guards currently stationed on the ridge. Once there, the unicorns of both regiments would set up with the artillery to provide long range fire support, while the earth ponies would mass in the valley, adopt the chevron formation, and charge straight into the Changeling army. The idea, however, was not to get bogged down into a battle of attrition as the 3rd Solar Guard had, but to punch a hole in the Changeling lines through which the beleaguered 3rd Regiment could retreat through. [What Blueblood is referring to is known as the Equestria Charge, which is a battlefield shock tactic that resembles more of a stampede than an ordered military stratagem. The idea is to use sheer speed and brute force to shock the enemy; it isn’t particularly subtle but its psychological impact more than makes up for it.]

As plans went, it was probably the best possible one we could think of except for ‘run away’, which would have simply left a large Changeling army to rampage around southern Equestria. That and Shining Armour, after my display at Maredun, fully bought into the image that I was somehow a noble hero willing to risk life and limb for Equestria. I didn’t particularly want to disappoint him, especially since he was starting to forgive me for making his younger sisters life a living hell in school all of those years ago, so, rather naively, I agreed to tag along back to my regiment.

Speed was of the essence, as it would only be a matter of time before the Changelings would discover our stratagem and move accordingly to counter it. However, we seemed to have been particularly blessed that day, as the 1st Solar Guard reached the ridge without any problems. I pondered that the Changelings were somehow ignorant of our presence their focus instead upon the besieged 3rd Solar Guard Regiment instead of the far larger army massing just north of their position. [Blueblood’s hypothesis does seem likely; it is entirely possible that the Purestrain leading the Changeling army would have been leading from the front, if so then it is unlikely that it would have even been aware of Shining Armour’s manoeuvres. However, considering all of the Changelings are linked by a Hive Mind broadcasted by the psychic powers of the Purestrains, it is difficult to believe that no single Changeling could have seen them. Either the Purestrain was supremely confident of crushing the 3rd Solar Guard that what Shining Armour was doing appeared to be of little consequence, or was so preoccupied with orchestrating the fighting efforts of thousands of drones that it was physically impossible to manoeuvre his army in time to counter it. With the lack of any written records on the Changelings’ behalf it is impossible to tell.]

I marched alongside Shining Armour, with Cannon Fodder and Marathon in tow behind me. Behind us the entire regiment, nine hundred ponies armoured in brilliant gold-plated steel that scintillated in the bright afternoon sun, marched. Their rhythmic hoofsteps came as distinct, single tremors that shook the dry ground beneath me.

As a precaution we had attached unicorns from their parent company to the earth pony platoons to dispel any Changeling illusionary magic. We knew from the Battle of Canterlot that a favourite tactic of the Changelings was to disguise themselves as our comrades in the field of battle, which naturally made things rather difficult for us in determining friend or foe. It was rumoured, though not officially verified, that the majority of the Royal Guard casualties in that battle were a result of ponies turning on their comrades who they believed to be Changelings in disguise, only to find the truth that they had just murdered their friends after the fact. Shining Armour was determined not to allow this to happen again.

It felt strangely nostalgic to be with my old regiment once more, though back then the only time the 1st Solar Guard came out in force was on a military parade down the streets of Canterlot. I recall the last one I had taken part in was during the Summer Sun Celebration, which took place during a great heat wave and no fewer than fifty guardsponies fainted from heat exhaustion and dehydration. We must have made for a rather sorry sight standing to attention with unconscious ponies in our midst and medics moving to aid them, all of us silently begging for Princess Celestia to hurry up and get on with it.

The sounds of distant battle were just becoming audible, sounding much like the odd background noise of a large crowd at a major sporting event. The mood was tense. The Regiment had long been considered to be the greatest of all in the Royal Guard and now, for the first time in the one thousand years since the end of the Nightmare Heresy, they would have to prove themselves worthy of that heritage. I supposed the Night Guards were somewhat lucky in that respect; the original Night Guard Corps had been disbanded after the Nightmare Heresy, so with no direct continuation between the current 1st Night Guard Regiment and the one that served one thousand years ago, other than their name, there was no proud legacy for them to live up to.

Colonel Sunshine Smiles had taken the liberty of mobilising the earth pony and pegasus companies at the base of the hill, but left a platoon and a squadron up on the ridge with the artillery just in case things went pear-shaped, which they inevitably do in the course of war.

With a few barked orders the 1st Solar Guard Regiment came to a halt with the simultaneous slamming of a near thousand hooves, which sent a small tremor through the ground. The two regiments faced each other across the plain, with the resplendent and glorious golden Solar Guard arrayed against the dark and mysterious Night Guard the difference appeared to be as clear as night and day. For a while the two regiments faced off one another, like two gangs of common street thugs sizing each other up before a brawl. I heard mutterings from the Solar Guard behind me, catching snippets of words like ‘ruffians’, ‘commoners’, and ‘monsters’.

Shining Armour stepped forwards and I followed. Marathon scampered off to rejoin her own platoon and disappeared into the serried ranks of the Night Guards, while Cannon Fodder took his usual position just behind me and slightly to the right. Fortunately for me, this time we were downwind of him so this rather historic moment wouldn’t be tainted by everypony involved gagging on his scent which, over the course of the day, had only grown worse.

Sunshine Smiles stepped out alone from the formation of Night Guards, looking rather tired but otherwise ready for battle. Curiously, he bore the cannon he had been using as a club upon his back, and I surmised that the 16th Artillery had declared that gun to be too damaged for proper use and allowed him to keep it as a morbid souvenir. His piercing amber eyes were fixed upon Shining Armour, which caused the normally unflappable Captain of the Guard to shudder slightly under their gaze. The myriad scratches and gouges upon his armour, and the messy splatter of Changeling ichor, only added to his normally fearsome appearance.

We met equidistant from the two regiments and stopped. The two officers saluted one another simultaneously.

“Colonel Sunshine Smiles,” said Shining Armour quietly, “it’s good to finally meet you, though I wish it was under better circumstances.”

The enormous earth pony nodded his head. “It’s about damned time you showed up,” he said bluntly, which made the young unicorn blink in surprise, “we’ve been waiting for you, so perhaps we can save the pleasantries for after we’ve all been slaughtered.”

“Er, yes, of course,” stammered Shining Armour, quailing a little before the imposing pony. He flopped down on his haunches and began to draw out a rough map of the gorge with his hoof in the dusty earth. Sunshine Smiles looked on as Shining Armour explained his plan to him in thankfully short, succinct sentences. I already knew the plan so I admit I ceased to pay complete attention to what Shiny Arsehole was saying, though Sunshine Smiles seemed enraptured by the plan.

“And what happens after we pull the 3rd Regiment back into the valley?” asked the scarred Colonel, which was a sensible question which I, in my haste to get this messiness over and done with, had neglected to ask.

“We fight,” replied Shining Armour as he stood up. “The Changelings’ advantage in numbers will count for nothing in there, and the horde will be under constant artillery and unicorn fire. It’ll just be a matter of time before they break.”

“Very well,” he nodded. “And where will you be?”

Shining Armour shrugged, “Leading the charge with the earth ponies of course.”

The Colonel cocked his head to one side curiously as Shining Armour wiped the dust from his purple and gold armour. “And not with the unicorns?”

“And miss out on all the fun?” he said, grinning widely. “Besides, I’d never order my stallions to do something I wouldn’t do myself, even if it is riding into the depths of Tartarus.”

Sunshine Smiles smirked and nudged the Captain of the Guard with a hoof in that characteristically friendly gesture he always gave to somepony he liked, though Shining Armour virtually toppled over with the strength of the nudge. “A stallion after my own heart, I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

I was never a particularly religious stallion. You see, it’s rather hard to believe a pony is truly divine if you’ve witnessed her chasing her younger sister around the palace, screaming obscenities, sending servants diving for cover, and crushing furniture beneath their hooves just because the latter had committed the juvenile ‘immerse-a-hoof-in-cold-water-when-they’re-sleeping-so-they-wet-the-bed’ trick. But despite my misgivings on the alleged divinity of my Auntie Celestia, I found myself silently praying to her as I followed Sunshine Smiles back to the regiment. Far be it from me to be arrogant enough to assume that Auntie Celestia, Goddess of the Sun and Sol Invictus, was bothered to listen to me pleading for my worthless little life, after all she does have rather more important things to do like stopping the sun crashing into the ground and wiping out all life.

[Despite her rather serious demeanour in public, my younger sister is an incorrigible prankster behind closed doors. The incident Blueblood describes is indeed true, and any mention of it in public (and I will know of it) will result in banishment for all involved. As for my divinity, I prefer to allow my ponies to freely believe what they will. I will neither confirm nor deny my divinity; however, it is not my place to tell ponies what they should believe. With regards to crashing the sun into the ground, that has only ever happened once and it is the reason why the dinosaurs went extinct.]

Still, my prayers did offer some consolation for me as the regiment assembled for the charge. The earth ponies stamped at the ground in nervous anticipation for the oncoming slaughter, their newly acquired spears glinted in the fading daylight, while the pegasi flew combat air patrols just above our heads. To our left the 1st Solar Guard set themselves up in a similar fashion, though the wait was interminably long. I remember standing there, being hoofed endless mugs of tea and oats rations from my venerable aide, as I counted the seconds for them to manoeuvre such a vast number of ponies into position. Not that I was particularly looking forward to it, mind you, but I was merely feeling the same tense anticipation one feels when one is about to go into a dentist’s surgery to have a root canal conducted.

The earth ponies arrayed themselves out in an arrowhead formation, with the Night Guards making up the right half and the Solar Guard on the left to produce an even split between the middle. Shining Armour and Sunshine Smiles stood together at the very tip of the formation, and I was not very far behind them with Cannon Fodder and Red Coat. The young captain probably wasn’t in the best position to fight, seeing as he was half-blind by the large bruise on his eye and his body covered with small cuts and bites, but I resolved to stick close to him in the hope that the Changelings would attack him, the weaker and more injured pony, first instead of me.

“Finally ready?” asked Sunshine Smiles somewhat impatiently.

“Only if you are,” replied Shining Armour. He took a glance over at the enemy in the distance, which was only visible as a blackish-green smudge just on the horizon where the valley opened up into the vast deserts beyond. Only then did I realise that we were going to have to gallop that entire distance, and I once again cursed my lack of that earth pony stamina.

“I’ll race you,” the Colonel quipped to the unicorn at his side.

Shining Armour blinked gormlessly for a few moments, and then his mouth formed into a wide grin, “Last one there’s a mule.”

Fantastic, I thought to myself, we were being led by a pair of schoolcolts.

I took one furtive glance up to my right at the artillery positioned on the ridge, praying that this time they were firmly pointed in the direction of the enemy and not at my own head. I was not keen to face the savagery of an artillery bombardment once more, but was thankful to have it on my side for once. There was a rumble, like distant thunder, and I watched as a puff of smoke flared out of one of the cannons like dragons’ breath. To my eternal relief they had missed us entirely however, to my subsequent chilling terror that also signalled the start of the charge.

Sunshine Smiles shrieked a bestial cry of rage that was carried through the Night Guards’ ranks before, as one, we surged forth into a gallop. I tried to slow down in order to get into the centre of the formation, which I guessed to be the safest position, but in the dense press of bodies I had no chance of getting there without getting trampled by our own stallions.

Trapped in the mass of sweating, stampeding, bloodthirsty stallions was oddly exhilarating, despite the eye-watering stench of unwashed ponies that nearly made me gag and the thick dust kicked up by the hooves of those in front of me. Either side of me I felt cool steel armour and warm bodies press against my sides, while the pony behind me periodically rammed straight into my hindquarters in a vain bid to make us somehow go faster, and ahead of me were rows upon rows of bobbing heads, pounding hooves, and armour-clad flanks. Between gaps in the dense dust cover I could see our cannons spitting hot iron death at the Changeling horde between them, and the reek of sweat and clogging dust was soon joined by the familiar ozone of unicorn mage fire as they commenced their volleys. The dust obscured most of the results of such, so I could not verify their effectiveness, but I could see the clods of dry earth thrown up by round shot and the spectacular light show of magic missiles. Above us the pegasi circled in elegant and majestic sweeps shimmering glints of shining cold and cold steel in the warm afternoon sun, reminding me of flocks of phoenixes and bats alike.

Braying madly for violence and bodies streaked with sweat the earth ponies charged onwards down the valley. Shining Armour, who was just ahead of me and to the left, seemed to be doing well on maintaining his earlier promise by keeping up admirably with the earth ponies, which was something I was rather struggling to do.

The rumble of cannon fire and magic missiles ceased abruptly to avoid hitting us just as, like a weakened dam bursting, the Changeling line crumbled under the onslaught of the pony-wave. The malevolent beasts chittered and shrieked as they were impaled upon an unstoppable wall of spear points, though their shafts were shattered by the force of the initial impacts. The armoured bulk of hundreds of ponies, however, proved more than sufficient to drag the startled Changelings under our hooves. Their bodies were mashed and stomped beyond all recognition in the stampede, turning into unidentifiable pulped flesh and shattered chitin. The pegasi shrieked ahead of us into the swirling aerial ballet above our heads. Glancing up I caught fleeting glimpses of shining gold and dark steel darting around like dragonflies on a hot summer’s day, duelling with the nimble and flitting Changelings who resembled ugly swarms of midges. Sometimes, the dragonflies and midges would clash and one would fall like a stone into the armies below locked in combat.

We did not have it all our own way, however, for inevitably the stampede began to lose its momentum and slowed. The Changelings, now dreadfully aware of our presence, immediately turned away from the 3rd Solar Guard to deal with this new threat, and once more we became bogged down in the brutal slog of close quarters combat. Yet this time, we had the advantage of long range artillery and unicorn mage fire on our side. In an expert display of gunnery, the remnants of the 16th Artillery averted their aim to just beyond our position to fire into the sides of the Changeling formation where they swept around the beleaguered 3rd like the tide around an island, which did much to stem the flow of Changeling reinforcements.

It was still brutal, however, as Shining Armour and Sunshine Smiles drove us ever forwards. I drew my blade into a telekinetic grasp and waded into the melee; the cloying mass of Changelings surged against us only to be hacked down by swords, spears, hooves, and, in the Night Guards’ case, fangs. I remember very little of the charge, only viciously hacking my sword left and right at the sight of any green and black in an incoherent blur of violence. Despite the lapse in memory, I vividly recall the sheer exhaustion that began to take over me, even such that the adrenaline coursing through my veins, invigorating my body and pushing me to feats of violence I would never have thought myself capable of, could not counteract it. It was magical exhaustion; though telekinesis is one of the most ‘efficient’ spells that a unicorn learns, the act of swinging a heavy lump of steel back and forth for so long took its toll upon my concentration. Then there was the noise; a vile, hateful cacophony of screams, roars, and the sickening squelch of torn flesh.

We were succeeding in driving them back, however, as despite their weight in numbers they could not fully bring that advantage to bear in the tight press of the valley, meaning that the Royal Guards’ superior training, weapons, and heavy plate armour would inevitably pull through. In the slog of combat I lost all track of time, but it felt like decades had passed before we’d finally forced the enemy back far enough for us to rendezvous with the remnants of the 3rd Solar Guard. In the course of the fight I’d received an additional bite to my leg, and despite my best efforts the shrapnel wound on my shoulder had reopened [We can assume that Blueblood found a medic at some point and neglected to include this admittedly unimportant note in his narrative], so I limped, or maybe dragged myself, over as the earth pony platoons worked on widening the gap.

The ponies of the 3rd Regiment looked exhausted, but defiant. Their once shining armour was covered in so much pale dust that they looked like ghosts, and the vivid splatters of blood and gore did little to help that morbid image. They had a haunted look to their eyes, weary but determined to continue fighting. All semblance of the Royal Guard command structure seemed to have vanished with officers and NCOs dead, wounded, or otherwise taken out of the fight, ad hoc platoons and squads were formed out of the survivors to try and maintain some semblance of cohesion. Despite their captain and colonel being blithering idiots with the collective intelligence of an apricot, the lower echelons of the 3rd Solar Guard proved to be rather effective in performing their duties. I was beginning to think the sale of officer commissions was not necessarily a good thing.

The first mob, for lack of a better term, of 3rd Solar Guard ponies we ran into were a scratch platoon of mostly unicorns and the odd earth pony who had become separated from his own unit. They were led by a unicorn sergeant, who greeted me with a mixture of relief and elation and seemed to be struggling to restrain himself from embracing me in a well-deserved hug. In the end he went for a simple parade ground salute.

“Where’s Captain Clear Heavens?” I demanded.

“Down there, sir,” he said, jerking his head to indicate just behind him. “Forgive me, sir but are we pulling back?”

I nodded my head, “Yes, prepare to organise an orderly retreat into the valley.”

The sergeant grinned, “Finally, somepony with a lick of sense. Guardsponies! Prepare to move out!”

I pushed my way through the press of weary and battered guardsponies, passing the wounded and dying as the sea of ponies parted to allow me through. The overwhelming smell of Cannon Fodder’s body odour reassured me that he was still alive and by my side, and, oddly, I found was more tolerable to the reek of blood and bodily waste that surrounded me. I saw medics attending to injured ponies, one of them thrashed and shrieked in agony as he was held down for an emergency amputation, the sight of which made me feel quite queasy and faint.

Shining Armour trotted up to join me. True to his name, his armour had somehow remained mostly unblemished despite the fact we had just ridden through the gates of Tartarus, which left me to believe that either the Changelings wouldn’t dare touch him, or he was canny enough to avoid the fighting. [Shining Armour’s after action reports indicate he was at the thickest of the fighting; the apparent cleanliness of his armour is likely down to a magical enchantment.] He had taken his helmet off and held it under his foreleg, thus forcing him to walk in a bizarre three-legged limp that seemed no more dignified than my own wearied stumbles.

“You!!” A familiar voice abruptly began to pluck at my remaining nerves. Clear Heavens forced his way through the mob of injured ponies, much to the irritation and anger of his medics. The two cuts I had given him after the duel had left two thin scars on either cheek they did little to mar his handsome visage though and I’m sure any mare would be swooning over him to tell them the heroic tale of how he earned them. “What are you doing here?!” He yelled at me above the din of battle, his face contorted into an expression of utmost indignation.

Trailing behind him was a lieutenant, his second in command probably, who looked about ready to give up. Like the other guardsponies his armour and fur were covered in a film of dust, which stuck to the splatters of blood and clotting open wounds on his body. He kept his expression impassive in that old aristocratic tradition of not displaying any emotion in the face of danger; whoever he was, he had clearly been trained well.

“Delivering your orders, Captain,” said Shining Armour. “You’re to pull back to the valley.”

He blinked incredulously, and his eyes looked about ready to burst out of his head. “Retreat? Retreat! The 3rd Solar Guard does not know the meaning of that word! And we certainly don’t need your ‘help’ in defeating the Changelings, our victory is certain.”

Well, that decided it he was clearly delusional as well as incompetent.

“Sir,” said the tired Lieutenant, the strain creeping into his refined Canterlot accent bore the weight of what he had just been forced to endure, “perhaps it might be prudent to withdraw; our casualties are becoming insurmountable and we will be overrun soon.”

Clear Heavens suddenly swung around, striking the young Lieutenant in the snout with a back-hoofed slap. The colt stumbled back from the force of the blow, but true to the old aristocratic adage of maintaining a stiff upper lip and grace under pressure, merely straightened up and looked his superior square in the eye as the insane Captain ranted and blood trickled down from his nose.

“I will not tolerate defeatism, Lieutenant Fine Vintage!” he shouted. “There will be no retreat, and I’ll have anypony who even thinks of the word flogged. The 3rd Regiment will not suffer such dishonour, not while I’m in command. For the Princess!!”

Clear Heavens reared up on his hind legs and pointed dramatically in the vague direction of the Changeling army, striking a heroic pose that would make any propaganda artist practically explode with patriotic glee, and looking as if he believed himself to be the star of his very own war film. Well, whatever movie was playing in his mind was probably better than that horrendous motion picture biopic about me. [‘Blueblood: A Commissar’s Life’ starring Tom Flanks as Prince Blueblood, my faithful student counted no fewer than three hundred factual and historical errors ranging from incorrect uniforms to the complete absence of Cannon Fodder.]

Shining Armour grunted in frustration, “Please, listen to reason, you’re exposed and surrounded out here we need to fall back to a more defensible position.”

Clear Heavens blinked at him gormlessly. “Defence? But we’re on the offence.”

I snapped. With the day I’d just been having, running back and forth down that infernal valley being shot at, bitten, and then contending with General Crimson Arrow’s gross inability to command effectively I was in no mood to put up with Captain Clear Heavens’ enthusiastic and suicidal incompetence.

So I punched him.

"I don't have time for this!"

The unicorn was quite surprised by this sudden and bold move, as were Shining Armour, the Lieutenant, and I. Clear Heavens stumbled back a little, clutching his head as he blinked back in shock at what had just happened. I reached out with my magic aura, wrapping my telekinesis around the gold rank pips on his armour and wrenched them off to throw them in the Lieutenant’s direction, who caught them with his hooves as a bewildered expression overtook that aristocratic implacability.

“Congratulations on your promotion Captain Fine Vintage,” I said, and the newly appointed Captain blinked down on the pips that rested on his hooves as if they were radioactive and might explode at any moment, “now organise an orderly retreat! That's an order!”

I turned on my hooves and marched back to my regiment, feeling thoroughly disgusted with the way some of my aristocratic brethren in the Royal Guard had been behaving. I knew this would happen, but at the time I felt that running around shouting ‘I bucking told you so’ would not be conducive to getting out of this alive, regardless of how satisfying it might have been at the time. Fine Vintage, however, proved to be a reasonably effective officer and, with the aid of Shining Armour, managed to organise a fighting retreat into the valley in short order. The famed discipline of the common Equestrian soldier came into its own as the ponies slowly pulled back into the valley we had just erupted out of; such discipline, however, did not seem to translate over to the officer corps as well as it should have.

I, on the other hoof, believed my work to be done and managed to slide my way through the press of bodies, injured ponies, and corpses back to where the Night Guards were doing an admirable job in holding back the Changeling hordes to provide a ‘tunnel’ through which the 3rd Solar Guard could pass through back into the valley. I made the excuse that I was looking after the wounded, which placated Cannon Fodder who asked me why we were moving in the opposite direction to the fighting. This, however, would only contribute to my fraudulent reputation by appearing to care for the safety of those wounded ponies. I reassured them with the false platitudes that the Ministry of Misinformation and the Commissariat had so thoughtfully provided for me, despite their abject transparency to my ears they proved enough to reassure everypony else.

My hooves began to itch just as I reached my regiment, though the ponies of all three were starting to mix as they worked, fought, and died together, and I began to realise that this was going much too well for the kind of cock-up that usually plagues my life. Granted, the problems with Clear Heavens and Crimson Arrow were irritating, bordering on disastrous, but they were each resolved in a short amount of time so as not to cause too much damage (at least, that's what I thought at the time; as it happened not summarily executing them on the spot, however unpleasant that might have been, would turn out to be a mistake). Had I any indication of what I was stumbling into as I moved away from the more obvious danger of the battle, I’d have probably stayed out at the front line instead.

True to form, the Changelings followed us straight into the valley where, to my vague surprise, Shining Armour’s plan seemed to be working in blunting the Changelings’ advantage in numbers. The odds were moved further in our favour when the artillery and unicorns on the ridge began pouring an obscene amount of firepower at the mouth of the valley where the enemy was forced to funnel in if they were to reach us. If we could hold them there, while the artillery withered down their reinforcements, then victory, or at least survival, was all but assured.

I found Captain Red Coat sitting on his haunches, supervising the transport of the injured. He held a thousand yard stare in the general direction of the ponies carrying the wounded on stretchers in a long line back to Maredun for treatment in the makeshift field hospital there. The horrid wailing and sobbing of the wounded ponies was quite disconcerting, and I did my best to try and ignore it. Keen to look as if I was actually contributing to what was going on, rather than just bossing other ponies about, I trotted on over.

“What’s the situation?” I asked him.

The young Night Guard Captain blinked up at me, his brow furrowed in confusion. “I was just speaking with you, remember? The Colonel told me to supervise the movement of the wounded back to Maredun.” he said, which made the itching in my hooves get worse, though I put his confusion down to shell shock or stress.

I shook my head, “No, I just got here; I was over with Shining Armour and Captain... uh, former captain Clear Heavens.”

“That can’t be right, I was just...” he stopped mid-sentence and stared over my shoulder at something behind me. Now, experience has taught me that whenever a pony does that, it means there’s something very dangerous and bloodthirsty just behind me and I should run away as quickly as possible, but I was young and naive at the time so I merely turned around to see what exactly he was staring at. As a precaution I drew my sword.

It was me, or rather a Changeling disguised as me. The doppelganger, whose guise was nearly perfect yet conspicuously missing the wounds I had sustained in the battle and not covered head to hoof in a thin film of dust, was standing a short distance away with a group of Night Guards and Solar Guards. I couldn’t overhear what exactly was being said, but whatever it was resulted in uproarious laughter from the soldiers. It was probably just a result of all of the stress I was feeling at the time, but the first thought that came into my tired old head was that this Changeling doppelganger seemed to be doing a far better job of maintaining morale than I was.

Behind me I could hear Red Coat clamber back up to his hooves and seize his spear, which had somehow survived the initial charge, in a loud clatter of armour plates that sounded like a pile of pots and pans falling. Not wanting to be mistaken for the doppelganger and find myself on the receiving end of that unbroken spear I pushed my way forward, charging my aching horn with the necessary magics before casting that spell I had been practicing for just over a week now.

The disguise was stripped away instantly in a flash of sickly green light to reveal something rather more monstrous in its wake. It was a Purestrain, one of the commanders of the Changeling hives that project the latent psychic hold of the Hive Mind upon its numberless hordes of mindless thralls. I had fought one before and won largely as a result of a fluke and the as-yet undiscovered unique talents of Cannon Fodder, but this one was far more horrifying in its appearance than its deceased brother.

I still shudder as I recall the hideously mutated form of that particular Changeling Purestrain. There it stood before me, surrounded by gawking guardsponies, nearly twice my size and girth bloated with whatever sickly mutations gifted unto the beast by its debased Queen, with a long sinuous neck that led up to an insectoid head shaped in a pale mockery of that of a pony. As with all Changelings, the extremities of its limbs were riddled with holes, but in this case they were decayed and riddled with maggots and fat bodied flies.

It stopped in mid-sentence as the glamour faded, and in that instant exploded into a spectacular display of obscene violence. Its slathering maw, which contained far too many fangs as to be considered safe for a mouth to hold, lashed out and tore the throat from a Night Guard, while it bucked its hind hooves into the chest of a Solar Guard and sent him flying back with a horrible crunch of smashed bone. The malformed and jagged horn upon his forehead glowed with baleful green energies that hurt my eyes to look upon, and with a blinding flash half a dozen ponies were reduced to ashes.

About a half dozen of the injured ponies carried on stretchers suddenly sat up; their bloodied injured forms were suddenly engulfed in a flickering green glow that revealed their horrid forms for all to see. The newly revealed Changelings hissed and turned on their former comrades, felling the surprised guardsponies with rending bites to throats and exposed flesh. A cry of alarm echoed through the ranks and the guardsponies were spurred into action to meet this new threat.

To say that I was terrified would have been a severe understatement, and my horror only grew when the Purestrain fixed his malevolent green eyes upon me and licked his drooling lips with a forked tongue. The ponies around me flew into a blind panic when presented with this and, agreeing that this course of action was the most sensible at the time, joined them in turning on my heels and fleeing. Cannon Fodder, being the dutiful aide as ever, followed me in my flight. I didn’t need to run fast, just faster than Cannon Fodder so that while it was busy munching on my aide I could quickly stab it in the face and claim victory.

We weren’t fast enough. I dared to glance over my shoulder and saw the beast dive towards us with its fangs bared. The obese mass of the monster shoved Cannon Fodder to the side, and sent Red Coat tumbling head over hooves with a wide swing of his hoof. With my sword already drawn I turned and stopped to swing my blade in a wide downward arc to bury it in my opponent’s skull. The abomination’s horn lit with dark magicks as I lunged in for the kill. The thing moved with sudden speed and deflected the attack with that malformed, jagged protrusion. There was a flash of green light and a snap of air being displaced as I was thrown backwards, my sabre torn from my grip and sent clattering to the ground beside me.

“This was just too easy,” he said with a voice that sounded like the crackling of embers. The Purestrain stepped towards me its dinner plate sized hooves fractured the ground beneath its monstrous bulk. It opened its maw, running a slithering grey tongue along its rows upon rows of sharpened fangs. Those keen eyes glimmered with the malevolent intelligence of their kind cunning, manipulative, but a slave to the will of their fallen Queen.

I crawled on my back, struggling to get away from the monster and closer to my weapon. Two earth ponies charged at the beast, bellowing cries of rage and warning me to get out of the way. I watched in impotent horror as the Changeling Purestrain glanced up in their direction. His horn flickered with green energy, swirling and coruscating as power flickered across its jagged length before it discharged with a crackle of displaced air, followed by the stench of ozone and melted flesh. There, where two brave ponies had once stood was a pile of ash and cinders.

It laughed, moving in closer until he was virtually straddling me and swung his hoof down across my face. Stars exploded across my vision and the right side of my head ached terribly with the strike. Something warm began to trickle down into my mane and my cap had fallen off.

“Pathetic,” spat the Purestrain derisively. “Is this Equestria’s last line of defence? We conquered your miserable city in ten minutes, we laid low your so-called Goddess, we had you at our mercy.”

The creature grinned as its horn illuminated once more with baleful energy and I closed my eyes for the end.

It didn’t come.

Of course it didn’t kill me, otherwise I wouldn’t be here writing this bloody thing, would I?

The creature suddenly hissed in pain and I dared to open my eyes. I saw the Purestrain, his face contorted into a rictus of agony, flinch away from me suddenly. A spear was buried in a vulnerable chink in the chitin armour on his hindquarters approximately where a pony’s cutie mark would lie. Cannon Fodder emerged galloping with his horn levelled low to charge into the Purestrain’s side.

The Purestrain turned, apparently forgetting me for a while, to face this new threat. So focused was he on toying with me that he had completely forgotten about Cannon Fodder’s existence, though I couldn’t imagine why given my aide’s memorable odour, and the greater battle around us. The Changelings who had masqueraded as injured ponies had been dealt with, though at some disproportionately heavy losses as many guardsponies were slain before they had a chance to react. The Night Guards circled around us with whatever intact spears they could find levelled on the Purestrain, trapping him like a wild animal. Despite the monstrous face I had to admit that seeing his expression of dawning horror was most satisfying, as the creature undoubtedly realised that his little gambit in trying to take my place had left him isolated and completely surrounded by very angry and vengeful ponies.

I struggled to my hooves and grabbed up my sword. The Purestrain shrieked stamping its hooves in frustration and anger it lit its horn with baleful magical energies and then... nothing the Purestrain was now in range of Cannon Fodder’s Blank field. He shrieked in impotent, pathetic rage. His horn sparked uselessly with sickly green light as he tried to summon magical energy that simply wasn’t available anymore.

That didn’t deter him from fighting on. Cannon Fodder lunged, and the Purestrain spun on his hooves and delivered my aide a buck to the chest that sent him flying into the air.

It turned quickly to strike at me with its maw open, ready to bite into my tender flesh and rip me apart. I was quicker. I rammed my sabre home, driving the blade into that open mouth. The Purestrain stopped and began wobbling on its hooves, gagging on its own blood that trickled down its throat.

“You conquered our city,” I said as I twisted the blade and gazed with defiance into the dying eyes of the monster before me, “you laid low our Goddess, you had us at your mercy; but you still failed.”

I gave the sabre a shove with my magic, driving it further into the back of the beast’s mouth until the tip of the blade protruded from the base of his skull. As I ripped my sword free the Purestrain collapsed in a heap, his spinal cord severed by the blade, and his malformed body twitched as it struggled to cling to its mockery of life. I beheaded the abomination just to make sure.

I gingerly stepped over the body and the expanding pool of foul smelling ichor to retrieve my cap which, for some peculiar reason, had become rather important to me despite my abject dislike of the bloody thing. As I placed it upon my head, my limbs still trembling from the fight and my breath quick and shallow, I looked across at the large mob of guardsponies around us. Captain Red Coat and Cannon Fodder were seemingly fine, if a little battered and damaged, but at least they were still alive.

A medic tended to them as I limped on over. Red Coat was the most fortunate and suffered only another set of light bruises on his shoulder to add to the patchwork of blue and purple on his body, while Cannon Fodder seemed rather worse for wear. I felt an odd sensation of concern as I watched a medic, a unicorn identifiable by the white circle and red cross in lieu of the eye on his armour, use his telekinesis to undo the myriad straps on my aide’s breastplate and peel the crumpled steel from his barrel, thus revealing two rather large hoofprint-shaped bruises.

Cannon Fodder fidgeted a little in discomfort as the medic projected a pale yellow aura from his horn onto my aide’s chest, which I noted to be covered in a slightly darker shade of grubby beige fur than the rest of him which implied he very rarely bothered to take it off and thus all manner of interesting skin and fur diseases might be festering there. The medic also seemed to be holding his breath as he leaned in close, Cannon Fodder’s odour apparently being much too strong to bear for a pony who had been through medical school and had to build up a resistance to all manner of foul reeking horrors.

“Sorry about that, sir,” said Cannon Fodder.

I cocked my head to one side curiously, “For what? Saving my life again?”

He shook his head and grinned, looking rather proud of himself, “For missing, sir; I was aiming for the bastard’s head.”

I chuckled, mainly as a way of relieving the tension that had been building up throughout this disastrous day. The medic stood up and announced that the wounds were only superficial and should heal naturally, advising that Cannon Fodder be put on light duties for the time being before trotting off -- with an unmistakable look of relief on his face -- in search of the next pony who needed his valuable skills.

Of course, ponies would conveniently omit Cannon Fodder’s contribution to the battle, and instead crediting only me with the death of the Changeling Purestrain that had disguised itself as me; rather foolishly, I might add, considering I was very much alive. Admittedly, Cannon Fodder wasn’t the sort of pony one would want cluttering up the perfect image of the noble hero.

As I sat there with the two, my breath coming in ragged gasps that made my bruised ribs sting with every inhalation, I felt a strange sort of relief. The wounded ponies were continuously streaming past us now on their way back to Maredun and I overheard rumours, later verified, that Shining Armour’s brilliant plan had actually worked and the Changelings were in full retreat. What surprised me, however, was that Shining Armour had ordered the Royal Guard to retreat further back to Maredun. We hadn’t won the battle per se, history would later record the Battle of Black Venom Pass as being ‘inconclusive’ as the Royal Guard had failed in its objective to seize the southern end of the pass, and Shining Armour was reluctant to even attempt to give chase to the fleeing Changelings lest he lead our army into yet another possible trap [A decision that continues to generate much argument to this day. I, for one, believe that his caution was quite justified under the circumstances, as any further attempt to take the southern pass would likely have resulted in another encirclement, especially considering that the 3rd Solar Guard was in no condition to continue fighting and the 1st Night Guards were becoming exhausted]; yet I had survived and as far as I was concerned that was victory enough.

“I didn’t think it would feel like this,” said Red Coat wistfully after a moment of uncomfortable silence. “You know...? All the stories talk about the glory and the fighting... but they don’t tell you how they make you feel once it’s over.”

“How do you feel?” I asked him in a knowing, comradely tone.

The young captain shrugged his shoulders and idly kicked at the dusty ground. He didn’t look at me when he spoke, but rather at the spot of ground just between his front hooves.

“Sick,” he said after a moment’s consideration, before finally looking up in my direction. I suppressed a shudder at the haunted look in his eyes the unwavering gaze of a young stallion who had just seen and experienced things no pony of that age should be forced to. “Was your first time like this?”

I frowned. “My first time?” I considered making an inappropriate joke there about how losing my virginity also made me feel ‘sick’, but for the sake of not upsetting Red Coat I held my tongue.

“I mean your first time in battle, sir.”

I shook my head and grinned, which made him frown in confusion. “My first time in battle was the Great Canterlot Snowball Fight of ’05; I took a snowball to the head and caught a cold, so yes I did feel sick afterwards.”

He chuckled quietly and fell silent, gazing listlessly out at the guardsponies who marched past us. It was the kind of quiet stoicism that ponies expected out of their officers; they wanted to believe that we are invulnerable, perfect, and somehow immune to the psychological stresses and strains of war. Looking at Red Coat I knew he wanted to cry and run home, and I couldn’t particularly blame him for that, but to his credit he held that facade of quiet detachment rather well given his inexperience. As for me, well, I had my discreditable reputation to hide behind, and ponies seem to have a rather selective memory as far as they are concerned about my status as a hero.

The atmosphere was ambivalent at best. We hadn’t won, so there was no jubilant cheering and celebrating as usually occurs, but we hadn’t particularly lost per se either. It was a stalemate, with no sense of finality to it, only the implication that this was merely the first of what would become a gruelling, unpleasant war. The convoy of wounded soon passed us, protected by weathered platoons of earth ponies and squadrons of pegasi, while the remainder of the Royal Guard began its wary and careful retreat back to the apparent safety of the fortress.

The three of us sat there in silence for a while, watching as the three battered regiments the 3rd completely shattered and the Night Guards weary after a full day of fighting, assembled by platoons and stalked back. We shared in the mutual unspoken relief that, against all of the odds and the brutality of war, we had survived, and in the dawning, horrific realisation that this was merely the beginning.

[Blueblood’s entry ends rather abruptly here as his involvement in the battle came to an end. To better set the events in a historical context I have included a short extract from the noted historian Paperweight’s seminal work ‘A Concise History of the Changeling Wars’. While admittedly lacking in detail, Paperweight’s work provides a clear and succinct description of the wars. For those looking for a more detailed account, then I can recommend ‘Blood in the Badlands’ by my Faithful Student Twilight Sparkle which, at thirty-seven volumes, provides an unparalleled description of the war down to the tiniest details, right down to what I was having for breakfast each morning.]

Extract from Paperweight’s ‘A Concise History of the Changeling Wars’.

The Battle of Black Venom Pass might have been inconclusive in pure military terms, but the implications of this battle for the entirety of the war effort cannot be denied. The Royal Guard had failed in their primary objective to take the pass in its entirety and seize a hoofhold in the Badlands with which to launch a full invasion; however, the ancient fortress of Maredun was firmly in Equestrian hooves and would provide a bulwark against further Changeling incursions. A combination of Changeling infiltration of the 16th Royal Artillery Regiment and strategic incompetence had resulted in the over-extension and complete encirclement of the 3rd Solar Guard, and General Crimson Arrow’s callous disregard for the lives of the soldiers under his command nearly resulted in the complete destruction of the regiment. It was only through the actions of Commissar Blueblood, who should really need no introduction here, in rallying the confused 1st Night Guard regiment and then removing the incompetent General Crimson Arrow from command that saved the regiment.

The 3rd Regiment, however, would cease to exist as a cohesive fighting force until much later in the war, suffering over two hundred killed and five hundred wounded. It was only by some miracle, possibly due to the propaganda being spread around at the time that capture by the Changelings was a fate worse than death, that they did not completely give up. Casualties suffered by the 1st Night Guard and 1st Solar Guard were relatively light, as it seems the Changelings were not expecting them to be so bold as to mount a rescue. It is difficult to ascertain exactly what the Changelings were thinking, given the complete lack of any written records or subjects to interview, but it is likely that they assumed that the Royal Guard would remain in Maredun, which indeed was what Crimson Arrow’s initial plan was.

The battle would ruin the careers of three leading officers in the Royal Guard; Crimson Arrow, whose callous disregard for his ponies' lives would so shock the general public that they would demand his dismissal; Rising Star, who should have retired decades ago; and Clear Heavens, whose refusal to retreat resulted in his cashiering by Commissar-Prince Blueblood. Its ramifications, however, would extend further. The Royal Guard was believed to be invincible, but the battle had shown clearly that this was not the case. We believed, in our arrogance, that the war would somehow be easy. The relative ease at which the Changelings were first expelled from Canterlot had lulled us into a false sense of security, and we assumed that we merely had to march into the Badlands and exterminate them as pests. Black Venom Pass revealed that we faced a foe that was cunning enough to set up ambushes and conduct espionage, and that our own forces were woefully inadequate to face them.

Shining Armour has been both praised for leading the charge that saved the 3rd Solar Guard and chastised for not pursuing the retreating Changelings into the Badlands.

The individual guardspony cannot be blamed, for they were well-equipped and well-trained. After action reports from the battle imply that the Royal Guard fought tenaciously and viciously in the face of the enemy, and that Changeling casualties were far in excess of those suffered by Equestrian forces. Blame, therefore, was placed upon the commanders, whose incompetence in preparing and leading the battle nearly resulted in abject defeat, were it not for Commissar Blueblood intervening. It seemed to prove the efficacy of Princess Luna’s experiments with the Commissariat, and soon commissars would be attached at all levels of the Royal Guard. An inquiry was set up under Twilight Sparkle to investigate the problems of the Royal Guard’s command structure and how they could be solved.

A/N – Phew, I’m glad that’s over, really struggled with these two chapters. Again, I can’t say I’m entirely happy with how they’ve turned out, but hey, here they are. Originally they were going to be a single chapter but I couldn’t squeeze all of it in without making it seem rushed. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them more than I did writing them.

A/N #2 - Fixed the massive punctuation errors, these were a result of some problem in converting the .docx file I was working on.

Bloodstained (Part 1)

Bloodstained

Prince Blueblood and the Siege of Fort E5150

I must admit the popularity of these Manuscripts, which I have been dutifully compiling and editing from the hodgepodge of rough notes and scribbling that I found scattered inside Blueblood’s safe, is rather surprising despite their rather limited circulation. What had started as a small hobby for me to while away a particularly boring weekend has now developed into a fully fledged project, with aims to collect and publish Blueblood’s memoirs in their entirety within our rather close circle. Though I do have aims to release these texts to the general public once all living memory of these events has passed, excepting myself and my fellow immortals naturally, which should be within the next couple of centuries or so.

To this end I present the third entry in the Manuscript, which details the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Black Venom Pass and the Siege of Fort E5150 (colloquially known by its nickname as ‘Fort Nowhere’). This particular text neatly rounds off the ‘trilogy’ that describes Blueblood’s meteoric and rather unwanted rise to fame, which culminated in the climax of this siege which has since passed on into myth and legend. Indeed, the image of Blueblood standing triumphant amidst the destruction of the battle, and putting himself in harm’s way between mortal danger and a pony very dear to my heart (in typical fashion he says this was entirely accidental and done in the heat of the moment), has formed an enduring propaganda icon that has burrowed its way into the Equestrian subconscious.

It should be noted that Blueblood is not necessarily the most reliable of chroniclers; however, I am inclined to accept his depiction of these events as absolutely true for the most part, and therefore have largely left the original text alone. As per the previous entries I have annotated this entry to clarify certain points or expand upon the historiography of the events described, considering how he tends to focus entirely upon things that concerned him to the exclusion of virtually all else around him. Despite the involvement of myself, my sister, and my faithful student Twilight Sparkle in the events described I have resisted the foalish urge to edit the text to make myself appear better.

-HRH Celestia, Princess of Equestria

Part One

If there is one thing that I’ve learned over the course of my long and fraudulent career, other than that I am in a small minority of ponies who aren’t utterly and irrevocably insane, is that any military operation advertised as being simple and easy is very unlikely to be so. The senior echelons of the Royal Guard were still plagued with the sense of rather irritating and misplaced optimism, even after the near annihilation of the 3rd Solar Guard Regiment in the Battle of Black Venom Pass, which they regarded as merely being a slight setback. Field Marshal Iron Hoof and his subordinates were still under the peculiar misapprehension that the war was not only winnable, but could be done so within the vague timeframe of ‘before Hearth’s Warming’.

It was roughly a week since the battle, and the Princesses were coming on an official royal visit to the encampment at Dodge Junction, which would entail a tour of the encampment and a delightful tea party for which all of the senior officers of the five regiments there were invited (at least, the ones who had survived were invited). I had been given the somewhat unwanted pleasure of forming part of the honour guard to greet the Royal Pony Sisters, which, as far as I could remember from my previous service in the Royal Guard, involved everypony dressing up in a pristine uniform and standing very still as Auntie Celestia compliments each and every guardspony on how smart and wonderful they look. It was a particularly warm day too, with nary a cloud in the bright blue sky to provide any cooling shade from Celestia’s sun which, in its mercy, was in danger of giving the guardsponies heatstroke as we waited in the parade ground.

Compared to the usual display of pomp and circumstance that occurs with most normal royal visits, ours seemed to be rather lacklustre, but I assumed we could be forgiven due to the unpleasant heat wave, the fact we had only been given a day to prepare, and, of course, the fact that we’re still in a state of total war. The Changelings had been rather quiet recently, but in a rather uncharacteristic display of sensible caution Field Marshal Iron Hoof was taking no chances. The garrison at Maredun remained on high alert, gazing watchfully down through the valley for signs of an approaching Changeling horde, while the Dodge Junction Encampment remained in a permanent state of readiness to provide much needed reinforcement if it looked as if the castle might be overrun.

I was feeling rather impatient, fidgeting nervously and awkwardly on the parade ground as I watched the thin sliver of gold that was the Princesses’ royal chariot approach with an agonising slowness and blatant disregard for urgency. Sweat was pouring down my body, forming rather unsightly stains in the folds of my uniform and sticking to my matted fur. I had long since given up with my normal grooming regimen beyond what was mandatory for a pony in the Royal Guard to maintain a basic level of sanitation, largely because I no longer had an hour of free time a day to bathe and clean myself, but also the oppressive heat and my daily exercise and training made my daily ablutions rather pointless, for in a few hours my efforts would be nullified by the grime and dirt accumulated as a result of that.

The honour guard was formed of two platoons; one from the Night Guards and led by Captain Red Coat, and the other from the 1st Solar Guard and led by Shining Armour, which were arrayed three ranks on the parade square. An ensign from each regiment held aloft their regimental standards, which hung limply in the still air. The ponies wore their dress uniforms; a crimson red tunic with white sashes for the Solar Guard, a midnight blue tunic with white sashes for the Night Guard. I was unique in this respect, for my dress uniform just so happened to be exactly the same as my combat uniform, mess dress, and off-duty dress, which, while it did save on time getting dressed for different social events, was not especially practical when it came to combat.

Traditionally, the Night Guard contingent should have been led by Colonel Sunshine Smiles, but considering Red Coat’s rather fragile emotional state I thought it best to give him something that was relatively important but also rather simple to do to help rebuild the lad’s confidence. The adolescent officer, who, at just seventeen years old, I believed to be much too young for the Royal Guard let alone being given a position of authority, stood next to me and watched the skies intently. Since Black Venom Pass he had become rather more quiet and withdrawn, prone to ‘spacing out’ as it were, but still maintained the facade of cheeriness and youthful exuberance. Ordinarily I’d have left him to it, but looking after the soldiers’ wellbeing was my responsibility and it would not have been conducive to my continued existence if he were to have a breakdown in the middle of combat.

At the moment he seemed to be coping well, perhaps even a little excited at the prospect of meeting the Princesses for the first time. I couldn’t blame him, even I was looking forward to seeing my dear Auntie Celestia again, Luna perhaps less so but I had hoped that my recent alleged heroism in Black Venom Pass had at least made her tolerate my presence, but I like to believe I was doing a better job of maintaining that aristocratic detachment expected of all officers. Red Coat, however, couldn’t seem to stand still and instead jittered from hoof to hoof as if he was in desperate need of the loo.

“Have you ever met either of the Princesses?” I asked, if only to alleviate my own boredom.

Red Coat thankfully stopped hopping like a constipated foal and shook his head, “Not in person, no, but Princess Luna did deliver a speech when I graduated from the Academy with my commission.” He rubbed at his floppy ears with a hoof, “Do you think I should have brought my earplugs?”

I chuckled, “I don’t think that’s necessary, she’s learned to use her indoor voice now.”

The speck in the sky was now close enough to be identifiable as a large chariot pulled by a team of four pegasi. The golden chariot banked lazily towards us, circling above the town and gradually losing height in preparation to land. I questioned the reason why my aunties, the both of them being alicorns and possessing fully functioning wings, needed the services of a sky chariot. I supposed it was to make some sort of grand regal entrance, but it just came across as being rather lazy to me.

“But we’re outdoors,” said Cannon Fodder, who had hitherto been silently standing at his usual position just behind me and slightly to the left or right. I glanced over my shoulder to see the same gormless and blank expression on his face that implied he was, in fact, being sincere and not trying to be facetious. Of course, he was entirely incapable of using or even recognising sarcasm.

The royal chariot drifted down towards us gracefully with a gentle flutter of the four pegasi’s wings. The ornate craft, built out of gold and studded with glistening jewels and gem stones, descended and landed gently upon the flat dusty ground before us. Though they were likely exhausted from their flight, the pegasi charioteers pulled the heavy vehicle forth proudly, their powerful muscular bodies heaving and panting with the exertion.

As with everything involving my dear Auntie ‘Tia, the craft was ostentatious to the point of vulgarity. For starters it was almost entirely made out of burnished gold, which scintillated in the burning midday sun, and the myriad gem stones embedded across its prow cast bright multi-coloured light into the assembled array of the honour guards. The ornate prow was emblazoned with the ancient coat of arms of Equestria that illustrated the union between the sun and moon; the golden sun, carved out of amber, lying in the embrace of the crescent moon, here represented by a curved sliver of diamond that reflected bright light rather painfully into my eyes. From this armoured prow, a pair of wings swept gracefully over the fuselage of the chariot, though in my humble opinion the effect was somewhat ruined by the gems placed in a seemingly haphazard manner. Of all the chariots in the Royal Chariot Fleet that she had to use, it had to be the one most likely designed by a blind pony for whom sartorial elegance and practicality was only a suggestion.

[My chariot is not made out of solid gold, but is actually gold-plated. If it were made out of solid gold it would be far too heavy for my pegasi to pull. I must admit, that particular chariot is not one of my favourites, but it is the only one large enough to accommodate myself and my sister.]

Princess Celestia, diarch of Equestria and Goddess of the Sun, sat at the reins of the chariot with an expression of serene regal detachment on her face. By her side sat Luna, who, as ever, wore that permanent scowl on her face as if she had just bitten into an apple and discovered half a worm inside.

“Honour guard!” cried Shining Armour as the chariot touched down before us. “Ah-tenn-SHUN!”

Behind me I heard, no, ‘felt’ is more appropriate a word, dozens of hooves slamming into the ground behind me. The quiet banter and laughter was silenced as the guardsponies snapped to attention, the well-ingrained discipline of their training over-riding their ‘normal’ behaviour. The only sound audible was the faint, ever-present murmur of activity in the encampment beyond, and the impatient stamping and whinnying of the four pegasi pulling the chariot, who could probably have been excused from making the necessary obeisance to the Princesses after having dragged them across Equestria for the past couple of hours.

“Honour guard! Kneel!”

As one the assembled guardsponies prostrated themselves before our Princesses. The ensigns respectfully lowered their regimental standards to the dusty ground before royalty, as tradition dictated. I knelt too, though technically as a member of the Royal Family a simple nodding of my head in their general direction would have sufficed, I felt that I should give the appropriate reverence required of our two Goddesses. Besides, I didn’t want to stand out by being the only one still standing up, so like everypony else knelt down and pressed my nose into the dust.

The reverent and sacred mass obeisance before our Princesses, however, was rather rudely shattered by a certain purple baby dragon.

“Finally!” I heard him shout, and I dared to raise my head prematurely to see Twilight Sparkle’s pet baby dragon, a lizard-like beast roughly the size of the average dog, leap over the side of the chariot and fall face-first into the dust. “We’ve been on that chariot for hours, I really need to pee.”

“Spike!”

Twilight Sparkle’s head popped up just between the two Princesses and followed her irritating little purple pet over the side of the chariot, though she managed to avoid embarrassing herself with a similar face-plant and instead managed to land dextrously on all four hooves next to the squirming baby dragon.

I exchanged a confused glance with Captain Red Coat as the guardsponies behind us lifted their heads one by one and stared incredulously at the sight of the Princess’s esteemed faithful student shouting at her assistant. A few chuckled and jeered at her, but were quickly silenced with aggressive admonishments and blows to the head from their sergeants, and the young unicorn flushed red with embarrassment. Princess Celestia was suppressing a giggle and held a hoof in front of her mouth, while Luna merely scowled harder, if she frowned any more she’d probably have ruptured a blood vessel in her forehead, assuming that she actually has blood. [She does.]

Shining Armour shook his head and chuckled as he stepped forwards out of the formation. He waved a hoof in the general direction of the latrines, “Over there, buddy.”

The baby dragon muttered a quick ‘thanks’ and darted off to the latrine shacks as if Tirek himself was on his tail.

“Ugh,” Twilight sighed in exasperation, “I’m really sorry, everypony; he’s usually better behaved than this.”

I could only cringe at the atrocious disregard for the great social traditions which Equestria is built upon, and wanted nothing more than to bury my head in the ground and pray that this horrendously embarrassing affair was nothing more than a fever dream brought on by sunstroke or shellshock. But no, and typically Auntie Celestia seemed to find the whole thing hilarious as she giggled away in the chariot, though I suspect after having a millennia long lifetime to deal with all of this pomp and ceremony she was rather tired of it, and thus prone to sabotaging as many royal events as possible for her own amusement (yes, Celestia, if you’re reading this, I know all about the Grand Galloping Gala). [He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, I would never sabotage such a dry and boring event like the Gala by inviting the six ponies least qualified to attend and allowing them to run riot.] I shared a glance with Auntie Luna, whose expression of pure disdain at what was going on implied that, for quite possibly the first and only time in my life, we agreed on something.

“You must learn to control your bondservant better, Twilight Sparkle,” said Luna, leaning over the edge of the chariot. “I suggest beating him harder.”

I suppressed a snicker. It seemed despite Princess Luna’s attempts to adapt to modern life, the closest thing she could approximate ‘personal assistant’ as was ‘bondservant’, which, to give credit where credit is due, is a step up from what she used to do the previous year by referring to Spike as a slave or a pet.

“Luna,” said Twilight through set teeth as she looked at the Night Mare over her shoulder, “I am not going to beat Spike.”

“Don’t worry, Twiley,” said Shining Armour as he stepped up and rubbed his hoof roughly on his younger sister’s head, thankfully interrupting the already awkward situation before it could erupt into an argument between the all-powerful Goddess of the Night and the bearer of the Element of Magic. “If he’s lucky he might not even have to face the firing squad.” [Shining Armour is obviously exaggerating here; the practice of execution by unicorn firing squad was discontinued several centuries prior.]

Twilight snorted and flinched away from her brother, looking not at all impressed by the somewhat inappropriate cheeky remark, “Very funny, Shiny.”

By now the two Princesses had disembarked from their chariot, and the guardsponies quickly recovered from the distraction and snapped back to attention. Celestia was still chuckling to herself, while Luna merely glowered at Twilight with all the disdain she could possibly muster. The young unicorn mare winced and ducked behind her mentor as a foal would with her mother, though refrained from embarrassing herself further by trying to hide beneath the sun princess’s undercarriage.

“Be nice, sister,” said Celestia, her voice as motherly and warm as ever even when quietly admonishing her younger sibling. “We did spend three hours in the air and, well, he is only a baby dragon after all.”

“Let us just get this over with,” Luna snapped.

With that embarrassment out of the way the ceremony continued, though with the added addition of Twilight Sparkle doing her best to hide from Luna’s judging stare. Shining Armour stepped back into formation and stood to attention as Princess Celestia inspected him and his Solar Guard. Though he was technically family now through his marriage with my cousin, Princess Cadence, they maintained the formality of this austere procedure by only exchanging a few terse, polite words with one another as Celestia complimented him on the discipline and appearance of his troops, despite the fact that climate conditions here meant everypony’s fancy dress uniform was covered in a thin covering of pale dust.

Shining Armour flushed with pride, puffing his chest out and standing tall like a new officer recruit on graduation day who had just received his commission. As Celestia and Luna moved onwards, he winked at Twilight, who followed her teacher dutifully.

Red Coat looked up in quiet awe at the two giant-sized alicorns as they approached, both standing head and shoulders above him. As he shivered from the sheer anxiety of it, the perspiration dripping down his face in rivulets not entirely due to the hot weather, I wondered if allowing him to lead the honour guard was a bad idea.

Princess Luna stood before us, wings flared out menacingly and looking rather more like an ancient nightmare beast of myth than a serene Princess of the Realm. For a rather long and awkward moment she glowered down at poor Red Coat in the same manner as a judge preparing to sentence an obviously guilty criminal, or a predator about to devour a helpless prey animal. To his credit, Red Coat didn’t run away screaming as many a poor stallion had done when subjected to my Auntie Luna’s patented awkward stare, despite his obvious anxiety and nervousness, but merely did his best to meet her gaze.

“Vivas Noctus!” screamed Red Coat suddenly, as if suddenly struck mad [‘Long live the night’ in Ancient Equestrian, an old battle cry of the Night Guards].

Behind me the stallions reared up on their hind legs and then slammed their fore hooves into the dusty ground, sending a small tremor through the earth.

“VIVAS NOCTUS!” they roared in unison, which made a handful of the normally stoic and disciplined Solar Guard flinch and stare at their darker brethren in abject confusion before returning to attention. I winced, my ears still ringing after having thirty or so stallions screaming into them.

Luna smiled, which was an extremely rare but not unwelcome occurrence, before laughing heartily at the display. Twilight Sparkle slowly emerged from behind her mentor’s long graceful legs and blinked as the assembled Night Guards snapped back to attention as if nothing untoward had happened at all. I merely settled on my haunches and rubbed at my ringing ears and hoping to get some of my hearing back; after enduring my Auntie Luna’s Royal Canterlot Voice for over a year and now this it’s a miracle I wasn’t struck deaf.

“Glorious,” intoned Luna, smiling widely at her stallions. “You are to be commended, Captain, it does my heart good to see the old ways of the Night Guards Corps still yet live after one thousand years.”

Red Coat beamed proudly, looking much like a schoolfoal who had just aced his spelling bee contest and was about to be treated to ice cream.

“T-thank you, Your Highness!” he stammered.

“And Prince Blueblood,” she said. All of the mirth and joy immediately evaporated from her face, only to be replaced by that same chilling expression of supreme condescension she always wore when having to lower herself to speaking with me.

“Princess Luna,” I nodded my head respectfully towards her.

“I am...” she paused, trying to think of the correct word, “...pleased that you are still alive.”

“As am I,” I said dryly as I shrugged my shoulders, which I instantly regretted as the shrapnel wound I received there at Black Venom Pass was stinging rather painfully at the relatively simple gesture. Irritatingly, the ache there would never go away, becoming quite unbearable in the cold winter months. “And all things considered I’d quite like to keep it that way.”

Princess Celestia chuckled melodiously; her warm smile did much to ease the awkward and tense atmosphere that seemed to cling to her darker sister like a body odour does to Cannon Fodder. She walked around Luna gracefully, the golden vestments of her office, the breastplate and her crown, shimmered brightly in the harsh light, and her golden horseshoes kicking up only the faintest amount of dust with every slow and deliberate step. I returned the smile, feeling much more relaxed by the familiar visage of the mare who had practically raised me after Father had gotten himself lost forever exploring the Zebrican jungles and Mother subsequently lost her marbles and was locked away. [Though I was a major part of Blueblood’s early life, much of his raising after the loss of his parents was done by a succession of governesses and nannies who probably did more to instil the toxic ideas of social class and hierarchy in him than anypony else. My involvement in his upbringing was cut short when I took on Twilight Sparkle as my personal student.]

The difference between the two regal sisters was like night and day, if you would pardon the unforgiveable pun. Where Luna was cold, distant, and aloof, Celestia was warm, loving, and motherly. The greatest difference, of course, lay in their physical appearances. The taller sun Goddess, for those of you who have been living under a rock for your entire lives and thus have no idea what she looks like, is pure alabaster white with a shimmering rainbow mane that wafts ethereally on a non-existent breeze, which contrasted with the rather chilling malevolent air that was invoked by her younger sibling’s countenance. Of course, it didn’t help Luna’s case that she happened to be wearing her silver and black lacquered armour, which had the rather unfortunate side effect of making her look more like the nightmarish half of her psychosis than she might have wanted.

“Quite so,” said Celestia, lowering her head down to my level so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck back, “though I fear so many of my little ponies were not so lucky.”

“Their sacrifice will be remembered,” I said, giving my words the appropriate amount of gravitas. I turned my gaze to Twilight Sparkle, who had by now emerged from the apparent safety of clinging to Celestia’s legs like a foal. The formally shy and socially awkward filly I remembered from high school was replaced by somepony altogether more confident and mature, though traces of her anxiety around new situations were evidently apparent as she seemed rather intimidated by the imposing guardsponies and still embarrassed by Spike’s behaviour. What hadn’t changed, of course, was the insanity that descended every time she was presented with something brand new to study, which this time just happened be my unfortunate aide, Cannon Fodder.

“Lady Twilight Sparkle,” I said, using her formal title as the austere surroundings of the official ceremony demanded it, “I didn’t know we would have the pleasure of your company today.”

Twilight flicked her rather unkempt mane away from her eyes. “The Princesses requested I help lead an investigation into how the Royal Guard can be improved,” she said plainly and somewhat awkwardly, “and where better to start than right here?”

Well, I couldn’t fault that logic, though I wasn’t particularly happy about that arrangement. It implied that she would be staying there, which, as political officer, would only make my already complicated life that much more difficult. Military and civilian personnel tend not to mesh particularly well, especially when said civilian has had very little experience of how the Royal Guard works, or doesn’t work as the case may be. Though I suppose I had little to fear, after all, her irritating older brother was Captain of the Royal Guard and a career officer, despite his rather ignominious beginnings as a private soldier, so she probably had some knowledge of what to expect. Honestly, however, even though I knew what she was capable of and what she had done to save Equestria many times before, I could not shake the image of the scared filly I used to make cry on a regular basis.

At any rate, it seemed that my problems, actually, would come from the Royal Guard side, as the military tended to resent what they saw as civilian interference in how they do their job; the fact that many of them can barely perform their own duties without it resulting in a massive cock-up and she was only trying to help notwithstanding. Not that I could blame them, really, as despite their massive incompetence and blind adherence to the outdated traditions of the Royal Guard, it’s rather galling to a stallion for some strange, adolescent and slightly psychotic mare to turn up one day and tell him that everything he had been doing for most of his adult life was absolutely wrong.

“So you’ll be staying here for a while, then?” I asked with no small amount of trepidation. On a more personal level, I somewhat feared that the filly I used to go to school with would begin undermining my tentative authority and sabotage the nascent beginnings of my heroic, but discreditable, reputation by telling everypony about all of the rather unpleasant things I used to do to her.

“I hope that’s not too much trouble, nephew,” said Celestia. “Twilight Sparkle will only be observing and interviewing ponies in preparation for her report.”

I arched an eyebrow at the strange purple mare, “I suppose if she doesn’t mind sleeping rough; we’re not exactly running a hotel here.”

“And I get to spend more time studying Cannon Fodder!” Twilight squealed suddenly, clapping her hooves together excitedly. “Oh, it’s a shame I left all of my equipment in Ponyville.”

I glanced back to see Cannon Fodder stiffen almost imperceptibly at Twilight Sparkle’s glee at the prospect of subjecting him to another battery of tests and experiments. I knew she wasn’t deliberately malicious, but previous experience had taught me that whenever Twilight is presented with something that is beyond her current understanding she will do absolutely everything in her power to change that, occasionally forgetting that little thing called ‘ethics’. As I saw Cannon Fodder’s slight discomfort I recognised the opportunity to win a few brownie points over my foalhood nemesis, petty though it may have been, but one must remember I was rather younger and less mature than I am now, that and using snide remarks to gain a modicum of social prestige over a rival was something that just came naturally to me as a senior member of the ruling elite.

“Cannon Fodder is a soldier of the Royal Guard, not a guinea pig,” I said carefully and loudly so that everypony could hear me. “Don’t you think he deserves a little dignity?”

Twilight shrank back a little, her ears folding flat against her head in embarrassment. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

I suppressed the urge to grin inanely. A niggling part of my mind warned me I was being too cruel by embarrassing her in front of Equestrian Royalty, though a far larger and more rational portion told me that it was not entirely advantageous to me maintaining my favourite hobby of breathing to upset a mare who had enough magical power and expertise to render my physical body into its component parts. However, a quick glance around indicated that the guardsponies approved of what I had just said, as even though technically Cannon Fodder was not part of the regiment, he was still a fellow guardspony, and it showed that I was looking out for their best interests. This was probably the only part of my fraudulent reputation I actually wanted to maintain, the rest of it being sustained purely out of necessity, as giving the impression that I care about the common guardspony tends to make them much more willing to help protect me when things inevitably go pear-shaped in battle.

Twilight Sparkle recovered quickly though; her excited expression returning to her face as she looked up into the concerned visage of her ancient mentor. “I can’t wait to get started with my research!” she said, waving her little hooves animatedly with all the exuberance of a schoolfoal relishing the chance to impress their teacher. “I’d like to start by examining the Night Guards first, if that’s okay, Blueblood?”

I shrugged my shoulders, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. But wouldn’t you rather be with your older brother?”

“Of course I’d rather be with my BBBFF [Big Brother Best Friend Forever],” she said, glancing over at the eponymous Shining Armour who winked at her before returning to attention. “But having a family member involved in the very thing I’m studying just wouldn’t be good practice; I would invariably be biased by my familial relationship with the subject and the integrity of my results may be compromised, which is why I shall be avoiding studying the 1st Solar Guard and instead allow another researcher to conduct the study in my stead.”

I nodded my head, only half paying attention to Twilight Sparkle’s small lecture, but I got the general gist of it. I inwardly cursed my luck as undoubtedly I’d be saddled with looking after the civilian as she sticks her nose in where it’s not wanted and makes a general nuisance of herself. I supposed that if it led to a widespread reform of the Royal Guard to make it at least somewhat more competent, then a few weeks or months of irritation would be worth it. If anything ‘protecting the Princess’s favourite pet’ might make the perfect excuse to stay away from the frontlines and the horde of Changeling horrors massing in the Badlands, but I didn’t count on Twilight Sparkle’s almost suicidal urge to gather new knowledge.

“There’ll be plenty of time for studying later,” said Celestia, extending a wing over her young protégé. “Shining Armour is giving us a tour of the encampment and then we’re meeting with the officers for tea.” Please excuse us Blueblood and Captain.”

I bowed curtly as Celestia and Twilight stepped back towards the waiting Captain of the Guard. Princess Luna glowered at me for a short moment longer, as if trying to dream up some brand new and extravagant way of getting me killed in her glorious name right then and there. Apparently she came up blank as she just turned and followed her elder sibling without another word.

I breathed a sigh of relief as she was gone. Princess Luna always made me feel anxious, as she did with just about everypony else aside from the very few of us mortals she deigns to consider friends. We watched as Shining Armour led the small royal entourage deeper into the encampment, which was still little more than a collection of tents of varying sizes and large cleared out spaces for the soldiers to bivouac in [A fancy word for ‘sleeping outside without a tent’]. No doubt the Royal Pony Sisters would be thrilled to see the various important tents around here; they who moulded the world from dust and raised the entire pony race from nothingness, fought daemons and numerous unnameable horrors from beyond the Veil, and whose statesponyship and skills in war have built Equestria into the sole superpower in the world. Somehow the organisers of this little event believed these veritable goddesses would be suitably impressed by a collection of tents.

At any rate, it gave us a little more time to prepare for the tea party, which I was very much looking forward to. Auntie Celestia and I had grown rather distant over the years since I became old enough to claim my birthright as prince of the realm and heir to the Blood Clan, probably in no small part to my admittedly loutish and un-chivalrous behaviour in recent years. A nice social gathering would be perfect for me to rekindle my somewhat strained relationship with my aunties, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Naturally, things didn’t go to plan, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

With the Princesses and Twilight leaving, the honour guard was dismissed. The arrayed ranks of soldiers dispersed noisily as they returned to whatever duties they were required to perform at this time. I assumed Spike would be picked up at some point and not left alone in the latrines with the stallions; they were not exactly the best ponies to leave a young child around if you didn’t want him to pick up some colourful language and an advanced knowledge of a mare’s anatomy and what to do with it. I was about to leave for my tent for a long and intense bathing session to get myself looking presentable for the tea party, when I noticed Captain Red Coat lingering and staring at the retreating forms of the Princesses and their escorts.

“Hot,” he said breathlessly.

I stood next to him, watching the swaying flanks of the Royal Pony Sisters as they followed Shining Armour. I shrugged my shoulders; a lot of ponies seem to have a rather peculiar attraction to my divine aunties, but not me. I, for one, prefer my mares not to be twice my height and, more importantly, not related to me.

“Celestia or Luna?” I asked out of morbid curiosity.

Red Coat shook his head, “Not them, I mean Twilight.”

I followed his slack-jawed gaze to Twilight’s sashaying rump. She was a little pudgy and rather too bookish for my tastes, but evidently she had an effect on the hormonally imbalanced teenaged mind. Then again, at seventeen years old colts are wont to become infatuated by anything female and still breathing.

“Hey, Commissar?” he said, finally taking his eyes off the swaying flank as it disappeared into the crowd of guardsponies milling around the place. “Do you think I have a chance?”

“I think you have about as much as I do,” I said blankly, not quite sure what to make of this interesting turn of events, though I felt the best course of action was to try and nip this in the bud before Red Coat’s sudden lust for the Princess’s protégé would result in an incident which would end with his banishment to a celestial body. “You know, it’s not a good idea to get infatuated with civilians,” I said, trying to sound like I had been there and done that, as Red Coat seemed to be under the mistaken impression I was some battle-hardened veteran.

The young stallion shrugged his shoulders and muttered something that sounded like ‘I guess so’.

With that done I left for my tent, knowing that in reality it would do little to dissuade him from pursuing his rather foolish courtship. Actually, looking back on this it’s rather amusing, but I had rather more important things on my mind at the time than to dwell on that, namely getting Cannon Fodder and I to look suitably neat and tidy for this tea party.

As we made our way through the mob of off-duty guardsponies milling around, chatting, drinking, eating, and playing card games, my hooves started tingling slightly as I thought about the upcoming social event; why would the Princesses come all this way just for a tea party? Granted, as royalty, attending social functions with high ranking members of the Royal Guard and aristocracy was just what was expected of them, and visiting the soldiers on the frontlines was obviously there to boost morale, but I had the rather distressing notion niggling in my hindbrain that there was an ulterior motive behind this visit. Whatever it was, I sincerely hoped that it wouldn’t involve me. But as always, things very rarely go according to plan.

Author's Note

Woo, new instalment.

Anyway, hope you guys like it. Trying to go with shorter chapters to facilitate faster updating, though I'll be taking a short break until the New Year perhaps.

'Vivas Noctus' is, of course, a tribute to Aegis Shield's Lunar Stallions stories, which have been a major influence on my work.

Also, fast running out of titles with the word 'blood' in it, may have to abandon this naming convention.

Bloodstained (Part 2)

Cannon Fodder’s brand new dress uniform lasted for approximately thirty minutes before the residue of muck, grime, and assorted unidentified stains in his fur seeped through into the dark blue fabric of his tunic. It was some small mercy that the dark colours of his new uniform managed to hide most of the accumulated unpleasant substances, though the ungodly stench of body odour and flatulence was only slightly muted by the fresh change of clothes. However, considering how long everypony else in this tea party had been living in the Dodge Junction encampment, surrounded entirely by thousands of stallions and mares with access to only the most basic sanitation, I doubted that my aide’s charming bouquet would be quite as noticeable to them.

As for me, I like to believe I cleaned up rather nicely despite the rather meagre facilities on hoof and only having about an hour to use them. It’d probably have taken a full day at the spa, tended on by a small army of attractive spa mares trained in the delicate art of male grooming and armed with the finest lotions and shampoos available, for me to feel anything approaching clean. Fortunately, Cannon Fodder’s incredible skill at scrounging things for me had borne fruit in the form of real soap; as opposed to the bars of unidentifiable origin that the Logistics Corps seem to think make an adequate substitute. Quite how he managed to procure such a rare item in the Dodge Junction encampment was probably something I was better off not knowing, but in the interests of getting somewhat clean I was more than willing to turn a blind eye to whatever suspect means Cannon Fodder had employed.

The tea party itself was held in the Dodge Junction town hall, which had been requisitioned by Field Marshal Iron Hoof and his general staff for his combined headquarters and venue for social events. The town’s mayor and his small cadre of petty civil servants had been forcibly ejected from their municipal offices and forced to take up residence in a small barn on the town outskirts. What the mayor thought about this rather one-sided arrangement is not recorded by history, as historians naturally tend to ignore such trivialities, but I recall the grizzled old ex-cherry farmer being rather livid when his repeated demands to be allowed back in the dilapidated town hall were denied.

I was feeling rather confident as I made my way with Cannon Fodder through the encampment, though my efforts in making myself look presentable were slightly ruined by the ever-present dust that was kicked up by the hooves of thousands of ponies living and working in the camp. Evidence of the Princesses’ passing was evident in the peculiar wreathes of pretty flowers scattered across the parade squares and sleeping grounds and the garlands hanging decoratively over the ubiquitous armour and weapon racks. Actually, as I stepped past them, making my way through the areas cordoned off for the use of other regiments of Army Group Centre, the guardsponies were busy clearing up after them. In all likelihood, the garlands of flowers imported at great expense from the far reaches of Equestria would be recycled as part of our daily rations of the mysterious brown stew; a delicacy that we have yet to learn the component parts of.

We were late, though not so late as to be inconvenient, just enough to be considered ‘fashionable’ by the noble socialite dilatants that made up the bulk of the officer class of the Solar Guard, who would in turn be the majority of the party guests of this little soiree. Come to think of it, arriving ‘fashionably late’, as it were, was beginning to sound increasingly vulgar to me, as it was the sort of thing that the poseurs with pretensions to class and sophistication do to try and impress the social elite of Equestria’s hierarchical class structure. The sad thing is that it quite often works for them.

The rather run-down old building was guarded by two of Celestia’s pegasus guards, with the other two presumably inside guarding her person in the party. She didn’t strictly need guarding, of course, being a physical goddess and therefore impervious to all mortal-made weaponry, and surrounded entirely by loyal guardsponies. [Not strictly true. Like many mortals, Blueblood has conflated immortality with invulnerability.] Their presence, therefore, was purely decorative. Until recently, mind you, standing still and looking imposing was the most strenuous part of being in the Royal Guard and, if I had my way, it would remain so.

The subdued sounds of a polite tea party could be heard through the ramshackle doors and smashed windows – the light bubble of polite conversation intermixed with the clinking of fine porcelain and glass, a polite chuckle, and Twilight Sparkle screaming at Spike to behave himself in front of the Princesses.

The pegasi saluted as I stepped between them to get to the door, but as soon as Cannon Fodder approached to follow me their wings became suddenly erect, spread so that they formed a barrier between him and the door. My aide, unflappable as ever, walked straight into the wall of wings and bounced off them, looking somewhat more confused than usual at the two stallions barring him.

“Halt!” the one on the right shouted, glaring down at my assistant.

“Access is restricted to authorised guests only,” said the left guard sternly.

Cannon Fodder looked rather bemused at this turn of events, looking up at the two pegasi with his usual gormless and confused expression that implied he was barely aware of what was going around him. I stopped short of opening the door, glancing over my shoulder to watch the two pegasi turn their noses up at the dishevelled unicorn, and wrinkling them in disgust at his pungent odour.

“My job is to follow the Commissar everywhere he goes,” he said, and then looked over at me just behind the barrier of feathers, “unless he says otherwise.”

I did consider just leaving him there outside to wait for me, as he would be rather out of his depth at this refined tea party with the Princesses as he was with Fancy Pants’ benefit party a few weeks ago. However, I was growing rather reluctant to being separated from him as he had developed a very useful knack for saving my life and getting me out of sticky situations. I did not expect anything to go so drastically wrong that it would require his unique abilities as a Blank or stabbing things with spears, but one can never be too careful when the enemy is only a few miles away and happens to have a particular aptitude for underhanded warfare. Furthermore, I knew that the officers of the Night Guard would be present, including Blitzkrieg, who was most likely the most improper guest for a high society get-together in all of Equestria, and Twilight Sparkle’s beloved assistant Spike, who came in a close second, so Cannon Fodder would not be alone in being snubbed by everypony else.

The two guards looked at me sceptically, lowering their wings slightly.

“His security clearance is as high as mine,” I said.

They shared a confused glance before reluctantly lowering their wings and allowing my aide to follow me. Cannon Fodder gave an unconcerned shrug as the obstacle was cleared and started forwards.

Satisfied that we could finally continue, I pushed the door slightly open with my telekinesis, and the previously muffled sounds of the tea party became much louder and clearer. The party itself was in full swing already, and through the narrow gap between the door and the jamb I could see that the main hall was filled with mingling party guests. The large table, which had seen both opulent banqueting and intense military strategising, was still there and this time it was supporting a veritable mountain of cakes, biscuits, gourmet crisps [Blueblood means ‘potato chips’; he picked up some elements of the Trottingham dialect and traces of an accent due to his long association with the 1st Night Guards, much to the amusement of his compatriots in the Royal Court], and other assorted confections that were liable to disappear shortly if nopony could restrain Princess Celestia.

“Twilight Sparkle will be there, won’t she?” said Cannon Fodder sheepishly, bobbing his head around comically to try and look past me.

“I expect so,” I replied, glancing back into the hall and spotting a certain lavender-coloured mare bombarding her elder brother with a plethora of searching questions about his recent activities and urgent reminders not to do anything stupid, which was something I couldn’t count the overly enthusiastic Captain of the Guard to adhere to.

“Maybe I should wait out here for you.”

I shook my head. “There’s a free buffet table in there,” I said, knowing that Cannon Fodder’s distrust of Twilight Sparkle, which I surmised to be linked to his equal fear of doctors and dentists, was nothing compared to his voracious appetite. The effect was instantaneous, as he suddenly pushed his way past me, lightly knocking me into the door as he made a beeline towards the vast array of cakes and sweets on the table.

Straightening my uniform and dusting off a few biscuit crumbs that had migrated from Cannon Fodder as he unceremoniously barged past me, I entered into the hall. The other two pegasi guards were revealed to be standing on the other side of the door, and they bowed their heads respectfully and shut the door behind me.

The atmosphere was congenial, if somewhat forced and awkward, as is standard on all of my Aunties’ royal visits as everypony drives themselves into yet higher states of anxiety to make sure that they are all having a good time. There was a reason members the official Royal Party Planners Guild had a higher likelihood of developing high blood pressure and heart disease, and it was rather worrying that these morbid statistics started to get worse as the bearers of the Elements of Harmony started attending royal functions. The red-clad officers of the Solar Guard were busy mingling and engaging in idle banter, while the midnight-blue officers of the 1st Night Guard stood in their own little corner of the room and venturing out only in search of party snacks and drink.

The Princesses themselves were sitting at the head of the table, with Twilight Sparkle by her mentor’s side, and chatted pleasantly among themselves. Some of the braver party guests would approach, bow, and exchange a few polite words with them before trotting back and feeling proud of themselves. Naturally, most of the attention was heaped upon Princess Celestia, who handled it with her usual regal grace. As for Princess Luna, well, I didn’t think it was possible to drink tea angrily but she somehow managed it. Eventually, once they had plucked up the courage after imbibing strong tea and, in Captain Blitzkrieg’s case a surreptitious hipflask full of illicit moonshine, they came to their dark matriarch’s side to keep her company.

The hall itself was hastily decorated and it showed. With only a few days to repair and rather more pressing matters to attend to, Field Marshal Iron Hoof’s staff had simply strewed bunting about the place. Brightly coloured flags of red, white, and blue were hung above us on rope that stretched from wall to wall.

The regimental banners were back, and the dark battle standard of the 1st Night Guards stood out amidst the brightly coloured flags. The standard was still tattered and ripped from the battle, with numerous rips from shrapnel shot in the fabric, but Colonel Sunshine Smiles had remarked that the ‘wounds’ the flag had suffered were a far more appropriate tribute than the more conventional battle honours stitched into the other banners. The guardsponies, however, were taking bets on how long until the standard became so damaged that the Colonel would be forced to eat his words and have it repaired. At any rate, the first official battle honour had been applied to standard – a small scrap of embroidered silk that bore the words ‘Black Venom Pass’ had been stitched into the midnight blue cloth.

A quiet hush descended as I entered, which only made me feel a little more tense than usual. The reaction of the party guests was ambivalent; the older, more dyed-in-the-wool traditional officers turned their noses up at me, while a few of the younger officers, particularly the survivors from the 3rd Solar Guard Regiment who credited me with saving their lives from General Crimson Arrow’s incompetence, clopped their hooves in applause. My falsified reputation for heroism had yet to take on the universal appeal it would have later in my distinguished career. Therefore the Royal Guard was split down the centre into two camps – those who fully bought into my nascent status as the hero who slew a Changeling Purestrain in single combat and single-hoofedly saved an entire regiment from destruction and those who thought I was an interfering civilian bureaucrat sent from Canterlot with dangerous ideas about egalitarianism and appointment of officers by merit over birth and social status, both being rather distant from the truth.

Field Marshal Iron Hoof and General Crimson Arrow were together in a corner of the room, apparently having been conversing together before Cannon Fodder and I had blundered clumsily into the hall. Iron Hoof looked at me blankly, as he always did, before suddenly finding a painting of some country yokel’s grandmother incredibly fascinating. As for Crimson Arrow, my former friend and colleague, he glowered at me with a look of pure, unadulterated hatred for having betrayed him.

It was the first time I had seen Crimson Arrow since the battle; he had spent the intervening week sulking away in his tent. Any attempts by anypony to speak with him had been met with either frustrating silence or violence in the rare occasion a more courageous officer blundered in and demand he actually perform his job as commander of Army Group Centre. He looked gaunt and thin, his formerly handsome face now looking rather like a skull that had been flensed of its meat and the skin clumsily stretched over it, and dark bags visible under his hate-filled eyes. I suppressed a shudder when I saw the intense expression of betrayal in those eyes.

I looked away, unable to meet his gaze. I reminded myself that we were at war, and such things as personal friendship were entirely secondary to the prosecution of that war and achieving final victory over the Changeling menace. Looking back, however, I fear I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had said ‘I’m sorry’. Unfortunately, things in life tend not to be that simple, and on a second reflection it is likely that he would have rejected my apology and the course he had set himself upon would be unaltered.

I noticed Spike was at the table with Cannon Fodder and gorging upon a sapphire and emerald cake roughly twice his size, though it seemed that by the way he was eating it much of the cake ended up smeared over his face and on the floor. I watched with vague amusement as Bramley Apple from the 16th Royal Artillery Regiment informed the dragon child that he’ll make himself sick eating like that, to which Spike demonstrated his rather tentative grasp on the concept of causality by explaining that it was a problem for ‘the future Spike’.

“Howdy, sir!” Bramley waved enthusiastically at me as I approached.

“Hello, Sergeant,” I replied, noticing the extra stripe added to his rank insignia. I was rather perplexed as to why he, a non-commissioned officer, was present. Then I recalled all of the commissioned officers of his regiment were either killed or missing in action, thus making him the effective commanding officer until a replacement could be found or buy his way in. “Congratulations on the promotion.”

The War Ministry was likely going through a small bureaucratic nightmare as it struggled to find a way to fix the leaderless and ungodly mess that became of the 16th Royal Artillery. Ordinarily, I supposed, the entire regiment would have been disbanded and the survivors amalgamated to form the core of a brand new regiment or reassigned to other regiments. However, the chaos of war tends to make an almighty mess of the neat and ordered bureaucracy that is the War Ministry, though the Ministry is more than capable of entangling itself with red tape and paperwork by itself during peacetime. In the ensuing confusion and collective arse-covering that occurred after the Battle of Black Venom Pass the regiment seemed to have been forgotten. As with many things in my increasingly complicated life, it hinted towards something rather unpleasant in my future that only became obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

“Ah thank ya,” Bramley saluted. “Ah’m a little bummed out Ah didn’t get a commission, if’n Ah’m honest. Ah’m feeling a might outta place ‘round all these fancy-schmancy officer ponies.”

I levitated a small fondant fancy with pink frosting up to my mouth and nibbled on it delicately, eyeing Spike and Cannon Fodder over Bramley’s shoulder as they seemed to be engrossed in an ill-advised cake eating contest.

“I’ll see if I can’t pull a few strings with the War Ministry,” I said between mouthfuls of the small cake, with no plans on actually following through with my proposal. While I knew him to be a capable leader, as Major Starlit Skies attested to during the Battle of Black Venom Pass when Bramley Apple rallied the remnants of the 16th Artillery, I was reluctant to upset the proverbial apple cart any more than I already had in removing not only an officer but a general from command. By circumventing the ponderous bureaucratic machine of the War Ministry, and annoying the aristocratic dilettante officers, I would only make more enemies.

It felt like a damned shame.

“Don’t worry about it, sir,” he said with a shrug. “Ah ain’t no proper gentlecolt, all Ah knows is how to fire cannons and yell at stallions.”

“I think you’d be a great officer!” said Spike enthusiastically, crumbs and spittle spraying as he spoke with his mouth full.

Bramley smiled and rubbed the top of Spike’s head with a hoof in a rather unbecoming affectionate gesture that expertly illustrated why he would never become an officer, unless the existing officer class suddenly have a long overdue revelation and realise that grace and sophistication in social gatherings is rather secondary compared to genuine leadership skills, tactical ability, and fighting prowess – particularly when ponies lives are at stake.

I arched an eyebrow cynically, wondering at what point in Spike’s career, between running errands and fetching things for Twilight Sparkle and being left behind to fend for himself when his mistress and her friends were off saving Equestria again, he managed to squeeze ‘armchair general’ into his hectic schedule. The sad thing was that I agreed with him, which I found to be deeply troubling.

“Ah thank ya, Spike, but Ah ain’t lookin’ to be no officer. Shoot, Ah ain’t lookin’ to spend mah whole life in the Royal Guard anyhow. Apples’ are in mah blood.”

A quick glance at his flanks, not that I’m particularly oriented towards checking out the rumps of other stallions, informed me that his cutie mark was indeed of an apple. Though, the fact that the apple seemed to be fired out of a large howitzer left room for a lot of interpretation. [Bramley Apple acquired his cutie mark during his first Apple family reunion in Ponyville, where it is reported he destroyed the Sweet Apple Acres’ barn with a home-made mortar.]

“If ya’ll will excuse me, sirs, but Ah’d like to talk to Miss Twilight for a bit, Ah hear she knows mah cousin Applejack out of Ponyville.”

With a slight bow of his head in my direction he trotted off towards Twilight Sparkle and the Princesses, earning a few disapproving glances from some of the more stuffy officers who evidently believed that a mere nom-com such as he shouldn’t even be allowed to breath the same air as the Princesses, let alone approach them. As it happened, from my somewhat distant vantage point at the other opposite end of the room, it seemed that Princess Celestia rather enjoyed Sergeant Bramley’s company long after Twilight Sparkle drifted away to mingle with the other guests.

“You know,” said Spike as he clambered up on a chair so he could reach the cakes better, “I’ve been thinking.”

I highly doubted that, but for the sake of trying to get through this tea party without having yet more cake hurled in my direction like sweet sugary cannonballs of confection I decided to humour him.

“About what?”

“Well, I was just thinking. Twilight’s basically my big sister now, and her, I mean our, brother is married to Princess Cadence, your cousin. I think that makes us family now!”

Resisting the urge to pick up the moronic dragon and throw him head-first into a large, three-tiered frosted cake took a herculean effort on my part. However, I realised that if I could not get away with using Rarity as a pony-shield I probably couldn’t get away with abusing Spike in such manner, especially in front of his legal guardian, the princesses, and the vast majority of the army’s core leadership, regardless of how much he deserved it. So I merely forced a smile to my face, probably the sort that air stewardesses on airships perform when greeting the customers they were to be trapped with for the next few hours. I had the feeling I’ll be using that smile quite a lot that day.

“In a sense... Excuse me, I have to go and get some tea.”

“Pfft, whatever, cousin.”

I glowered down at Spike, and he just smiled that insufferable smug grin of his before stuffing it full of yet more cake. With a disdainful ‘hmmph’ I turned on my hooves and made my way around the large antique table, weaving my way around the chattering party guests, to the small portion of its surface devoted to drinks. As I left I heard Cannon Fodder loudly announce that he won the cake eating contest.

In truth I felt the need for a little solitude, which was something of a premium in the Royal Guard and certainly not to be found at this party. For when I stepped away from Spike I was assaulted by admiring fans – young ensigns, lieutenants, and even a captain wishing to congratulate me on my recent success. Naturally, I saw through their obviously shallow attempts to ensure the safety of their very expensive commissions and politely brushed them off with equally vapid platitudes – something that I learned from years spent amongst the social elite of Canterlot.

Over at the other side of the room I could see Captain Red Coat cautiously eyeing Twilight Sparkle, who, like me, was busy mingling amongst the party guests and making polite conversation. After a few fortifying glasses of wine and a sip of whatever illicit alcoholic, and quite possibly toxic, liquid was kept in Captain Blitzkrieg’s hipflask, he summoned up the necessary courage to try to speak with her. I paused, briefly, to watch the train wreck in all of its beautifully hideous glory from the apparent safety of the central table. Evidently, Red Coat had been getting dating tips from Blitzkrieg, and while his arsenal of pickup lines might have worked wonders on the ten bit whores who ply their trade in the Trottingham slums, they failed spectacularly against the more refined mare. Twilight Sparkle was either remarkably tolerant or oblivious of Red Coat’s intentions, though knowing her and her chronic lack of success with stallions I suspected it was the latter. Eventually, the inevitable happened, and after one mangled and particularly vulgar pickup line too many (‘is that a horn on your forehead or are you just pleased to see me?’, which, to this day, the meaning of which still eludes me), Shining Armour, who had been monitoring the situation from close by, could take no more and clipped Red Coat around the ear, barked a few harsh words in his face, and sent the adolescent scurrying back to Princess Luna with his tail between his legs. Naturally, most of his comrades found this hilarious.

With that fiasco over with, I gracefully slid past the assembled mass of party guests to the section of the table allocated for drinks. As expected, there were a wide variety of teas, coffees, and even wine on display. The tea cups, mugs, and wine glasses were arrayed out in neat little lines like soldiers on parade. The smaller assembly of tea kettles, coffee jugs, milk, and wine glasses were situated just behind them. I briefly overheard Captain Blitzkrieg complaining that there was no ‘proper Trottingham tea’ to Princess Luna just behind me. I, on the other hoof, was looking for something a little more tasteful than the sort of mud-like beverage so ubiquitous to the Trottingham underclass, so I settled for a cup of lapsang souchong.

I poured myself a cup, briefly noting that the kettle was the expensive sort with a magical enchantment to keep the liquid contained therein at a steady hot temperature. The warm, smoky aroma of the unique blend helped sooth my fractured nerves, and I was about to take a relaxed sip before I was interrupted by a pompous-sounding voice beside me.

“The Royal Guard has gone to the dogs, I tell you, sir!”

The speaker was either a very ugly unicorn or a very handsome pig dressed up in a Solar Guard dress uniform. The uniform itself was absolutely immaculate – the tunic was a brilliant crimson red that had yet to be faded by exposure to the bright sunlight and the nigh-constant dust around, and so utterly devoid of unsightly creases it must have been starched so stiff as to restrict movement. The high collar seemed to be restricting the blood flow to his head, for the skin on his face beneath his white fur was tinged red and, rather disturbingly, throbbing purple veins were visible on his neck and forehead.

“Pardon?”

“The Royal Guard, sir!” he blustered. Every syllable that escaped his somewhat malformed mouth made the thick jowls on his cheek wobble as if they were made of jelly. “It’s an absolute shambles, is what it is.”

I took a sip from my cup warily, savouring the distinctly smoky flavour of the fine tea. “Forgive me; I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before.”

A broad, sickly sweet smile came to the unicorn’s face as he puffed his chest out proudly and stood tall. Well, as tall as the rather diminutive stallion could stand; despite holding his shoulders back and his neck held high he was still a full head shorter than me. Small red eyes, like those of a rat, gazed up at me from their sunken sockets and twinkled with a smug sense of superiority.

“Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter,” he said slowly, as if he enjoyed the sound of his name as much as he did his voice, “of the ‘Celestia’s Own’ 1st Solar Guard Regiment, sir!”

“Commissar Prince Blueblood of the 1st Night Guards,” I replied. I couldn’t help but wonder which idiot granted this pony a knighthood, but considering how knighthoods might as well have been given free in boxes of cereal for what they were worth these days it shouldn’t have surprised me. [Sir Scarlet Letter MP was knighted on a recommendation from the House of Commons for his services in the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Regulation of the Sizes of Stamps, which, after five years of intense deliberation and billions of bits spent in research, decided that postage stamps were the right size for the job after all. To ensure that no undue blame is apportioned either to me or my sister, I wish to make it absolutely clear that it was Princess Cadence who approved the absurd request.]

Scarlet Letter chuckled and patted me on the shoulder, and I instinctively flinched away from the well-hooficured hoof. “Of course I know who you are, sir! Saved Princess Mi Amore Cadenza’s life, foiled a Changeling plot to invade the city, and...” he looked over to where Crimson Arrow stood sulking in a darkened corner of the room, “...burning the dead wood from the Royal Guard. I daresay you’re making quite the name for yourself, the common pony seems to think you’re some sort of bally hero.”

“I was merely doing my duty,” I said with the verbal equivalent of a vacant shrug. Annoyingly, it was that exact sort of modesty that perpetuated my undeserved image, but for the time being it was serving me well and I didn’t particularly feel like talking to Scarlet Letter. It didn’t take a master of pony psychology to work out what he was doing, it was as plain as the irritating friendly smile on his face – he was trying to butter me up, befriend me, and hope that I wouldn’t treat him too harshly should I find him wanting on the battlefield.

“Of course, of course.” He stepped to the table and prepared a cup of coffee for himself. “Personally, I think you’re rather wasted here. I mean, you’re the Princesses’ nephew for Faust’s sake, you should have Iron Hoof’s job.”

I shook my head and smiled as best as I could, indulging in this little stallion’s pleasing fiction that he was acquiring my friendship, if only out of morbid curiosity to see what exactly he thought he could get out of me. Naturally, being so high up in Equestria’s aristocratic hierarchy made me subject to this sort of behaviour, and I had come to accept it as one of the more irritating drawbacks of my noble lifestyle. Ponies would often come to me, offering false promises of friendship and alliance in a bid to gain something they believed I could acquire for them. For the most part it was supporting some piece of legislation that was being sent to the Princesses for approval, or putting my not-inconsiderable influence behind a certain pony, or in Rarity’s case a chance to enter into Equestria’s upper classes.

“And be stuck five miles behind the frontlines buried beneath a mountain of paperwork and miss out on proper soldiering? I think not.” It was a lie, naturally, as there was nothing I wanted more than to be five miles behind the frontlines, where the biggest threat to my life was a paper cut and not hordes of bestial, angry Changelings intent on tearing me into tiny pieces.

“Quite right, old chap, quite right,” he patted my shoulder again and grinned irritatingly. “But it must be galling for you, dear boy, to be surrounded by that low born scum who dare to call themselves officers of the Night Guard.”

He jerked a hoof in the direction of the said officers, who were conversing happily with both of the Princesses. I couldn’t quite hear them over the gentle murmur of dozens of gossiping party guests, but it seemed evident that all involved were having a good time of it. To my surprise, Captain Blitzkrieg was chatting quite amicably with Princess Celestia, who smiled with genuine warmth and affection at the gruff pegasus. I have always secretly admired my Auntie Celestia for her ability to relate to the common pony and make each of her individual subjects feel uniquely blessed and loved, which is something neither I nor Princess Luna have quite managed to achieve yet. Though frankly, in my case I just didn’t bother trying until much later in my life.

“They’re good soldiers,” I said blankly before taking another sip of my tea, resisting the urge to throw the scalding hot liquid over the impudent little Lieutenant’s face. I decided instead to go for the bluff old soldier routine, despite the fact I was much too young to pull it off effectively at the time.

“Yes, they might be good soldiers but they’re far too unrefined and vulgar to be officers.” He leaned uncomfortably close to me and said in a suspiciously low and quiet voice, “They’re not gentlecolts. We’re both officers of the old school and we both know that officers need to act with a sense of decorum. After all, sir, it’s what separates us from the brute beast that is the common Equestrian soldier. It’s a shame that a pony of your great and noble standing has to lower himself to the level of these base animals.”

I grimaced, but managed to hide my facial expression behind my rather dainty little teacup. A few weeks ago, before my baptism of blood in Black Venom Pass, I’d have naturally agreed with him, but after having fought alongside those ‘base animals’ and ‘brute beasts’ my viewpoint had been rather corrected. I even began to feel some small measure of affection for this band of misfits and social rejects, though that might have just been a result of my innate paranoid streak that told me I had to form a bond with these ponies if I were to survive.

“I have a brother high up in the War Ministry and a few friends in the House of Commons,” he said, sipping from his cup of coffee. The rising steam from the hot liquid formed a wreath around his rotund face with its sickly sweet smile, and he licked his thin lips in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of a lizard. “All I have to do is send off a few letters to some very important ponies, a quiet word here or there, and I can have you assigned to a regiment of your own choosing. Who knows? I might even get you out of that ghastly uniform and into a Colonel’s.”

I have to admit that I found it all rather tempting at the time, but I knew that underneath all of that faux-affability and smarmy friendliness laid the hidden truth that he expected me to do something for him too. I doubted that whatever it was that he had in mind was particularly pleasant or easy, and in all likelihood it probably would have ended up causing more trouble for me than it was worth. Call me unhealthily paranoid, but when a pony goes deliberately out of their way to try and become friends with me, to the point that they’re becoming rather creepy about it, they’re obviously up to no good, particularly when politicians and the Royal Guard are involved. [I find a degree of paranoia about what my politicians are doing to be rather justified in most cases.] A near lifetime of dealing with these sycophantic social climbers had shown me that these ponies rarely, if ever, want something for nothing.

“Have a think about it, Your Highness.” With that he patted me on the shoulder and slinked away, melting into the crowd of ponies around me, and then he was gone.

I was relieved to be finally rid of him. Initially I had thought it best to put it out of my mind, after all, with Changeling-held territory not more than a few miles away to the south and a number of military commanders of questionable sanity and competence dreaming up ways to get me killed in the name of Princesses and Country, I had rather more important things to worry about.

“I see you’ve made a new friend,” said one of the few voices I was actually pleased to hear. The newly promoted Captain Fine Vintage, who had been quietly observing from the sidelines, approached me and took up position by my side.

He wore his new rank pips with obvious pride, as evidenced by the slight smile on his thin lips and the self-assured manner in which he carried himself, which was a far cry from the exhausted and beleaguered junior officer I had seen in the Battle of Black Venom Pass. As Scarlet Letter might have put it, he was an ‘officer of the old school’; meaning he was of aristocratic descent and had paid for his commission and subsequent promotion into Clear Heaven’s vacant position with a not-inconsiderable number of bits. Unlike Clear Heavens and many other such officers, however, he was actually rather competent in his job and pragmatic enough to realise that noble birth is not an adequate prerequisite for military and that if he wanted to succeed in his job he had to actually put the work in.

“That pony is an idiot,” I said derisively, draining the last dregs of my tea before gently floating the empty tea cup back to the table. “I can’t imagine why Shining Armour would allow somepony like him hold the Princesses’ commission in his regiment.”

Fine Vintage smirked and shook his head. He held a half-filled glass of red wine in a pale telekinetic aura just underneath his chin, and as he swished the glass around, making the dark crimson liquid disturbingly reminiscent of blood slosh swirl and slosh about inside, he looked thoughtfully into it as if the answer to that quandary lay at the bottom of the glass. Considering his special talent, the manufacture and appreciation of fine wines as denoted by his cutie mark of a wine bottle decanting its dark red contents into a glass, I was not surprised that he adhered to the ancient proverb ‘in vino, veritas’ [In wine, truth]. Despite the substantial proportion of Field Marshal Iron Hoof’s wine cellar he had been sampling throughout the party, the young Captain remained remarkably composed and clear-headed for most of the afternoon.

“Leverage,” he said, after some consideration. “He’s not an idiot, Blueblood, he’s a snake. If he comes off as foolish to you, it’s because he wants you to.”

“What do you mean by ‘leverage?” I asked.

“Shining Armour is dancing on a knife edge,” he said quietly, glancing around to check that nopony was eavesdropping on our conversation. “He lost the entire city of Canterlot to a Changeling invasion in less than ten minutes. Granted, it wasn’t entirely his fault; he was under Queen Chrysalis’ mind-warping illusion spell, but a lot of ponies question whether he should still be Captain of the Royal Guard.”

“Hmmph,” I snorted in contempt. “It shouldn’t matter what those ponies think; if my Auntie Celestia wants him she can damn well have him.” [One of the rare occasions I agree with Blueblood on political matters. Equestrian democracy was at a rather nascent stage of development at that time, and Parliament often created more problems than it solved.]

Captain Fine Vintage smiled and took a small sip of his wine, taking a short moment to savour the complex flavours before finally swallowing. I’ve never understood oenophiles, while I do enjoy a good glass of fine wine every now and again and I am not exactly a philistine when it comes to appreciating the art of a particularly good vintner; there are some ponies who seem to revere the grape as much as they do Celestia, Luna, and even Faust Herself. Besides, I was more of a whisky fan myself.

“Quite right, Blueblood, but sadly even the Goddess of the Sun must acquiesce to the facile demands of Parliament from time to time. As it happens, Parliament is split between those who support Shining Armour and those who want his dismissal. It is only by divine providence that both chambers of Parliament are marginally in support of Shining Armour, due in no small part to the Lieutenant’s efforts in encouraging certain members of Parliament to seeing reason.”

“I see; Shining Armour is beholden to Scarlet Letter for saving his career.”

I didn’t state the obvious, but a quiet nod from Fine Vintage confirmed that I was thinking along the right lines – Scarlet Letter was using his influence to keep Shining Armour’s flagging career alive despite criticism from Parliament and the Royal Guard itself in return for a boon of some description. I had already known that Shining Armour’s performance in the Battle of Canterlot had severely damaged his reputation, but I was prepared to cut him some slack considering he had what little remained of his mind under the magical thrall of a dominating mare – much like his current marriage.

What Scarlet Letter wanted in return, however, was still an abject mystery to me. While it was certainly possible that the irritating little stallion might be content with being a junior officer in the Royal Guard’s most prestigious regiment, no doubt winning a good number of brownie points over his friends and peers back at Parliament, I feared that his ambitions lay a damn sight higher than that. Then it hit me; he wanted Shining Armour’s job. Naturally, I didn’t have the slightest bit of evidence other than a gut feeling, but my innate paranoia has the incredibly irritating tendency to be right about these things, and when I factored that into the equation it started to make much more sense. However, this revelation did bring some smidgen of hope for me. Shining Armour was not a complete fool, appearances being deceiving and all that rot, and though Scarlet Letter had managed to establish himself on the 1st Solar Guard Regiment’s chain of command and ready to work himself up to that esteemed position of Captain of the Royal Guard, he was exactly where Shiny Arsehole could keep a very close eye on him.

Regrettably, it did little to assuage my worries enough to suppress the gnawing paranoia in the back of my mind. That same paranoia which had the irritating tendency of being right nearly all of the time, and as it happened I might have saved myself a lot of trouble later in my career if I had managed to organise an unfortunate and very messy accident involving him and one of Bramley’s sixpounders that we might have ‘forgotten’ were fully loaded.

“I say,” said Fine Vintage, interrupting my thoughts, “is that General Crimson Arrow over there? I assumed that he had returned to Canterlot in shame.”

I glanced momentarily at the General, who had, by now, ventured out from his self-imposed seclusion in the corner of the room to chat with the few officers who had chosen to support this with equus non grata. He seemed a shadow of his former, outgoing self, and looked ashamed to even be in the company of other ponies.

“The same reason Colonel Rising Star is allowed to command your regiment,” I replied, “War Ministry whitewash. One can’t just get rid of a general or a colonel; they both have too many supporters within the Ministry, so Clear Heavens was made the scapegoat.”

There was very little time to dwell on the matter, however, as the chiming sound of a teaspoon tapping delicately against an empty wineglass cut through the gentle hubbub of conversation around us. Everypony turned their heads towards the sound, ears forward and attentive, to see that the origin of the universally accepted gesture that somepony wants everypony’s attention was Princess Celestia.

The supreme Diarch of Equestria stood, spoon and glass in her golden telekinetic aura, and waited patiently for everypony’s rapt attention. A couple of soldier-servants appeared from the darkened alcoves of the room and cleared the table of leftovers with military precision and speed, much to Cannon Fodder and Spike’s dismay, to ensure a clear line of sight between the Princesses and their audience. It may have been my paranoid streak acting up again, but I glanced over my shoulder behind me to see the two pegasi guards that had accompanied the Diarchs secure and bolt the door, thus ensuring that the audience was very much a captive one.

I thought it was rather early to end the party after just half an hour, and I was feeling rather disappointed that I didn’t get to speak with Auntie ‘Tia, though I consoled myself that there would be plenty of time later once she had gone through the motions of thanking everypony for such a lovely, if short, party.

“I would like to thank each and every one of you for welcoming my sister and me so warmly today,” she began, which resulted in a polite and restrained ripple of applause from the assembled mass of officers, and an excited whoop from Bramley Apple.

“However,” she continued without bothering to wait for the sound of clopping hooves on the rough wooden floor to die down, “I would also like to say that my sister and I are very much disappointed in you all.”

Author's Note

A bit of a filler chapter, admittedly. Hope you enjoyed it.

Bloodstained (Part 3)

The gentle rumble of applause was cut short immediately, as if the needle of a gramophone was suddenly wrenched from the spinning record, to be followed by an intense and oppressive quiet. Behind me I heard a fine porcelain teacup drop and shatter expensively on the hard wooden floor. Next to me, Fine Vintage had momentarily lost his telekinetic grip on his glass of wine and spilled a great deal of it on his front before he could catch the falling goblet, the crimson liquid staining his red tunic black and his white sash scarlet.

Looking back on this turn of events, as I sit here with my battered old typewriter and a tumbler of vintage single malt, I shouldn’t have been particularly surprised. In fact, I felt a slight sense of elation at the vindication of my initial suspicions about Celestia’s ulterior motives; Auntie ‘Tia always had the rather irritating tendency to mask her true intentions behind something seemingly innocent and harmless, and I’m not just talking about when I was nine years old and a much-anticipated trip to the Daring Do World theme park turned out to be a visit to the dentist to have new braces painfully fitted. Despite her rather underhanded tactics, I must concede that, for the most part, the ends do justify the means. Unfortunately, it left me with a chronic distrust of everything she did, and even worse for me, it often resulted in the placing of my vulnerable, squishy, un-armoured body in harm’s way far more times than I’m comfortable with.

Princess Celestia swept her cold, unflinching gaze across the entire room. The motherly expression on her face was gone, to be replaced by the cold and stern countenance of an experienced elder states-mare. Her lips were a thin line across her elegant muzzle, and were turned ever so slightly downwards at their ends. Her violet eyes narrowed and were utterly devoid of all of the love and warmth she normally holds for her beloved ponies, and instead they were filled with nothing but silent contempt for everypony in this room. As her chilling eyes tracked across the room slowly, occasionally pausing to single out one or two ponies for her particular attention, the assembled equines shuddered and flinched from her steely gaze. The effect was completed by the fact that her wings were spread erect to their fullest span, making the already monstrously tall alicorn princess appear even larger than usual.

I looked over to the Night Guard officers, who stood relatively close to the two Princesses. The majority of them seemed to be taking it with the usual passive stoicism and aloofness stereotypical of ponies from Trottingham, though I noticed that the left side of Colonel Sunshine Smiles’ face, where the hideous scar mangled his once attractive features, was twitching rather violently as it was wont to do whenever something unpleasant was happening. Captain Red Coat looked like a foal who had just been told Princess Celestia doesn’t personally deliver presents to good little colts and fillies on Hearth’s Warming Eve night [Apologies to anypony under the age of ten years who might be reading this]; likely due to the rather copious amounts of alcohol the teenager had drank throughout the party coupled with his very public embarrassment at the hooves of Shining Armour over Twilight.

Celestia’s long and spiralled horn ignited with the same warm glow of the sun on a fresh spring morning, and a sheaf of papers materialised into the space just before her head. Holding the inch-thick wad of papers within her yellow telekinetic glow she flicked through the files with deliberate slowness, seemingly taking her own sweet time in order to prolong everypony’s nervous anxiety as much as possible. The long, awkward moment of silence dragged out interminably and was made worse by the incessant ambient noises that seemed amplified both by the hush and my own anxiety. The constant and unremitting ticking of the infernal grandfather clock in the corner, as if counting down the remaining seconds of life for everypony in the room, and the gentle ruffle of paper sliding across paper, coupled with the fact that everypony seemed to be coughing and breathing much too loudly only heightened the nauseating anxiety I was feeling. Judging by the uncomfortable body language and nervous movements of everypony else in the room, I wasn’t alone.

My anxiety, however, was not helped by the notion that it would take one single lightning strike by the enemy to not only incapacitate the entire senior command of the Royal Guard’s Army Group Centre but also completely decapitate the leadership of the Equestrian state and thus leave Cadence as supreme overlord of the country. Needless to say, I am eternally thankful that the Changelings did not even attempt such an audacious plan; if my cousin Cadence, as friendly and gentle as she is, was to become sole ruling monarch of Equestria I’m not certain I would have wanted to survive the attack to see what kind of unremitting horror would ensue as a result of Cadence’s reign.

Whatever effect Celestia was trying to go for was instantly ruined by Spike.

“But I didn’t do anything this time!” he blurted out impetuously. The baby dragon sat on the table, legs dangling over the edge and his little face was smeared with brightly-coloured cake frosting. He looked around with a blank and slightly confused expression on his face, while the ponies around him reacted with the same sort of silent shock and incredulity.

I caught a fleeting glimpse of a smile on Celestia’s face before her scowl returned, as if a mask had slipped from her face to allow us a glimpse of the true pony behind it before being hastily reapplied again. She recovered quickly, in stark contrast to her younger sister who rolled her eyes and buried her head in her forelegs in embarrassment.

The wad of papers dropped, making an audible ‘thump’ noise that rapidly restored order by cutting through the general background noise of ponies coughing, breathing, and quietly whispering around me. I heard Spike yelp at the noise, but thankfully there were no further outbursts from him; Twilight Sparkle had instructed him to start jotting down minutes of the meeting on paper to be recorded for posterity. [The minutes are, of course, kept in the Royal Guard Archive. It is not necessary to read them, as Blueblood’s description of this meeting is actually more accurate than Spike’s, which is mostly made up of how delicious the treats were.]

“Over three hundred of my little ponies were killed as a result of your collective incompetence,” she said with no small amount of venom in her voice. [This is the early estimated death toll of the battle, which was later revised to four hundred and thirty-seven.] Her hoof, clad in a golden horseshoe that scintillated in the bright sunlight streaming through the cracked and broken windows, tapped on the pile of papers before her. “Explain.”

Nopony did.

Not that I could blame them; nopony wanted to be subjected to the torrent of verbal castigation in front of all of their friends, rivals, and peers, however justified I knew it would be. A couple of the braver ponies, or more cowardly depending on how one looks at it, tried to make a break for it through the doors, only to find their passage blocked by the two fearsome pegasus soldiers standing guard over it. No amount of ranting and raving, pulling rank and threatening all manner of unpleasant but still legally sanctioned punishments, would dissuade them from their sacred duties as the Princess’s personal guard. [To elaborate on this point, the personal bodyguards of my sister and I are drawn from the Royal Guard regiments, during this time they are considered to be outside the usual Royal Guard rank structure and take orders only from members of the Royal Family.] I had already checked out the possible escape routes beforehoof, and discounted that one for the aforementioned reason. The only alternatives were the windows, which were much too high for me to climb out of and the shattered panes still contained broken shards of glass for anypony stupid enough to attempt it to impale themselves upon, or to somehow burrow my way through the old wooden panels into the cellar.

“Come now,” she said, tapping her golden hoof on the table before her impatiently, “I want to hear your excuses.”

“Acceptable losses,” said Field Marshal Iron Hoof, a twinge of anxiety inflecting in his normally expressionless monotone. Despite being taller than most ponies in the room I still had to rear up slightly on my hind legs to catch a glimpse of the khaki-coloured pony in the corner of the room. His facial expression was the blank rictus of a well-practiced poker face, at least what little of it could be seen past the peaked cap pulled so low as to cast his eyes in shadow and the enormous bushy moustache like two small, furry voles had taken up residence on his upper lip, which began to twitch nervously.

Celestia turned her head slowly, her ethereal mane wafting gently on the invisible and intangible solar winds as she did so. She arched an eyebrow imperiously and tilted her head back slightly to look down her long muzzle at the Field Marshal in a slow and deliberate piece of theatre. That was what all of this was, thought I, as I observed the normally stoic and emotionless Iron Hoof, supreme commander of the Royal Guard, very gradually begin to lose his nerve and break down.

With a gentle wave of her golden hoof Celestia summoned a soldier-servant from their hiding places in the dark corners of the room. A nervous mare, probably in her mid-teens and therefore only doing this as a means of fast-tracking her way to earning a commission on recommendation from the Field Marshal, trotted on over. She tripped occasionally on the rough and pitted floor as she approached, before bowing low and graciously before the Diarchs.

“Would you be a dear and fetch a fresh pot of tea for my sister and I, please?”

The maid mumbled a response, and then scampered off through a set of doors I presumed led to the kitchen area. As I watched, I yearned for Celestia to just get on with this ridiculous and uncomfortable posturing.

“Now,” she said, finally deigning to continue, “what did you just say?”

“I-it’s a matter of ratios,” Iron Hoof stammered, speaking more to the floor between his forelegs than to the Princesses. “In order to maintain parity with the Changelings our stallions have to kill ten drones for every guardspony we lose. Our best estimates for the Battle of Black Venom Pass indicate that we have achieved—”

“Ratios?” Celestia arched an eyebrow imperiously as she interrupted the stallion. The soldier-servant returned with her teeth clamped around a tray. Upon this tray were a teapot and two dainty cups as requested, all made of fine porcelain with a delicate pink and sky blue flower motif. Steam rose from the teapot’s spout, which had been cunningly crafted to resemble a dragon’s head and neck so that, when poured, it would look like the dragon is vomiting tea. I personally thought it was rather hideous, but it seemed that the Field Marshal liked it; evidently whatever skills Faust had bestowed upon him to make up for his singular lack of imagination and poor social skills, sartorial elegance was not one of them.

The maid placed the tray on the table in front of the Princesses, avoiding the small pile of papers. She was dismissed, much to her obvious relief, with a quiet ‘thank you’. Celestia set about pouring the amber-brown liquid into the cups provided, and as she did so, she continued speaking.

“This is war, not accountancy; the lives of my little ponies are precious to me, and they are not resources to be wasted. I will not allow you to drag Equestria into a war of attrition that we cannot possibly hope to win.”

“Ma’am, with all due respect,” he continued, using that all too familiar phrase all soldiers use with their commanding officers to mean ‘with absolutely no respect’, “You cannot afford to be so weak-hearted and naive. No amount of skill on my part or any of the officers, nor the quality of our equipment and the training of the guardsponies, will enable victory without the sacrifice of ponies’ lives. You and the nation must learn to bear such loses if we are to win this war.”

Princess Celestia quietly sipped her tea, which in the ensuing silence that followed the Field Marshal’s short monologue seemed eerily loud and awkward; as if she were deliberately slurping in that same uncouth manner most uneducated ponies do when presented with a cup of tea. Naturally, Celestia is utterly incapable of performing any act without a supreme sense of decorum and grace (except when she thinks she is alone with a very large cake); having pretty much invented the concept of etiquette in the first place, so I simply put the ill-mannered noise down to my own heightened nervousness.

So when Princess Luna finally spoke up, it was quite a shock to us all.

“You dare?” she hissed, her voice felt rather than heard, as if it came from within my own head and scratched at the walls of my sanity.

The Night Mare rose and planted her forehooves on the table, her steel sabatons gouging two great U-shaped grooves into the antique wood. Her eyes flickered with unearthly light, like the baleful glow of the full moon on a cloudless night, as she swept her predatory gaze over the assembled mass of ponies before her. Knowing what was coming next I crouched down and put my hooves in my ears as a necessary precaution, and gently nudged Fine Vintage and indicated that he should do the same. The austere and proper officer looked as if I had just recently gone insane before he finally worked out my meaning and followed suit.

“YOU DARE PRESUME TO LECTURE US ABOUT WAR?”

The Royal Canterlot Voice blasted through the hall, the sheer concussive force of her voice made the rickety old beams and wooden walls of the ramshackle structure shudder and quiver in a way that I felt was not conducive to the immediate survival of everypony in the room. I believe it is only by Faust’s own divine intervention that saved us, and certainly not the architectural skills of the inbred country folk who built this thing, for whom health and safety guidelines in the construction industry are, at best, to be taken as a polite suggestion.

My cap was blown off my head and my mane, which for the first time in a fortnight was coiffed and styled into something approaching ‘smart’, was now completely and utterly ruined. I felt something lukewarm splatter onto my face, and tentatively peeking up to see what it was I was at first shocked at what initially looked like blood hit me, but on closer inspection it was revealed that Fine Vintage’s wineglass had been shattered by the force of Luna’s voice and sprayed its contents over us [This is unlikely, as sheer volume alone is not enough to make glass shatter. It is more likely that Fine Vintage accidently crushed the glass with his own magic]. Thankfully, he regained enough of his concentration to catch the shards of glass before they shredded my face into ribbons.

Princess Luna was apoplectic. Her body shook with barely controlled rage, ears angled forward aggressively, and her wings spread to their fullest span, as if she was struggling to keep herself from leaping over the table and tearing everypony apart in the room with her bare hooves. To this day I am not certain whether it was simply a trick of the mind or whether it was actually happening, but it seemed as if all of the light and colour in the room was being drained away from it.

Her face twisted into a snarl of pure, unadulterated anger as she swung her hoof forth in the Field Marshal’s direction, who, to my eternal surprise, stood stoically before the nightmarish vision before him with only the faint quivering of his upper lip to betray any fear he might have been feeling. She sucked in a deep breath, and as her lungs filled with air the armour plates strapped across her barrel and chest clanged together like an oversized wind chime in a hurricane.

I pre-emptively put my hooves in my ears once more, though I feared it would not provide adequate protection from the full force of the Royal Canterlot Voice. While it would be rather unfair to blame the tinnitus that would come to affect me later in life solely on Princess Luna, standing close by to a cannon going off one too many times probably having more to do with it, I still can’t help but wonder if she didn’t inflict the Royal Canterlot Voice on me quite as much in the early part of my career I would not have to contend with this irritating and nigh-constant ringing in my ears.

When the expected aural assault did not come I felt rather foolish for having ducked and plugged my ears as if taking cover from an artillery strike, but that feeling soon passed when I realised that practically everypony was doing much the same thing. Cannon Fodder was the exception, as usual, and trotted up to me with an unusual expression on his face that I could only describe as ‘dull surprise’. In his mouth was my cap, which he had evidently retrieved shortly after it had been blown halfway across the room.

The only other ponies who weren’t cowering, hiding, or making some sort of obeisance in a vain attempt to placate her, were Twilight Sparkle, Cannon Fodder — who looked decidedly unimpressed with Luna's display — and Princess Celestia. The latter touched her armoured hoof to Luna’s foreleg, rubbing the dark velvety fur reassuringly while looking up with a sympathetic yet somehow firm expression, while the former simply trotted up to Luna’s side with the same sort of suicidal determination normally reserved for insane stunt pilots.

“Princess,” she whispered, though the distinct lack of excess noise around us made her quiet voice seem rather loud and clear, “Remember what we taught you — use your inside voice when addressing your subjects!”

Luna gave an abrupt ‘harrumph’ of contempt before sitting down, idly brushing off her elder sister’s hoof as she did so and shooting an uncompromisingly harsh glare at Twilight that seemed to say ‘that’s it, you’re now on the list’. We all watched anxiously as the dark alicorn sucked in a deep breath and closed her eyes, as if trying out one of those fatuous New Age methods to calm one down and eliminate negative thoughts. The assembled ponies slowly drifted, as if by natural magnetism, towards the far end of the room closer to the only obvious exit. Those unfortunate enough to be too close to the Princesses instead gravitated towards Celestia, with the exception of most of the Night Guard officers, as if the Princess of the Sun would protect them from the wrath of the Princess of the Night.

It seemed like a game of good cop/bad cop, or to be more accurate, ‘good princess/psychopathic bitch-queen princess’. The damnable thing was that this cheap little trick, normally reserved for small-time police officers who have seen far too many cop films to use on juvenile petty criminals, seemed to be working wonders on the experienced veteran officers around me. Indeed, I recall that same technique used on me by two novice members of the Gryphon secret police who were so comically inept at it they ended up incriminating themselves [Blueblood’s involvement in the Gryphonburg Conspiracy, while fascinating, need not trouble us here]. In allowing Princess Luna to, well, be herself in this meeting, the officers would automatically look to Princess Celestia for protection and comfort, thus making them all the more malleable to manipulation. I supposed its success here was down to the rather unique place Princess Celestia holds in the minds of just about every pony in Equestria, such that the very idea of doing anything to make her even the slightest bit upset is so utterly repellent that most of us tend to bend over backwards just to try and please her. [Blueblood is mostly accurate in his summation. However, make no mistake, I do this because needs must and not because I enjoy it; sometimes my little ponies need a quiet nudge in the right direction.] At any rate, despite my misgivings about her technique, which I found to be as transparent as it was tasteless, but then again a lifetime of dissembling and arse-covering allows me to spot when another pony is doing it just as easily, I could not doubt its effectiveness.

“How can so many of you have forgotten your history?” said Luna, her voice thankfully back to what could be considered safe for everypony’s hearing, though it had lost none of its power for it. “Equestria was forged upon the anvil of war, its foundations are the bodies of the fallen, their blood its mortar that binds it together, and it was the Royal Pony Sisters who led our forces into battle. For over one thousand years since the Three Founders of Equestria, Princess Platinum, Commander Hurricane, and Chancellor Puddinghead, raised the flag on what would later be known as Canterlot to my banishment for my crimes in the Nightmare Heresy, Equestria has known only constant and unrelenting warfare for its survival. Equestria has only endured those dark times through the courage and sacrifice of the Royal Guard, whose exalted members my sister and I were honoured to stand and fight shoulder to shoulder with.

“What would they say if they could see you all now? They who held the line at Ghastly Gorge, who stormed the sheer cliffs of Vanhoover, who were forced to fight against me, their very own Princess whom they loved and adored, when I fell to the Nightmare? What would they think to see that the peace for which they had martyred themselves for would breed officers and leaders of such incompetence? They would be ashamed of you!”

She paused for dramatic effect, casting her stern and chilling gaze over the mass of assembled ponies before her, most of whom cowered and looked away rather than meet her eyes. Naturally, I did not want to be seen as anything less than the absolute pinnacle of stallionhood and pride, despite my stomach twisting itself into all manner of interesting and intriguing shapes that would keep a geometry teacher entertained for many hours, so I pretended to be busy with Cannon Fodder and my hat. He left some residual drool, cake crumbs, and some icing on the visor where he had been holding it with his mouth.

Naturally, most of us expected Princess Luna to unleash the Royal Canterlot Voice upon us once more and just destroy everypony’s sense of hearing in one fell swoop. Indeed, a few of the ponies took to sheltering under the large table with their hooves on their ears as if taking cover. I attempted to look as nonchalant as possible as I wiped the mess from my cap, and it seemed that a few of the ponies nearby, including Captain Fine Vintage attempted to copy my example.

So when she spoke again after that long pause in a soft, quiet voice, barely louder than a whisper, we were all quite surprised.

“War is about willpower, Field Marshal, not about balancing casualty lists; the numbers that are dead is no indication of triumph or failure. Defeat is merely the destruction of the ponies’ determination to continue fighting, and nothing will do more to erode the willpower of the Equestrian ponies to prosecute this war than the wastage of lives for very little gain. If ponies are to die in this war, then you are to ensure that their lives are spent for meaningful goals, not thrown away for hopeless endeavours mired by the incompetence of the officer class. Is that clear, Field Marshal?”

Defeated, Iron Hoof bowed his head in reticence and nodded his head, mumbling a very quiet, “Yes, Your Highness.”

“If we are to speak in the crass terms of pure mathematics,” said Celestia, idly munching on a sugar cube as she did so in a calculated, and rather transparent if you ask me, disarming move to ease the tension somewhat, “Then the numbers are against us, anyway. The Changelings can muster an army that numbers in millions, and while a Changeling drone is no match for a highly trained and dedicated guardspony, they can recuperate their losses far more quickly than us. A war of attrition with the Changelings is doomed to failure from the very start.”

“Y-yes, Your Highness, I understand.” Naturally he was lying right through his big bushy moustache, though nopony had any idea about that until years later when we became mired in trench warfare and forced to clear Changeling hives tunnel by bloody tunnel. I wonder now if the venerable old Field Marshal had picked up The Big Alphabet Book of Military Strategy during his time in the Academy and only got as far as reading ‘Chapter One: A is for Attrition’ before getting bored and picking up a Playmare magazine instead.

“General Crimson Arrow,” she said, turning her attention to the quiet and subdued General in the corner of the room who seemed to be doing his hardest to try and melt into the wooden walls behind him, “You, above all others, bear the greatest responsibility for this. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I did my duty,” he said flatly, his normally jovial and friendly tone of voice now emotionless and devoid of inflection. He also sounded raspy, as if dehydrated, and much quieter than usual, such that I had to strain even in the tense silence in order to hear him clearly.

“Of course you did,” said Celestia dryly, her voice veritably dripping with barely concealed sarcasm. “But it was your intransigence that very nearly spelt disaster for the Royal Guard. Were it not for the intervention of my nephew, Prince Blueblood, the entire 3rd Regiment of the Solar Guard may have been utterly destroyed and the fortress of Maredun overrun.”

I noticed that everypony was suddenly looking at me, expecting me to say something. I realised this rather belatedly, I admit, so fixated was I in cleaning my cap and placing it on my head. Fortunately for me, eyewitnesses tend to recall my austere and princely bearing more than me not paying enough attention to what was going on around me.

“I merely did what was required of me,” I said, once again indulging in that false modesty that ponies seem to think befits a great hero. “The praise belongs to the brave stallions and mares who fought so well in the Pass.”

It was a clichéd line certainly, and far too reminiscent of the rather corny slogans that adorn the many propaganda posters that blighted Equestria’s streets, but sadly it was the best I could come up with on such short notice. It worked, however, judging by the rumble of polite applause and general murmurs of affirmation that rippled through the ponies around me.

Auntie Luna’s response was rather more interesting; her eyes were wide and her jaw hanging wider and flapping uselessly, giving the rather startling impression of a hungry guppy fish at feeding time. She rapidly regained her composure, and as the noise of the crowd around me started to die down I could hear her whisper to Celestia in Old Equestrian, the ancient language of the Goddesses, “Who is this stallion and what has he done with our syphilitic, waste-of-space nephew?”

I ignored the comment, mostly, though I confess to feeling some small measure of pride at the fact that, despite the rather vulgar insult which the good Princess probably should have kept to herself, given that most of the officers present here probably had a classical education and therefore reasonably fluent in Old Equestrian, she had finally acknowledged the fact that we are related by blood. Princess Celestia too ignored Luna’s comment, and instead fixed me with a rather intense glare as she took one more sip of her tea. Her expression was rather quizzical, with an eyebrow arched imperiously, and I feared that she looked past the unwanted facade of the noble hero I was now struggling to maintain and saw the truth. If she did, I could at least count on the fact that my dear Auntie would not be so vindictive to ‘out me’ in front of everypony. [I found Blueblood’s unexpected reputation for heroics to be rather useful in later endeavours, much to his evident irritation, which will be described in detail in later entries of this manuscript.]

Celestia poured herself a second cup of tea from the pot. “I think it might be best if we start from the beginning,” she said, in the rather condescending manner of a schoolteacher trying to get a class of particularly slow foals to understand. “Can any of you tell me why Canterlot fell in a mere ten minutes?”

Stony silence ensued once more, save for Twilight Sparkle who thrust her hoof high in the air and jumped up and down on the spot, making some rather foalish noises unbecoming of the Princess’s personal student. There was a broad, manic grin to her face, and her eyes sparkled with the need to educate and lecture ponies around her, sparking barely-suppressed memories buried in my psyche of our shared classes in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, where her ten minute presentations on magical theory tended to last several days. [Despite being two years older than Twilight Sparkle, Blueblood did indeed share classes with Twilight Sparkle. Blueblood had to be kept back a year after poor test scores, and Twilight was allowed to enter the school one year early.]

Despite silently willing for somepony else to answer and thus spare us from being subjected to a lecture that would outlast the entire war itself in terms of its length, everypony around me remained utterly silent. Instead, rather cowardly I might add (though it’s what I would have done in their position), they took relief in the fact that they would escape the intensely awkward and psychologically scarring inquisition from the two Royal Pony Sisters, which they had just witnessed being inflicted upon Field Marshal Iron Hoof moments before.

The serene Princess of the Sun let out a sigh of exasperation, clearly feeling much the same as I did, before she reluctantly waved a hoof and said, “Very well, Twilight Sparkle.”

“And do try to keep this one under five minutes this time,” said Luna dismissively.

Luna’s warning did nothing to dampen Twilight Sparkle’s newfound enthusiasm, for the normally rather shy mare had beamed brightly at the opportunity to bore us all with her vast knowledge and thus prove herself worthy of being Auntie Celestia’s personal lapdog. She cantered up, almost skipping, between the two Princesses and cleared her throat.

“The exact reasons behind the Fall of Canterlot are many and varied,” she began; her voice became clipped and rather formal as she delivered the lecture. I instantly wished that I had acquired several glasses of wine before they were all taken away, for I had no desire to endure a Twilecture sober. “The primary reason, however, directly involves the Captain of the Guard, Shining Armour, and how his command of the defence of Canterlot was severely compromised from within.”

“Yeesh, Twiley,” said Shining Armour, blushing slightly and looking uncharacteristically awkward, an expression I took no small measure of enjoyment out of. “You’re making me look bad in front of everypony.”

“He’s quite capable of doing that by himself,” I whispered dryly to Fine Vintage, who chuckled quietly at the little joke. Fortunately, nopony around me seemed to have heard that, or at least they chose to ignore it.

“Don’t worry, BBBFF, I’m going somewhere with this.” She smiled sweetly at her highly embarrassed older brother, before turning her attention back upon her thankfully rather brief lecture, “Shining Armour was the weak link in the Royal Guard’s command structure, though not of his own will. Firstly, the War Ministry had very little intelligence about the exact nature of the threat against Canterlot, and so prepared for a long and protracted siege against ‘conventional’ forces. The timing of the threat was nearly perfect; coinciding with the much-anticipated wedding between Shining Armour and Princess Cadence, so the Royal Guard found itself torn between its primary duty of maintaining the defence of the city and providing additional security for the wedding.

“Secondly, with everypony’s attention focused on the wedding and on the threat from without, nopony could have foreseen Queen Chrysalis’ infiltration of the city and her foalnapping of Princess Cadence. With the leader of the Changeling invasion force intimately close to the commander of Canterlot’s defences, she had full and unrestricted access to every single facet of the Royal Guard's defence plans. As Shining Armour’s willpower was sapped by Chrysalis’ increasingly powerful psychic domination he became ever more suggestible to her poisonous influences. The defences, already severely compromised by the enemy’s knowledge of them, were further damaged as Chrysalis influenced several crucial command decisions — the decision to move the bulk of the Royal Guard contingent out into the Canterlot Province hinterlands being the most strategically important. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Royal Guard remnants in the city were overwhelmed so quickly.”

[Again, even with Blueblood’s remarkably precise long-term memory, he is only mostly accurate in replicating Twilight Sparkle’s lecture. Unfortunately, this remains the most complete transcript of this lecture, as Spike was incapacitated by a debilitating stomach ache halfway through the speech.]

Celestia slurped her tea once more. “Do you now see? My little ponies, the Fall of Canterlot had proved that the Changelings are a dangerous enemy who will employ the use of great cunning and subterfuge to achieve victory. You believed that this war will be easy; that you will win a few great battles and it will all be over and then you can return home and bathe in the glory of victory. You have underestimated your enemy and you have failed to learn from past mistakes, and in doing so you have committed the two greatest sins possible in warfare.”

Princess Celestia placed her now-empty cup back on its saucer with a hollow ‘clink’ of porcelain on fine porcelain. “We are not in a surplus of officers,” she said, dabbing at her mouth delicately with a small white napkin, “and if it were not for that fact, we would have cashiered most of you instantly and have you replaced with ponies of greater competence and intelligence than you. As it happens, we are willing to give you a second and final chance, which is why we have set up a Royal Commission headed by my personal student, Twilight Sparkle, with aims toward wholesale reform of the Royal Guard.”

A murmur of dissent rippled through the ponies surrounding me, though it never really developed more than a few hushed whispers complaining about civilian interference in military matters, and that it was patently ridiculous that they should be subjected to the scrutiny of a silly little mare who did not even come from a good family even if she was Celestia’s prized pupil and her brother was Captain of the Royal Guard. I did sympathise with them, but that little voice was rapidly silenced by the altogether more rational notion that the Royal Guard was certainly in need of reform if I was to avoid being martyred.

Celestia held up a hoof and the bickering died down. “The Royal Guard must change if we are to achieve final victory over the forces of Queen Chrysalis. Each of you now faces a choice; you can either embrace this change, or instead foolishly cling to your outdated and parochial ideals, and thus condemn yourselves to stagnation and finally defeat.”

“Furthermore,” said Princess Luna, “In light of Commissar-Prince Blueblood’s success with the 1st Night Guards, and the staggering incompetence we have seen from the rest of you, we shall be introducing commissars across the Royal Guard at a regimental level and in the General Staff very soon. They will be our divine will incarnate; they will inflame the weak, guide the lost, and advise you in all command decisions. They will be utterly without mercy to punish officers who are incompetent or cowardly; for it is your actions that will mean life and death for the ponies under your command. If you perform your duties with the valour and dedication expected of officers of the Royal Guard then you have nothing to fear from them, if you do not...”

She left the remainder of that threat unspoken, but judging by the fleeting and worried glances in my direction nopony was having any difficulty in imagining what sort of heinous and medieval punishments I might have in store for them should I or my future colleagues find them unsuitable for command. The ignominious end of Captain Clear Heavens’ career and the temporary removal of Crimson Arrow from command had conclusively proved to everypony, myself included, that I was prepared to use the power and authority unwillingly bestowed upon me. Though only I knew, and perhaps Auntie Celestia, just how reluctantly.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut this tea party short,” said Celestia, rising to her hooves and placing her soiled napkin back on the table with the empty teacup, “my sister and I must be in Appleloosa before sundown. Thank you all for your kind hospitality, I pray that our next visit will be under happier circumstances.”

The two alicorns moved to leave, with Twilight Sparkle tagging along behind them like a stray cat following a potential new owner home, and Spike draped across her back and groaning in pain as his bulging stomach inflicted painful retribution on him for his wanton indulgence in diverse, saccharine confections. The crowd of ponies parted to allow them to leave like oil through water, and the doors slammed shut behind them with a tense and resonant finality.

Author's Note

Well, this one was probably the most difficult chapter to right so far, which is why it's rather late. Hope you all like it anyway.

Bloodstained (Part 4)

Subsequent attempts to revive the tea party fell flat, the mood having been completely and irrevocably killed by the unremitting verbal broadside from the two Princesses. Many ponies simply left, leaving the Field Marshal and a few hangers-on alone in the town hall like the most unpopular foal in school on his birthday party with the handful of ‘friends’ forced to attend by their parents. I lingered for a while, to see if I could scrounge some more free food and drink out of the Field Marshal, before leaving when I noticed that the Night Guard officers had already gone. After that I left hurriedly, claiming that I was needed to help Twilight Sparkle settle into her new surroundings, though really I just wanted to get out of that wretched party and spend some quality time with my Auntie ‘Tia instead. Cannon Fodder swiftly followed me, but only after stuffing the myriad pouches and pockets that festooned even his dress uniform with cake and biscuits until they were bulging and overflowing with confections.

I was bitterly disappointed that I did not have the chance to speak with Celestia during the party, and as I trudged my way back to the encampment, Cannon Fodder following me like the dutiful assistant he always is, I prayed that I would not be too late. The all-too-frequent confrontations with my own mortality had helped put my mind into a rather new perspective, and I felt the need to try and repair the bridges I had burned down with my foalish and arrogant behaviour. Luna, however, I felt was a lost cause and would never, ever even begin to like me. Although her attitude towards me had started to soften by that point, I believed, back then, that even with the gradual thawing of our relationship it would take far longer than my natural life span [which was rather long compared to that of most ponies, owing to his weak alicorn heritage] before we could be considered on friendly terms. Still, getting her to accept our tentative blood relation was some small step in the right direction.

I confess to feeling somewhat elated after the party, though everypony else was downright miserable. I had hoped that they would take Celestia’s and Luna’s words to heart and begin prosecuting this war in a proper and sensible manner, particularly Iron Hoof and Crimson Arrow, which would mean I could get this unpleasantness over and done with as soon as possible and return to some semblance of a normal life. But then again I was not looking forward to being forced to endure Twilight Sparkle’s company for any extended period of time, particularly if we were to go into battle once more. The prospect of avoiding said combat by having to foal-sit Celestia’s favourite pet only narrowly outweighed the disadvantages of being subjected to her obsessive attention to detail, incessant logorrhoea, and occasional bouts of crippling insanity.

Cannon Fodder and Spike had bonded over the course of the failed tea party; both sharing the same interests in downing vast quantities of sugary confection, especially if it’s free, and both seeing themselves as number one assistants to very powerful and influential ponies. Spike even spoke of forming a trade union of Number One Assistants, though he only had a tentative grasp of what a trade union actually does and seemed to think it was some sort of social club, as opposed to the venomous tendrils of Collectivism infesting the lower orders of industrialised Equestrian society.

Despite the hope that welled within in me that we might conceivably win this war and, more importantly, that there was a decent chance that I might actually survive long enough to see its end, Princess Luna’s final warning about the expansion of the Commissariat worried me. They were a completely unknown quantity, and beyond some terse correspondence between myself and the Commissar-General in the War Ministry I had absolutely no contact with any other member of the organisation. While I believed I would be able to act rationally when it came to exercising the rather absurd amount of power that lay in my hooves, I feared that my future colleagues and brothers-in-arms would not be quite so sensible when it came to enforcing discipline. Nevertheless, I was reasonably confident that any rational officer would learn to behave himself with the omnipresent gaze of the Commissariat lingering over him and therefore any unpleasant confrontations between the Ancien Régime and the new guard would be avoided. If anypony who happens to be reading this has been paying attention, they will know that reality has an increasingly nasty habit of taking my hopeful expectations out behind the scooter shed and bludgeoning them to death with a sledgehammer.

It was late afternoon as we commenced our journey back, following a gentle trickle of officer ponies, all in similarly disheartened spirits, as they made their way back to the encampment, no doubt to sit in a darkened tent with a bottle of strong alcohol to contemplate where exactly their lives had gone wrong and what they could do about it. The sun, fat and yellow in the clear blue sky, was halfway through its descent into the western plains beyond the horizon. The blistering heat and muggy humidity that is the bane of my existence here in the Badlands was slowly starting to fade away into the horrid chill of the cold desert night, which I found to be marginally preferable to sweating through my shirt all day. The ungodly stench of war would linger on, however, and only grow worse with the coming heat of the new day, and with it so would the vermin: disgustingly fat-bodied flies that seemed to get everywhere, especially in one’s food, tiny mosquitoes that would sneak in unnoticed to feed off ponies’ blood and leave irritating bites in their wake, and legions of rats that were slowly driving the Catering Corps to insanity.

“I think that went pretty well,” said Cannon Fodder abruptly as we cleared the town and crossed the short expanse of wasteland to the encampment.

I cocked my head to one side in confusion. “By what measure can you possibly judge that as having gone ‘pretty well’?” I asked incredulously.

“The food was nice,” he replied with a vacant shrug, “and there were no Changelings like the last party we went to.”

“Touché.” I had to concede that he did have a point in that respect; seeing as how the previous two parties I had attended resulted in my life thrust into terrifying and mortal danger, first from a very large cake and the second from a rabid horde of Changelings, while being accompanied by a certain mare whose shrill and incessant whining could alone conquer the Pits of Tartarus itself. Perhaps I should have sent a letter to the War Ministry requesting that we fire Rarity out of a cannon into Queen Chrysalis’ hive and then sit back and wait for their inevitable surrender.

We trudged through the outer picquet lines, and the soldiers on sentry duty only made a token effort to stop us and check our identification papers to ensure that we were not Changeling spies. The fact that when a Changeling assumes a pony’s identity they usually go out of their way to steal their personal effects to complete the illusion apparently hadn’t occurred to them. While I was thankful that we had managed to get through with the minimal of hassle, for I did not want to waste any more time than strictly necessary and risk missing Auntie ‘Tia completely, I made a mental note to speak with the provosts [the military police] and the General Staff later about the importance of maintaining base security and a gentle reminder about how things very nearly turned to disaster in Black Venom Pass as a result of Changeling infiltration. However, as we crossed into the encampment, that notion was swiftly pushed out of my mind.

Celestia and Luna were still there, thankfully, as we reached the parade ground where their chariot had touched down a few long hours earlier. The vehicle was still parked in the middle of the busy square, and could be glimpsed briefly between the marching formations of dust-covered Solar Guard ponies, a few hundred feet or so from the edge from which we had approached. The four spoked wheels of the opulent carriage had gouged two great furrows in the ground’s uneven surface, and the iridescent gold reflected the glorious rays of the setting sun like a miniature simulacrum of the bright solar orb itself. The two Princesses, one as magnificent and bright as a warm spring day and the other as dark and mysterious as a completely cloudless night, stood by their craft. Next to them, their four pegasus bodyguards and personal chauffeurs tended to the chariot, inspecting the wheels, harnesses, and limbers and performing the usual twenty-point check before they could take flight again.

At first I feared I was too late, and thus broke into a brisk trot in an effort to at least say ‘goodbye’ properly to Auntie Celestia before she left, which was something I was unable to do when I was unceremoniously dragged out against my will and shipped off to this Faust-forsaken part of the world. Irritatingly, the parade ground was still in heavy use despite the Princesses’ visit, as sections and platoons of the 1st Solar Guard Regiment practiced square bashing [military slang for drill]. Sergeants and corporals berated their soldiers’ alleged inability to march in perfect synchronisation by screaming obscenities and questioning the guardsponies’ sexual preferences in increasingly louder voices, and all of this to the tune of the regimental band attempting to play ‘I Vow To Thee, My Equestria’ with their habitual enthusiasm and distinct lack of anything approaching musical talent.

I weaved my way around the marching formations like a lost dog dodges the heavy Manehatten traffic, leaving scattered formations of confused guardsponies who were torn between stopping to salute me as I passed them or ignoring the distraction and carrying on marching regardless. Whatever they did earned them a torrent of further vocal abuse and threats of bloody violence from their NCOs regardless of their actions being right or wrong. I ignored them, hell-bent as I was on making sure that I at least have a short conversation with my beloved Auntie, and thus leaving a trail of mayhem and chaos in my wake that was further compounded as Cannon Fodder barrelled through the confused formations with his usual single-minded determination to stay by my side at all times.

That if the Princesses were preparing to leave they would have cleared out the parade ground so that their pegasi would have enough space to build up speed for a decent take-off had not occurred to me at that point, and if it had I probably would have taken a rather more leisurely pace that did not interfere with the Solar Guard’s drill practice. At any rate, it was all inconsequential; the ponies might have taken a bollocking from their NCOs for daring to do anything without their express permission but ultimately they would recover from the peculiar distraction and get on with yet more drill.

The Princesses and the carriage had a small space cleared for them in the centre of the parade square, which was cordoned off with a barrier made of short sticks placed a few feet from each other and connected by long hemp rope. While I initially doubted that such a barrier would be effective against any intruder, as I was able to simply step over it, I realised that it was just there as a guide to prevent the marching troops from wandering into the chariot. To march sections and platoons straight into walls and other solid objects, sometimes straight into other ponies if a drill instructor is feeling particularly cheeky, and watch the hapless ponies continue to march on the spot in front of the bemused obstruction to the vague amusement of all observing is a fairly common trick used by NCOs, so I just assume now that it was to prevent some sergeant or corporal trying that out with the royal chariot and the Princesses. [Actually, a few did attempt just that.]

The four pegasi bodyguards tended to their craft; checking the various harnesses and joints fastidiously for any faults or problems that might put their lives at risk. I say ‘their lives’ as two alicorn demi-goddesses they were to escort to Appleloosa were made of much sterner stuff than the average pony, being able to shrug off injuries that would likely kill you and me as if they were mere paper cuts.

Twilight Sparkle was beside the carriage tending to her luggage, which consisted of a number of large wooden trunks and a chest of the style that is normally seen being dragged out of the ground by surly pirates. Being the fastidious little pony that I know and can barely tolerate even existing, she had her checklist out and was partway through verifying the contents of her luggage against the enormous list in front of her. Ordinarily, I supposed, she would have employed the aid of her ‘number one assistant’, but he was still paying the price for his over-indulgence and lay groaning in pain on the ground, obviously in no position to lend a claw in aid.

“Uhhrr... never again,” he groaned, and his stomach made a hideous gurgling noise like a caged animal.

Twilight popped her head up from her checklist. “You said that last time, and the time before that. I think you might have a serious problem!”

“Nuh-uh! I can quit whenever I want to!”

“You said that before, too.”

Captain Red Coat stood off to the side of the chariot and quietly observed Twilight as she tended to her luggage. He looked rather sick, with a haggard appearance and a rather green tinge to his cheeks underneath his grey fur. Evidently, he was still rather inebriated, though seemingly now stuck in the melancholy stage after his very public embarrassment at the hooves of Shining Armour. I later learned that this was the lad’s first experience with alcohol, and at a mere seventeen years old he shouldn’t have been allowed near the drinks table in the first place.

“Captain,” I said, injecting as much authority into my voice as possible, as I trotted on over to him. “How are you holding up?”

Red Coat shrugged. “I was so stupid, and now she’s probably never going to want to speak to me again. Besides, she’s the Princess’s personal student; she’s not going to be interested in some grammar school oik and the son of a minor accountant.”

The poor lad looked thoroughly despondent, and I feared that it would have some negative effect of his leadership of his company. Any organisational stratum of the Royal Guard, from sections through platoons, companies, regiments, armies, and the administrative staff, is only as good as the officer who commands it. An officer’s personality and his own state of mind reflects positively upon the stallions he commands, and in the interests of keeping myself alive by ensuring that the wall of heavily armoured ponies I intended to hide behind were in a suitable mental state to do so, I decided I’d lend him a hoof. After all, I did not want in a battle situation for him to suffer a sudden bout of despair, specifically the sort that melancholic romantic poets and modern ‘break-up’ pop songs fixate upon.

The teenage mind being as it is, constantly starved for sex but also very much incapable of holding its attention on one thing for any extended period of time, I considered just letting him borrow a few items from Cannon Fodder’s extensive library of specialist gentlecolt’s literature. Though I doubted that would be a good long-term solution, as I would not want to encourage that certain practice and Cannon Fodder would be rather unhappy with being forced to part with even a small part of his collection. I supposed giving him a little nudge in the right direction, even if his attempted relationship with Twilight Sparkle was doomed to failure, would at least help improve his self esteem for the time being.

“Go and help her with her luggage,” I suggested, and vaguely wondering at what point in my hitherto short but unexpectedly ascendant career my already prodigious job description included ‘regimental matchmaker’. Despite my proven track record when it came to meeting and bedding pretty young mares, I was hardly the best colt to be giving advice on doing so. My prey tended to be very impressionable and very bored daughters of minor aristocrats, and I merely had to say 'I am Celestia's nephew' and they were mine for the night. It rather took the sport out of it.

“But she’s a unicorn!” he protested. “I think she can handle all of that herself.”

“She’ll appreciate the effort anyway, Red Coat, and besides, it’ll give you a chance to talk to her. Just don’t use any more of Captain Blitzkrieg’s chat-up lines.”

“Well, okay, if you think so...”

I gave Red Coat a friendly pat on the shoulder and wished him luck before he trotted off to ‘help’ Twilight, whether or not she actually wanted or required it. It struck me as rather disturbing at how most ponies were often willing to just blindly follow whatever vague suggestion I put forth, though I usually find that many of my proposals tended to be the one obvious, unpleasant, but very necessary solution to our survival but nopony wants to admit it. But even I would think twice about following my own advice.

I shook my head despondently and left Red Coat with his latest attempt to seduce Twilight Sparkle, though I knew he had about as much chance of succeeding as Cannon Fodder winning the Miss Equestria beauty pageant. Still, being let down gently by the object of his affections would be better for him that being beaten to a bloody pulp by her over-protective elder brother.

Putting this latest insanity out of my mind for the time being I decided to focus on my original goal of seeing Auntie ‘Tia, so I bade Cannon Fodder to make sure that Captain Red Coat did not do anything untoward with Twilight. My veritable aide complied with his new duties as chaperone with his habitual stoicism and quiet obedience.

The Princesses themselves were standing away from the chariot, quietly conversing in Ancient Equestrian as I approached them. It appeared that they were having an argument of sorts, but speaking sotto voce [low voice] and in Ancient Equestrian implied that they did not want to be overheard. I wanted to respect their wishes, following Twilight’s example; not wanting to get involved in the affairs of alicorns which would no doubt lead to something unpleasant and possibly dangerous, but given the natural curiosity of ponies and my personal paranoia that anypony not wanting to be heard is invariably up to something sinister I just couldn’t help myself.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Luna, hissing through set teeth, “I cannot believe you’re suggesting we stand back and do nothing!”

“I am suggesting nothing of the sort,” said Celestia calmly and soothingly, as one would with a petulant child. “We will guide and advise our little ponies, but no, we cannot dictate and rule as we have done in the past; Equestrian society has moved on since your banishment.”

“I know,” she hissed, stomping a hoof in frustration and kicking up a small cloud of dust that wafted away in the warm breeze. “’Equestria’s government system has developed so much over the last one thousand years’,” she said, mimicking Twilight Sparkle’s rather studious and nagging voice when she delivers one of her infamous Twilectures, “’The old system of vassalage whereby feudal nobility swear fealty to one another and are subject to the divine autocratic personal rule by the two Warlord-Princesses has gradually developed into a constitutional diarchy, in which the executive and legislative power of the Crowns is exercised by the office of the Prime Minister and the Houses of Parliament respectively’.”

“Then you know we cannot undo one thousand years of political evolution. I apologise, sister, but an Act of Parliament forbids any alicorn Princess of Equestria from personally commanding any ponies under arms, and I have no intention of inviting a constitutional crisis by allowing you to break this edict.”

“An edict that was passed by short-sighted and ephemeral mortal ponies while I was exiled upon my moon and while you had lapsed into a coma following our fight...” Luna stopped and made a sudden pained expression, which disappeared as abruptly as it had formed upon her face, “...your fight with Nightmare Moon. This whole mess would have been avoided had we personally taken command of our armies and brought the fight to Chrysalis. I will not stand idly by while ponies’ lives are wasted by incompetent foals!”

“Don't forget, Chrysalis nearly killed me." Celestia stared into Luna's eyes with a soft, yet determined expression. "I cannot risk the same happening to you.”

Luna shook her head emphatically. “No, she only defeated you because you were holding back; you did not want to risk harming our subjects by unleashing your full power. The government be damned, sister; I don’t want to spend the war wasting away in Canterlot Castle with all the bureaucrats and their blasted red tape and toilet paper! I want to fight!"

I cleared my throat in the noisy manner one does when one wants to attract attention, and the two Princesses stopped and looked at me in surprise.

I had decided I had overheard enough, and did not want to earn the ire of both princesses for having listened in too much on what they had obviously intended as a private conversation between them, largely because I did not think that I could adequately pretend not to be eavesdropping; one who tries to affect nonchalance usually looks more suspicious as a result. Though what they were discussing did make me feel somewhat uneasy, I resolved to put it out of my mind. The edict of which they spoke of (as if I need to explain the post-Heresy Reconstruction, but judging by the declining standards in history education in Equestria’s state schools I probably have to, assuming the reader happens to be a low-born, state-educated commoner) was intended to ensure that the immense destruction caused by the Nightmare Heresy would never be repeated by delegating the command of the vast Legions across numerous officers and commanders, as opposed to being vested entirely in one individual who may or may not fall prey to feelings of jealousy and personal inadequacy and try to take over the world.

Celestia forced her usual kindly smile to her face.

“We will continue this discussion later, Luna,” said Celestia in modern Equestrian, apparently giving up any efforts to hide their conversation.

“Your experiments with democracy will bring Equestria nothing but ruin,” said Luna, and for perhaps the first time since her return to Equestria I agreed with her on something. She gave a snort of utmost contempt, matched only by the scowl on her face, as she climbed onto the chariot and watched the marching ponies.

Celestia breathed a heavy sigh of exasperation and shook her head in dismay as she watched her sister go, once more allowing me a glimpse of the pony underneath the regal façade she always wears like a shield. I found it rather disconcerting to see the two goddesses of Equestria, in whom we all look to for safety and guidance in trying times, behaving more like two bickering siblings than the serene deities they were supposed to be. As she turned her gaze back towards me, her habitual gentle smile returned once more to her face.

“Your Auntie Luna can be rather trying at times,” she said softly, “she does her best, but it is difficult to adjust after such a long absence. She’ll learn.”

The divine goddess of the sun, ruler of all Equestria and her territories and dominions overseas, stepped forth and bent her long, swan-like neck down and nuzzled me gently, which I returned tentatively and, frankly, I felt rather embarrassed by the open display of familial affection in front of everypony. Fortunately, everypony was rather too busy to pay much attention to us.

“I’m sure she means well,” I said, stepping back a little to allow myself some modicum of personal space again, as much as I love my Auntie Celestia, her tendency to show affection in public can be rather grating. “I think her taking command of the Royal Guard might be best, however.”

I was being earnest for once; Princess Luna would certainly do a far superior job of leading the Royal Guard to victory than Field Marshal Iron Hoof. Then again, in my opinion a boiled potato was more suited to command an army than the Field Marshal, and possessed a more interesting personality than him too. However, I knew the political fallout would be immense, and not many ponies would be particularly happy about a pony who was once the single most notorious war criminal in Equestrian history, whose armies slaughtered, burned, and raped in a vast swathe of destruction across the land to the very gates of Canterlot Castle, once again in charge of a large number of heavily armoured ponies. As getting trapped in the subsequent political turmoil was inimical to my overall goal of living an as stress-free and ultimately safe life as possible, given the rather precarious situation my unwanted reputation had forced me into, I then decided that perhaps it just was not worth it. Naturally, I would later be forced into said political turmoil regardless of what I wanted, so it made no difference in the end.

“I do not doubt her ability to command,” said Celestia gravely, no doubt having experienced her younger sister’s fighting prowess and tactical acumen on the battlefield during those dark days of the Nightmare Heresy. [I only faced Nightmare Moon once in battle, and that was during the Siege of Canterlot. And while Princess Luna was certainly a capable military leader, who led the Royal Guard to many great victories in the wars for Equestria’s unification, as Nightmare Moon she had lost all semblance of military sanity and relied heavily upon massed infantry charges that, while undoubtedly successful against the Loyalists in the opening stages of the Nightmare Heresy, were unsubtle and resulted in monstrous casualties that contributed to her final defeat at Canterlot.]

Celestia shook her head and said, “Never mind, she’ll understand eventually. Your Auntie Luna always hated politics; she seemed to think it got in the way of getting things done properly.”

Once again I found myself in that rare situation of agreeing with Luna. I vaguely wondered if Tartarus was freezing over at the same time.

“Do you really have to leave so soon?”

“I’m sorry, but there’s another dispute over land ownership between the settler ponies in Appleloosa and the buffalo tribes.”

“I still think you should...”

“No, Blueblood,” Celestia interrupted me by placing a hoof on my shoulder. Despite being clad in shimmering metal, it did not feel cold to the touch. “For the last time, I’m not going to evict the buffalos from their land and force them into reservations.” [Sadly, Blueblood’s proposal did garner quite a bit of support from Parliament, but I am thankful that he was rather too lazy and apathetic to put any serious effort into seeing it passed and that the opportunity for a more peaceful solution to the ongoing land disputes presented itself.]

I gave a vacant, nonchalant shrug that would have done Cannon Fodder proud, had he actually seen it; my venerable aide was rather preoccupied by watching over Red Coat struggle to lift up and arrange the grossly over-sized suitcases that Twilight had brought with her. I turned around to observe them, aware of my regal auntie stepping to my side, towering over me in a manner reminiscent of a mother over her foal, and then stretching a long and graceful wing over my comparatively smaller body. With the warmth emanating from her, like basking in the sun in a pleasant summer’s afternoon, I could not help but be reminded of the days of my late childhood and early adolescence when I lived with her.

We walked back towards the chariot slowly. With the airy feeling of nostalgia filling my mind I began to feel somewhat less discomfited by Celestia’s outward displays of affection, though I reminded myself that she was like this with just about everypony. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a degree of smugness when I saw Twilight Sparkle glance up at us from her ubiquitous checklist and, for a fleeting moment, I saw what I hoped was a small degree of jealousy on her pudgy little purple face.

“Blueblood, I want you to look after her,” said Celestia.

I blinked up in surprise at her, rather perplexed at the idea that Celestia would think that Twilight Sparkle, the mare who defeated Nightmare Moon, Discord, and numerous other threats to Equestria’s existence could possibly require looking after. Granted, this was before her controversial coronation as yet another bloody Princess of Equestria and ascension into our nation’s divine pantheon, but I’ll come to that later.

“Of course,” I said, “the Royal Guard can be an intimidating place for a young innocent mare such as her. Private Marathon and Corporal Hooves are both from Ponyville; I’ll assign them as her bodyguards.”

Celestia chuckled warmly, and hugged me closer to her side with her wing as we walked towards the chariot. There, Red Coat sat patiently as Twilight Sparkle continued to run through her checklist, which I assumed was merely a large list of assorted sundry items that she had brought with her. Knowing her as I did, they would likely be lots and lots of books. Fortunately, the studious little mare was rather too focused on her monstrously long checklist to pay any attention to what we were saying about her, or anything else going around her for that matter.

“You misunderstand me; I want you personally to watch over her.”

I blinked. “Pardon?”

My divine Auntie stopped as we reached the chariot, removed her wing from my back and stepped around to face me. As she loomed over me, her stern but motherly expression framed by the soft pastel shades of her flowing mane and her scintillating gold regalia, I could not help but feel rather small and insignificant. I suppressed the urge to prostrate myself, though I confess I found it difficult to look her in the eyes.

“I know you and Twilight have a...” she paused, as if trying to think of a more appropriate word, “...a history together, but I hope you two can be grown up enough to put that aside.”

I nodded my head. “Of course, Auntie.”

“Then hear me. The results of Twilight Sparkle’s commission will affect the military and political careers of many aristocratic and moneyed officers across the Royal Guard, many of whom fear that they will be found wanting when she publishes her findings for all of Equestria to see. I pray that such ponies will see this as an opportunity to amend their ways or retire their commissions gracefully. But I fear that there will be many who will want to affect the results of the commission to appear more favourable to them, by manipulating or threatening Twilight Sparkle herself. I do not wish to see her come to harm as a result.”

“I see,” I said pensively.

“Please, Blueblood, you and Shining Armour are the only ponies I can trust to protect her. My faithful student is a wonderfully intelligent mare, but she can be rather naive of such things. I have tried to shelter her from the political mire of Parliament and the Royal Court so that she may concentrate on her studies into the Magic of Friendship. You, however, are much more experienced in the cutthroat affairs of the aristocracy, and therefore ideal for this purpose.”

Well, technically I was most experienced in avoiding the tangled webs of lies, deceit, and backstabbing that plagues all strata of the rich and powerful in Equestria, but I supposed even that made me perfect for looking after Twilight. It was not something I was going to look forward to, but it was impossible to ignore a directive from Princess Celestia of all ponies. Granted, she still used that insufferable technique of masking what is in fact a direct order behind the alluring facade that I might actually have a choice in the matter. At any rate, I believed that protecting Twilight from the more politically minded and, frankly, insane ponies around us would be rather easy; a simple matter of imposing my supreme commissarial authority to block any who might be trying to cosy up to her for malicious ends or simply threaten her.

Oh how wrong I was, but I’ll come to that later.

“Of course,” I replied, tipping my head in respect and laying a forehoof over my chest. “On my honour, no harm will come to Lady Sparkle.”

“Thank you, Blueblood.” Celestia smiled and gave me a quick and gentle nuzzle before she stepped gracefully onto the chariot itself. The four guardsponies, apparently now satisfied that their vehicle was appropriately airworthy, set about securing themselves safely to the four yokes.

“How long will she be staying here?” I asked.

“As long as necessary.”

I gestured towards the gilded carriage. “Do you not want the honour guard to give you a proper send-off?”

Luna, to my surprise, snapped out of her sulk and said, “Nay, ‘tis better that we leave discreetly; we wish for those officers to think well upon our words and reflect upon their own performance. Besides, it would not do well to indulge in such pomp and circumstance in these troubled times.”

I had to disagree, but I kept my objection silent as I was rather not in the mood to get into an argument I would surely lose. If anything, giving the Princesses the proper royal send-off that they deserve would invariably give the ponies here a much needed morale boost after the rather lacklustre showing at Black Venom Pass. Morale is a fickle thing, and despite the infinite complexity of making large groups of young, hormonal stallions and mares happy for an extended period of time to keep them useful, sometimes it is rather small things like little ceremonies that can perk their spirits up, if temporarily at least.

The four pegasi stamped and snorted impatiently, stretching wide their long wings and flexing their powerful dorsal muscles in preparation for another long haul flight. Ahead of them the swarming formations of marching ponies had parted to leave a small runway, though the drill practice had certainly not ceased as their NCOs would be loathe for even royal ceremony to interrupt what they saw as the backbone of all Royal Guard operations.

As I took a few steps back away from the chariot to allow it free room to manoeuvre, and more importantly out of the way of the huge spoked wheels, Twilight Sparkle had apparently elected to rejoin us in the real world and abandoned her checklist to Red Coat and Cannon Fodder. She trotted up merrily to her side, beaming brightly at the prospect of her latest academic venture and simultaneously giving me a glimpse of what the next few months of my life might be like.

“Everything is double- and triple-checked, Your Highness!” said Twilight excitedly, bringing her hoof up to her forehead as she did so in a sort of clumsy salute. “I hope I have everything I need to get started; I have every history book I could find in the Golden Oaks Library about Equestria at war, plus plenty of parchment and quills. Ohhh, I just can’t wait to get started on this research project!”

Celestia chuckled, and I rolled my eyes in mild irritation. “Your enthusiasm is to be commended Twilight,” she said, “but remember; your findings here may mean the difference between victory or defeat and life and death for many of my little ponies. This is a very serious undertaking, but I can think of no mare better suited to this task than you.”

“I won’t let you down, Your Highness!” Twilight positively beamed with barely-contained pride at her mentor’s approval.

“Good luck, my faithful student; and to you, my nephew.”

At the stamp of her hoof the chariot lurched forwards awkwardly. The four straining pegasi pulled on their yokes, gathering speed and beating their powerful wings faster and faster. We watched patiently as the ungainly and inelegant craft, its garish luxury still somehow unmarred by the perennial dust and sand that tends to stain everything within a few minutes of arrival, careened down the runway faster and faster. The pegasi leapt into the air, muscles straining with the effort, and were then born aloft by their innate magical abilities of flight. The chariot, against all of the known rational laws of aerodynamics and common sense, followed suit.

Despite their desire to leave with as little fanfare as possible, many of the Solar Guard out on parade stopped to cheer the two Diarchs as they departed. Not that they seemed to mind, really, as I could see two hooves, one gilt in gold and the other clad in silver, waving down at the whooping crowd below them. I supposed that the rather more natural and spontaneous display of affection for their Princesses, especially when it happened to be against direct orders from their immediate NCOs and drill instructors, to be a rather more suitable send-off than gathering the honour guard once again for a contrived and forced ceremony. As the airborne chariot flew onwards, shrinking from my view until it became a tiny golden speck flittering through the reddening sky, the cheering died down as officers restored order to continue with their drill practice.

With the Princesses gone and with little else to do with the day, we all gathered up Twilight’s luggage; Red Coat and Cannon Fodder precariously balancing huge piles of luggage upon their broad backs while Twilight and I carried the remainder with our magic. Spike was still in no fit state to walk, his stomach grossly swollen and distended in a way hitherto thought impossible by all medical science and making ghastly noises as if it were a dying beast, and so he hitched a ride on Twilight’s back.

“I trust that your accommodation has been prepared for you?” I asked, eager to get back to my own tent and while away the rest of the afternoon and evening with naught but a bottle of finest single malt that I had negotiated out of the Quartermaster’s store for company.

Twilight nodded. “Colonel Sunshine Smiles was gracious enough to give me an empty tent.”

“I’ll help you settle in, then,” I said, reasoning that providing a little extra hospitality for our irritating guest might help me look a little more favourable in her eyes. Though I had little reason to fear from her scrutiny, as much of Equestria was under the false impression I was somepony of good moral fibre, a little extra insurance wouldn’t hurt.

“This is heavy!” said Red Coat, the chest and the small pile of suitcases wobbling precariously on his back. “Is this all books?”

“Mostly,” said Twilight. “I’ve packed every book I can find about warfare; On War, The Magic of War, the journals of Neighpoleon of Prance to name a few.”

“Oh, I read that in the Academy! Ooph, who knew paper could be so heavy?”

“Welcome to my world,” groaned Spike, but nopony paid much heed to him.

We made our way back to the Night Guards’ camp slowly, drawing a few odd and wary looks from guardsponies and officers alike. Red Coat and Twilight continued to converse politely about their mutual love of books, though Red Coat’s seemed to vary somewhat from Twilight’s as he had a rather odd fascination with Neighponese comic books, but their conversation was pleasant, at least. I, however, tuned much of it out and pondered my ever-changing circumstances. The coming weeks would become very interesting for me, and not in the way I hoped for.

Author's Note

Hello~ Another chapter completed behind schedule again, sorry about that, but I'll try to keep to my goal of one new chapter a month as best as I can.

Anyway, I've been considering commissioning an artist to draw a cover image to replace the rather crappy one I drew myself up here. So if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be most grateful.

Bloodstained (Part 5)

There was a little game I liked to play every morning, if I could, and it was called ‘pretend I’m not really here’. It was a deceptively simple sort of game, in the sense that the rules were elementary to learn but it was actually completely impossible to actually win. Since my unwanted return to military life, I had developed the tendency to wake up about five or ten minutes before the morning reveille, which I had learned to take advantage of. So each morning, after I had dragged myself out of my cot and before those damnable bugles were blown, I would sneak out behind my tent where nopony could see me and just sit there, look at the morning sky, and pretend I was somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ tended to vary according to my fleeting whims and moods: sometimes I would imagine I was sitting in my mansion’s garden on a hot summer’s day; or perhaps I was holidaying in balmy Los Pegasus; or, if I was feeling particularly imaginative that morning, I was the guest of an exotically dusky daughter of some rajah in the far off Land of a Thousand Gods [an archaic term for Coltcutta; Blueblood’s father was once Viceroy of that region]. Wherever it was, it was certainly preferable to the stark horror of the Badlands and of the war. As I’ve mentioned, this game is utterly impossible to ‘win’, for the simple illusion of being someplace else is instantly shattered the moment I accidentally take my eyes off the blue skies. For even the slight glance down or to the side would reveal the vast array of tents, parade squares, flags, weapon and armour racks, and the strewed mass of sleeping soldiers that always looked disconcertingly like the fallen corpses left behind after that terrible advance up the ridge.

At six o’clock, just like every day in the Royal Guard, my idle escapism was rudely disrupted by a single bugle call, muffled by the distance, which was then joined by another and another to form an offensively loud chorus that seemed to drill into my brain via my ears. The awful sound, which to my tired mind sounded like the trumpet call Tirek uses to call the daemonic minions of Tartarus to his side, reverberated through the encampment. At once, any illusion of peace and quiet was shattered as the encampment struggled into life like a depressed office worker at the sound of his morning alarm clock. Soldiers pulled themselves out of their bedrolls, some having to be kicked awake as they had somehow managed to sleep through those infernal bugles, and the preparations for the day’s work began in a frenzy of activity.

That morning was different; in addition to the dawn chorus of bugles and griping soldiers struggling to wake up, I heard a high-pitched shriek that was undoubtedly Spike being woken up against his will.

I perked my head up, still reluctant to pick myself off the ground, which to my tired, sleep-deprived mind felt like the most comfortable patch of earth under Celestia’s sun. With just the sort of bad luck that plagues my unhappy life, Twilight Sparkle’s tent had been erected on the empty patch of dirt right next to mine, where I had vaguely thought about growing a small Zen garden. A side effect of this was that I now had to contend with two noisy snorers as I tried to sleep, as if Cannon Fodder’s nocturnal drones weren’t bad enough.

I saw small paws grasp at the cloth in panic, and the vague squat shape of Spike flailing against the tent. Inevitably, the cloth tore and Spike fell straight through it and landed face first into the dust.

“What’s that noise?” he shouted, looking around at the ponies frantically. “Are we under attack?”

“Spike!” exclaimed Twilight Sparkle as she emerged from the hole and stepped gingerly around the prostrate baby dragon, apparently doing her best to ignore me and the small crowd of snickering, jeering soldiers that gathered around them.

“Is it the Changelings? Why is everypony looking at us like that?”

“It’s just the morning wake-up call. The Royal Guard has to operate according to a strict timetable to ensure the maximum efficiency of each soldier is fully utilised for the war effort.”

I sighed, Twilight’s short little Twilecture giving me a brief but vivid glimpse of my imminent future. I steeled myself for a long day supervising Princess Celestia’s favourite pet and making sure that no harm would come to her, or, to be more accurate, ensuring that she caused no harm to anypony or anything around her; the last thing the war effort needed was the sort of chaos and insanity that only an unrestrained Twilight Sparkle mental breakdown could bring, and the unpleasant memories of the Great School Chemistry Lab Disaster were still vivid in my mind. [In the course of basic class exercise to measure the boiling point of water, the young Twilight had somehow managed to form a miniature black hole that levelled much of the science block.] So, as I forced something approximating a happy and care-free grin on my face, I rose to my hooves and stepped on over towards the two.

The troops rapidly dispersed as I approached, evidently reasoning that invoking my wrath by teasing the ‘soft civvies’ was not worth it and scampered off to find some breakfast. I supposed that punishing them for being rude to a lady might have earned me a few extra bonus points in Twilight’s eyes, but as she stretched the definition of the word ‘lady’ so far as to render the word completely meaningless I decided to let it pass. Colts will be colts, after all, and I could hardly reprimand them for that.

“Good morning, Twilight,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

The young mare flinched at my approach, in a manner startlingly reminiscent of the same way she would do so in the school playground when I and my small pack of cronies used to tease her relentlessly for her low birth and take her lunch money. I have to admit that I found her response to be quite worrying, and for a tense moment I feared she may yet still harbour some resentment, and maybe even fear, of my rather shameful treatment of her as a teenaged colt.

Fortunately, she recovered quickly, and I put her reaction down to only having just woken up.

“Sleep well?” I asked, inclining my head respectfully towards the mare.

“Oh, good morning, Blueblood,” said Twilight, shrugging wearily. Judging by her bloodshot eyes and the dark rings that framed them it was most certainly obvious that she hadn’t. I had vaguely wondered what she and Red Coat had gotten up to the previous night; I had to leave the two of them alone as I had a mountain of paperwork to catch up on, and though I was wary of what Red Coat might attempt to do while left alone with her for an extended period of time, I correctly reasoned that his fear of Shining Armour was sufficient to keep his teenage lusts in check.

She stifled a yawn. “I was so excited about this new research project I could barely sleep. And Red Coat was gracious enough to help me organise all of the books that I bought.”

I wagered they were doing a lot more than simply organising books, but being the gentlecolt that I am, or at the very least pretend to be, I kept my thoughts on Red Coat’s indiscretions to myself. [Twilight Sparkle assures me that their relationship, such as it was, was strictly platonic, and I am inclined to believe her.] Glimpsing through the hole that Spike had made earlier, I could see that Red Coat was absent, or at least not visible through the small gap. What was visible, however, were the fruits of their labour as, somehow, Twilight had set up a half dozen small bookcases filled with enough books, tomes, and scrolls for me to suspect a great shortage of reading material across Equestria would ensue. Where she got those bookcases from was a bit of a mystery; she could not have possibly brought them with her as they certainly would not have fit in her luggage cases, and that officious bureaucrat Quartermaster Pencil Pusher certainly would not have allowed her to procure such frivolous items from the Logistics Corps. [Twilight had indeed brought the bookcases with her, but used a complex miniaturisation spell to transport them.]

“Hey, Blue,” yawned Spike, waving a hoof vaguely in my direction. I resisted the sudden urge to correct him for using the familiar form of my name with the back of my hoof. “I’m going to have another lie-in. I don’t know how you guys can cope with this.”

He turned to enter the tent via the hole he had just unceremoniously torn his way through, but Twilight had thrust a foreleg out to block him and he sleepily walked straight into the extended appendage.

“Sorry Spike,” said Twilight as she gently pushed Spike away from the tent. “Princess Celestia is counting on me to produce this report and I can’t do it without my Number One Assistant by my side.”

“You’ll get used to it,” I said, patting the odious little reptile on the head and then surreptitiously wiping my hoof clean on my jacket. “The first few nights are always the most difficult.”

Twilight smiled. “That’s what my brother said when he first signed up. I didn’t think it would be quite this bad.”

“So, what’s on the agenda today?” I asked, eager to get this over and done with as soon as possible.

“I’d like to start with some preliminary observations,” she said. “I’ll try to stay out of everypony’s way and just observe the regiment on a normal day, that way I can see how the Royal Guard operates on a daily basis, and then I would like to perform a few interviews with the soldiers, if possible. Using my findings from there I can then determine the best avenues for more vigorous, targeted investigations.”

Her stomach rumbled noisily and, it may have been my imagination, but I think I saw her podgy belly quiver too.

“Oh,” she laughed nervously and blushed, “and find some breakfast.”

I nodded my head dumbly. Whatever it was she was planning made little sense to me, and I confess to not paying much attention what she was saying at the time, though it was unlikely that I had missed anything of any actual worth to me. As far as I could gather, with my sleep-deprived mind in desperate need of some breakfast and that revitalising Trottinghamshire tea, my own role in these investigations would merely be restricted to part-time chaperone as she wandered around the camp with Spike taking notes and perhaps sitting in while she interviewed various serviceponies. It seemed simple enough that I could do it without screwing up too badly.

Princess Celestia’s warning still troubled me greatly, as it further complicated my already difficult life, but I had hoped that I might be able to hoof this duty off onto somepony else. After all, Princess’ Regulations dictated that whenever a lady takes up residence in a Royal guard camp, she must be accompanied at all times by an officer of good moral character. Granted, ‘good moral character’ automatically invalidated just about everypony in the officer corps of the entire Royal Guard, especially me, but still I believed that the best course of action was to create some sort of rota for the Night Guard officers to foalsit her for a while each day. At any rate, Twilight would likely consider that to be a good idea, as it would mean further opportunities to investigate the officers and discern further information from them for her research project, provided that she did not drive them away first.

Nevertheless, I had a great many routine tasks and things to perform irrespective of Twilight’s investigations. At the very least, I supposed that if Twilight’s research was based upon quiet and dispassionate observation with only an occasional interview that could be conducted on the interviewee’s off duty time, then the actual disruption to the normal day-to-day running of the regiment would be kept to a bare minimum.

“The canteen is over there.” I pointed yonder to the large tent the array of troughs around it. “One of the Night Guard officers will help you get something to eat.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I have some important business that I need to attend to first,” I said, only half lying this time as, though I did not relish the idea of breakfasting with her as I found her company quite tiresome even at the best of times, I did actually have one rather important duty to perform before eating.

The regiment’s mail-mare would be making her rounds by now and official protocol demanded that I personally accept whatever super-top-secret, classified-confidential, for-my-eyes-only documents that were addressed to me, rather than simply allow Cannon Fodder to do it on my behalf. Well, to be more accurate, I would merely accept the papers, make a show of flicking through them for the benefit of the mail-mare, and then pass them onto Cannon Fodder for subsequent processing and thus satisfy the letter of the law if not its actual intent. It was not strictly legal, but I correctly trusted in my esteemed aide’s rather foal-like belief that absolutely everything I did was for the greater benefit of Equestria. Besides, his unique position as my personal aide (which was a post that was never really fully ratified in Princess’ Regulations but nopony seemed to notice, or if they did then Cannon Fodder’s obstinate personality and his poor personal hygiene dissuaded them from questioning it) theoretically afforded him the same security clearance as me. [Not quite true, as all officers, including commissars, were allowed to keep a personal servant, or ‘batpony’ as they are known in Trottinghamshire regiments, if they could afford to pay one, which was what Cannon Fodder was officially listed as on the regimental books. Blueblood, however, is correct in stating that the post of an official commissarial aide was never fully ratified, but since Cannon Fodder never achieved any rank higher than that of private, his security clearance was in fact the lowest possible grade for the Royal Guard. As Cannon Fodder’s unique gift became all the more valuable to us, my sister and I found it expedient to ensure that this bureaucratic anomaly went uncorrected.]

“Oh, okay,” said Twilight, sounding oddly disappointed at the prospect.

I guessed it was a manifestation of her social awkwardness, which, despite her apparent success in researching the Magic of Friendship, still afflicted her. Then again, anypony would feel quite shy and vulnerable when forced into a vast Royal Guard encampment, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of complete strangers, most of whom are heavily armed and understandably suspicious of any outside intrusion into their daily lives, added to which her academic mindset would preclude her from forming any sort of friendships here lest they affect the results of her research. Naturally, she would cling to very few ponies she was already familiar with, even I, her childhood tormentor.

“I shan’t be long,” I said, trying to mollify her. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m finished. And you might want to see Pencil Pusher about getting a new tent, but fair warning; he isn’t going to be happy about it.”

With that, I bade them farewell and trotted back to my tent. I found Corporal Hooves, the regiment’s mail-mare, waiting for me inside the ‘front office’ area, while Cannon Fodder sat at his suspiciously well-organised desk and munched messily on one of those muffins the Corporal somehow found the time and resources to bake for virtually everypony.

“Good morning, sir!” she said cheerfully, performing a clumsy salute that nearly knocked off a helmet that was at least two sizes too big for her head. She reached into one of the voluminous saddlebags strapped around her armoured barrel and produced a thick wad of papers and envelopes. “Mail for you!”

“Thank you Corporal,” I said, accepting the packages in my telekinetic grasp. Cannon Fodder appeared by my side a second after his pungent odour filled my nostrils, bearing a hot mug of tea which I accepted gratefully.

I took a few sips of the hot drink as I idly flicked through the envelopes to sort out which could be given to Cannon Fodder for processing and which required my own personal attention. The majority of which were the usual sort of paperwork that makes up the bulk of my duties; forms, lists, letters, discipline reports, propaganda literature to be disseminated amongst the soldiers, requests for meetings, proposals from the RASEA [The Royal Armed Services Entertainment Association, which provided entertainment for Equestrian military personnel. Though many talented entertainers started their careers working for the Association, much of the entertainment was of substandard quality, which led to the more popular translation amongst the troops of the acronym RASEA as ‘Really Awful Shit Every Afternoon’], and a myriad of other important yet onerous things.

What many civilians, and indeed many soldiers and officers, fail to realise is the sheer amount of paperwork required to keep the Royal Guard functioning to at least some degree of efficiency. For every fighting stallion there are at least a dozen petty functionaries, administrators, and bureaucrats completing, processing, and signing hundreds of lists and forms. Each individual soldier constitutes a drain on resources; he has to be fed, watered, clothed, armoured, armed, and half a dozen other things required ensuring that he is in a fit physical and mental state to fight effectively. To ensure that his needs are met requires that such resources are to be brought from all across Equestria: oats and hay from the central fields of Equestria, armour and weapons from the great factories of Trottingham, and so forth; each constituting a significant administrative burden to requisition, transport, and distribute these things. Ultimately, this all trickles down from the non-combatant administrative staff to commissioned and non-commissioned officers and, more recently, to the political officers of the Commissariat. If I didn’t know any better, I was sure that many of these officers were simply unloading as much of their paperwork onto me as they could, as if I weren’t drowning in paper to begin with.

Technically, much of this could have simply been completed by unit commanders and signed off by that officious little bureaucrat Quartermaster Pencil Pusher, but as political officer it was beholden unto me to examine these cases and approve, reject, or amend them according to the wider political aims of the war. That the wider political aims of the war were a somewhat nebulous concept in the beginning had, essentially, turned this facet of my job into that of a proverbial rubber stamp. There were a few other things, mind, pertaining to the education, indoctrination, and loyalty of the soldiers in the form of written reports from officers, organising punishment details, rewards, and the increasingly lamentable pamphlets and booklets supplied to me from the Ministry of Misinformation.

Buried amidst the things actually salient to my job, though I questioned the actual veracity of most of the bits of paper levitating before me, was the usual array of junk mail that was somehow redirected hundreds of miles away from my home to here. Even on the frontlines, with the fate of all of Equestria and the free world hanging precariously in the balance, there was still no escape from endless Cathayan takeaway menus and hoax letters informing me that I have won a free holiday to Los Pegasus.

The last item was the most interesting of my mail, though not necessarily for the right reasons. For as I quickly sorted out which items could be safely assigned to Cannon Fodder for completion and those which, regrettably, required my own personal attention later, I found a brown parcel embossed with the winged alicorn skull seal of the Commissariat. I opened it up neatly to find it contained a handsome black chapbook and a note scrawled on a sheet of paper. On the front of this book the winged alicorn skull motif was repeated again, but embossed in silver above the gothic symbol were the words ‘The Royal Infantrypony’s Uplifting Primer’. The small note revealed that this was the first draft edition of the book, which the powers that be were planning on issuing en masse across all enlisted service personnel in the Royal Guard. They were, however, gracious enough to send me an advanced copy for approval, though given the rather poor quality of the earlier literature they had dispersed to the troops I didn’t hold out much hope for this one.

It was at that point that I noticed that Corporal Hooves was still standing in front of me with a happy, gormless smile on her face and only one of her infamously mismatched eyes actually looking at me.

“Was there something else, Corporal?” I asked, with the subtle hint that she should leave.

Corporal Derpy Hooves was an odd one. I’m not certain how the Royal Guard recruiting sergeant who signed her up came to the conclusion that this wall-eyed, perpetually cheerful, sweet, innocent little mare was the perfect addition to the 1st Night Guards Regiment. At the very least, I supposed, she was given a non-combatant role assisting the Quartermaster with the regiment’s mail. That said, despite her disabilities, or, perhaps, because of them, she was universally loved across the whole regiment, and often soldiers would go out of their way to protect her from those who might take advantage of her trusting and naive nature.

“Oh! General Crimson Arrow says there’s an important meeting he wants you to go to at oh-seven-hundred hours at his command post.”

I placed the mail items down for the time being. Seven o’clock, for those not au fait with the military’s unique method of telling the time, was less than an hour away and this was the first I had heard of this supposedly important meeting. Instantly, I feared the worst, though the lack of itching in my forehooves that usually precedes something dangerous and life-threatening that my subconscious has picked up on provided some relief. The General had become a virtual recluse after his shameful performance in the Battle of Black Venom Pass, and even then, I would have assumed he had the common courtesy to give far more than fifty minutes warning before whatever high-level briefing he had planned. So either whatever he wanted was of the utmost importance that I had to drop absolutely everything now and attend to him, or he had just lost even more of whatever social skills he had left.

“That’s silly!” said Corporal Hooves suddenly, interrupting my train of thought. “How can you have seven hundred hours? There’s only twenty four of them in a day.”

“It’s the military, Corporal; don’t expect it to make sense.”

Breakfast with Twilight was going to have to wait now.

***

The General’s command post was at the centre of the encampment. It consisted of a single tent, which, while much larger than mine, was quite small compared to the town hall used by the Field Marshal. Around the main tent, where the Centre campaign was supposedly planned according to the greater strategic goals set by Iron Hoof and the ever-changing political goals set by those fools in Parliament, were numerous smaller tents which served as offices for Crimson Hoof’s administrative staff. While the fortress of Maredun had briefly served as his headquarters, with the bulk of Army Group Centre still ensconced in the Dodge Junction encampment and the proximity of the fortress to Changeling country the General had made the logical decision of relocating safely behind the frontline. A sentiment I could understand perfectly.

The tent itself was about the size of a tennis court, and like Iron Hoof’s headquarters it was dominated by a huge table in the centre. Upon this table, which the senior command officers of the 1st Night Guards and the 1st Solar Guards, Sergeant Bramley Apple, General Crimson Arrow, and a strange unicorn officer I had never met before had crowded around, were a vast assortment of maps, scraps of paper, quills, ink wells, pencils, and other office detritus. Around the walls of the tent were numerous smaller desks, each stacked up with piles of paper and files, and bookcases crammed full rolled up scrolls and documents. In addition to the dense bouquet of war that pervaded the entire encampment there was a lingering scent of musky old paper, ink, and stale coffee.

As I had made the mistake of stopping by the canteen along the way to pick up a small feedbag of oats for breakfast, Twilight and Spike had elected to tag along, much to my irritation. The annoying thing was that despite my status not only as a Commissar of the Royal Guard, but also as a Prince of the Realm, Twilight Sparkle outranked me. She had been given absolute carte blanche by Princess Celestia and Princess Luna to do whatever is necessary for her research paper [within reason, of course. Twilight can get a little carried away at times] and, for all intents and purposes, was therefore the highest-ranking individual in the whole encampment. There was some solace to be taken, however, as she and her pet dragon would merely be observing the proceedings. Or so I had thought.

“You’re all probably wondering why you’re all here,” said Crimson Arrow as I ducked under the tent flap and squeezed past his two personal bodyguards, who were uniquely identifiable by their ostentatious and blindingly bright dress uniforms.

The General stood at the far end of the long table, reared up on his hind hooves and his forelegs planted on the table. As I took my position directly opposite him and next to the unknown officer, our eyes met for an uncomfortably long moment as he regarded Twilight and I with the same level of disdain as he would something unpleasant he discovered sticking to the underside of his hoof. Despite still looking quite undernourished and exhausted, the small pile of half-empty mugs of coffee piled up on the desk around him bore testament to his lack of sleep, there was a newfound energy in those previously dead eyes that simply wasn’t there before.

“A question that has plagued philosophers since time immemorial,” I said, grinning widely. It was a silly pun, calculated to lighten the somewhat tense mood, and I was glad to see that it had worked somewhat as it garnered polite chuckles from most of the assembled officers and even elicited a very brief smile from Crimson Arrow. “I hope I haven’t missed anything now.”

“Twiley!” Shining Armour bounded over like the over-grown excitable foal he was and fired a veritable barrage of questions at Twilight who, to her credit, seemed to take it all in her stride, but I supposed that she was used to such overbearing behaviour from him before. “Did you sleep well? Was it too cold? Do you need an extra blanket? Did they post enough guards at your tent? Did Red Coat behave himself?”

Red Coat winced visibly at the mention of his name, and withered under the threatening glare Shining Armour shot at him from across the table. The young stallion looked positively dreadful, with bags under his bloodshot eyes which were each outlined by black rings and rheum. Apparently suffering from a severe hangover, if the quantity of alcohol he had downed at the party and his obvious inexperience with being drunk were any indication, he tried to hide from the irate Captain of the Royal Guard behind Colonel Sunshine Smiles’ massive bulk. The Colonel himself looked rather displeased at his subordinate’s behaviour.

“He was a perfect gentlecolt,” said Twilight, flicking her uncombed and matted mane from out of her eyes, “until he fell asleep and I had to carry him back to his tent.”

Crimson Arrow and the other officers looked at Twilight suspiciously, but if they protested to her presence here then they made no effort to vocalise it, though the distasteful expressions of the Solar Guard officers and the General made their thoughts on the matter quite obvious for all to see. Crimson in particular looked like a pony who had discovered his milk had gone off only after pouring it on his breakfast cereal. The Night Guard officers, apparently feeling as if they had nothing to fear from her scrutiny, seemed rather more at ease with the exception of Red Coat, but that was for a completely different reason altogether.

“Now, Shiny,” continued Twilight, “it’s important that while I’m here conducting my research that you don’t communicate with me in anyway unless I ask a question, and that goes for the rest of you too; I want to create a snapshot of how the Royal Guard lives and works without any outside interference. So for all intents and purposes, I don’t exist.”

Spike, the little dragon sitting on her back with pen and quill at the ready, made a concerned ‘yelp’ sound. “But if you don’t exist, then whose back am I sitting on?”

“You don’t exist either,” said Shining.

“I... I don’t exist?”

The sound of Crimson Arrow’s bare hoof tapping on wood interrupted Spike’s first existential crisis.

“Now like I said,” the General sighed in exasperation, he had obviously rehearsed this little procedure earlier and seemed exasperated at the fact that ponies, as ever, were not following the neat little script he had in his head. “I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve brought you all here.”

“Something that requires the expert skills of me and the lads,” said the strange pony next to me, or at least, that’s what I think he had said.

He was a unicorn pony of average height and build, but his virtually impenetrable accent and strange manner of dress marked him out as a pony not of the Equestrian mainland. He wore a blue tunic that may have once been a brilliant shade of ultramarine, but had faded to a sky blue tone over the years from exposure to the harsh sun of wherever he had come from, and was festooned with clumsily sewn-on patches of varying colours where the fabric had worn through. Upon his head he wore a wide-brimmed hat, with the right side of the brim pinned up against the side. At first I took him for one of the civilian specialists that the Royal Guard sometimes took in to help out with some dull administrative task, quite like Twilight Sparkle but without so much power and responsibility, but the military badge on the front of his hat certainly marked him out as a guardspony of sorts. In hindsight, the axe that was strapped across his back might have been a bit of a giveaway too.

The foreigner turned to me and said, “About bloody time you got here, mate, I’m parched. Get me a cuppa.”

I blinked vacantly at the odd stallion.

“I beg your pardon?” was all I could manage to say. As a Prince of the Realm I had grown quite used to a wide variety of different responses from ponies when they first meet me, even before I had donned the scarlet sash and my reputation grew beyond all reason, but I have to admit that this one took me by surprise. Reactions usually ran the gamut between slack-jawed amazement, defiant refusal to be impressed by me, and, more common in the earlier part of my career, barely concealed contempt for my very existence. As he looked up at me with a vaguely impatient expression on his face, which I returned with one that probably resembled a fish that had been dragged unwillingly out of the water, I realised that he had, quite earnestly and innocently, failed to recognise me. As perplexing as that sounds, not only being the Princesses’ nephew, Canterlot’s most eligible bachelor at the time, and, more recently, a Hero of Equestria, I actually found it fairly refreshing.

“For the benefit of those who have only just arrived,” said General Crimson Arrow, shooting Twilight and I another one of his disapproving glares, “this is Lieutenant Southern Cross of the Royal Horsetralian Engineers Corps, who has just arrived here via airship from Horsetralia.”

Horestralia, that explained it; a distant Equestrian colony more accurately known as ‘the land where absolutely everything wants you dead in the most horrible, painful, and humiliating way possible’.

“G’day.” Southern Cross touched the brim of his hat with a hoof which, I had only just noticed, was a magi-mechanical replacement built out of dull brass and made a faint humming noise every time he moved it.

“And may I introduce to you,” Crimson Arrow continued in an oddly grandiloquent tone that, come to think of it now, had quite a mocking quality to it, “His Royal Highness Prince Blueblood, Duke of Canterlot, Member of Their Divine Highnesses’ Most Honourable Privy Council, Aide-de-Camp to the Royal Pony Sisters, and Commissar...” –he said that word as if it were the name a particularly nasty strain of flesh-eating virus– “...attached to the 1st Night Guards Regiment.”

[That was Blueblood’s full style of address at the time, and by the end of his career he would accumulate so many titles and medals that, rumour has it, if he ever turned up late for an occasion the announcer would simply keep on reading them until he eventually arrived.]

I confess to taking no small amount of satisfaction at seeing the realisation slowly dawn on his face, looking as his pale grey eyes widened in shock and he seemed to lose all motor control over his jaw muscles. He recovered his composure with commendable alacrity, forcing a cheerful grin to his face as he then leaned against the table, resting a foreleg on it.

“Bloody hell,” he said, “I’ve really stuck my hoof in it this time. It’s the little bowtie, mate; makes you look like a waiter.”

“And my uniform didn’t dissuade you of that notion?” I said jokingly. I offered a smile to show that there was no offence taken, despite the slightly more irrational part of my mind wanting to invoke the ancient laws on lèse-majesté and have him thrown in a dungeon somewhere. [Lèse-majesté refers to the crime of injuring or offending the dignity of members of the royal family. Though it remains on the statute books as law, it has not been enforced since the end of the Reconstruction era, despite many unsuccessful attempts by Canterlot royalty to do so.]

“Gimme a break, I’ve been stuck on an airship for the past two days.” He rubbed his dark-ringed eyes with a hoof and hesitated for a moment. “I don’t have to kiss your bloody hooves now or something, do I?”

I chuckled. “Please don’t; it’s very unhygienic and not to mention quite undignified for all involved.” I do so hate it when ponies tried to do that. After all, there is a difference between basic respect towards one social betters and outright sycophancy, and the last thing I wanted was slobber all over my nice and clean boots. I have to admit that I found the engineer’s good humour quite infectious, in spite of my lack of sleep, his less-than-deferential manner towards me, and the chronic paranoia gnawing at the back of my mind telling me that I would not find the results of today’s meeting to my liking. Nevertheless, I found his company to be at least more tolerable than that of most of the ponies in my usual social circle. At the very least, his friendliness appeared to be genuine, as opposed to the rather more cynical attempts by elements of my clique back in Canterlot trying to gain my friendship in exchange for power and influence.

My unusually good mood, however, would not last particularly long as Crimson Arrow cleared his throat in an obvious attempt to draw attention back to him. He was always like that; forever in the shadow of other ponies, myself included, which I think explained his intransigence in accepting the advice of other ponies in the Battle of Black Venom Pass. However, any sympathy I might have felt for him quickly evaporated when I vividly remembered the bodies scattered across that cratered ridge, blood and viscera smeared in great streaks across the ground, and how close we came to defeat as a result of his inflexibility.

“Ladies and Gentlecolts,” he said clearly and evidently trying to inject as much authority into his raspy voice as possible, “if I might be allowed to begin.”

[Again, though Blueblood is largely accurate in describing how this meeting took place, he still tends to gloss over some of the smaller details. If the reader wishes for a complete transcript of the meeting, then Spike’s minutes are currently stored in the Canterlot Archives. When free from any distractions such as his favourite confections, Spike proved to be a superb ‘number one assistant’ for Twilight.]

He glared around at us, daring anypony to interrupt him once more. None did, and when he was apparently satisfied that none would do so again he pulled up one of the large maps from the table, scattering a few of the smaller sheets and some quills onto the ground around our hooves. I leaned forward to get a better look at the miserable scrap of land that we would be fighting and dying for and, in my case, running away and hiding from. To my complete lack of surprise, it was Black Venom Pass.

Upon closer inspection, the map turned out to be a composite of innumerable aerial reconnaissance photographs cut and pasted together to create a single large representation of the Pass and the surrounding mountainous terrain. Indeed, as I swept my eyes over the image, trying to discern any clues as to Crimson Arrow’s plan, I could make out the subtle lines in the shadows where the smaller individual photographs were stitched together.

The rocky and barren landscape, which looked even more desolate from above than it did from the ground, seemed as though Crimson Arrow had rolled up the sheet of paper and then attempted to flatten it out once more. The entire band of hilly terrain was riddled with ridges, rocky outcrops, and undulating troughs and peaks was split in half by the thin wavy band of Black Venom Pass, and looking straight from above I could see how its serpentine form had lent the pass its nickname. The fortress of Maredun was visible at the northern end of the pass as a dark, blocky structure clinging to the side of the ridge, while looking at the southern end I could discern tiny black spots which I took to be the bodies left after the battle. [This is highly unlikely, as the bodies would have been recovered and returned to Equestria for burial. Even then, at the altitudes pegasus aerial reconnaissance flights usually operate at and keeping in mind the relatively low resolution of cameras at the time, individual ponies, dead or alive, would not be visible. It is probably that Blueblood merely saw indistinct collections of boulders and his imagination filled in the gaps.] What was most interesting about this map, however, were the thin lines drawn in blue ink that weaved their way around the ridges and contours of the hilly terrain either side of the Pass. I didn’t know what they meant at the time, but knowing the Royal Guard as I did, I doubted that they indicated anything pleasant. What was absolutely plain to all of us, however, was the big blue arrow that left very little room for interpretation as it swept southwards straight through the Pass and into Changeling territory.

“The Changelings' main strength is cowardly deception,” said Crimson Arrow after we all had a chance to examine the map. “If robbed of this advantage, they are weak and easily defeated.” Well, I wasn’t too sure of that. Granted, in a straight one-on-one fight a well-trained and disciplined soldier will almost always triumph over a single Changeling drone, but the fact of the matter was that one never encountered a drone without a thousand or so of his best mates and a Purestrain or two to back him up. Overwhelming numbers and a complete disregard for casualties, while not a complete guarantor of victory, still tended to tip the odds in the Changelings’ favour when it came to set piece battles. Anyway, I was rather interested in what Crimson Arrow had planned; he seemed to have all of this worked out already, which was at once reassuring and disturbing at the same time.

“It is my aim, therefore,” he continued, “to force the Changelings into a battle of annihilation, where they will be completely and utterly destroyed. Once that has been achieved, we can secure a hoof-hold around Black Venom Pass and begin the invasion of the Badlands.

“Ladies and gentlecolts.” He paused in a manner he must have thought was very dramatic, his warm amber eyes sweeping over each and every one of us. No doubt he imagined himself as playing the leading role in a cast of millions, and as he fixed his gaze upon me and I stiffened in response, I silently begged him to just get on with it. He cracked a small, smug smile, and said with all the gravitas of a classically trained actor, “Welcome to Operation: Equestrian Dawn.”

This was not going to end well.

Author's Note

Here it is, a little late again I know. Not much else to say about this chapter, aside from the fact that I had written about half of it before deciding it was rubbish and starting all over again. I had booked a whole week off work to try and write, but it didn't turn out so well. I've come to the conclusion that I need to be completely and utterly bored in the office, and therefore having to resort to using my imagination to work out this story, in order to write properly.

A little note about Southern Cross. I've had an Aussie friend of mine check out the character's dialogue, mainly so I don't cross the line between affectionate parody and into Crocodile Dundee/Steve Irwin stereotypes.

And now you know where Derpy was for most of Season 3. Originally I had planned on Derpy filling in for Jurgen, instead of making an OC in the form of Cannon Fodder, but decided against it. Derpy is far too sweet and innocent for the role.

Bloodstained (Part 6)

“We are going to assault Black Venom Pass again.”

It should have come as no surprise to me; our strategic options were extremely limited by the nigh-impassable terrain that separated us from our enemy, but to hear Crimson Arrow say those words with the same blitheness as he would if he were to announce that he was nipping off to the canteen to get some breakfast was most disconcerting. In spite of the unpleasant heat that was just starting to build up that morning, a mere prelude to the scorching temperatures that would peak around midday as it was wont to do, I felt a sudden and unpleasant chill crawl and slither, like some icy wet reptile, across my back and shoulders.

It was a chill that was in no way ameliorated by the hot breeze that wafted through the tent, which made the loose cloth fabric flap and threatened to scatter the myriad papers on the table if it were not for the strategic placement of numerous ornamental paperweights. The morning sun filtered through the relatively thin tent cloth, casting the scene in an eerie yellow and orange glow. Where the pure sunlight penetrated through the small gaps in the fabric, bright beams of hot white light were cast periodically through the tent and cast whatever they touched into stark relief amidst the more sombre surroundings. In these beams the ever-present dust motes shimmered like millions of tiny stars around us, which drifted lazily on the light breeze and gave the proceedings a strange ethereal quality to it.

The sunlight fell harshly on General Crimson Arrow’s face, illuminating his neatly-trimmed white fur so that it appeared to glow with a luminescence all its own. This light, however, only emphasised the haggard lines that now etched over his once-attractive face. The visor of his peaked cap had cast his eyes into a deep shadow that was emphasised to a terrible degree by the dark bags beneath them. For the first time since I had seen him during this campaign he looked as if he belonged in the uniform. Even in our days in the Academy in Canterlot he always resembled a young colt playing dress-up more than an actual soldier, and this only grew worse as he rose up through the ranks and culminated in the venerated and austere position of General. Before, the crimson red dress uniform, peaked cap, epaulettes and aiguillettes, pretty gold lace, and shiny medals looked quite ridiculous on the young stallion – his tunic did not even fit him properly – yet in the intervening nocturnal period between the tea party the day before and this meeting there came a definite transformation into the determined commander that now stood before us.

Behind me, I heard the sound of quill scratching on high quality paper – a sound that would rapidly become the soundtrack to my misery over the coming months – as Spike the Dragon, who was still seated upon Twilight’s back, began his task of taking notes on Twilight’s behalf. One of Shining Armour’s subordinates stifled a yawn, while another slurped noisily from a large mug of the thickest, blackest coffee I had ever laid eyes on. Major Starlit Skies was busying himself filling up a pipe with tobacco, going about the business with the same level of fastidious attention to detail as he did with just about everything else. The tension in the room amplified these noises and the external sounds of the encampment at large to a great degree.

“My plan is quite simple,” said Crimson Arrow finally, such that it was a relief to hear his voice. The words, however, did very little to engender any sort of hope in me. In fact, they had rather the opposite effect.

I looked down on the large map before us and could not help but be reminded of the old saying ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again’, which might apply for relatively simple and harmless things like baking a cake or attempting to construct flat pack furniture (or getting one’s servants to do so, in my case), but when it came to military strategy attempting to do the exact same thing more than once tended to result in utter disaster. If underestimating one’s enemy and failing to learn from past errors were the two cardinal sins of war as described by Princess Celestia the day before, then being repetitive and therefore predictable was the completed trinity of military incompetence. The sad thing was, we did not have any other option than to try and take the valley once more, it being the only passage large enough to support an army of any considerable size and, perhaps just as important, our supply route once we secured a hoof-hold in the Badlands.

I was, however, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and see what he had planned. Partly out of vague curiosity to see what he had been doing in the one week of his self-imposed exile, but mainly because I was safe in the knowledge that I could simply veto whatever it was if I found it to be objectionable. Then again I found just about everything the Royal Guard did objectionable, but in the interests of maintaining my fraudulent reputation and the continued waging of this war I decided that I best be lenient. The thin blue lines that snaked their way around the ridges and contours of the Macintosh Hills on the map, however, indicated that he had planned something rather more complex than just another suicidal charge into the breach. Quite morbidly, they looked to me like a medical diagram of little veins and capillaries.

Crimson Arrow’s horn glowed, and with his magic he brought over an officer’s swagger stick from a writing desk in the corner of the room. It was a short cane of highly polished wood and capped at one end with a silver ornamental head engraved with the crest of our old regiment: the 1st Solar Guards. The orb glinted brightly in the sun as he levitated the stick above the table and indicated with the pointy end the enormous blue arrow on the map.

“The main assault on the south of the Pass will be made by the 1st and 5th Regiments of the Solar Guard and the 1st Regiment of the Night Guard,” he continued, “with the 9th Royal Artillery due to arrive next week providing fire support and the Dodge Junction Militia acting as a strategic reserve.” Well, a fat lot of good a bunch of imbecilic, lazy cherry farmers would be if things inevitably take a turn for the worse, if they could be bothered, what with their hectic schedule of sitting around in the sun and occasionally whoring their daughters out to the soldiers in the encampment for a quick bit, to pick up a spear and actually contribute to the war effort. I suppose, with hindsight, it was good that these clumsy amateurs stayed out of the way and allowed the real soldiers to get on with their jobs, and judging by the derisive snort from Blitzkrieg and one of the Solar Guard officers shaking his head, I was not alone in this opinion. [Royal Guard personnel tend to look down upon the militias as being amateurs, with some small degree of truth to that. However, it should be noted that the militia guards tended to acquit themselves rather well despite their lack of training and equipment. Of particular note is the Ponyville Militia during the Battle of Ponyville later in Blueblood’s career, which is described in another entry in this manuscript.]

“In preparation for the main assault, a smaller force will need to take and hold this position here.” Crimson Arrow indicated to a small, indistinct grey smudge in the south east area of the map with the end of his cane, and I belatedly noticed that the majority of the aforementioned thin blue lines seemed to converge upon this singular spot. It was a pony-made structure, at least as far as I could discern from the blurry image, which to me looked like a squashed insect on the paper more than anything else. As to its actual shape and architectural design, it was completely impossible to tell. Whatever it was, my initial thought was just how isolated and exposed it seemed; though only a few miles deep into enemy territory just beyond the Macintosh Hills that separated us from the enemy like a barrier, it looked extremely vulnerable to encirclement.

“This has been designated Fort E-5150,” he continued, tapping his cane lightly on the dark smudge. I wondered vaguely who had bestowed such a dull and utterly bland name upon that ancient fortress: the faceless desk-monkeys deep within the War Ministry’s dark and forbidding cubicle farms or Crimson Arrow himself? Say what you will about giving military installations, projects, and crafts overly dramatic and vulgar names like ‘Vengeance’, ‘Indestructible’, and ‘Arse-Kicker’, at the very least they are memorable. All I could foresee was a bureaucratic nightmare about to unfold as a result of some desk clerk’s hoof slipping on a typewriter, Faust knows what chaos might ensue if a fort was denied its monthly shipment of paperclips.

“The pony civilisation that built Castle Maredun also constructed a series of smaller fortified outposts along the Macintosh Hills, presumably to prevent pre-Equestrian raiders from bypassing Black Venom Pass and going straight over the hills. A battalion [an ad hoc formation consisting of two hundred and seventy ponies, consisting of three platoons from each company, and often used for when smaller fighting formations might prove to be more tactically advantageous than committing an entire regiment to the battle] made up of platoons from both the 1st Night Guards and the 1st Solar Guards and backed up with artillery support from a 16th Royal Artillery scratch battery will advance in small groups through the passes between the hills and then take and fortify the outpost. When Army Group Centre makes its assault on the Pass the battalion will be in a prime position to outflank and encircle the Changeling army, thus ensuring its complete and total annihilation on the field.

“Like I said, sirs, quite simple really.”

I have to admit that it did seem like a perfectly reasonable plan. Granted, it wasn’t even in the same league as, say, Neighpoleon and his arch-nemesis the Iron Duke of Trottingham, but still it looked as if it might actually work. Like most military strategies, however, it relied entirely upon the misapprehension that the enemy was going to behave in a predictable manner. If anything, the point of strategy was to try and act in a manner contrary to the opponent’s perceptions. Despite this, assuming that the Changelings did as they were damn well expected to do, it might have a chance of actually working.

There was, however, one huge flaw with this plan that I picked up on almost instantly. I hid my immense discomfiture with considerable effort, being a proverbial stone’s throw away from running out of that tent, digging a small hole, and then ordering the closest guardspony to bury me in it. Encircling the Changeling army meant sneaking through the mountains undetected and taking that fortress, and this was entirely dependent on the assumption that the Changelings would simply not notice formations of armoured ponies marching through these small passes like thin trickles of water flowing around stones in a stream. We would be advancing through those tight, narrow passes, where our progress would be made difficult by the meandering paths conforming to the natural passes forged by nature, thus funnelling us all into indefensible choke points ripe for Changeling ambush.

I’ll grant him that the great generals of the past often had to make blind leaps of faith to achieve victory. It strikes me as odd how sometimes, though not all of the time, the difference between a commander remembered for his skill and one remembered for his incompetence is often down to fickle whims of Lady Luck. The genuinely useless ones, however, are rightly committed to posterity for their idiocy. At any rate, I resolved myself to keep myself as far away from this risky flanking move as possible, thought it certainly meant that I would be joining in with the main attack. At the very least, I would have a veritable horde of heavily-armoured ponies to hide behind and a clear line of retreat.

“Is the fortress garrisoned?” I asked. I had dredged up some vaguely remembered fact from high school classes about how assaulting fortresses tended to result in massive casualties for the attacker, though I was safe in the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I would not be taking part in this suicidal excursion. Showing at least some sort of interest, however, would at least endear me further to the ponies I would be fighting with shortly.

Crimson Arrow responded by inclining his head towards me, and the harsh light only made him look all the more disturbing as the light glinted off his amber irises, and as his eyes were cast in deep shadow by the visor of his peaked cap it gave them the unsettling effect of appearing to glow. He shuffled at the papers on the desk before his hooves, and when he answered my question after a moment’s thought he seemed to speak more to the map between us than he did to me.

“Military intelligence reports indicate that it is inhabited by a small tribe of Diamond Dogs,” he said. “They probably use the tunnels beneath the fort to mine the gems their kind lust after.”

“What are the rules of engagement?” asked Colonel Sunshine Smiles. His scar twitched slightly.

Crimson’s horn illuminated once more, and a small wooden chest levitated over towards us from its hiding place near his desk in the corner. The locks on the chest opened with an audible ‘click’ sound each, and as the lid swung back to reveal its contents the whole tent was suddenly bathed in dazzling beams of multi-coloured light. Inside this chest was a spectacular collection of highly polished and masterfully cut gems: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, topazes, zircons, sapphires, and probably more varieties of shiny, pretty stones than I can remember now. As the thin but intense beams of morning sunlight struck each and every one of those precious gems the light was refracted, coloured, and intensified within to give the vague impression that they each burned with a fire of their own. A few reflected beams of coloured light, giving the peculiar impression of being inside a very underwhelming discotheque, and as the multicoloured light was cast upon the pristine white coats of the General and the Solar Guard officers they looked as if they had been caught in an explosion at a rainbow factory. Behind me, I heard Spike make the same slavering noises as a dog when it hears a tin of dog food being opened or Celestia when she detects cake in the vicinity.

“You may use these to barter for possession of the fort,” he said. I vaguely wondered where he had acquired all of these gems from, though precious stones being as ubiquitous as they are in Equestria I suspect he probably just bought them all from a shop (or, more likely I suspected, he had ordered an underling of some description to do so on his behalf).

“And if the negotiations were to fail?”

“Kill them all.” With those cold words the lid of the chest slammed shut with a sudden and resonant finality as if to punctuate that point. A few of the stallions jumped or shuddered in shocked surprise at the sudden loud noise, and the irritating multicoloured light that had reflected from its precious contents dissipated just as quickly. As the chest was levitated back to its resting place by Crimson Arrow’s desk, I exchanged a few worried glances with Shining Armour and Sunshine Smiles; the former was decidedly nonplussed by the implication that we should slaughter a load of Diamond Dogs just to capture some fortress while the latter bore an expression of mild distaste at the prospect.

I did not know much about Diamond Dogs at the time; I had never seen one before, except for a few diagrams in biology textbooks and some vague memories of hearing my father describing his various adventures with them in the far-off places of the world. From what little I knew, they were dim-witted, unintelligent, territorial, and avaricious to a fault, though nature, being the troublesome mistress that she is, had probably made up for such deficiencies by granting them superior upper body strength, sharp claws, and a violent temperament to match.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Crimson Arrow, shrugging his shoulders blandly. “We don’t want to antagonise the entire population of Diamond Dogs here; the very last thing we need is an unknown quantity of partisans disrupting the war effort from behind our frontline. Negotiate for a peaceful hoof-over of the fortress if possible, but if they refuse you are permitted to use lethal force to take it. Capturing E-5150 is absolutely paramount to the success of this offensive, and I am allowing you to use any means necessary to do so.”

I winced at the thought of Diamond Dogs waging guerrilla war behind our lines. It was one thing to be slain on the battlefield, but quite another to be murdered when one believes oneself to be safe and secure behind the frontlines. The mental images of these hulking beasts who, despite their manifest stupidity and distinct lack of personal hygiene, knew this treacherous landscape like Auntie Luna knows the stars and constellations themselves, and would easily be able to sneak and burrow their way past our forward pickets to attack us at our most vulnerable disconcerted me to no end. I glanced at the ponies around us, wondering if any of them could be trusted not to accidentally commit a massive faux pas. Shining Armour, I supposed, was quite an affable pony, though in a manner that disregarded the niceties of social class that I found to be quite irritating, and given the similarities between him and the quasi-bipedal slavering mutts he might get on well with the dim creatures. The Night Guards, however, while being excellent and dedicated soldiers I found their skills in the finer arts of diplomacy to be rather lacking. I know I’m hardly a stranger to the occasional gaffe, but usually when I make a faux pas the very worst that happens is I receive a glass of expensive champagne in the face, as opposed to accidentally starting a war. [He seems to have forgotten the time he nearly started a war with Saddle Arabia by insinuating at an ambassador’s dinner party that the Sultan was inclined towards sleeping with the dead.]

“Excuse me, sir,” said Bramley Apple meekly, snapping instantly to attention as Crimson Arrow swivelled his head towards the NCO’s direction. Bramley swallowed reflexively in his nervousness, and settled on the age-old sergeants’ trick of dealing with an officer by fixing his gaze on the empty space a few inches above the General’s head. “Pardon me for asking, sir, but as sure as the sun rises every morning there’s no way in Tartarus the boys can pull our guns over that rocky ground, sir. Lands’ sakes, sir, we won’t get more than a hundred yards in that terrain before somepony breaks an axle or a wheel, and Ah can tell you, sir, when that happens the gun has to be abandoned. No way to transport a gun once its carriage has been broken, sir, no way.”

“Yes, I had considered that,” said Crimson Arrow with a hint of irritation entering into his voice, as if he wanted to suffix that statement with the short phrase ‘of course I have, you idiot’. “That is where Lieutenant Southern Cross and his ‘lads’ come in. As the battalion advances through the valleys, the engineers will clear a path for your gun carriages.”

The engineer pony next to me nodded his head and grinned. “That’s right, sirs. If you want something built or blown to kingdom come then we’re the blokes you need.” A surreptitious glance at his rear revealed that his cutie mark was, rather worryingly, a red stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. I made a mental note to stay as far away from him as possible in the battlefield, lest I find my component parts scattered over a wide area.

“Well,” said Bramley Apple, finally taking his gaze off the vacant space above Crimson Arrow’s head to regard the Horsetralian officer next to me. His expression was rather quizzical and sceptical as he appeared to be studying the odd pony’s features, before he eventually relented, probably deciding that it was not appropriate for a pony of his lowly station to argue with an officer, and shrugged his shoulders. “If y’all say so, sirs.”

I have to say that I shared his concerns, but as I was confident of the fact that I would not be participating in this rather foolhardy venture and would instead be firmly in between a steel wall of heavily armoured ponies to the front and a clear route of escape to the rear I felt it rather unnecessary to voice them further. Besides, the other ponies seemed rather positive, and even if I could not be precisely one-hundred percent convinced of the efficacy of this risky plan, I must admit I was starting to find Crimson Arrow’s self-assurance to be quite contagious. However, I did not envy the poor ponies who would be traipsing through those hills, their already slow progress further retarded by having to guard not only a full battery of artillery, guns and limbers all, but also a unit of sappers hewing their way through the rocky, unforgiving landscape with liberal application of high explosives and the threat of ambush constantly over their heads.

I suppose I had one thing to look forward to: I would be free of Twilight Sparkle and Spike for a short time.

Crimson Arrow snorted, apparently some sort of signal that we were to move on. He turned his head to face Shining Armour, who throughout this meeting had divided his attention between listening to what was being said and making silly faces at Spike. “Lord Captain [a rather archaic form of address for the Captain of the Royal Guard, for when his full title is too long but when the speaker wishes to avoid the confusion and possible offence that might occur when referring to him merely as ‘captain’],” he said, “you will command the main assault on Black Venom Pass.”

Shining Armour responded by beaming brightly like a colt scout having just been awarded another badge for his already extensive collection. He saluted in a rather clumsy manner, grinning as he did so with his usual lack of deference for authority, “I won’t let you down, sir!”

“See that you don’t, Shining.” The General then turned his head towards Colonel Sunshine Smiles, who returned his gaze with an equally intense, if not more so, stare of his own. “Colonel,” he said.

“Sir.” Sunshine’s refined accent and deep voice seemed to resonate about the tent.

“You will lead the bulk of your regiment with Shining Armour into Black Venom Pass. As such, I will leave it to you to nominate one of your senior officers to command the flanking battalion.”

Were I in Sunshine Smiles’s armoured horseshoes I would probably have picked Major Starlit Skies to lead the attack. His bordering-on-obsessive care for the most minute details and general calm, unflappable demeanour suited him well to this sort of complex operation, at least in my mind, and out of the three possible candidates he was the least likely to do something reckless and get everypony killed. Red Coat was far too young and his opinions on military strategy and leadership were limited by the diktats, dry literature, and outdated teachings of the Academy. His naive and puppy-ish eagerness to please everypony, though oddly endearing in a child, would certainly leave him vulnerable to easy manipulation by his subordinate officers and NCOs. As for Blitzkrieg, well, though I could not doubt his prowess in the air and this leadership of his company, I simply did not think he had the adequate organisational skills to command an entire battalion plus an artillery battery and an additional platoon of engineers. Not to mention his rather abrasive personality would certainly put him at odds with the Solar Guard lieutenants. No, Starlit Skies was by far the most obvious choice, and one would have to be a fool to think otherwise.

So it was quite a shock to me when, after a brief moment’s thought, Sunshine raised his hoof and placed it on Red Coat’s shoulder.

“I nominate Captain Red Coat,” he said.

Red Coat’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates and his pupils shrank suddenly to mere pinpricks. He made an odd, spluttering noise as if he was choking on something, his own saliva perhaps, as he blinked up in confusion at his commanding officer. His jaw worked uselessly for a few moments, only producing that peculiar coughing and wheezing noise interspersed with the odd surprised squeak, before he could finally articulate a single, flat, “What?” At the time I thought that his odd response was merely the result of his hangover and the fact he had not been paying close attention to the proceedings, though I can sympathise with him on the last point, but looking back now I can now see that it was a far greater, more primal emotion behind his comical reaction: fear.

One of Shining Armour’s comrades, Major Puff Pastry of the earth pony company if I recall correctly, made a loud ‘harrumph’ of contempt. “Him?” he blurted out disbelievingly, and I felt I had to physically restrain myself from repeating his incredulous cry. “You must be joking, sir.”

“I never joke about my work,” said Sunshine Smiles.

“He’s only a child,” Puff Pastry replied blankly. He lazily swung his hoof to point at his opposite number directly across the table. “My stallions will never take orders from a little whelp who doesn’t even need to shave.”

Red Coat flushed a deep red colour beneath his ashen grey fur and looked decidedly uncomfortable with what was going on. He anxiously touched his acne-covered chin and cheeks with a hoof. “I do too have to shave,” he protested quietly, though by his body language and tone of voice he appeared to be trying to convince himself of that rather than the pony opposite him.

“They will do as they are damn well told,” snarled Sunshine Smiles. “And you forget your place, Major.”

“Forgive my rudeness, sir,” said Puff Pastry, bowing his head a little in deference to the superior officer. “But I refuse to put my stallions’ lives at risk by placing them under the command of an inexperienced officer, especially on a mission of this great complexity.”

“And that is why Commissar Prince Blueblood will accompany Captain Red Coat.”

Oh, thank you very much, Colonel Sunshine Smiles. I wanted to strangle him right there, to just leap straight over the map-strewn table and wrap my hooficured hooves around that imbecile’s neck and squeeze until his eyes burst like balloons, but that might have been considered impolite in the circumstances so I relented. I like to feel that I kept my irritation in check at having my plans scuppered so completely, though I could not help but feel the ends of my lips tugging downwards and my brow furrowing into a frown. As all eyes turned to me I forced a decidedly fake smile to my lips that I hoped looked sufficiently cocky enough to fit in with their idea of the sort of thing I’d do, all the while I tried desperately to think of a way to get out of this suicidal plan without appearing to lose face.

It was an already difficult task that was made completely impossible with everypony staring at me, waiting for an answer. Especially disconcerting was Red Coat, whose gaze at me from over the desk with those huge, pleading, puppy-like eyes of his which, when combined with his sullen expression and the ravages of his drinking yesterday, made him look so pathetic it was difficult to say ‘no’. I came up blank; there were no lies, half-truths, deceptions, or tricks left in my arsenal that would have gotten me out of this situation with my reputation intact. It was then that I decided my best option, objectively, was to simply go along with it and then take measures to ensure my own survival in this mission.

“Oh, I don’t think the lad needs any help,” I said, taking step one in plotting my survival. “He’s a perfectly capable officer who graduated from the Academy with top marks if I recall correctly.” I recalled that minor factoid from some half-forgotten conversation I must have had with him some time ago, or probably dredged it up from some record or scrap of paper. Not that the slightest bit of difference, as what the Royal Military Academy believes an officer should be and the reality are quite dissonant concepts. After all, even I had managed to scrape a passing grade all those years ago. Anyway, that helped to boost his confidence slightly, which was sorely lacking, and would also mean he would try that little bit harder to avoid disappointing me.

I shrugged my shoulders, affecting to look as if putting my life in danger was no real issue for me, despite the fact that my heart was rapidly turning into a frigid ball of ice beneath my ribcage. “I’ll be more than willing to offer my assistance to him if needed.”

That seemed to mollify Captain Puff Pastry and Captain Red Coat a bit, as a little bit of colour started to return to the latter’s skin. This bloody issue was going to irritate me further, but I decided that I would worry about it later. It might not be all that bad, I told myself; if we were careful we could reach the fort unmolested, happily exchange it for a few shiny baubles, and then launch the flanking attack on the Changelings’ rear. At least there we would not be facing the full frontage of the Changeling army, but rather their exposed flanks. Despite all of these assurances my hooves began to itch once more.

Terror, however, soon gave way to boredom as the meeting continued to drag on. From what little I can remember of the remainder of that briefing, and even if I could recall more I would have spared my dear reader (whoever you are) from the sheer banality of what was being said, the conversation soon drifted towards the exact military formations that would make up the two prongs of the attack. While it was obvious that the main bulk of our two regiments would be committed to the frontal assault on the Pass, the issue of which platoons to assign to the battalion was a rather more difficult task. It had been decided, much to my confusion, that both the 1st Night Guards and the 1st Solar Guards regiments would contribute their platoons to form an inter-regimental battalion. It was a nice enough idea in theory, and thankfully Shining Armour was able to beat a little sense into the more snobbish of his junior officers.

I had to admit that the previous collaboration between our two corps had worked out reasonably well in Black Venom Pass, as battle and shared mortal danger tended to have quite the levelling effect on most ponies. Nevertheless, from what I could tell, despite my attention still wavering between the listening to the officers discussing dull numbers and statistics and my own daydreaming about sharing a bath with Fancy Pants’ attractive and highly promiscuous trophy wife, two thirds of the flanking battalion would be made up of Night Guards platoons. The remaining third would naturally be formed up of three platoons from each company of the 1st Solar Guard, and it was quite a shock when I heard Scarlet Letter’s name announced to lead the unicorn platoon. It was enough to pull me straight out of my pleasant, erotic fantasy to crash unpleasantly back in the grim real world – the mental equivalent of being awoken from a deep sleep by having cold water splashed on one’s face.

Of all the ponies I had met in his regiment, Scarlet Letter seemed to be the least suited to be in charge of any group of armed ponies, in fact I barely trusted him to perform his day job as a Member of Parliament adequately. My dislike of him was not entirely rational, I’ll admit, and for all I knew he could have been a perfectly competent officer. Yet there was something about that scrawny little pony that just put me off; at the risk of sounding shallow I found his physical appearance quite repellent, but that was hardly his fault, yet there was something in his manner, the idea that he was trying to gain my friendship merely as a means to an end, that just disturbed me. I had mostly forgotten about him and his rather amateurish attempts to ingratiate himself with me in the intervening time between the tea party and this meeting, but those incredibly snobbish and derisive terms he used to describe the same ponies I had fought with and seen die did not sit well with me.

Despite my objections, I decided that it was not worth interrupting the meeting merely to voice my unproven paranoia about this particular pony. I made a mental note to speak with Shining Armour about it at a later date, though I suspected that Shining merely wanted the scheming little unicorn as far away from him as possible in the battlefield. If Scarlet Letter could be trusted to shut up and keep his views to himself, especially when surrounded by over a hundred of the so-called ‘base animals’, then there shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Following that we came to the most onerous part of any meeting, the question-and-answer session. As the officers posed their questions to General Crimson Arrow, who did his best to answer them despite the rather nascent stage of planning here, I noticed a distinctly different atmosphere in this meeting compared to the last briefing I attended. A week earlier there was a sense of excited anticipation, as foals feel on Hearth’s Warming Day morning before they rush in to tear open their presents, whereas now one got the impression of the utmost professionalism. Questions were short, terse, and wasted few words, and their answers were suitably punctilious, if dull.

The meeting dragged on past an hour and my legs were starting to ache from standing in one place for so long. Though I had been trained in the subtle arts of standing perfectly still for extended periods of time by virtue of my previous and lacklustre career in the Solar Guards, the intervening time being spent in idle luxury must have done much to erode what little remained of that. I gently flexed each of my legs in turn to maintain the circulation and avoid fainting, which would have been most unseemly for one of my austere station to do so. But with my mind wandering and my limbs getting ever number each passing minute I silently begged them to stop asking so many damned questions and let me go.

After what felt like an eternity the questions soon began to dry up, probably because the other ponies were getting as bored as I was. I, however, was sufficiently skilled to maintain the illusion that I was paying rapt attention to what was being said, with judicious and frequent nods of my head and making noises of general assent whenever it felt necessary.

Crimson Arrow gathered up some of the papers in his magic and began to shuffle them neatly on the table in the universally accepted sign that business is concluded, and not before time. Unfortunately, I heard an excited gasp from behind me, and instantly that high-pitched sound brought back distressing foalhood memories of being stuck in thaumatology class and a certain purple filly wasting everypony’s time by asking so many irritating, but admittedly academically valid, questions so that we all missed our break time. So ubiquitous was that sound in all classes that I shared with her that it had become so ingrained in my memory, I did not have to turn my head back to see that Twilight Sparkle was holding a hoof in the air and likely waving it anxiously.

The General glanced up from his papers and frowned in a peculiar way. “Yes, Lady Sparkle?”

Giving up all semblance of trying to appear at all regal, relaxed, and as if I actually wanted to be here, I let out an irritated groan and sat down on my haunches. What Twilight actually asked was rather more unexpected and all the more horrifying than having to sit through a veritable barrage of questions.

“Can I come, too?”

Faust help me.

Author's Note

Lots and lots of lovely exposition here, sorry guys but I hope I've at least made it entertaining for you all.

Bloodstained (Part 7)

To say that the notion of Twilight Sparkle tagging along to view a battle did not sit at all well with me would have been a gross underestimation of just how I felt about it. As if I did not have enough to worry about with the threat of ambush; a possible siege against Diamond Dogs; the presence of Scarlet Letter; and, of course, millions of Changelings each with a vested interest in wearing my pelt like Rarity wears a fashionable new scarf, Twilight Sparkle had apparently lost all rational sense of self-preservation. Judging by the varied reactions of the ponies around me, I was not alone in thinking this. Indeed, something quite historic had just happened; the collective opinions of myself and a dozen ponies of different ranks, regiments, corps, and walks of life were in a sort of uneasy consensus; Twilight Sparkle was completely out of her bloody mind.

Captain Red Coat, who had somehow fallen asleep during the long and dull question-and-answer session, awoke with a jolt and lifted his head wearily from a small puddle of drool on the table. His esteemed associate, Captain Blitzkrieg, had taken to lying on his belly next to his earth pony comrade and was idly scratching his name into the underside of the wooden desk with one of his many wickedly-sharp stiletto blades. The thuggish pegasus perked his head up, pricked ears twitching like a guard dog on alert, as he heard something that likely finally interested him. On the other side of the debris-strewn desk, the officers of the 1st Solar Guard looked uneasily at one another as their commanding officer appeared to be having a small seizure. The only ponies who seemed unfazed by what was going on were Sergeant Bramley Apple, who, because of his low status as an NCO, was not allowed to express anything other than blind obedience, and Lieutenant Southern Cross who seemed more amused than anything.

As I turned my head to look down at her, my sincere promise to look after her echoed loudly through my mind. How was I supposed to ensure her safety if she insisted on putting herself in mortal danger? My fear that the greatest threat to her continued existence would not come from, say, a disgruntled and politically-minded officer out to save his career or from Changeling infiltrators, but from her own determination to acquire knowledge and her own naïveté about what a battle is actually like was turning real. More importantly, my irritatingly vivid imagination was conjuring all sorts of divine punishments that Auntie ‘Tia might mete out on me for failing my sacred oath; perhaps hot, molten gold would be poured down my throat and the resulting cast of my digestive system be cut out to serve as an example to all who forsake their vows.

Some ponies looked directly at me as if waiting for an answer; word had somehow spread – as it often does in the Royal Guard, for despite the perpetual need for secrecy ponies can and will talk – that I was apparently responsible for her. I suppose it made sense; even without any knowledge of Princess Celestia’s little chat with me it would have been obvious that I as the principal political officer here, and therefore the link between the military and civilian spheres of life, it was beholden unto me to ensure her safety.

“Pardon?” I said flatly.

Twilight’s hoof scuffed at the ground nervously, kicking up a little cloud of dust and gouging a small trough as she seemed to become acutely aware of suddenly becoming the centre of attention despite her earlier assertion that she would merely be ‘observing’.

“I want to observe the battle for my report.”

“No. Out of the question.”

Twilight looked positively crestfallen; her ears wilted and she pouted like a spoilt foal being denied a new toy. “How am I supposed to write this report for the Princess about the Royal Guard if I can’t even observe how a battle is fought?”

I have to concede that she may have had a point there, as despite her extensive preliminary reading those history books and ancient texts generally do not provide one with an adequate description of what a battle is actually like. If anything, the dry statistics and reporting of facts and figures from history books and the rather dubious authenticity and self-aggrandising nature of Pre-Heresy Era primary texts paint a highly misleading image of warfare; one where a battle is a quick and somewhat civilised affair, with plenty of glory for all who survive – especially generals and leaders – while the dead and injured are quietly swept under the rug as mere numbers at the end for the bean counters, if they are acknowledged at all. [It should be noted that some of the ancient texts on war that Twilight had brought with her were, as Blueblood described, not entirely accurate and often heavily biased in favour of whatever cause or faction the writer belonged to. Though I have done my best to make myself and my memories available for historians, any reliable testimony I can give is limited to those events which I had witnessed or presided over. This unfortunately led to a vague and incomplete historiography of the Wars of Unification and the Nightmare Heresy which was only corrected by the return of my sister, Princess Luna.] Of course she was intelligent enough to know about all of this, but, knowing her as I do, it was that same deficiency of knowledge that was likely driving her curiosity here. A certain proverb about cats and their deaths thereof sprung to mind.

“It’s a really bad idea, Twiley!” Shining Armour exclaimed, shaking his head emphatically. “Battles are very dangerous! You might get hurt!”

With such insight into the supreme art of strategy it became obvious to all attending just why Auntie ‘Tia, in her divine and infinite wisdom, had hoof-picked this lower-middle class oik to be Captain of her Royal Guard and her personal defender. Sarcasm aside, Shining Arsehole’s rather idiotic outburst was understandable in hindsight, given that his younger sister appeared to have taken complete leave of her senses. The other officers and I were at least polite enough not to show our derision of his behaviour, aside from a frustrated snort from Blitzkrieg that indicated, like me, he wanted this nonsense over and done with as quickly as possible.

At the very least, Twilight’s response to Shining’s comment indicated that we both in agreement on something for once; she rolled her eyes and sighed as she paused to collect her thoughts, the exhalation of her breath causing the minute golden stars of dust to swirl violently before her as if on invisible cosmic winds.

“I know that,” she said rather quietly, but in the stillness of the room her voice felt somehow amplified against the background noise of the encampment.

“I implore you to listen to your brother,” said Sunshine Smiles gravely. He attempted to pull what I could only assume what was intended to be a sympathetic smile, but that scar of his transformed what should have been a gentle expression into a grotesque and sardonic grin. “The battlefield is no place for a young lady such as you.”

Twilight frowned at the rather condescending remark. “It’s not like I’ll be taking part in any of the fighting. I’ll just be observing.”

Shining Armour shook his head again, though this time he appeared to have recovered somewhat from the initial shock of hearing Twilight’s request and no longer resembled a poorly-stuffed dog with bugged-out eyes and a hanging lower jaw. “It’s still too risky,” he said. “A lot of things can go wrong in a battle.”

“Shining...” whined Twilight.

“Oh, don’t worry Lady Sparkle,” I said, partly to mollify her enough so she no longer looked like an abused little puppy, but mostly because I just wanted to bring a quick end to this insanity. “You may have access to all AARs [After-Action Reports, the military does love its acronyms] and interviews with soldiers and officers once the battle is over. Would that be sufficient to your needs?”

She paused, thinking it over. “I suppose that would be okay,” she said, but her tone of voice and the petulant sulking expression that she wore implied that it was most certainly not ‘okay’. Her disappointment, of course, was not matched by the other ponies around us, as a palpable sense of relief seemed to flood through the tent around me, especially Shining Armour who looked like a condemned criminal who had just been granted a stay of execution. Whether the rest of them were genuinely concerned for Twilight’s safety or, like me, they just wanted to leave and do something (relatively) productive I could not say. However, it was not to last as before General Crimson Arrow had the chance to even think about proclaiming that our business was concluded and arrange for the next strategy meeting to sort out the dull specifics of the operation, he was interrupted by a short, loud, violent exclamation that came from just next to me.

“Hey!”

Spike suddenly vaulted himself over Twilight’s head and onto the table with surprising dexterity, considering his clumsy and ungainly appearance.

“Spike!” Twilight regarded him with shock. “What are you doing?”

Spike ignored her, and the rest of us were so utterly paralysed by indecision that nopony could do more than stand and stare vacantly at the bizarre spectacle. Of course this was utterly inappropriate that he, a mere child, should even be present, let alone make such a mockery of this highly sensitive strategy meeting. However, as he was under Twilight’s care and, more importantly, he was capable of shooting searing flames from his maw, none of us really knew whether we should attempt to intervene.

“This is Twilight Sparkle we’re talking about!” he cried, looking remarkably like some sort of reformist demagogue reciting his ridiculous creed to an assembled mass of ignorant peasants, gesticulating with his hands and scattering scrawled bits of paper and detailed survey maps beneath his clumsy feet. “She’s the most powerful unicorn in all of Equestria and Princess Celestia’s personal student and a bearer of an Element of Harmony!”

He turned around to face me, and I felt the tremendous urge to introduce his obnoxious little face to the back of my hoof, though I knew Twilight, whose cheeks were by now blushing a brighter shade of red than the scarlet sash tied around my waist, would likely not approve of it. So there I stood, rather paralysed by the absurdity of what was going on and morbidly interested to see what exactly he was trying to prove with this ludicrous display. He jabbed a finger against my chest, and instantly I felt the familiar aristocratic indignation rise within me.

“If anything, you should be taking orders from her!” he shouted.

“Spike.”

“She defeated Nightmare Moon!”

“Spike!”

“And Discord, and an Ursa Minor!”

“Spike!”

“She gave me an awesome moustache.”

“SPIKE!”

The sound of Twilight’s voice, like a mother telling her foal to behave in public, brought Spike’s little tirade to a crashing halt. He stood there, his stubby finger pressed against my chest as I gave him my patented disapproving commissarial glare, and his previously indignant expression gradually gave way to vacant-eyed confusion as if he was somehow incognisant of what he had just done wrong. Around us, the assembled ponies watched on with expressions that varied between disbelief and stern disapproval; though whatever effect Colonel Sunshine Smiles and General Crimson Arrow were trying to achieve by glowering at Spike was utterly destroyed by the infantile snickering of Shining Armour and Lieutenant Southern Cross.

“Get down from there!” implored Twilight.

With a small burst of telekinetic magic I pushed Spike away from me. Not hard enough to cause him any damage, mind you, but just enough force to knock him on his rump. He bounced slightly as his backside hit the paper-covered table. I smoothed down the slight crease he had made in my storm coat which, admittedly, looked as if had seen better days. I looked down, and Spike met my flat gaze with a ridiculously adorable expression of mild confusion that made me want to vomit. Of course, my every impulse was to pick him up and drop-kick him out of the tent as hard as possible, but I doubted that anypony present would have taken kindly to seeing their supposed hero abusing a child even if the runt did bloody well deserve it.

In the awkward and embarrassed hush that ensued, Captain Blitzkrieg skulked away, only pausing to tell me that he was ‘only going for a piss’ as he passed me on his way out of the tent. I did not see him again until much later that day. If I did not have such a significant stake in this, as it was my sworn duty to ensure that Twilight does not do something desperately suicidal just because her enissophobia [fear of committing some unpardonable crime or sin, in Twilight’s case he probably means ‘failing me’] had over-ridden her sense of self-preservation, I would have likely followed him.

Looking rather sheepish, Spike scrambled off the table, sending more papers flying as he did so, and retook his usual position perched upon Twilight’s back. “I was only trying to help,” he muttered as Twilight made a few apologies to the assembled ponies for Spike’s behaviour.

“I’m sorry, Lady Sparkle,” I said, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible despite my growing irritation. “But it is because you are a bearer of an Element of Harmony that you cannot be allowed to risk your life like this. Try to think strategically; the Elements of Harmony are amongst the most powerful magical artefacts in Equestria’s arsenal, and key to defeating Queen Chrysalis. Please, for the good of Equestria, I implore you to reconsider your request. If you were to be injured, captured, or, Faust forbid, killed in battle then it would as severe a loss to us as the destruction of an entire regiment. Think, where would Equestria be without the bearer of the Element of Magic?”

I thought that little speech would have been the end of it. However, despite her earlier acquiescence, Twilight had somehow been emboldened by Spike’s short but impassioned rant. She no longer seemed to be trying to hide from the sea of mostly disapproving faces behind the table, but, as if she had just become cognisant of the fact that, yes, she was a bearer of an Element of Harmony and therefore worthy of at least some respect, she stood tall with her head held high and her chest puffed out confidently; a far cry from the meek little mare I used to relentlessly tease and bully some ten years ago.

“But this is something I really have to do,” she declared. “My commission will ultimately shape how the Royal Guard will be reformed into a more effective and efficient fighting machine, and if putting my life in danger means I may be able to save the lives of your soldiers then so be it. Princess Celestia has personally asked me to lead this commission, and I’m not about to let her down by not giving her a complete picture of the state the Royal Guard is in.”

The mention of Princess Celestia’s name put the fear of Her into my colleagues, as a stony, awkward hush once more descended over the tent. It was silent save for the nervous coughs of a few of Shining Armour’s comrades and the irritating scuffle of hooves on the dusty ground.

I wondered how long it would be until Twilight Sparkle pulled the ‘I Am Princess Celestia’s Most Faithful Student And I Can Do Whatever I Want’ card, though I am no stranger to using Her divine name and my rather loose association with it to get what I wanted (namely persuading the palace kitchens to give me treats when I was a colt or seducing mares when I grew up). Seeing Twilight use it, however, was still rather jarring, considering she seemed to be under the rather endearingly mistaken assumption that one can succeed in life on pure merit alone, without noble birth or the appropriate connections with powerful ponies. Looking back on it now, after these decades, her rise to power and later coronation as a princess of Equestria a year after this meeting might have been viewed as a striking a blow for egalitarianism by some of the rather more naive ponies in our fair land, but one must not forget that she had only risen to such a lofty position by dint of her close association with the one pony highest on the metaphorical totem: Princess Celestia. [One of the more frustrating of Blueblood’s faults is his tendency to assume that the world and everyone in it operates on the same cynical mindset that he does. Contrary to what this paragraph suggests, Twilight was crowned princess based on her sterling work in the study of the magic of friendship and steadfast defence of Equestria against many threats, and not mere nepotism.]

Despite it not being stated overtly, the threat behind Twilight’s words was obvious to all; do not obstruct my work or you will answer to Princess Celestia. Once again I found myself trapped in that infernal self-contradictory labyrinth of circular logic unique to the Equestrian military. My duty was to protect Lady Sparkle so that she may proceed with her investigation; the Royal Commission on the Royal Guard as it was now called. [Its full title was ‘The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Reform of Their Highness’s Armed Forces with Special Reference to the Battle of Black Venom Pass’. Unsurprisingly, most ponies simply refer to it as the Twilight Sparkle Commission.] If she was to place herself in any sort of danger in the course of her research, as she was proposing now, then naturally I would have to step in and put a stop to it for her own good. However, in doing so I would be obstructing the Royal Commission and therefore liable for prosecution. Were I to allow Twilight to go it would constitute an unacceptable risk which would, in turn, compromise the integrity of her research. Research projects tend to be very much compromised when the researcher is wounded or dead.

As much as I wanted to be as far away from the irritating little mare as possible, considering I would much rather go into Dodge Junction and attend a hoe-down than suffer Twilight’s presence for any longer than I felt was strictly necessary, it seemed that the best course of action was to allow her to accompany me to Fort E-5150. I could keep a better eye on her, for one, and ensure that she did not do anything too reckless in her relentless pursuit of knowledge or, as Auntie ‘Tia had advised me, keep the more politically-minded officers from trying to skew her research in their favour. The fact that it would provide a perfect place for me to attend the battle without actually having to place myself in any sort of danger, as I would be relatively safe foal-sitting Celestia’s little pet when the tides of blood and steel and chitin clashed was, of course, merely an added bonus for me.

“My commission has the backing of the Royal Commissariat,” Twilight added, when it became evident that nopony was going to speak up. At once, all eyes turned to me for guidance, and I silently cursed her for putting me on the spot like that. I looked around at the sea of expectant faces, each demanding that I settle this insanity for once and for all.

“As the Princess wills, we obey,” I said, reciting a common platitude I had picked up from the common soldiers. It was the verbal equivalent of a vacant shrug; one given as a reluctant acceptance that things are not going quite as well as one would hope but that there is not a lot that could be done about it, which perfectly matched how I felt then. “Are you absolutely certain you want to do this?”

Twilight paused, and then nodded her head energetically. “Absolutely!”

“Very well, then.”

I looked to Shining Armour and Sunshine Smiles; the two ponies most likely to object to this arrangement, judging by their earlier vocal objection to the very idea of Twilight being anywhere near a battlefield. In theory, I could have simply pulled rank and slammed my commissarial authority upon them, and that would have been the end of the discussion. That, however, was unlikely to have gone down particularly well with my colleagues, and considering that I had to work, sleep, and fight alongside these ponies I thought it best not to antagonise them. A thought, by the way, I do my best to instil into the commissar cadets I now train, in the vain hope that any mortal wounds they may suffer after graduation are at least inflicted by the enemy and not by disgruntled soldiers and officers with scores to settle.

“You will require an escort,” I continued, putting the plan that was hastily formulating in my mind to appease the two officers into motion.

“I’ll look after her!” exclaimed Red Coat suddenly. The young officer looked suddenly sheepish, glancing up at Sunshine Smiles for support that never came, before he muttered an embarrassed apology and sank beneath the table.

“Ahem, I will look after her.” I looked to Shining Armour. “If that is acceptable?”

Shining Armour looked at me with a decidedly ambivalent expression; though he appeared to trust me now since we had both spilt the blood of Equestria’s enemies in Black Venom Pass, it seemed we still had rather a long way to go when it came to his sister. I could not fault his trepidation over the prospect of leaving his beloved sister with the pony who had once reduced her to a sobbing wreck, but thankfully reason prevailed, albeit rather slowly as it seemed to take him quite an embarrassingly long amount of time for him to think about it. I suppose he was quite unused to the concept of using the organ located between his ears, however small and withered it might have been.

“When Twilight gets an idea into her head, it’s hard to talk her out of it,” he said, grinning like an idiot. “You will look after her, Blueblood?”

I nodded solemnly. “I swore an oath to Princess Celestia that no harm will come to Twilight, and I’m not about to renege on that.” And, more importantly, keeping that promise would provide a suitable pretence for me to find a nice, safe, and preferably comfortable little cubby hole deep inside the fort for me to hide from the Changelings in.

Anyway, that little act of alleged chivalry seemed to placate Shining Armour, and he brokered no further objections to this plan. Judging by the rumbles of general assent from most of the ponies around me (especially Red Coat, who was no doubt enthused by the idea of spending even more time with Twilight) that statement had gone down particularly well with them. The irony of further cementing my fraudulent reputation for heroics by actually arranging to have myself as far away from any opportunity to show off said heroics was not lost on me, and it took a not insignificant amount of willpower to avoid grinning smugly to myself. I hoped I succeeded.

With Shining Armour satisfied for now, I turned my attention to Sunshine Smiles. The flesh around his scar twitched violently as he looked down his sharp, refined muzzle at me.

“Colonel,” I said, “do you have anything further to add?”

“On this occasion I will defer to the Commissar’s judgement,” he said, narrowing his amber, draconic eyes at me. The implication lurking behind those words like a dagger concealed within a dark cloak was not lost on me; if something were to go wrong I would be held personally responsible in his eyes. “However, I must say that I am not entirely happy with this arrangement.”

Truth be told, I was not particularly happy with this arrangement either, but the only thing that would make me truly happy was to be allowed to go home with a nice bottle of Pol Roger champagne and some bored and highly impressionable Prench noblemare willing to entertain me for the night. Sadly, sticking with Twilight seemed to be the best way of maximising my chances of survival, barring desertion, of course, which was not an option as having one of the most recognisable faces in all of Equestria would have made hiding rather difficult.

The Colonel gave a vague sort of shrug, apparently recognising, like me, that this was all beyond his control and that it was simply best to go along with it. “I want her to attend some basic Royal Guard training,” he continued, and I noticed that he was speaking to me as if Twilight was not present in the tent at all, “and she will be given a suit of armour to wear."

I decided that it would not be entirely politic of me to voice any objections to this entirely unfair arrangement—that the civilian non-combatant received a full set of Night Guard steel plate armour to wear while I still had to prance about dressed like some bloody Saddle Arabian dictator—as everypony was much too tired anyway to tolerate any further interjections. I merely nodded my head in agreement with Sunshine Smiles, and prayed to Faust that nopony else would have anything further to say.

The meeting wound down to a close once more, and not before time; a surreptitious glance at my pocket watch revealed that I had been trapped in this tent for little more than one and a half hours, and I was rapidly feeling that sense of artificial exhaustion that one generally feels after the first hour or so of a meeting. With nothing else constructive to add from anypony else in the room, General Crimson Arrow tapped a muffled tattoo on the paper-covered table with his swagger stick to draw attention to himself. He had been conspicuously silent since Twilight had voiced her proposal, in stark contrast to his prior verbosity in explaining his master plan. It was as if he did not want to get directly involved with Twilight, though I suppose his sudden shyness was quite understandable, considering that she is yet another pony present who, in addition to me, held the power of life and death over his flagging career.

“I hope you made the right decision,” he said, addressing me. As with Colonel Sunshine Smiles thinly-veiled threat, the implication of whose lap blame will be placed into should things go pear-shaped was starkly apparent. I wondered if I had made the correct choice, but it was far too late to back down now. “Well, before we wrap up, does anypony else have anything to add?”

Red Coat put his hoof up in the air, and I barely restrained the urge to dive across the table throttle him.

“Can I have an awesome moustache, too?”

General Crimson Arrow glowered down at the simpering adolescent for a few seconds, his elegant swagger stick held aloft menacingly in a pale red glow as if ready to strike Red Coat across the cheek. “Get out,” he snapped. “All of you.”

Despite his brusqueness, a few ponies mumbled their thanks to the General and even fewer offered half-hearted salutes, except for Bramley Apple who performed his so perfectly that it would have moved any tough-guy drill sergeant to hot tears of joy. One by one they began to shuffle out of the tent, and as they did so I clumsily clambered up to my hooves and moved to intercept Shining Armour as he walked past; there was still the matter of his choice of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter to command the Solar Guard unicorn platoon in the flanking battalion that I wanted to discuss with him urgently.

“Not you, Blueblood,” said Crimson Arrow suddenly. “I’d like a word with you. Alone.”

I snorted in irritation, but there was little else I could do about it; when a general officer requests one’s presence for whatever mysterious reason and, just like the meeting this morning, absolutely everything else is put on hold until the matter is resolved. Inwardly, I cursed him twice; first for denying my chance to confront Shining Armour, and second for making me stay behind in this tent longer than I felt I strictly had to. Luckily, I caught Shining’s eye as he walked past me, and, somehow divining my intentions, he nodded his head towards me with a solemn expression on his face. “I’ll catch you later,” he said, before leaving through the tent flap just behind me.

The last of the officers silently vacated the tent [Including Twilight Sparkle and Spike, presumably], and I was left alone with Crimson Arrow. I felt quite awkward in the presence of my former friend, though I hid my discomfiture behind the habitual masque of cold, contemptuous, aristocratic aloofness that had served so well in protecting me, like a shield, from the worst consequences of my actions. I admit that I often wonder these years, decades after the events which I am describing here, where that facade ends and the true Blueblood begins, if one such beast actually exists after all this time. The awkward hush that descended around the tent became interminable, and yet somehow I could not think of anything to say.

We were separated by a gulf of paper; maps, communiqués, lists, and hastily scribbled notes that, like the sea, seemed to have waves, eddies, and currents in the swirling morass of scattered sheets. Yet the greater and more tumultuous gulf between us was one of betrayal, or, rather, my perceived betrayal, which still seemed to cut Crimson Arrow deep. Of course, I was completely and utterly justified in my decision, at least in the eyes of the Princesses, soldiers, my peers, the press, and the greater masses of Equestrian society, and, by dint of my rank and title, beyond any reproach for it, but whispers of doubt still echoed in my mind.

“So,” he said finally, his halting voice dry and cracking.

“So?”

“How are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” I replied automatically. “And you?”

He shrugged vacantly, but gave no verbal answer. None was needed, of course, as I could tell by his dishevelled appearance and awkward body language exactly how he was feeling. He shuffled nervously on his hooves, kicking up dust as he did so, and his cold, glimmering eyes, deep in the shadow cast by his peaked cap, darted around the tent at everything except me. His voice, when he finally summoned up the courage to speak once more, was quiet and stammering, compared to the rather more confident and impassioned explanation of his master plan about an hour earlier. The difference, I found, was quite startling and a little disconcerting.

“Can I... can I get you a drink?” he asked after a moment’s pause. A flicker of magic from his horn opened the small drinks cabinet, hitherto unnoticed by me, located just next to the writing desk nestled in the corner of the room. Contained therein were a number of cut crystal glass decanters, each filled to varying levels with amber, clear, or dark red liquids. Where the harsh morning light slipped through a small hole in the roof and struck the now opened cabinet, the expensive and finely wrought crystal, probably modelled on some ancient artefacts of the long-dead Crystal Empire [the Crystal Empire was restored as a vassal state after its return one thousand years after its disappearance and shortly after the completion of Operation Equestrian Dawn and the events Blueblood was describing, the consequences of which are described in later entries. Prior to its re-appearance, there was significant archaeological interest in the Crystal Empire, and luxury items styled upon ancient Crystal artefacts were very much in vogue] sparkled brightly and gave the myriad fluids these vessels bore a lustrous glow. Situated above these decanters on a separate shelf were a number of tumblers, goblets, and port glasses, all styled in that same, quite gaudy, style.

“It’s a little early in the morning for that, isn’t it?” I said dryly, though after that meeting I certainly felt I could do with something of sufficient strength as to wipe my memory of it.

Crimson Arrow did not answer, but instead trotted off towards his beloved drinks cabinet and chose a clear crystalline decanter a quarter filled with a deep amber-red liquid. He lifted it up, his pale blue aura wrapped around the rectangular glass vessel carved with diamond patterns, and examined it carefully before selecting two wide-bottomed brandy snifters decorated in the same design.

“I was saving this bottle,” he said as he pulled the spherical stopper from the decanter and placed it delicately aside. “Hors d’age brandy; hoof-crafted by the Prench monks of the monastery of Saint Ivrogne.”

I snorted. “How the devil did you get your hooves on that? I’ve been trying for years!” It was purported to be the very best by those very few ponies lucky enough to have actually sampled this incredibly rare beverage. Sadly, despite my esteemed position in the hierarchy of Equestria’s ruling class and my extensive network of vassals across the heartland of Canterlot, I found it nigh impossible for me to secure even a single bottle, which, for a time, led me to believe that there was some sort of conspiracy mustering against me.

A sly grin formed on his lips as he looked at me over his shoulder. “Anything is possible with the right connections,” he said vaguely, “you should know that.” He turned his attention back to the bottle and began decanting it into the two prepared snifters.

Holding the two goblets in his telekinetic grasp, each containing a measure of the dark amber-brown liquid that sloshed violently with every movement, he stepped cautiously towards me and offered a glass. “It was quite difficult to get this bottle, and I hoped that the two of us would be able to toast our victory together after Black Venom Pass. Well, we all know how that turned out.”

“Yes, quite,” I said, quite unsure of what to say. Nodding my head, I accepted the proffered glass, and his pale white aura surrounding was replaced by my deeper blue. I made a show of holding the drink up to the light, watching as the bright morning sun made the deep amber-brown liquid sparkle and shimmer as if diamonds had been immersed within.

“Today seems like as good a time as any,” he said, shrugging. “We may not get another chance now.” He held his glass up and tapped it against mine with a bright, chiming ‘clink’ noise. “To victory.”

“To victory.” I took a small sip of the brandy, taking the time needed to fully appreciate the distiller’s art. The aroma, which reached my nostrils a full second before this so-called ‘eaux-de-vie’ touched my lips, was strong, heady, and slightly reminiscent of vanilla. The drink itself failed to disappoint; it was smooth, luxurious, with a surprisingly complex taste which echoed dry fruit and strong finish that lingered pleasantly on my tongue. Absolutely divine; like kissing an angel.

As the pleasant warmth of the drink filled me—said to be magically enhanced to protect the imbiber from the effects of extreme cold which were obviously not needed here—I watched Crimson Arrow take a sip, too much and much too quickly, and as a result broke out into a violent fit of coughing and wheezing. It took him a while, but after briefly screwing up his face as if he had just bitten into a particularly sour orange that he was assured was perfectly sweet, he recovered admirably.

Crimson Arrow was the sort of stallion who fancied himself as one not only capable of holding his drink, but able to do so in a polite, refined, and classy way; the sort who can quite casually drink a shot of exceedingly strong and quite expensive liquor without appearing to choke on it, and the subsequent effect of which does not reduce one’s behaviour to what an uncouth commoner might call ‘shit-faced’. Sadly, the truth was rather different, and, as I watched him struggle to contain the burning sensation rising up his throat, the fond memory of having to carry him back to his billet from the officers’ billet after he had partaken of far too much port again brought a small smile to my lips.

“I’ve something to tell you,” he said as he placed his drink aside on the table, breathing a heavy sigh as he did so. He removed his cap, placed it on the table next to his drink, and smoothed down his dyed blue mane anxiously with a hoof. Licking his lips, he said, in a quiet voice as if he was trying to force himself to say something deeply unpleasant, “I’m leaving.”

Author's Note

Huzzah! Finally, another chapter!

Edit: fixed the colour formatting issues.

Bloodstained (Part 8)

“You’re leaving?” I echoed dumbly.

“Yes,” he answered flatly.

I took another slow and measured sip of my brandy as I tried to understand the full consequences of that statement, and put to order the chaotic mess of thoughts and emotions that raced through my mind. As I did so, General Crimson Arrow, who suddenly found one of the many maps on the table to be far more interesting than me, appeared greatly misshapen by the distorting effects of the wide, bowl-shaped glass levitating just before me. The notion took quite a while to sink in, and its subsequent ramifications for the war effort and, more importantly, my own safety, took even longer. Fortunately, taking that long, luxurious mouthful of the utterly perfect brandy did much to buy me time to organise my mind and formulate a response; a trick that I had learned from many a dull high society ball. At first I did not know what to make of this development, but my initial gut-reaction was one of relief; I had expected him to be as difficult to remove from his position as it is to extricate Auntie ‘Tia from a well-stocked pâtisserie, but rather he had appeared to be doing the honourable thing and resigning, seemingly of his own free will.

“When?” I asked finally.

“Don’t know. A few weeks, maybe.”

“May I ask why?”

“Politics,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Ah, I never tread there.” [Not strictly true, as Blueblood was a member of the House of Lords, though his actual attendance record is quite poor]

“The Foreign Office believes the Gryphons may take advantage of the chaos here and try to seize our holdings in Zebrica, so the Secretary of State for War’s suggested I voluntarily resign as commander of Army Group Centre to take command of the EEF [Equestrian Expeditionary Force – a Royal Guard formation set up to defend Equestria’s overseas colonies and allied native tribes in Equestria from possible Gryphon expansion] and Native Auxiliaries there. Of course, the Secretary of State for War knows about as much about war as she does about the concept of marital fidelity, which is sod all.” He frowned at me. “You worked under her when you had that desk job in the War Ministry.”

“Indeed I did.” I chuckled warmly, offering a knowing grin as I recalled fondly my brief time working under the Right Honourable Silk Sheets MP, Secretary of State for War at the time, and remembered with greater pleasure the not infrequent, but much more interesting, late night sessions where I was allowed to be on top. Though I did so with a slight pang of regret at the loss of such a carefree existence, one where I merely had to conceal a few youthful indiscretions with a combination of bribes and the threat of violence (from hired goons, of course; I’d prefer not to get my own hooves dirty), rather than my current situation of having to hide behind a dense tapestry of lies, dissembling, and arse-covering to avoid being exposed as the craven bastard that I truly am.

As I lowered my glass, peering into the deep amber drink that sloshed and churned with the gentle swirling motion that I applied to it, a common saying popped unexpectedly into my head: better the devil you know. Do not misunderstand me, dear reader, Crimson Arrow was a poor general; singularly deficient in the personal qualities and the organisational skills necessary for a general officer of his rank to prosecute a modern war, though, judging by the determination he had shown in organising this new offensive and his newfound openness to the opinions and suggestions of other, more experienced officers, he at least showed that he was willing to learn from his mistakes. I was happy to see him leave, and to do so quietly and without fuss so as to maintain what modicum of dignity he had left, but I feared that the pony who would replace him could be worse. Those fears, of course, would later prove to be well-founded, but, as the history books would attest, at the very least his replacements went through the metaphorical revolving door of commanders of Army Group Centre with sufficient rapidity so as not to cause too much lasting damage to the war effort, despite each coming up with new and creative ways of having me martyred for Equestria.

“You know,” I said carefully, pausing for a moment to try and select my words as diplomatically as possible. “That might be for the best.”

“Of course, of course.” He exhaled deeply, like a deflating balloon, and the mental image was made all the more apt as his shoulders slumped and his head hanged as if he had suddenly lost all motor control of his neck. Raising his head, he looked away from me, apparently out of a small gap in the tent fabric out at the soldiers milling around outside. “We both know what that really means,” he said, an inflection of defeat creeping into his normally refined accent. “They want rid of me without actually getting rid of me, so they simply transfer me to a dead-end post where I can leave and then simply fade away.”

His despair relented; his expression hardened and became, like mine, a mask of aristocratic detachment. Though outwardly, to the untrained eye, he appeared as a pitiful, broken wreck, a mere hollowed shell of the former outgoing and warm personality of a youthful stallion eager to please his betters and gain their acceptance, now made bitter and resentful for what had happened to him; if one looked closer beyond his tired, haggard appearance one could discern a hidden drive and determination that propelled him forth.

“I told the Princesses that I had done my duty,” he continued, “but the truth is that I simply didn’t. A soldier’s duty, your duty, is to follow orders to the letter and to fight like demons, and that’s it. Even in defeat, so long as a guardspony has done those two things he can take solace knowing that he has done his duty. A general’s duty is victory, pure and simple, and I failed to bring victory. There are two types of generals that ponies remember: good ones and bad ones; those that win battles, and those that lose them.”

Crimson Arrow enveloped with his magic the snifter of brandy, which he had left on the table beside him, and brought it just under his nose. I watched him carefully as he nursed his drink, gazing into it thoughtfully in the same manner as a fortune teller con artist does with a cup of stale tea for gullible tourists, and wondered vaguely where he was going with this impassioned speech.

“You don’t want to be remembered as a bad general,” I prompted, eager to get this awkwardness over and done with.

“Precisely.” Crimson nodded his head, and then took another sip of his drink. His face briefly screwed up at the burning sensation that all inexperienced drinkers feel when they swallow strong spirits too quickly, but this time he recovered with greater alacrity than before. An iron-clad hoof swept dramatically at the mass of maps and scrawled notes just beside us. “I want to put things right; one last opportunity to balance the books, as it were. Who knows? Maybe they’ll let me stay here.”

“Did you plan all of this by yourself?” I asked, indicating towards the mass of papers, notes, maps, and reports scattered across the table next to us.

He snorted in irritation. “Of course I did, what did you think I was doing for all this time?”

I gave a vague grunt of approval, though merely out of a complete lack of anything useful to say. I should, perhaps, have offered some small words of encouragement; trot out one of the useless, fatuous slogans dreamt up by the desk-bound lackeys in the Commissariat in the vain hope that would cheer him up, but the words seemed to choke and die in my throat before I could give voice to them. Anything I could have said to encourage him, to tell him that this was a marvellous plan that was certain to work and, once victory in Black Venom Pass had been finally achieved, the War Ministry’s small army of clerks and bureaucrats will prostrate themselves before his undoubted military genius, would have been unsettlingly premature. Despite the morale value of reassuring everypony that everything will turn out just fine and dandy, I often find, probably as a result of some sadistic clause in whatever rules of the universe Faust had written up during its creation, that upon such uttering such words everything goes massively pear-shaped.

Pear-shaped it did indeed become, regardless of my silence, but I’ll get to that later.

“As the Princess wills,” I said, for a lack of anything better. I don’t know whether it was merely a result of having been around the common soldiery for so long that I picked up that oft-used cliché, or whether it was that I have been thrust into so many situations that warrant the use of that particular phrase, but it seemed to me that I had started saying that quite a lot recently. I suspected, quite accurately, that I would be using that damned expression more and more in the future.

Feeling increasingly awkward, and in that rare situation of wanting to go and actually get on with my work, or, at the very least, appear to be doing so, I made an extravagant show of checking the time on my wristwatch. “I hate to cut this short, Crimson,” I said, stressing the informal use of his name, “but I have a few things to take care of today.”

Crimson Arrow gave a vague sort of shrug, idly swirling the brandy beneath his nose as he did so to coax the distinct aroma to collect in the bowl-shaped glass. “I expect you have more important things to do now,” he said, with a slight hint of sarcasm in his voice that was not entirely lost on me, though I decided to be diplomatic and not call him out on it.

I did indeed have some quite important duties to perform: taking care of the spiritual, moral, and ideological health of the regiment, weeding out the weak and incompetent, and making sure that Twilight Sparkle did not make too much of a nuisance of herself in pursuing her little research paper. Nothing too taxing, of course. Naturally, though I was open to any and all opportunities to getting out of doing any real work, especially if said work involved placing me in any sort of mortal peril, I knew that if I had spent all day with my former best friend, slowly getting drunker and drunker on a bottle of fine liquor that no doubt cost many times more than what a single guardspony earns in a year, minus stoppages, would not have done well to improve the slightly more egalitarian image I was trying to cultivate.

[During the early Changeling War, a private soldier of the Royal Guard was paid quite a handsome wage for the day. However, though it looked attractive on paper, and did much to entice needy and desperate recruits, this tidy sum was subjected ‘stoppages’ for their daily rations, clothing, armour, weapons, medical services, and so on. What was left after these stoppages varied according to regiments and the levels to which some unscrupulous officers and NCOs abused the system to steal soldiers’ wages, but for the most part it was rather paltry by contemporary standards. The practice was gradually phased out following the Twilight Sparkle Reforms, and fairer system of pay was put in place.]

I drained the last dregs of my brandy too quickly to properly appreciate the distiller’s art, but I felt it would have been a far worse crime to have not drunk it at all. “We must do this again sometime,” I said, the heady aftertaste of the drink still strong on my breath. “When all of this,” –I waved my hoof around at the trappings of military life around us; the maps, reports, paperwork, armour, weapons, and other army detritus– “is over.”

Only now, decades after, do I realise the foolishness of even contemplating that any of ‘this’ would ever be over. As young and immature as I was back then, though I had already developed that habitual cynicism that would save my wretched life again and again, I still held out false hope that when this war was over I could simply return to the life of indolence and idle luxury that had preceded it. Of course, that was not to happen; my military career would have no end, not after this war nor the wars that followed it until it began to utterly consume my life until there was nothing left but war. Even in my sleep, the only time I could truly let down that facade of heroism and become Blueblood again, withered and shallow as my true self had become over the years behind the masque, I was ever haunted by the numerous horrors that I had witnessed over the years; the faces of those unremembered fallen who had fought beside me, whose names and faces I cannot recall but forever appear in my dreams to judge me for having survived when they could not. [Princess Luna informs me that, like many veterans of wars, Blueblood suffered from severe nightmares. It is possible that he developed post-traumatic stress disorder in some capacity or survivors’ guilt, but if he did he seemed to be most adept at concealing it from those around him.]

Nevertheless, the younger and more naive version of me was very much looking forward to a return to some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, if one could consider any part of my life as being ‘normal’, and apparently Crimson Arrow was under the exact same misapprehension that I was. “I’d like that,” he said, as a thin smile crept over his dry lips. It was probably the first time that I had seen him in a state approaching genuine happiness since just before the Battle of Black Venom Pass. He paused, stammering as his lower jaw and lips worked to try and articulate whatever it was he wanted to say, but failed and finally just settled on, “Good luck out there.”

I thanked him, both for the much-needed luck and for the chance to sample that exquisite drink, and bade him good morning and farewell. Placing the now-empty snifter on the table, next to a small pile of broken quills and an ink pot that had been knocked over and spilt its contents over a relief map of the Macintosh Hills, I turned and ducked through the tent flap into the bright morning sunlight.

Blinking at the intense glare from Celestia’s sun, still fairly low on the horizon as it was still in the early stages of its daily journey across the skies, I sucked in a deep breath of the hot and muggy morning air. I felt quite ambivalent about what had just happened, and wondered whether or not I should have said or done anything different. Should I have done more to reassure him? Should I have offered him more aid? I don’t know, and looking back now I don’t think there was anything else I could have done to make the situation better; the matter of Crimson’s career was firmly out of my hooves and into the distant laps of unseen ponies hundreds of miles away, and anything else I could have said would have had very little practical value. The both of us were stallions quite unused to this modern fixation of constantly talking about one’s problems and emotions; raised as ponies of the upper class to be above the vast masses of commoners, our personal problems and issues could never be seen to be interfering with our duties as stewards of Equestria lest we lose face. To our kind, ‘face’, by which I mean prestige and honour, was everything, and to lose it by displaying any sort of weakness was to expose one to the circling sharks that infest the higher echelons of Equestria’s elite.

I shook my head, as if trying to shake these ridiculous thoughts out of my head; such self-indulgent introspection was not productive and there were far more important and more immediate things for me to worry about, like finding Shining Armour, making sure Red Coat was in a fit enough mental state to command, and the highly disturbing fact that Twilight Sparkle and Spike had been left in the encampment unsupervised. So focused was I on speaking with Shining Armour on the matter of his ill-advised choice of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter that I had completely forgotten about Twilight and Spike as they left the tent. It seems rather improbable that I would have lost track of something so important, especially when one considers just how much I’d fretted over the issue, but I believe I can be forgiven for such dereliction of duty given the great number of problems taking up space in my mind like overfed Neighponese sumo wrestlers jockeying for elbow room on a small dining table.

Well, it probably wasn’t that much of a big deal, I thought. Knowing Twilight as I did, she would likely have returned to the Night Guards' camp to pursue her research in earnest, probably with Captain Red Coat, so she was in a moderately safe pair of hooves for the time being. Resolving to head there to look for her, I stepped away from the relatively cool shade cast by the tent and into the swelteringly hot furnace that was mid-morning in Dodge Junction. The sun beat relentlessly down from a cloudless sky, which bore all the hallmarks of yet another uncomfortably warm day and an equally unpleasant cold night.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Shining Armour loitering nearby, leaning casually against the chest-high wall of sandbags that surrounded the command tent and making idle small talk with one of the sentries on duty there. From what I could understand, they chatted amicably about popular sports; a topic which I am most ignorant of, but I believe they discussed something about the Canterlot Canaries signing on a stallion who had scored more home runs than some other pony I had never heard of from the Manehatten Manatees [This is unlikely to be true, as the Canaries are a hoofball team and the Manatees played basketball. Blueblood’s taste in sports was mainly limited to fencing and croquet, as he often performed very poorly in team games in gym class]. I could not help but admire and, though I am loathe to admit it, envy the way that the Captain of the Royal Guard was able to ‘connect’ with the common soldiery on a level I could barely hope to imitate.

The sentry with whom Shining Armour was speaking showed none of the stilted awkwardness that enlisted ponies often exhibit on the rare occasion when an officer deigns to speak with them, especially one as senior as the Captain of the Royal Guard. He too leaned against the sandbag wall, legs crossed, and his spear resting in the crook of his foreleg in a manner that would have earned him many colourful threats from his sergeant that would have been both graphic in nature and anatomically improbable to actually follow through with, were he there to see it.

“Ah, Prince Blueblood!” greeted Shining Armour as I approached. “What hoofball team do you support?”

“East Trottingham,” I replied automatically; most of the soldiers of the 1st Night Guards supported them, often to the point nearing religious fervour, and I found it a damn sight easier to simply pay lip-service to their inane sports tournament rather than try and explain to the disbelieving ponies that I have about as much interest in their ‘beautiful game’ as I do in the complex workings of Canterlot’s ancient sewage system. I only had some small idea of how hoofball worked, but from what I could tell it involved two groups of fans of opposing teams coming together in a stadium for a brawl, and at some point during the riot, when the local militia moves in to restore some semblance of order, a hoofball match may break out.

[I should point out that Blueblood appears to have confused hoofball with soccer, which is understandable as Trottinghamites insist on referring to what the rest of Equestria calls soccer as hoofball. As I do not wish to get dragged into that argument, I shall refrain from revealing which definition I feel is correct.]

“Please excuse us,” I said, addressing the sentry, “but I need to borrow the Captain of the Royal Guard for a moment.” I offered a smile calculated to put the bewildered and slightly terrified pony at ease, but it was met with limited success; the relaxed and casual attitude that Shining Armour had so effortlessly induced in the guardspony had been completely and utterly ruined by my presence, and I could not help but feel slightly guilty about it. It appeared that Shining Armour too, like my divine Auntie Celestia, possessed that unique common touch that I so lacked and struggled to adopt.

Anyway, it was not like the stallion was in any position to refuse my ‘request’, not unless he had a death wish, so I discreetly tugged Shining Armour away by the hoof.

“So what did Crimson want?” asked Shining as we wandered away from the command tent. Both of our appointed areas of the encampment were in roughly the same direction, so, despite my internal misgivings about having this rather delicate conversation within earshot of scores of ponies, we walked and talked.

“He just wanted to run his plans by me,” I said, lying through my teeth. Rumours in the Royal Guard spread just as rapidly as venereal disease in the Trottingham slums, and I could foresee all sorts of turmoil creating even more headaches for me if anypony else had even gotten wind of Crimson Arrow’s resignation, especially if a politically-minded officer decided that he might take a stab at securing that now-vacant post. “From a commissar’s perspective, of course, to see if the operation fits with the greater political and ideological aims of the war.”

“Hmm, I see,” he said, in a manner that suggested that he did not quite believe me, and I faintly wondered if the smell of liquor was strong enough to be noticeable on my breath. If Shining Armour had noticed he was polite enough to keep it to himself. “And did it?”

“I could think of no objections.” We stepped out of the small cluster of tents that made up the administrative hub of Army Group Centre, ringed by labyrinths of sandbag walls and entrenchments, and into the small area of wilderness that formed a ‘no pony’s land’ between the Crimson Arrow’s small paperwork factory and the regimental camps, surrounding the command sections like a moat around a medieval castle. There, we could afford some small modicum of privacy from eavesdroppers, save for a few patrols and the occasional runner. “What do you make of it?”

Shining Armour shrugged, which made his gold and purple-lacquered armour clatter noisily. “It’s bold. If we can pull this off I might think about forgiving that bastard for leaving the 3rd Regiment out to die like that.”

I nodded, hearing the undertones of resentment plain in his voice. Shining Armour was never a pony to mince words, though I largely suspected that was merely a result of his somewhat limited grasp of the Equestrian language as much as it was his forthrightness and uncompromising dedication to the ponies under his command. Though in the case of his autobiography it would be more accurate to say that he liquified words rather than minced them. “Speaking of the offensive,” I said, trying to awkwardly segue into what I wanted to see him about in the first place. “Lieutenant Scarlet Letter.”

“What about him?” Shining Armour frowned, looking remarkably like some sort of primitive simian trying to comprehend the concept of written language as he did so.

I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth, and idly kicked away some tumbleweed that had dared to block my path, as I tried to think of a way to explain to him that I thought that his choice of the officer commanding the unicorn platoon was completely and utterly moronic, but not quite so bluntly so as to avoid hurting his feelings.

“It’s not my place to critique your command decisions,” I said, knowing damn well that the ridiculous hat resting upon my head and the scarlet sash tied about my waist most certainly made it my place, no, my duty to do so, but I’ve found that other ponies tend to feel better about something if they think that they have some say in the proceedings. “But when I had the pleasure of meeting him yesterday, he made some rather off-colour remarks about the ponies of my regiment. I fear that in this coming offensive his attitude problem may lead to greater friction in the flanking battalion, which will compromise the close co-operation between our respective regiments vital to the success of this operation.”

Shining Armour snorted and shook his head emphatically. “I like to think I know my own subordinates,” he said, but despite his words there was little venom or malice in his voice. His usual cocky grin allayed my fears that I may have overstepped my mark with that bit of rambling politico-speak. “But no, you’re right; he does have an attitude problem, which is exactly why I’ve put him forward for the flanking battalion in the first place.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow your logic.” I arched an eyebrow quizzically, wondering if the Captain of the Royal Guard had been out in the sun with his armour on for too long and the heat had boiled what little brains he has.

“What better way for him to overcome his stupid prejudices than fighting alongside the ponies he looks down his perfumed nose at? Besides, you’ll be there to keep him on the straight and narrow. One hoof out of line, and... well, I’ll leave that one up to you. I can’t think of better ponies to mould him into a proper and dutiful officer than you and your Night Guards. Besides, he expressed a keen interest in working with you.”

“Hmm, did he now?” I intoned sceptically. Perhaps Shining Armour was right; if the ordeals of battle had forced me to re-evaluate my opinions on social class, then it was just as likely that a similar such experience would prove sufficiently horrifying as to effect the same change in Scarlet Letter as it did in me. There was, however, one fatal flaw in Shining’s idea, other than his rather misguided faith in my abilities, of course, but I was not about to blow my cover by telling him that. “That’s assuming things will go well,” I explained, “there’s always the chance that they won’t.”

“Then he’ll have no choice but to keep quiet,” said Shining Armour, with a slightly conspiratorial edge inflecting his voice. Despite the apparent seriousness of our conversation, the cocky, self-assured grin that had graced the thousands of recruitment posters pasted up on the walls of Canterlot’s streets remained affixed to his face, as if it was some sort of permanent deformity that just happened to send the volatile hormones of young mares into a lust-fuelled overdrive on sight. “If he’s found wanting then we can simply have him cashiered, or executed. That is your job, after all, Commissar.”

I chuckled, recalling the words that Auntie Luna had spoken to me when I first donned the skull-faced cap: ‘fear ensures loyalty’. The prodigious amount of power now available at my hooves did have its advantages, I suppose; it was merely a matter of learning how to use it properly without making too many enemies. Despite the rational, intelligent part of my mind agreeing totally with Shining Armour, which in itself was an extremely rare occurrence that worried me not inconsiderably, the itching in my hooves had refused to go away. There was always that nagging, irritating little voice telling me that it was all going to go ‘royally tits-up’, as Major Starlit Skies would have so eloquently put it.

The short gulf between the administrative hub and the main body of the encampment had been crossed by now, and soon we were weaving our way around the myriad tents, armouries, bivouac sites, and parade grounds that made up this vast sprawl in the desert. We passed few ponies; only a few sentries on patrol and a couple of runners relaying important messages and many more unimportant ones between officers, but at this time of the morning most of the soldiers would already be well into their morning routines of training, drill, and indoctrination.

I stepped gingerly around a small mound of scrap metal, broken swords and shattered armour plates, piled haphazardly by an armoury ready to be melted down and re-forged so as to be of use to the war effort once more. The discarded armour, strewed out on the dusty ground by the open tent flap, was for the most part broken and probably irreparable; they were cracked, crumpled in by bucking Changeling hooves or ripped apart by fangs, and in some cases appeared to be covered in a thick layer of dark brown rust. Upon closer inspection, however, I saw that it was not rust, but rather dried blood, and only then did I realise that the armour and weapons had been taken from the dead.

[The metal used in Royal Guard armour and certain weapons is a magically enchanted high grade steel alloy. The exact spells and forging processes used are a national secret, the entirety of which is known only by a select few ponies in the War Ministry and the Royal College of Magi, and regimental armourers are taught only that which is sufficient to their job of maintaining arms and armour. As the manufacture of new armour and enchanted weaponry is such an involved and lengthy process, the Royal Guard places a great emphasis on re-using and recycling old and worn-out armour. A guardspony’s armour may therefore contain components hundreds if not thousands of years old, previously worn by countless soldiers before them.]

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” I said, trying to ignore the morbid sight before me. “But you do rely on his support in Parliament.”

Shining Armour suddenly stopped, and the grin on his face vanished to be replaced a deep, worried frown, and I wondered for a brief moment if I had crossed a line there. I did not know just how public his troubles with Parliament were, as I assumed that everypony knew about it, but then again, the House of Commons seemed to operate on the theory that they will earn more support from their electorate if nopony had any clue what they were up to. Not that it truly bothered me, as the post of the Captain of the Royal Guard was inviolate, appointed solely by Princess Celestia, but the idea that we could lose one of the few officers actually capable of performing his role properly to the infantile politicking of power-hungry demagogues, the majority of whom wouldn’t know what a war was if one turned up and gave them all haircuts, was most disconcerting. Nevertheless, I warily glanced around to make sure that nopony could overhear us, which would have been a daunting prospect at the best of times considering the endless cacophonic background noise that pervaded this encampment, and then pulled him gently behind the armoury.

“You have my full support,” I said, trying to help reassure him, for what good my support would have actually done him. The shade of the armoury, from which the sound of iron hammers pounding on hot steel resounded with the low hum of magical enchantment, provided some much-needed respite from the heat of the sun.

“Thank you,” he said awkwardly, apparently finding the fact that the two of us could bear each other’s company for more than five minutes without coming to blows just as confusing as I did. “But if all goes well, I won’t be needing his support, or yours, for that matter.”

“Oh?” I cocked my head to one side. “Why’s that?”

Shining Armour leaned in uncomfortably close to me, as if to impart some highly secret piece of information, and I instinctively stepped back away from him to allow myself some much-needed personal space. “Equestrians love a good winner,” said Shining Armour. “When we give the ponies the victory they crave, they’ll forget all about the mess I made of the defence of Canterlot.”

I snorted contemptuously. “Canterlot was not your fault,” I said sotto voce.

“Heh, you know... it doesn’t matter how many times ponies keep telling me that, I still can’t quite convince myself of it.” He shook his head, twisting up his face into a slightly pained expression before his habitual irritating yet charming smile returned to his lips, and waved a hoof dismissively. “Never mind all that garbage, it’s not important. Don’t you worry about me, Blueblood, victory wipes away all dishonour. I’ll catch you later, if Twiley doesn't have you run ragged trying to keep up with her.”

With that, Shining Armour snapped off a parade ground-quality salute, which I reciprocated without nearly as much alacrity and precision as he did, before he cantered away to do whatever duties the Captain of the Royal Guard was supposed to perform at this hour. As I watched him be subsumed into the amorphous mass of white fur, gold armour, and canvas tents that made up this vast, sprawling encampment, I took a brief moment to straighten up my uniform so I looked at least halfway presentable. I was feeling a little pensive, with that strange sort of lethargy that comes with the knowledge that one’s fate has been placed firmly out of one’s control, like a jar of biscuits placed on a shelf just out of one’s reach, and I contemplated simply wandering out into the desert to live as a hermit subsisting on tumbleweed and cactus juice.

I confess I was rather more stunned by the notion that Shining Armour was perhaps more intelligent than his appearance and behaviour would otherwise imply, as not only was he cognisant that Scarlet Letter, either through incompetence or malice, may end up jeopardising the success of this mission (and, more importantly, my hopes of living a long and happy life) but appeared to have adjusted his plans to either redeem Scarlet or at least keep him in line. Granted, I still thought it was a staggeringly daft plan that relied upon the two dubious assumptions that the operation would proceed without any major hiccups and that Scarlet Letter was of sound mind and rational bearing, but, considering that I had failed to come up a suitable alternative, I felt I had very little choice but to go along with it. Of course, I could have pulled rank and forced Shining Armour to do my bidding, but the fact was that my dislike of Scarlet Letter was based on a personal, paranoid distrust of the pony and not a professional critique of his competence as an officer; he could have made an excellent officer, for all I knew. While Shining Armour would have likely acquiesced to that demand, I was all but certain that Scarlet Letter would use his many connections in the higher echelons of the War Ministry and the Commissariat to make my life very difficult. Well, more difficult than it was already.

I decided that Scarlet Letter was just not worth getting so stressed over, not when I had far more important threats to my life to contend with, like Twilight Sparkle. It was probably best to find her as soon as possible, lest I come back later and find a large smoking crater a mile wide where the Night Guards’ camp used to be. So, reluctantly, I walked away from the cool shade and into the burning sun, and straight into a soldier who had been lurking just around the corner.

“Ooph!” The pony bounced off my chest and fell on her backside with a clatter of armour and flailing hooves. She was a unicorn mare of the Night Guards, and probably quite an attractive little thing underneath all of that armour and without those fangs, eyes, and other morbid accoutrements that Auntie Luna seems to like. Despite failing to recognise her, as there were nearly a thousand or so ponies in the whole regiment and I could not possibly remember the names and faces of each and every one of them (though it is prudent for a commissar to give the impression that he does), there was something very familiar about her, but for the life of me I just could not put my hoof on it.

“Sorry about that, guv’nor!” she exclaimed, her accent sounding curiously fake. It was the sort of accent that a pony who has never been to Trottingham fondly imagines what ponies from that great metropolis sound like; for starters, nopony there has ever called anypony else ‘guv’nor’ for hundreds of years, unless they were trying to squeeze more money out of tourists.

“Do watch where you’re going,” I snapped, gently pushing the mare aside with a hoof as I stepped around her. Feeling a more than a little embarrassed at having so carelessly walked into her, and wanting nothing more than to get away before the scene escalated, I left her sitting on her rear in the dust and continued my journey.

“Toodle-pip!” she called out as I departed.

Ordinarily, I would have paid the event no further mind, but the itching in my hooves forewarned me that things were definitely not what they first appeared, which, of course, would vindicate my suspicions later that day. There was the issue of her accent; having spent quite a significant amount of my time over the past few weeks surrounded by ponies from Trottingham, I like to think I had by then worked out their odd and idiosyncratic manner of speech, particularly in their dialect, as I recall one highly embarrassing incident where I learned that to them the word ‘fanny’ pertains to a lady’s front bottom. Of course, there was a rational explanation for this – she could have been from Ponyville and merely putting on that accent, quite unsuccessfully, in a misguided attempt to fit in. [Though the 1st Night Guard is supposed to recruit only from the Trottingham area, a lack of new recruits meant that the recruiting sergeants often had to resort to using the city’s many prisons or range further afield to the surrounding towns and villages such as Ponyville. This lack of recruits, however, would not last long, as Blueblood’s fame meant an influx of ponies signing up to fight alongside their hero.] What she was doing this far away from the regiment, I don’t know, and frankly I did not care.

Safe in the knowledge that things could not possibly get any worse, I kept walking. Little did I know, however, that things were only just starting to go wrong.

***

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Twilight had behaved herself while I was gone, which, in itself was doubly surprising; anything pleasant happening that involved Twilight was an extremely rare occurrence. There were no magical mishaps, incurable curses, hexes, cantrips, or any repeat of the nameless horrors of her fifth grade chemistry set awaiting me as I cantered back to my tent. No, when I found them, she was quite happy sitting outside of her tent with Spike, who most certainly was not happy, observing as the soldiers performed their drill meticulously to the loud directions of a sergeant intermixed with colourful threats of obscene violence.

The rest of the day proceeded as normal, albeit with Twilight lingering around me as if we were joined at the hip. I did my best to ignore her, but I must admit that finding her continual presence, and that of Spike and the ever-present sound of his quill scratching on paper and his occasional complaint about how boring things were, to be quite grating. After taking a particularly dreadful show put on by the RASEA in the afternoon, which the two researchers decided not to attend, not that I could blame them considering the abysmal quality of the entertainment on hoof, I retired to my tent for the evening to start work on my letters.

A not-insignificant amount of my work was generated by receiving, reading, and responding to letters. The majority of my letters, I’m sure, had probably vanished in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the War Ministry, to be found centuries after my inevitable death and then burnt for kindling. However, with Spike present, the odious little reptile finally proved himself to be useful for once in providing a means for me to communicate directly with the two Princesses. As vindictive and passive-aggressive as it might seem, I had elected to give voice to my frustrations at being forced into this unpleasant situation by using him to send as many letters to Princess Luna as possible. [Contrary to what he has just written, his correspondence with the War Ministry and Princess Luna, the majority of which merely pertains to the bureaucratic minutiae of the Regiment, was received and collected for posterity. Readers wishing to illuminate themselves further will find these letters stored in the Canterlot Archives.]

It was just starting to grow dark as I dictated my latest letter to Princess Luna, and the mosquitoes were out in force once more. The light, gently tinged with a slight amber hue, flooded in through the open tent flap as I paced up and down the front office area and dictated to Cannon Fodder, who sat at his desk. Twilight, too, was there, lying on her stomach as she looked over the reams and reams of notes she had made that day, while Spike appeared to be passing the time by doodling in the sand with a claw. From what I had heard, he most certainly wasn’t enjoying his time here, which cheered me up immensely. Ordinarily I might have closed that tent flap to afford myself some modicum of privacy, but the heat had grown so unbearable that day that I was quite willing to sacrifice that to get some air in, despite feeling like I had been put on display like a prize on a game show. Just outside, the soldiers milled about aimlessly during their off-duty period; relaxing by camp fires, drinking tea, smoking, and indulging in card games and the sort of raucous banter that the lower orders enjoy.

“ ‘...as such, owing to the extremely poor quality of writing in the Royal Infantrypony’s Uplifting Primer, even by the abysmally low standards of the Ministry of Information’s recent outputs, I cannot, in all good conscience, recommend this book for publication and dissemination.’” Cannon Fodder frantically scrawled down my words on some yellowed paper with his usual disregard for legibility. “ ‘Yours Sincerely’... well, you know the rest.”

I stopped pacing and looked over his shoulder to make sure that he actually placed my name there, for his unyieldingly literal interpretation of orders meant that there was a very real chance he would sign that letter ‘Yours Sincerely, well, you know the rest’. Fortunately, he appeared to have learnt his lesson from last time and had scrawled ‘H.R.H Commissar Prince Blueblood’ there.

“Oh, and put a postscript at the bottom there,” I said, suddenly recalling some other important point that I wanted to make. “ ‘Please pass this onto the director of the Royal Armed Services Entertainment Association: the entertainer known as the Great and Powerful Trixie is to be henceforth banned forever from all future RASEA entertainment events following an incident today that resulted in the Horsetralian Engineers voicing their displeasure of her act by attempting to burn down the stage. Those soldiers have since been commended by their commanding officer, a sentiment which, if you have had the great misfortune to have seen her act, you will understand perfectly. I can confirm that Trixie has survived the ordeal, but she appears to have fled and her whereabouts are unknown.’”

Cannon Fodder added the finishing touches to the letter, dotting the ‘i’s’ and crossing the ‘t’s’, or the other way around as he sometimes got the two letters mixed up. Apparently satisfied with the legibility of the letter he passed it over to me, and thus ensuring he got a good amount of his saliva as he picked it up with his mouth. Taking it gingerly with my magic, I rolled it up neatly and tied a ribbon around it, before affixing a wax seal bearing my family crest, a single drop of blood within a kite shield. Satisfied that it looked halfway presentable, which is the most important thing when it comes to sending letters to royalty, I offered it over to Spike.

“Direct to Princess Luna, please,” I said.

Spike snorted, making no attempt at disguising his boredom or displeasure at being trapped with me for an extended period of time. Not that I could particularly blame him; even I found my own company to be rather tedious at times. The feeling, of course, was more than mutual, but at least I had the courtesy to feign politeness; the memory of the time he ate my homework, which, admittedly, I had forced Twilight to complete for me, was still quite fresh in my mind at that point. “Fine,” he said, his voice positively dripping with unconcealed irritation as he grabbed the scroll from my telekinetic grasp, but not before muttering something that sounded suspiciously like ‘who knew war was so boring?’.

Having never seen the magical transmission of mail through dragons’ fire in action before, and curious to see the one and only thing that Spike was actually useful for, I watched with mild interest as the lambent green fire issued forth from his maw and enveloped the scroll, apparently without burning himself [dragons’ skin, of course, is very resistant to fire]. The paper was immolated utterly; the resultant ashes swirled in the air, coalescing into a vague sort of cloud, and were swept on whatever arcane means Spike uses to direct these letters to and from the Royal Pony Sisters. [The exact mechanisms on how dragons’ breath works is far too complex to explain in these annotations, and quite inconsequential to the analysis of this text. Those curious, however, are encouraged to read chapter seven of Scientific Method’s authoritative but unfinished work ‘Treatise on the Biology of Dragons and Dragonkin’, published posthumously after his unfortunate death by immolation when testing the hypothesis that living creatures could be transported in the same manner as paper.]

The letter, however, seemed to have other ideas, and materialised inches in front of the surprised face of a seemingly random soldier, loitering a few feet away from my tent flap. She yelped in surprise, flinching back slightly as the scroll dropped to the dusty ground at her forehooves.

I did not know much about the magic of dragons’ fire breath, though for that matter I did not know much about magic full stop, but I had sufficient knowledge to realise that should not have happened. As Spike scrambled to his feet in a clumsy flail of stubby limbs, the look of abject surprise on his face indicated that, for once, we were in complete agreement. Reluctantly, with nopony else available to ask for an explanation as Twilight was in the middle of a study binge and therefore completely isolated from the external material world save for the parchment laid out before her, I looked to Spike for an answer.

“That’s not supposed to happen!” he blurted out, his ability to state the blindingly obvious in no way compromised by the intense heat of the day or his boredom. “I mean...” He frowned, looking remarkably like a ruminating bovine as he did so. “I mean, it should only go to Princess Luna because I told it to. And only the Royal Pony Sisters can receive mail like that, so...”

“That must be Princess...” I stopped, unable to finish that sentence for to do so would imply something quite horrible, but nevertheless the evidence there and, if Spike was correct, completely irrefutable. It should have been impossible; I saw both of my divine Aunties leave on their golden chariot just yesterday, but as both are beings of immense magical power, such that none but they and their kin can even conceive of the eldritch nature of their magics, the word ‘impossible’ more often than not just did not apply to them. It was not beyond the realms of believability that Princess Luna could mask her shape and form, for I was well aware of her new annual tradition of taking the appearance of the hated Nightmare Moon and scaring ponies for what I could only imagine as foalish amusement, but if whether she could at the same time create an illusion great enough to fool Auntie ‘Tia was another matter entirely.

“Uh, Blueblood?” Spike poked me in the foreleg, and the frantic, panicky thoughts that had flooded my mind in a vain attempt to understand it all ceased.

I looked at the mare, who, to my surprise, was still there. I recognised her belatedly as the pony who had bumped into me from the way back from my conversation with Shining Armour, and as I saw the stern and condescending expression on her face, and the menacing demeanour of cold and calculating superiority in her posture, I knew it could be nopony else. She picked up the letter with her magic; the aura that surrounded the scroll was one that I had seen many times before, most notably enveloped around me as I was suspended upside down, while Luna bellowed in my face for having groped the flanks of a passing servant mare.

There was only one way to find out for sure, though, so I darted through the tent flap and seized her. The mare emitted a high-pitched yelp of surprise as I wrapped my forelegs around her, and squirmed slightly. The lack of more vigorous resistance was a little surprising, but as she tilted her face up towards mine I saw a slightly defeated and guilty look to her. A part of me hoped that I was correct, because if anypony else was watching it looked as if I had just abducted a random mare.

I pulled her back into the tent. By now, Twilight Sparkle had torn her attention away from her research notes and looked at me with a decidedly bemused expression that implied that she had only just started paying attention to what was going on, and just saw me dragging in a mare without any context at all.

“So it’s come to this? You’re just foalnapping mares... now...”

Twilight’s words died away in her throat as I stepped through the threshold into the tent, and within a sufficiently close distance for Cannon Fodder’s magical null field to take effect, and thus vindicate my suspicions. A flash of light, and almost instantly the mare held between my forelegs grew considerably and, though I am certain she will not find it particularly flattering, much heavier too. Dropping her, and stepping back to close the tent flap from prying eyes, I beheld Princess Luna, sans armour and regalia, sitting there and looking about as guilty as a small puppy next to a pair of chewed slippers.

“You’re nicked, chum,” I said in a clumsy imitation of her false Trottingham accent, unable to resist the urge to tease her a little.

Luna offered a slight, awkward, and guilty smile as she shuffled nervously before me. “It’s a fair cop, guv’,” she said, again with her fake accent, “you’ve got me bang to rights.”

Author's Note

In the course of writing this, I have discovered that the optimum amount of alcohol to drink while writing is just under two glasses of red wine, any more than that and it just becomes impossible.

Bloodstained (Part 9)

Part Nine

Of all of us in that tent, which was starting to feel more than a little cramped with three unicorns, an alicorn, and a baby dragon sharing the same space as a fold-out desk and a few haphazardly strewed piles of paperwork and barely-hidden pornographic magazines, it was Cannon Fodder who appeared to be the least perturbed. Indeed, the only indication that he was even the slightest bit concerned about the sudden appearance of Princess Luna in our tent was the slight dislodgement of a few flecks of grime on his forehead, caused by his brow knitting together in a sort of confused frown. He looked to me, then to Luna, and then back to me. Upon deciding that, like everything else, I had all of this under control (which I most certainly did not), he asked, “Would the Princess like some tea?”

Princess Luna looked taken aback by the question, as, I admit, was I. She inclined her head towards my aide, and a soft smile came to her elegant muzzle. “Yes, thank you, Cannon Fodder, that’s very kind of you.”

Looking inordinately proud of himself, and quite oblivious to the disturbing implications of Princess Luna having run away to join the Royal Guard that were racing through my mind like a mob of excitable and very loud terriers, he retrieved a standard ‘Guard issue vacuum flask’ from one of the many non-regulation pouches and bags that festooned his ill-fitting armour. [Customisation of Royal Guard equipment is firmly against Princesses’ Regulations; however, it is rarely enforced by any but the most pedantic of officers. It is unlikely that any officer would have had the necessary confidence to confront Cannon Fodder about it, anyway, much less in his capacity as the Commissar’s aide.] As he busied himself decanting the murky brown fluid that passes for tea here into a stained mug, I shuffled anxiously from hoof to hoof as I stood before a very embarrassed Princess Luna.

To say that I was uneasy about this entirely unexpected development would be like saying Princess Celestia is only just slightly taller than most ponies; it felt as if a snake, ice cold and slimy, had wormed its way around my guts and was squeezing for dear life, and then gnawing upon my rapidly beating heart for good measure. Of course, the mere presence of the darker of my two divine aunties invariably has that effect on most ponies; being fully capable of reducing grown stallions to sobbing wrecks, though the aura of malice that usually accompanies her like the stench of body odour around Cannon Fodder was somewhat muted by uncharacteristically sheepish demeanour. Exactly how and for what purpose she had decided to grace us with her presence I knew not, but my initial gut reaction, which has an irritating tendency to be right far too often to be comfortable, was that it was all something that I should certainly be afraid of. The thought that she might have decided that the Changeling army was taking far too long to rip me limb from limb, and that she would rather come here and do it herself, made a very loud and unwelcome entrance into my mind.

“Puh... Princess Luna?” said Twilight dumbly, her eyes so wide open that I feared they may drop out of her skull and onto the dirt by her forehooves. “Is that you?”

Princess Luna arched an eyebrow imperiously, and inclined her head towards her elder sister’s prized pupil sitting just slightly behind her. “Of course,” she said, a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Who else might I be?”

“Nightmare Moon?” posited Spike, tactful as always.

Luna scoffed, but otherwise ignored Spike’s outburst. She enveloped with her dark aura the mug of hot tea that Cannon Fodder offered her. “Thank you,” she said with a grateful smile, causing my aide to blush, or rather, the muck on his face to be tinted a slightly red colour, as he retreated back behind his desk. The mug was held just before her lips, and the hot steam that coalesced in ghostly wisps around her elegantly proportioned face, wreathing around her muzzle and disturbing the gentle wafting of her ethereal mane, gave my Auntie’s usual haunting, otherworldly nature a rather more daemonic appearance that did little to help quell my anxiety. Summoning what tiny iota of courage that I had left within the shallow husk of what remains of my withered soul, I stood before her and pulled what I hoped was a suitably stern expression, like the sort I make when a servant has failed to shine my shoes to an appropriately high sheen.

“I think I’d like an explanation now,” I said, trying to present the sort of calm poise and quiet self-assurance that everypony seemed to expect of me, but which I very rarely actually felt.

“Please don’t tell my sister,” she said, a tremor of anxiety inflecting her normally refined voice. I was rather taken aback by this, but I suppose it should really have come as no surprise to me that the one pony that Luna might fear, or, at the very least, respect as an equal or greater, was her elder sister; except, of course, Faust, but considering how our deity has been rather silent concerning the affairs of mortals and that matters of theology were far beyond my understanding, or caring, I dismissed that thought. To see her so shaken, however, in contrast to the supreme confidence and the arrogant, superior condescension that she otherwise exuded from every pore of her immortal body, if she indeed had them, was quite jarring for me and, if anything, put me completely wrong-hoofed. Indeed, I was so flummoxed by the concept that Luna would be disconcerted by anything at all that I struggled for a moment to think of what to say next.

I hope, dear reader, that you will at least empathise with me when I say that, for a brief second, I felt some small amount of foal-like glee at this sudden reversal of fortunes, especially when one considers my past animosity with her, which was based almost entirely upon her peculiar objection to me even daring the share the same plane of existence as she did. With but a single letter to dear, sweet Auntie ‘Tia, then still immersed in negotiations with the native buffalo near Appleloosa as far as I was aware [I was chairing the discussions between the buffalo chieftains and Appleloosa officials for what would later become known as the Treaty of Appleloosa, which definitively settled the Buffalo Question], I could single-hoofedly ruin Luna’s insane plan, whatever it was. Exactly what scheme Auntie Luna had in mind I did not know, but whatever it was it could hardly be conducive to my continued mortal existence. Of course, the thought that she could have me murdered quite gruesomely (and legally, though I’m sure Celestia might want to give her a stern talking to) before I could even open my mouth to dictate that letter to Cannon Fodder had occurred to me, so reason prevailed and I decided against that idea until I could ascertain by just how much Luna’s plan was going to put my life in peril, and whether risking Luna’s wrath was truly worth the modicum of satisfaction I would have received.

“Does she know that you’re here?” I asked at length. The question was a stupid one; of course Princess Celestia did not know that she had run away, if she had found out, I like as not would not be having this conversation in the first place. Or so I thought, at least.

Luna shook her head. “She believes I have flown back to Canterlot to ‘sulk’, as she put it.”

“And what happens when the guards at Canterlot report to Celestia that you still haven’t arrived?” I asked, unable to resist sounding smug as I did so. “Did you consider that?”

“Actually, I arrived at the palace this morning,” said Luna, taking a sip of her tea to conceal a knowing, enigmatic smile that started to unsettle me, “and I’m still there, after a fashion.”

A quick glance in Twilight’s direction confirmed that, like me, she too was rather perplexed by Luna’s answer, which was actually quite reassuring in an odd way; if the pony purporting to be the most intelligent and magically proficient mare alive was having as much difficulty comprehending something as I was, then surely it was not my fault for not having paid enough attention in school.

When Luna lowered her mug of hot tea, and in the dimming light of dusk and the soft blue glow of her magic the steam emanating from her drink took on an increasingly sepulchral look reminiscent of the smoke created by burning joss sticks in Cathayan funeral rites, her smug grin was replaced by a concerned frown. “Are neither of you at all familiar with the simulacrum spell?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Twilight tapped a hoof to her chin thoughtfully, frowning in concentration as she did so. “It sounds familiar,” she muttered, half to herself. “I think it’s referenced in the texts of Starswirl the Bearded, but so much of his work has been lost in the Nightmare Heresy,” [Specifically, the Great Library of Canterlot was burned to the ground during the siege by the Legions of the Nightmare, and in the conflagration a great many irreplaceable ancient texts and treatises were sadly lost, including the complete works of the great scholar Starswirl the Bearded, of which only a few disjointed fragments remain.] – Luna noticeably stiffened when that particular sad event was mentioned – “but nopony has been able to find enough of the fragments of the spell to make it work, and nopony’s even completely sure what it does. The academic consensus is that it’s a very elaborate illusion spell; completely impossible to tell apart from the real thing.”

Luna chuckled, swilling her mug of tea just before her elegant muzzle. “Very good,” she said, and Twilight’s face lit up with that same broad smile I remembered being on the receiving end of many a teacher’s compliments, “but wrong.”

The smile vanished. “Huh?”

“A simulacrum is most certainly not a primitive illusion; it is a physical construct given flesh and form by magic, and commanded by a powerful mind as if it were merely an extension of one’s own body. It is little more than a marionette, propelled by strings of magic to resemble the real thing so perfectly as to be nigh impossible to differentiate between the simulacrum and its master. The Princess Luna that you saw boarding the royal chariot yesterday was one such construct, and it is that construct that is now staring vacantly into space inside my personal chambers, and will then attend a meeting with the Neighponese ambassador tomorrow.”

Well, it sounded plausible, but as I was hardly the right pony to judge whether such a thing could even be attempted outside of the insane fever dreams of the most unbalanced scholars of the College of Magi, as far as I was concerned Luna could have been talking complete and utter nonsense and I still would have bought it. Judging by the enraptured expression on Twilight’s face, however, like a filly being presented with a little puppy for Hearth’s Warming, it must have been at the very least possible. Either that or she was just as gullible as I was. At any rate, exactly how Princess Luna came to be here while somehow fooling her elder sister, assuming that she wasn’t in on this whole affair in the first place, was quite irrelevant; the fact of the matter was that she was right here now and I should probably do something about it.

So I gave a vague sort of shrug, as if all of this had somehow made sense. “That explains how you’re here,” I said, wanting to get to the real issue here before we could get sidetracked further by an entirely pointless, albeit intellectually stimulating, academic discussion on ancient magics. “But it doesn’t explain why.”

The thought did occur to me that Princess Celestia had sent Luna here to keep an eye on Twilight and I, but that theory just did not add up in my mind, especially considering the awkward body language that most certainly implied that she was most anxious about being caught by her elder sister, unless she happened to be a tremendously good actress. I like to think that all the dissembling and arse-covering that I’ve been doing since my early teens to avoid getting into trouble has meant that ‘reading’ other ponies trying to pull the same trick on me is one of the very few things that I’m actually good at (not getting lost easily underground, seducing mares, lying, and an odd gift for picking up languages being chief amongst my very limited repertoire of useful skills). [Blueblood spent most of his early childhood with his father, who ruled as viceroy of various Equestrian colonies and often went on exploring expeditions into the unknown. Therefore, he has become quite proficient in the varied dialects of Zebrica, Coltcutta, and Gryphon.]

“I was bored,” Luna said flatly, inspecting a hoof with a casual disinterest as she did so. “I am a mare of action, and I tire of waging war from afar with forms and meetings and petty bureaucracy. I desire to see this war up close, as I have done in ages past.”

“Bored?” I echoed, a little too impetuously, but only in a vain effort to try and convince myself that she had actually said something that staggeringly daft. A gentle nod from her confirmed it. I looked frantically to Twilight, Spike, and Cannon Fodder to check if I had just lost my mind, which was becoming increasingly likely as this war dragged on. “Most ponies,” I continued slowly, licking my dry, parched lips, “usually pick up a hobby when they’re bored. They don’t run away to join the bloody army!”

“It’s not like you’re going to find anything fun here anyway,” grumbled Spike.

Luna scowled at me, apparently not used to being snapped at in such a disrespectful manner, and, frankly, I was quite surprised myself at having done so, as normally my sense of self-preservation is strong enough to stop me doing stupid things like that, but considering that this insane mare was perfectly happy to put the lives of thousands of ponies here and the fate of the war itself at risk just to alleviate a vague sense of ennui was the culmination of what had been an exceedingly unpleasant day for me I think I can be excused for such behaviour. Looking back, it was the sheer flippancy of her explanation that truly vexed me; it implied that she either did not care about the effect her little escapade would have on my life or the thought just never occurred to her. Under that contemptuous scowl, the metaphorical spine that I had spontaneously grown withered and died, and I was left once more like a frightened foal in front of a monster.

“Forgive me for my rudeness,” I said, the rapid apology stumbling awkwardly from my mouth. I knew from previous experience that the best way to defuse Princess Luna’s rather short temper was to apologise as quickly and profusely as possible; it doesn’t even need to be sincere. I was, however, doing my utmost, once more, to not let Princess Luna know just how scared I was of her. “But it comes from a deep concern for your safety.”

“I’m touched,” she said, her voice positively dripping with sarcasm. “But I can take care of myself.”

“If the Changelings discover you’re here within spitting distance of their armies, they’ll stop at nothing to get you. You’re putting the success of Operation: Equestrian Dawn and all of Army Group Centre at risk just by being here.” And my life too, for that measure; I had no desire to throw it away on her account.

“If they find me,” she insisted in her most imperious tone. Her horn flickered with her dark aura, briefly illuminating the darkening atmosphere of the tent with his cold blue light, but whatever it was she was attempting had failed and the light died. She pulled an irritated face in Cannon Fodder’s direction, who sat behind his desk picking his nose, oblivious as usual to the effects of his unique powers on those around him. “Private, please leave us.”

Cannon Fodder looked oddly hurt as he skulked away from his desk, so I felt compelled to tell him to get some feedbags for our guests and anything else he fancied for himself from the canteen in an effort to cheer him up. As he left through the tent flap, I looked back to Princess Luna, whose horn was once more illuminated. Her eyes glowed with a stark, bright, white light that pierced through the gloom, and the cold aura enveloped her body until it she looked to be a being made purely of moonlight. I shut my eyes, but the actinic glare burned through my eyelids, and I feared that somepony outside might notice the sudden light display from within my tent; I could always blame it on Twilight Sparkle testing something.

The light vanished quickly, a mere flash, and I opened my eyes, blinking away the after-images burned onto my retinas, to see that Luna had once more taken the shape and form of a young mare of the Night Guards. She snapped to attention, or, at least, some semblance of it, and slapped her hoof noisily against her ill-fitting helmet in a clumsy approximation of a salute.

“Private Midnigh’ Rider reportin’ fer duty, sah!” she said with great enthusiasm, though her attempt at a Trottingham accent was still just as atrocious as before, if not worse. Even Spike thought so.

“Seriously?” he said, his voice curiously deadpan as he crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s, like, the worst accent I ever heard! It doesn’t sound anything like them!”

“You wot, mate?”

The faux-guardspony blinked in confusion at Spike, and I now understood that she was under the charming delusion that her disguise was completely and utterly perfect in every way shape and form. Well, in the physical sense, it was perfect, as far as I could tell; the illusion had no blemishes or glitches to it, though if one examined her closely one could detect the same aquiline and patrician features that Luna possessed, as indeed when one spends as much time as she in cultivating an expression of total condescension I imagine it’s rather difficult to shake it. The voice, however, was singularly terrible, and I was glad it was Spike that brought it up; better his hide burned to a cinder than mine.

“What he means,” said Twilight, chuckling awkwardly and admonishing Spike with a nudge from a hoof, “is that your accent is not one hundred per cent convincing.”

The accent was not even one per cent convincing, thought I, but I kept that to myself. Spike grumbled, and I overheard him mutter something about a pony named Pipsqueak who would be so offended if he was here to hear the Princess mangle his native dialect so. The Princess in question, though, huffed indignantly and stomped a hoof, still convinced that her creative interpretation of how the majority of the ponies in my regiment spoke was uncannily accurate.

Luna complained that one thousand years ago ponies from Trottingham all sounded like that, which, even if true, would still not have done her much good. Her body flashed with light once more, and after I blinked away the bright yellow stars that suddenly swarmed across my vision, I was met with the image of yet another mare. On the surface, I suppose, she appeared to merely be Luna in miniature; a small, svelte, lithe little thing with fur of a lighter blue than normal, and her ethereal mane replaced by one of actual hair, which framed her face with sky blue locks. Her face was still identifiable as Luna’s, though rounder, softer, and less aquiline, and yet those piercingly cold eyes remained.

The uniform that she wore, however, was of greater interest, for it was something that I had only ever seen in the faded annals of my revered family’s history. It was an archaic suit of armour of a style and make not found outside of a museum or a reference book or a historical re-enactment society since the Nightmare Heresy; it consisted of a simple breastplate which was little more than a single sheet of steel cast and moulded to fit a pony’s barrel. Absent was the fine filigree and decoration of modern armour, though lacquered a dark and rusty shade of red, like that of dried blood. Iron sabatons guarded her hooves, and an armoured saddle and barding of similarly-shaded lacquered metal protected her midsection and flanks. The only insignia that adorned this suit of armour was a blood red ruby centred upon the exact middle of the breastplate, where the blue star would be on a Solar Guard’s uniform, carved into the shape of a teardrop.

“I am Cloudless Sky,” she said, thankfully no longer attempting that awful accent, “Servant of the Blood, personal retainers to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Blood.” The mare bowed before me, and pressed her nose into the dirt. As satisfying as it was seeing Princess Luna prostrate herself before my regal glory, such that it was, I still felt compelled to point out another obvious flaw in her plan.

“Nice try, Princess,” I said, shaking my head, “but that title and our private army was revoked from our family by Princess Celestia, after great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Coldblood poisoned nearly everypony in the family and seized the title for himself.” Evidently, she must have missed that part when reading up on what happened during her long absence, if anything, though, I thought that this unhappy chapter in my family’s long and bloodstained history was the main cause behind her antipathy towards me. Credit where credit’s due, the disguise itself was masterful, but I expected that from the Princess whose power pertains to the night, darkness, illusions, and deception (aside from affecting accents).

Luna raised her head from the dirt and looked at me. “And who else will know about it?” She then glanced over at Twilight, who looked as if she was about to say something. “Aside from you.”

I looked at her sceptically, and I supposed, perhaps, that it might be possible to keep her a complete secret from the Changelings. I doubted that they would take much personal interest in me and my various hangers-on, though a great many of the enemies that I have faced over the years appeared to think that I was the most important cog of the Equestrian war machine, and therefore operated under the mistaken belief that if they killed me the entire Royal Guard would be gripped by a sudden sense of despair at my loss and just give up and go home. [Blueblood is understating his value a little here, for his loss would likely have had a severe impact on the morale of the Royal Guard.]

“Auntie Celestia will,” I said at length. Then, addressing Spike, “Take a letter, please: ‘Dear Princess Celestia...’”

“Desist.” Even though she was now smaller than me, I could not help but feel cowed by the sheer weight of power and authority that her voice carried. Nevertheless, my path was set, and as I looked to Twilight Sparkle and saw the doubt and confusion etched in the lines on her face, and the fact that Spike had somehow produced a sheet of paper and a quill from seemingly out of nowhere with far greater alacrity than one would normally expect of the slovenly, simple-minded dullard that he is, I was not alone in thinking that this was the right choice. “Put that quill down, Spike.”

“Spike...”

The baby dragon shook his head emphatically. “I never, ever thought I’d say this, but I’m with Blueblood.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Yeah, I know, I’m just as confused as you are, but I just think we should let Princess Celestia know about this.”

“I don’t like lying to Princess Celestia either,” I said. And neither did I like the sorts of horrific punishments that she would undoubtedly inflict upon me should I be found complicit in her younger sister doing something mind-bendingly stupid; I’ve seen the torture implements stored unused for centuries in the palace basements, and I had no desire to be given a practical demonstration of them. [This is preposterous; there is no secret inquisitorial torture chamber underneath Canterlot. Anypony found spreading such rumours will be subjected to questioning by the Royal Inquisition.] I looked to Twilight for support, hoping that her dogged devotion to Princess Celestia would win her over to my side. “Lady Sparkle?”

“I am my own mare,” snapped Luna before Twilight could answer. She rose to her hooves and fixed me with a malevolent glare. “And Princess Celestia is not my keeper. I will do as I wish.”

I considered pointing out that the last time she thought like that, she was possessed by the Nightmare and the bloodiest and costliest war in all recorded history broke out, but to save my own skin I decided against it.

“And Twilight,” she continued, gazing down her elegant muzzle to the young purple mare beside her, “I will teach to you the simulacrum spell in exchange for your silence.”

“One of Starswirl the Bearded’s lost spells?” Twilight gasped, her face split open by a rapturous grin. I knew that right there I had lost her forever, for her lust for the lost knowledge of her favourite long-dead unicorn would most certainly override what slender remnants of common sense yet remains in that over-filled head of hers. The serpent coiled around my stomach squeezed tighter.

“But what of Parliament?” I asked quickly, hoping to seize the initiative.

She took a sip from her drink, and glared at me archly from behind her mug. “What of it?”

I waved a hoof dismissively, finding her casual attitude to be rather grating. “Just you being here invites a constitutional crisis; no alicorn princess may command ponies under arms.”

“I am not bound by Parliament,” she said, again, irritatingly casual about the whole affair; as if plunging Equestria into, at best, the greatest political buck-up since the last one she started one thousand years ago, and at worst, the greatest civil war since, well, the last one she started one thousand years ago, was an entirely trivial affair that was hardly worth her time. “My power derives from Faust Herself, and by Her Grace I am appointed to rule Equestria in Her name. I answer to no temporal authority on Equus, elected or not.”

I wondered if the whole concept of the divine right of royalty was perhaps intrinsically flawed, somehow, especially if it allowed the apparently divinely-appointed rulers of the most powerful nation in the world to go gallivanting off to warzones on a mere whim; my own use of that particular doctrine to excuse some of the more distasteful and illegal things that I had done in my youth notwithstanding, of course. Looking at Princess Luna and Twilight Sparkle, I wondered if the concept of self-preservation was just some sort of mental illness that only I was afflicted with.

“Besides,” she continued, “the edict states that no alicorn princess may lead ponies under arms. There is nothing to say that I may not accompany them into battle. The letter of the law will still be obeyed.”

“If not its spirit,” I retorted.

Princess Luna snorted condescendingly, and placed the now-empty mug of tea to the side. Standing face-to-face with me, or, rather, her face to my chest now that she was the size of an average unicorn mare, her eyes narrowed as they fixed onto mine with a glare of such intensity that I failed to suppress a small whimper. Regardless of the disparity in size, those cold, intense eyes of hers and the haughty, proud scowl on her face was enough to turn my bowels to water.

“You would not dare disobey a direct order from your Princess, now, would you?” she hissed. “Worry not, your dedication to my sister is admirable, but please allow me to deal with her. You are a soldier, Blueblood, and you will obey me without question.”

Defeated, and realising that there was simply no arguing with one so stubborn as her, not least of all due to the fact the alicorn in question can just as easily render me into a small pile of dust to be cleaned up by Cannon Fodder when he comes back, I simply gave up. It wouldn’t have been the first time I just surrendered in the face of Luna’s insane stubborn streak, and as sure as Tirek lies chained in Tartarus it would not be the last. [This phrase indicates that this entry was written just after the first time he retired, before Tirek was unbound from his daemonic prison and Blueblood’s return to active service]

Truth be told, I was simply exhausted; I suppose I could have argued with her further, but I believed my position to be untenable in the face of her overwhelming bullheadedness and thus I bid a hasty retreat, preferably before I was reduced to a messy stain on the ground. The events of that day – the upcoming mission, Twilight Sparkle, Crimson Arrow’s resignation, my confrontation with Shining Armour – after all of that I felt an intense fatigue I had not known since the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Black Venom Pass. Military life often leaves one at the very edge of physical and emotional collapse, and Luna’s appearance was most certainly an unpleasant shove in the direction of that precipitous drop to a breakdown.

Spike tugged at my sleeve. “Uh, Blue? You okay there? You kind of zoned out.”

“I’m fine,” I said, despite my imminent meltdown. I was doing my utmost not to grab Princess Luna by the ears and scream into her irritatingly smug little face that this was all a bad idea. “I just remembered that there’s something very important I need to do. Cannon Fodder will take care of your needs until I return.”

I left hurriedly, their feeble protests barely registering as I ducked through the tent flap and into the cool of the early evening. Wanting nothing more than to escape to some semblance of solitude, I picked a direction seemingly at random and started walking, hoping the nocturnal perambulation would help clear the tumult of thoughts swirling like a hurricane in my mind. The ponies gave me a suitably wide berth as I stalked between the tents, armouries, and parade grounds, no doubt the scowl upon my face indicating that I was most certainly not in the mood for idle conversation, should anypony feel particularly suicidal enough to approach me for that.

If Princess Luna wanted to play at soldiers, so be it, I thought. I shan’t risk my life unduly for her sake. I kicked at a stray dog unfortunate enough to cross my path; the damned things were becoming endemic in the encampment, no doubt fed scraps and kept as pets by the more sentimental of the soldiers here. The dog yelped and sprinted away from me.

Darkness descended, and Princess Luna’s moon loomed fat and yellow in the star-flecked expanse above, as if she was mocking me with it. I crossed into Dodge Junction, and there I wandered listlessly into the district given over to the less wholesome activities a soldier on leave might waste his monthly pittance on. I found a brothel frequented by many off-duty personnel of all regiments – a dank, sordid little place, lit darkly by a small number of dim gas lamps that illuminated the prostitutes entwined with their clientele like grotesque, multi-limbed monstrosities, obscured by a dense haze of tobacco smoke that lingered like a fog. I caught glints of steel and gold mixed with elegant silks and velvet, and of eyes watching me with a mixture of alarm and distaste. Ignoring them, I sought comfort by procuring the services of one of the many painted, pretty mares from a slovenly, fat, greasy little stallion, presumably the proprietor of this establishment.

I indulged in a night of rough passion, a far cry from the skilled and refined courtesans I was used to, but when the morning came the next day, a sickly feeling of guilt and shame for having sunk so low added to my already troubled nerves. I settled the bill by tossing a purse full of bits onto the bed, and walked back to the camp hoping nopony would notice my indiscretion.

***

The preparations for the upcoming offensive proceeded with the usual precision and efficiency expected of the Royal Guard, that is to say, with none. The weeks that followed Luna’s arrival on my doorstep, or tent flap to be more accurate, were a confused mess of muddling through the various problems and issues that arose in trying to marshal the necessary formations, supplies, and resources required for this complex operation. Much of these were conducted in a series of ad hoc meetings with General Crimson Arrow, as and when he felt like it, it seemed. We often went days without hearing from him; the apparent mastermind of this audacious, if suicidal, plan remained ensconced within his tent alone, only for a flurry of frenetic activity to follow as I and half a dozen other officers would rush to his call to discuss some seemingly trivial aspect of the attack. As tedious as these meetings were, at the very least military personnel tended towards brevity in their discussions, as opposed to the meetings I attended when I worked at the Ministry of War, where civilian managers could somehow say so little of actual worth with so many words in a manner that was as impressive as it was irritating.

Though these meetings and the dozens of other, minor things that demanded my attention were onerous in the extreme, I threw myself into these new duties in a vain bid to remain as far away from Princess Luna as possible. Twilight Sparkle’s presence was annoying enough, but at the very least I was not often the subject of her attention, and more often than not I merely acted as her chaperone as she observed or interviewed soldiers. When ‘Cloudless Sky’ stood by my side (remaining a judicious distance from Cannon Fodder) I could not shake the uncomfortable sensation that she was observing and judging me.

Her disguise itself worked perfectly, and Cannon Fodder could be trusted to do as he was told and keep quiet, and as for Spike, well, foals tend to be very amenable to bribes so his silence was bought by a large helping of ice cream with extra sapphire sprinkles. To my dismay, I had hoped that perhaps Major Starlit Skies, a proficient magic user in his own right, might have been able to spot some holes in the illusion. Alas, my colleagues, the senior officers of the regiment, only took a passing interest in the new arrival, who I tried to explain as having been sent by the family matriarch, my dear old mother, in one of her more lucid moments, to act as my personal bodyguard. [After the disappearance of Blueblood’s father in unexplored Zebrica, his mother was sent by distant members of his family to a mental hospital on the dubious pretence of being ‘overcome with grief’. He is rather private about that affair, and I do not wish to insult the memory of my nephew by disclosing the specifics here.] The exception, however, was Captain Blitzkrieg, who winked at her lecherously and lamented that nopony ever sent pretty mares to him anymore, which left both I and Luna quite speechless. Nevertheless, I actually saw precious little of my auntie in those weeks, save for the few token appearances masquerading as my personal retainer and her loitering about my tent as I tried to do paperwork, thus eradicating the last vestiges of what little privacy I had left. What she got up to when I didn’t see her, I don’t know, and neither did I particularly care, but the notion that she had taken on the form of a black, amorphous, star-speckled cloud and lingered in the shadows, just beyond my sight, could not be shaken.

The majority of my work, however, was spent working as liaison officer between the four arms of the Equestrian Armed Forces that would form the flanking battalion – the 1st Night Guards, the 1st Solar Guards, the 16th Royal Artillery, and Southern Cross’ motley collection of Royal Engineers. What this actually meant in practice, of course, was that I had to sort out any arguments and conflicts that would arise between the four while trying to give the impression that I was being as fair and even-hoofed as possible, which made me feel like a kindergarten teacher most of the time. As a result of the close co-operation required between the officers of these disparate organisations, each with very different mindsets and viewpoints on just how things should be done, disagreements and arguments were all but inevitable, but fortunately all of the officers were possessed of sufficient will and drive to see this endeavour through without causing too much of a hassle. Regardless of their personal opinions of each other, for I suspected that many of the Solar Guard still held reservations about their darker cousins in service to the former Nightmare Moon, they were mature enough to form working, professional relationships between them with only a little direction and relatively few threats of violence from me. There was, however, one notable exception, and you, dear reader, shall receive no prizes for guessing who that pony was.

Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter appeared to have made it the goal of his hitherto short and undistinguished career in the Royal Guard to make my life as difficult as possible; it was he, and not Twilight Sparkle, or Princess Luna, or even Spike, as irritating as the infant dragon was, who contributed the greatest to my misery over that week and the weeks to come. I do not think that he truly intended any malice towards me, as he was under the charming delusion that the two of us were friends and he would therefore take every opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with me despite my increasingly unsubtle attempts to distance myself from him. The problems arose from his distinct inability to get on with anypony else, and he frequently butted heads with Captain Red Coat and Lieutenant Southern Cross over matters which I felt to be quite trivial, necessitating me, as political officer, to come in and definitively settle the issue.

One such argument arose over the proposed marching order of the column. Scarlet Letter insisted that it should be the 1st Solar Guard, being the oldest and most prestigious regiment in the Royal Guard, and his platoon specifically, that should have the dubious honour of the battalion sent to certain doom in the valleys and gullies of the Macintosh Hills. Ordinarily, I might have allowed him that privilege, as placing him at the head of the column would have invariably exposed him to the greatest amount of danger, were it not for Southern Cross’ equally vociferous insistence that the engineers lead the column. The engineers’ reasons, of course, were purely practical; if they were to clear a path through the rough ground for the battalion with its artillery and baggage train, then it made sense to place them at the head of the column. Naturally, reason prevailed, by which I mean I put my hoof down and told Scarlet Letter to shut up, and the Horsetralian Engineers would lead the way.

That example was typical of the sort of fiasco that invariably followed Scarlet Letter wherever he went, like hoofsteps in the snow. I like to think that I had done all that could be reasonably expected of any sane pony in that situation, save for throttling him with my bare hooves. Looking back, however, if I had done that right there I might have saved myself a great deal of trouble, and probably earned the Medal of Harmony a few years earlier than I actually had done. But as the weeks wore on and my patience wore thinner and thinner, the thing that I recall giving me the most grief, aside from the thoughts of my imminent and messy death in a Changeling ambush, was a rather insidious rumour that began to infect the ranks of the platoons forming the flanking battalion.

It was a simple enough rumour, as the most insidious ones tend to be; Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter had been drilling his platoon all day in the hot sun, when, to the surprise of nopony but him, two soldiers had fainted from heatstroke, for which they were to be flogged. Whether there was any truth to this, I didn’t know, but regardless of its veracity the rumour spread, as they inevitably do, and filtered through the ranks and strata of the regiment and was thus embellished with every telling – the soldiers did not suffer from heatstroke but of chronic dehydration and malnutrition, and they were not to be flogged, but hanged. Ordinarily I would have simply ignored it, knowing that even the simple act of denial only adds credence to that rumour in the minds of the more paranoid of ponies, however, if left unchecked I knew it could erode the trust that I had spent the past week or so trying to build between the two regiments. What most ponies fail to realise is that good discipline is built upon a foundation of trust – soldiers obey orders because they trust in their officers’ ability not to get them killed needlessly in combat, and likewise officers trust in their soldiers’ ability to carry out those orders professionally. To erode that trust, even between different regiments and formations, is to invite defeat. Whatever I thought about Scarlet Letter was irrelevant if the common guardspony, standing shoulder to shoulder with his comrades, had absolutely no faith in the abilities of the ponies in the next platoon over.

“He only threatened to have them flogged,” explained Shining Armour when I confronted him about the matter over our habitual game of chess. I had taken to visiting the 1st Solar Guard Regiment’s officers’ mess regularly so that I might ‘liaise’ with their officers in a more relaxed and casual setting, at least that is what I told Colonel Sunshine Smiles, in actual fact most of my liaising was done with their well-stocked drinks cabinet of fine liquors and the younger officers, all of whom under the charming misapprehension that games of chance had more to do with sheer blind luck than the pair of aces that I kept concealed up my sleeves. The Lord Captain himself seemed to tolerate my company here, and on occasion we would indulge in a few games of chess to while away the remainder of the evening, though most likely for professional rather than social reasons. [The idea that Shining Armour might have simply enjoyed his company does not appear to have occurred to him. Shining Armour’s own memoirs imply that he considered Blueblood to be a friend, or as close as their respective ranks could possibly allow.]

Also present was Captain Blitzkrieg, who sat at our table nursing a pint of lukewarm Trottinghamshire bitter. Like me, the Night Guard’s officers too had taken to visiting the mess, apparently for the same reasons as I, though far less frequently and usually only if I was there to accompany them, and it appeared this time that the vulgar pegasus company commander had drawn the shortest straw. Despite my fears and reservations, he had yet to offend anypony; if anything he had become quite shy and reserved, though I put that down to a concerted effort not to embarrass himself or me in front of his social betters. At any rate, he was quite content sitting quietly with his brown beer and watching Shining and I play chess, occasionally picking up one of the defeated antique pieces to examine them.

The mess itself was a very large tent, far larger than General Crimson Arrow’s headquarters, and more luxuriously furnished, too. Plush, faux leather-backed seats, so soft that sitting upon one felt like sinking into a pleasantly warm marshmallow, surrounded by darkly-varnished wooden coffee tables, around which the many officers of the 1st Solar Guard and their guests would relax after a day’s work with idle conversation and drink. A few officers had brought mares, farm girls they had seduced while on leave, perhaps, and they danced in a vain approximation of a high society ball to the inoffensive, tinkling tune of harpsichord played by a young ensign. Above us, the accumulated smoke of dozens of fine cigars and tobacco pipes formed a visible fog, looking much like the clouds on an overcast Trottingham day, and promised woe for anypony concerned about the health of their lungs.

“But he didn’t go through with that threat?” I asked, looking over the chess board that separated us. It was Shining’s turn, and I watched with only a vague interest as he considered his next move. As he did so, one of the few pieces he had left on the board would be illuminated by a gentle blue glow, before he would decide against it and select another, and then another. His vacillation didn’t bother me overmuch; for the first time in weeks I was actually enjoying myself, and I had set myself up for a comfortable win in a few more turns and all he could do was delay the inevitable, though I suspected that he was merely allowing me to win out of politeness.

Shining Armour shook his head. “No, the two soldiers were taken to the field hospital. I doubt he would have gone through with it anyway.” At length, he finally selected his prince and moved it forwards; a bold move that had me worried for a brief moment, before I took another sip of my drink and re-adjusted my strategy.

“I see,” I said, nudging a pawn forth with my hoof. Just over Shining Armour’s shoulder I could just about see the pony we were gossiping about, sitting on another one of those luxuriously plush chairs and surrounded by a small mob of officers, some of whom I noticed were from the 3rd Regiment of the Solar Guard, and was apparently halfway through telling some sort of anecdote about his time in Parliament. I spotted Captain Fine Vintage amongst them, looking distinctly bored as the aristocratic officer did not appear to even attempt to look the slightest bit interested, and only lingered out of a sense of dim politeness.

“He’s a politician,” said Blitzkrieg suddenly, nodding his head in Scarlet Letter’s direction, “ain’t he?”

“He’s the member of Parliament for East Trottingham,” answered Shining Armour. As he considered his next move he picked up his glass of lemonade – the straight-laced Captain of the Royal Guard was not one to indulge in the ‘demon drink’ – and took a sip.

“Well, he’s certainly a member, alright.” Blitzkrieg frowned, and swirled what little remained of his dark amber drink in the glass. “Well, I didn’t bloody vote for him.” [Captain Blitzkrieg was, of course, a resident of the constituency of East Trottingham.]

I chuckled. “Of course you didn’t,” I said, “you aren’t eligible to vote.”

The puzzled expression on his face grew a little more intense as he struggled to work out the convoluted mess that was Equestria’s political system at that time, what with democratic reform still languishing in its infant phase of development, and how that slotted in with his rather primitive and one-sided view of the world. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that this was the first time he had even considered how this country is run, or not run, as seems more likely. “But why not?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

“You need to own an expensive enough property before you’re allowed to vote. Parliament seems to believe if you can look after a moderately large house, you’re intelligent enough to vote for somepony sensible, which means that hardly anypony can vote.” [Prior to the widespread electoral reform that followed the Changeling Wars, it was estimated that less than five per cent of the total population of Equestria could vote, though this was by no means uniform across the country as the necessary prerequisites changed from borough to borough.] And therein lay the main flaw with democracy, or, at least, that’s what I thought, for as the last century started to progress out of its infant stages my views were becoming less and less popular; the crux of the issue lies with the choice of prospective representatives with which to invest legislative and executive power over the state, and democracy tends to only attract those who actually want power and are willing to pursue whatever ruthless means necessary to get it. In my personal experience, it is those sorts of ponies that one should look out for, and, more importantly, should never be allowed to receive that power.

“But I owned lots of properties,” insisted Blitzkrieg. “Pubs, bars, gambling dens, opium houses, brothels...”

“He means owned legally,” said Shining Armour, offering a friendly smile. He moved his prince forwards and took my pawn, which I had sent out as bait, and while his piece remained unsettlingly close to my unguarded princess I remained confident that I could pull off a tidy victory here. “I used to have the vote, until I married Cadence, that is, and became a prince.”

“And East Trottingham is a rotten borough,” I added, considering my next move.

“Well, sir,” said Blitzkrieg, looking slightly offended, “I know it ain’t Canterlot, but Trottingham ain’t that bad.”

I begged to differ, having visited the destitute east end of that miserable little metropolis before with its disease-ridden slums and poverty-stricken rookeries, but as I did not want to run the risk of waking up with one of his stiletto blades embedded in my neck I refrained from voicing it, and instead tried to explain the corruption that lay at the heart of Equestrian politics, “No, no, a rotten borough is a constituency where the MP controls the small number of voters that live there.”

“Voter,” corrected Shining Armour, leaning back in his seat and taking another sip of his lemonade. “East Trottingham has only one voter, and that’s Sir Scarlet Letter’s wife.”

Nearly snapping my knight in half in my telekinetic grip, I blinked up in surprise at Shining Armour, and then stole a sidelong glance at the pony we were gossiping about. The idea that a mare could have tolerated his company long enough for them to exchange vows, or worse, copulate with him, was profoundly disturbing, but then again, my mother married my father, of all ponies, for purely political reasons, so I supposed it must have been possible.

Blitzkrieg frowned and then shook his head, deciding that, as all commoners should, that issues of state and power are far beyond his meagre reckoning, and downed the last mouthfuls of beer in one big gulp. Wiping the residual drops from his now sopping muzzle fur, he once again indicated Scarlet Letter, this time by pointing his empty pint glass at him. “So, I’m guessing being an MP’s fairly prestigious and well-paid and all, right?” he said. “What I don’t get is why he’s decided to join the Royal Guard as a lieutenant.”

“He’s fallen out of favour with the Prime Minister,” said Shining Armour, leaning forward conspiratorially, his voice low so as to be almost drowned out by the vapid, bland harpsichord music and the equally inoffensive ripples of polite conversation around us. In spite of myself, I could not help but lean over the chessboard too, and neither could Blitzkrieg, apparently. “He used to be the Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship, but in the last cabinet reshuffle he lost out, and he’s been sitting on the back benches for a few years now.”

I moved a knight forward and took Shining’s prince, and then tapped my chin thoughtfully. “I see. He thinks a short spell in the Royal Guard, earning a few shiny medals and a couple of impressive but ultimately cosmetic scars, will resurrect his flagging political career.”

“Eh, good luck to him,” said Blitzkrieg blandly, shrugging his shoulders casually, “a hoof out of line, though, and he’ll have to answer to the Commissar here.” Well, that was the theory at least. I wished it was that simple, but Scarlet Letter did not strike me as the sort who would be cowed into submission either by fear, as the Commissariat recommends, or by reason and out of a sense of duty, as I had been trying to instil in the officers I work with. Shaking the thoughts from my mind, which were becoming less and less coherent the more I drank from my glass, I noticed belatedly that Blitzkrieg had thrust his empty glass, with residues of foam coating the inside of the vessel, under my muzzle. “Speaking of which, it’s your round.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Come on, mate, how about a bit of that noblesse oblige, eh?” [Prench for ‘nobility obliges’; it refers to the concept that those lucky enough to have been born into the nobility have certain obligations and responsibilities to those less fortunate under their charge. Needless to say, Blueblood tended to find this idea an annoying hindrance at the best of times, though he often made pains to be seen adhering to it.]

As I took that glass and dragged myself reluctantly to the bar, I made a small mental note to find the pony who had taught him about that concept and have the unscrupulous bastard flogged, for I knew the good Captain would now take every opportunity to squirrel as many treats out of me as possible under that spurious pretext. Anyway, shortly after I returned with fresh booze the game ended in victory for me, as predicted, though Shining Armour seemed rather distracted for most of the remainder of it. Nevertheless, the alcohol flowing through my veins had made me feel proud of that victory, though I suspected that it had been quite unmerited.

Following that, I decided that it was time I retired for the night, and bade my farewells to the Captain of the Royal Guard. With Blitzkrieg with me I made my way back to the Night Guards’ camp, where I had hoped to sleep off the effects of the whisky. Had I known what lay there when I eventually arrived, I might have gone back inside for a few more drinks to help soften the blow of what would come next, but, innocently, we wandered back to our camp, and I had to make awkward small talk with the pegasus captain. Once out of earshot of the mess tent, or, at least, what he fondly believed to be out of the earshot, Captain Blitzkrieg returned to being his usual cocky, crude self, and almost immediately began to cast aspersions on the lineage of a few Solar Guard officers who had been rude to him, though he was somewhat justified, I might add; he had actually behaved himself quite well this time.

“Shining Armour’s all right, though,” he said, once he had finished his tirade, “and that Fine Vintage bloke.”

I chuckled; Fine Vintage had attempted, unsuccessfully, to impress his love of all things vinous on Blitzkrieg, and after one taste of a particularly rare white wine, the pegasus announced that it ‘tastes of cat piss’. Now, I recall hearing of a rumour that Fine Vintage had quite savagely assaulted a young ensign who requested that his pinot noir might be better served chilled, so I feared that Blitzkrieg might once again land me in another duel. Luckily, Fine Vintage merely chuckled and joked that ‘it’s not on the tasting notes’, and from then on the two had got on surprisingly well.

As we reached our tents, Blitzkrieg said ‘goodnight’ and departed. I noted, just before I ducked through my tent flap, that a warm glow of candles emanated from Twilight’s tent next to mine, and the silhouette of a small, slightly chubby unicorn lying on her stomach, legs tucked neatly under her frame, and of a hovering book was projected onto the cloth. Inside my tent, however, I found that Cannon Fodder had already gone to sleep, snoring loud enough to wake the dead, while Spike had curled up in what looked suspiciously like a dog basket at the end of the desk, also asleep and with plugs in his ears. Evidently, he could not tolerate another one of Twilight’s all-night study binges and stole away into my tent for some peace.

Wanting nothing more than to follow them into the realm of dreams, I stumbled into my ‘room’, and there, resting on my pillow, I saw a small brown envelope and a muffin – Corporal Hooves had probably visited with the mail. Luna was absent, off doing whatever it was she got up to at this time of night. Placing the muffin aside to enjoy later and, hopefully, sober, I picked up the envelope and opened it curiously. What was contained therein was enough to wash away the fog of drunkenness and bring me back to cold, hard, unforgiving sobriety. Ultimately, it was a fairly innocuous thing; a sheaf of papers bound together in red string and a red seal bearing the coat of arms of the Royal Guard. They were orders.

We were to muster at the staging ground tomorrow afternoon, and the attack that I had been dreading these past few weeks would finally begin.

Author's Note

In case any of you are wondering, Luna's fake Trottingham accent sounds like Dick Van Dyke's murder of the Cockney accent in Mary Poppins.

I want to add a disclaimer here, I shouldn't have to, as you're all intelligent, sensible people, but on the Internet one cannot take chances. This chapter dabbled a bit in politics. Needless to say, Blueblood's views aren't mine, and the politics is simply there for the purposes of world building. In fact, I've deliberately picked an archaic form of democracy as a way to avoid any possible inferences to modern issues. I'm here to have fun, and if I really wanted to make some sort of political point I would have picked a better medium than fan fiction.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the chapter!

Bloodstained (Part 11)

Part 11

All-in-all, everything had gone according to plan; we hadn’t all died yet, and we had reached the pre-appointed stop-off point roughly halfway in our unhappy journey only two hours later than we should have done, which meant that, at Captain Red Coat’s stubborn insistence that we keep to the plan, we had to blindly grope our way through the rough terrain and narrow defiles in the dark like a drunkard struggling to navigate his way home from the pub through a narrow alleyway. A number of guardsponies had stumbled over rocks in the dark, spraining their hooves and incurring a few bruises, though the latter was mostly due to Company Sergeant Major Square Basher’s rather ‘hooves-on’ approach to making sure that those soldiers had learnt their lessons of watching where they were going. Some of the cannons had broken their wheels over the course of our journey, which was something that we had all expected would happen, and thankfully the damage caused by dragging these guns over ground that was less than ideal for them was not irreparable.

Though my anxiety was strong during the daylight hours, it only grew worse when night fell; when we had set up the temporary camp, which consisted of little more than a small plateau area where the soldiers would bivouac and the officers would sleep in the tents that had been brought, the notion that we were now at our most vulnerable continued to nag at the back of my mind. Twilight Sparkle, thankfully, had retreated to her own tent to eagerly process all of the notes that she had made since the last batch that she had produced, Cannon Fodder was content sleeping in his portion of my tent, and Princess Luna was, unsurprisingly, nowhere to be found. It was by the dim light of a single flickering candle that I was granted some much needed time alone, though the constant sound of snoring from beyond the partition and the bubble of rowdy banter from outside the tent reminded me that I was never truly isolated here, and though I tried to busy myself with some pointless make-work, I still found my mind drifting back towards the very real peril in which we found ourselves.

Though Captain Red Coat and the other officers appeared to be entirely unconcerned by the ever-present threat of ambush, as all of the pegasus reconnaissance flights that ranged even beyond the hills themselves indicated that the enemy remained completely unaware of our secretive approach, I was not so sanguine; In fact, I had already seen flickers of movement from up the peaks that entrapped us within these narrow valleys. On a conscious level, I could explain such things as simply being the beasts that inhabit this desolate land, but the itching in my hooves still could not be calmed. Naturally, I could not allow the ponies around me to know of my paranoia; if the pegasi were adamant that the Changeling Army remained massed at the mouth of Black Venom Pass and that none of their scouts could possibly have come within five miles of us without their knowing, then I could not be seen to be getting so worked up about phantasms, which, for all I knew, could only be tricks my damned paranoia was playing upon me. Therefore, I sought to emulate the sort of stoicism and sangfroid expected of the Royal Guard officer class, and hope that Captain Red Coat et al would take from my example, however false it was, and act accordingly should what I fear actually transpire.

It is a little known fact amongst ponies that neither of the two Royal Pony Sisters actually needs to breathe; Princess Celestia is polite enough to go through the motions, but it seems that Luna simply doesn’t bother with such niceties. This unique facet of alicorns, being more accurately described as metaphysical concepts such as day, night, love, and friendship taking the physical forms of ponies to varying degrees of success, is not something that one picks up on immediately, yet one’s subconscious invariably takes notice, which merely adds to the overall feeling of ‘wrongness’ that Luna inevitably invokes in most ponies. Whether this is deliberate or not, I cannot possibly say for certain, but I would not put it past her to simply refuse to do so out of sheer stubbornness to lower herself to an activity only we mere mortals do, or a deliberate attempt just to make me feel as uncomfortable around her as possible. If it was the latter, then she certainly succeeded in her endeavour. [The metaphysics of alicorn biology are, unfortunately, beyond the limited understanding of mortal minds; suffice to say that what Blueblood has described is true to a certain extent.]

One can understand, therefore, as late that evening as I was catching up with some paperwork that had inexplicably found its way onto my desk despite being miles deep within what is considered enemy territory (bureaucracy will always find a way), and which Cannon Fodder had failed to deflect from me with his usual combination of bull-headed obstinacy and rank odour, that I completely failed to notice the presence of Princess Luna, sans disguise, until I was by chance distracted by some noise outside and turned my head to the left to find her face just inches from mine, apparently looking intently over my shoulder at my work. Needless to say, I reacted about as well as one might expect; I let loose an involuntary gasp of surprise as I flinched away from her reflexively, nearly falling off my cushion, and with a clumsy flail of my hooves as my primitive hindbrain tried to engage the ‘flight’ portion of pony’s self-preservation instinct I inadvertently threw a good portion of my neatly ordered piles of paperwork onto the ground. However, I like to imagine that I recovered from my initial shock with admirable alacrity, or at least I tried to give the impression that I had done, as I attempted to reassert my habitual demeanour of regal aloofness despite the surge of adrenaline rushing through my veins making me feel both twitchy and nauseated. [Princess Luna describes this event rather differently; saying that Blueblood ‘screamed like a filly’, fell out of his seat, and spent the next five minutes on the ground gasping for air ‘like a beached narwhal’. I cannot say whose account is accurate, due to a lack of corroborating evidence.]

“Auntie?” I gasped, between short, ragged breaths and some reflexive swallowing to try and quell the sudden infestation of butterflies that had broken out within my stomach.

“Princess,” she insisted through set teeth.

“Your disguise! What if someone sees or hears you?”

“They won’t,” she replied. Her tone of voice and peculiar choice of words did very little to help me relax.

The Night Mare was close, uncomfortably so, as if she had no concept of personal space, yet I felt no body heat radiating off her and no exhalation of breath stirred the sweat-matted fur on my skin. It was all very unsettling. She tapped the papers on the desk with a hoof the size of a dinner plate. “What are you doing?” she asked, entirely unconcerned with the near-heart attack I was still recovering from. I suppressed a small shudder; it felt as if the hide on my back was trying to pull itself free from the raw flesh it concealed.

She picked up a few of the sheets of paper that I had thrown to the ground during my brief panic attack – some more of the horrendously written pamphlets sent to me by the Ministry of Information for dissemination amongst the common soldiery, if I recall correctly – and studied them curiously. As I watched, my heart pumped frantically in my chest, and as her ears pricked and flickered I briefly entertained the notion that she could hear it as clearly as I could.

“Paperwork,” I said at length, surreptitiously concealing with a hoof a foalish doodle of Daring Do punching Queen Chrysalis that I had scrawled in the margins of a disciplinary report form as I did so. I was in no mood for small talk, especially not after the fright she had just given me, but I must admit that I was rather surprised by the idea of the Princess taking a personal interest in my work; for the most part she regards me with the same sort of quiet disdain as she would for some horrid creature that had just crawled out of an open sewer.

I had hoped that my short, terse answer would be enough to make her go away, and to further encourage her to pick up on that hint, I picked up my quill, which, in my panic, I had hurled with some violence at my desk where it had scrawled a large spiders’ web over a page of an open copy of Princesses’ Regulations, and pretended to scribble some notes in the margins of a form. Alas, as her social skills were still sadly lacking at this stage of her readjustment to Equestrian society, Princess Luna either failed to notice the cue to leave or simply ignored it. Mercifully, she stepped back and allowed me some breathing space, though I don’t suspect for a moment that she did so out of any concern for my comfort, and flicked through the pamphlets she had picked up.

“Why?” she asked at length, her brow furrowing into a slight, disapproving frown.

Well, that was the question I had been asking myself ever since I first scrawled my signature on a dotted line in triplicate. I shrugged my shoulders, despite the inevitable stab of pain from my shrapnel wound. “Because it needs to be done,” I said, providing what was probably the best explanation of the convoluted, labyrinthine bureaucratic framework that underpins not only the Royal Guard but all of Equestrian society as one could possibly give without Twilight Sparkle on standby to provide one of her trademark lectures.

Luna tossed the small wad of pamphlets down upon my desk and looked at me with an expression that was quite unreadable. Her permanent scowl deepened, and her lips set into a thin line, tugged slightly downwards at the ends across her long, elegant muzzle. Despite this, there was little of the condescension inherent in her whole demeanour, and indeed without her armour and regalia the mare standing before me looked uncharacteristically vulnerable and, well, like a pony, I suppose.

“This is what is wrong with Equestria these days,” she said, instead taking the cue to leave as an invitation for a rant. I noticed that this sort of thing had been happening to me a lot lately. “I thought I had escaped such nonsense when I came here, only to find the same rot that had infested the Ministry of War has spread to the frontlines.”

“War changed,” I said blandly. “A lot changes in one thousand years.” I contemplated pointing out that the last time Princess Luna went to war over a millenia ago ponies had yet to discover the link between diseases and drinking out of the same body of water one uses as a latrine, but I decided against it. I did not make it this far in life by saying every stupid thing that came to my head, instead I merely let that thought fester to write it out decades later in a document that nopony will read.

My auntie’s face become unreadable; an odd sort of grimace, slightly pained, flitted across her sharp muzzle, before the frown on her brow intensified and she fixed me with an odd glare. “War never changes,” she hissed, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s the one thing in a thousand years of exile that has remained unaltered.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and immediately regretted it. I don’t know what compelled me to try and stand up to the one pony in Equestria that one cannot stand up to, especially since I have seen first hoof what happens to those ponies who have tried to (primarily me and the palace servants during the first few months of her return to Equestria, and the subsequent problems they had trying to cater to her rather esoteric needs), and I had very little desire to subject myself to such treatment here of all places. But as I was pleasantly surprised that I had not been subjected to the full force of the Royal Canterlot Voice, which would have likely uprooted my whole tent and sent it flying down the valleys like a discarded newspaper caught in an stiff breeze, and that I wasn’t being throttled to the brink of passing out, I dared to look up from the ground between my forehooves and saw that Princess Luna was lying on my cot with her long, sinuous limbs folded underneath her slender body.

“You don’t?” she said, her tone imperious. She waved a hoof, as if encouraging a foal to read the next line out of a picture book, and her eyebrow was arched sceptically. “The purpose of war is to force the enemy into performing your will through the use of violence. That is the principle act of warfare and it will never change.”

“That’s what war is for,” I said. “How we fight it has changed.”

“No.” Her voice took on an edge of steel to it that made me shudder involuntarily. Anxiously, I placed a hoof on the desk behind me to steady myself, as if somehow the flimsy wooden fold-up structure would protect me in some manner. The papers on the desk and the copy of Princesses’ Regulations, a faux-leather bound tome about the size of a phone book and about seven times as dull to read, became suffused with her deep blue aura, were lifted from their resting places, and presented before me one by one until I was presented with what appeared to be a wall of paper.

“It is not enough,” she began, and the papers began to swirl around my head in a dizzying vortex that made me feel quite nauseated, “that a soldier is willing to risk his life out of a love of his Princesses and his country. No, there must be forms to fill in, tests carried out, procedures followed to the letter, meetings to be had, discussions, fetching, foraging, bureaucracy, punishment details, digging latrines. The Ministry of War be damned to Tartarus for all eternity for having turned soldiers into mere clerks. This. Isn’t. War!”

The forms, pamphlets, letters, and even the book of regulations that were circulating about my head as if I was trapped in the centre of some bureaucratic washing machine suddenly exploded into clouds of white confetti. I flinched, bringing my hooves up to cover the same handsome face that sent the ladies of Prench nobility swooning in their corsets, and there is no shame in admitting that I might have yelped slightly. I’m not quite sure how long I spent in that foetal position; it can’t have been too long but it certainly felt like it at the time, and as I lowered my hooves, which were still itching damnably since we stepped hoof in those hills, I saw all the work that I had done that evening lying like Hearth’s Warming snow around me.

Indignation rose within me; an emotion that one does not express before Princess Luna unless one has a death wish, but once again I felt the frustration and anger that I had been forced to suppress for the good of the war effort and my own false reputation rise within me. It was not that I was particularly upset that the work that I had done had been lost irreparably, for in truth I had been dawdling as usual and making every effort to indulge in the same sort of foalish procrastination that I did with school homework a decade ago. No, my anger rose from the principle that my work, however poor and incomplete as it might have been, had been destroyed by her, and that she would come here, from thousands of miles away to risk my life and that of thousands of others of ponies just to indulge in some stupid, fantastic nostalgia of hers when she led the armies of Equestria into battle. That she continued to lecture me as if she was an elderly mare regaling the younger generation with how utterly wonderful ‘her time’ was, despite such things as the Magna Carta Equus [‘The Great Charter of Liberties of Equines’; a document written by the first Parliament and signed by myself in the aftermath of the Nightmare Heresy. It is notable for, amongst other things, laying down the foundations of the Equestrian rule of law by stating that the will of the Princesses is not arbitrary and that no free pony of Equestria may be punished except through the law of the land. It should also be noted that it would be several years after her return from the moon until Princess Luna would acquiesce to signing the charter] and the concept of regular bathing were considered to be very progressive and highly dangerous ideas at the time, was sufficient to push me over the edge.

Luna’s face was a masque of pure detachment; as if it were merely a sort of working prototype of what a pony’s face should look like and whoever had crafted it, Faust most likely, had yet to inject even the slightest spark of life and animation into it. Indeed, only the gentle wafting of her ethereal mane fluttering on an invisible breeze and the stars within that flickered and rearranged themselves into simulacra of the myriad constellations of the night sky at her fickle whims were the only indications that I could see that she had not been hit with a petrification spell. I did my best to imitate it, but I soon found out that I was dealing with the pony who probably invented the whole concept of concealing one’s feelings beneath an impassive facade and gave up trying.

“Well, what do you think war is?” I blurted out, brushing the torn remains of the paperwork from my shoulders like dandruff. The Princess looked rather taken aback by my outburst, as, I must admit, so was I. There was no turning back now, I supposed, if I was to be torn limb from limb anyway I might as well go out proving my infernal Auntie wrong about something for once, so I continued: “The Royal Guard consists of forty-one thousand ponies-at-arms in forty-one Line Regiments of Hoof, plus the artillery, plus the engineers, plus the special forces, plus the Marines, plus the militias and the colonial auxiliaries. How in Faust’s name are we to get them to the frontline? Lists! How do we train them? Lists and paperwork! How do we arm them? Lists! Armour, food, water, ammunition, recruitment... all of it is done through lists! You can’t just round up a couple of your aristocratic favourites and conscript some peasant levies and call it an army, anymore; you need rules, you need orders, you need ponies to write this stuff down, otherwise nopony knows what in Tartarus is going on!” I paused for a breath. “And Faust help us all if nopony digs the bloody latrines.”

As she listened to my short tirade, her expression did not change. Only when I had stopped, somewhat out of breath and still running on a potent cocktail of adrenaline, fear, and polite, aristocratic indignation, did I notice that the ends of the thin line across her jaw that was her mouth were inclined slightly up in a smile. Panting slightly, I involuntarily gripped the firm cushion my regal behind was perched upon and awaited my immediate dismemberment and/or immolation. Instead, her reaction was almost the precise opposite of what I expected; she chuckled softly, which at first I found confusing and then, as it grew louder and more mirthful, I found to be quite terrifying.

“So, the ‘Prince’” –I somehow knew that she had placed sarcastic quotation marks around my title as she said it– “has a backbone after all. Perhaps my choice was not as ill-founded as I thought. Mark me, Blueblood, you shall be thankful that you yet have soldiers and not clerks standing by your side when you march into battle once more. You have given me much to consider, nephew.”

With that rather ominous statement, Princess Luna rose from my bed and stood before me, with that smile of hers never leaving her face. She dissolved before my eyes into an amorphous cloud of black-blue smoke and sparkles, like her mane, though to my eyes it just reminded me of a giant daemonic amoeba, and slipped noiselessly through the gap between the tent and the ground and into the darkness beyond.

Relief washed over me when she left, though not completely as the knowledge that she was still out there doing Faust-knows-what coupled with the underlying apprehension that very soon we may all die very horribly and very messily continued to nag at my mind. Nevertheless, I knew that it was probably time that I got some sleep, or, at least, pretended to, as I was certain that the fractured remnants of what once passed for nerves would not allow me to do so. I belatedly noticed that Cannon Fodder had poked his head through the tent flap and was regarding me with his usual expression of mild confusion and blankness. The overall effect made him look disconcertingly like one of those mounted trophy heads that Gryphon hunters seem to believe are ideal for decorating one’s home with.

“Is there anything the matter, sir?” he said, implying that he had, somehow, not heard what just transpired from beyond a flimsy drape of fabric. [It appears that Luna had placed a zone of isolation around Blueblood’s portion of the tent, which only lifted when she had left.]

I glanced down at the debris strewed about my hooves, and the little white flakes that settled over my slightly faded coal-black uniform, and, for the briefest of moments, considered telling him the truth. Instead, knowing that such an exercise would be fruitless at best and utterly detrimental to the somewhat messianic faith that he and his comrades placed in me, I merely shook my head. “Couldn’t sleep,” I said, forcing a smile to my face for his benefit, “thought I’d catch up on some ‘homework’, but my horn” –I tapped the bony protrusion on my forehead– “backfired on me.”

Cannon Fodder chewed thoughtfully, but otherwise said and emoted nothing. We stared at one another for a single, uncomfortable moment before I realised what I had done wrong.

“You may go back to bed, Cannon Fodder,” I said.

“Thank you, sir.” He nodded his head in some clumsy semblance of a bow, before it disappeared once more through the tent flap.

I looked to the cot, which no longer looked quite as inviting as it should have been with my level of fatigue, as somehow the fact that Luna had occupied it so recently made the idea of climbing into it quite unpalatable. I therefore took the rough, itchy woollen sheets from the bed and a rolled-up storm coat that I had been using for a pillow and tossed them lackadaisically on the dusty ground, and settled there for some sleep.

***

It was to my eternal surprise that I actually managed to sleep that night, despite being on the hard ground, and I was even more shocked when I woke up to find that all of my blood was still safely contained within my veins. I expect that one gets used to this sort of thing after a while; I had noticed that the common soldiery had, after basic training and a month or so into their terms of service, all evolved the ability to sleep at any time and any place and awaken alert and ready for combat, if needs be. Though I was far too soft a pony to have acquired that same ability at quite that level, the fact that I had managed to sleep for more than an hour, was able to stumble out of my tent the following morning without feeling that my brains had been somehow scooped out through my ears while I was unconscious, and that I only required just one cup of sludgy black coffee in order to feel the closest I had ever felt to ‘fully awake’ since my military career received its unexpected and entirely unwanted reboot, was all rather encouraging. At least, it was until I was sufficiently conscious enough to remember where I was and why.

As the camp stirred to life at the sound of the morning reveille, the refrain of which echoed around the valleys so as to give the impression that single bugle was merely one of a large chorus and no doubt alerting all Changelings within earshot of our presence, I stumbled out of my tent to find that ‘Cloudless Sky’ was standing sentry just outside of the tent flap. The sight of my disguised auntie so early in the morning gave me quite a shock, for I had clung to the very slim chance that the discussion we had the previous night might have encouraged her to re-assess her insane scheme and just disappear back to Canterlot. Nonetheless, there she was, ‘in-character’, as it were, as the cold and detached life guard of my most regal body, and once that I had gotten over that surprise I felt it best to get on with the task at hand.

I made my rounds, checking up on the soldiers, their NCOs, and the platoon officers, and where needed dispensed the necessary platitudes and slogans that some committee of middle managers in the Ministry of Information a thousand miles away in Canterlot must have fondly believed were inspirational but to me merely sounded insipid and facile. Nevertheless, on the whole the soldiers all seemed rather content, motivated even, by my empty words, and as I rambled them off by rote I mused how my role in this regiment had effectively been reduced to that of a talking head. More importantly, however, Princess Luna seemed to be relatively content with my showing, for as I said ‘the Princesses protect’ for the umpteenth bloody time that morning, having said that infernal phrase so many times in my career that those words have lost all meaning, a few glances over my shoulder at her showed she was smiling slightly. Either that, or she was merely amusing herself by imagining twisting my head around with her hooves like a bottle top until my neck snapped. Who knew what thoughts revolved in that unfathomable mind of hers?

Dawn had only just broken, but Celestia’s sun was still concealed from us by the tall peaks that towered over us, and our little camp was blanketed in darkness. As we were nestled in the cleft between two sheer cliffs, the route to our objective and even more misery (and almost certain death), and the one that led back to Equestria and civilisation, appeared to me as a tunnel stretching endlessly into the darkness, albeit with the clear, orange-tinted sky above and no comforting light shining from either end. In accordance with the plan which we were all supposed to be adhering to, once the whole business of waking, ablutions, breakfasting, and the relieving of the picquets was taken care of the camp burst into a frenzy of being torn down and packaged neatly for transport. While I was making my rounds, Cannon Fodder was hard at work dismantling my tent and preparing it and the contents contained therein for transport, and no doubt making sure that Twilight Sparkle is awake and ready in time; it would not have reflected well on us if we left her still asleep in her tent halfway into Changeling country.

It was only a matter of time before we came across Captain Red Coat, the officer in charge of this insane expedition, on my aimless wandering. The young officer was observing Company Sergeant Major Square Basher conducting an impromptu inspection of a section [more commonly referred to as a ‘squad’, an infantry section consists of between eight and twelve soldiers led by a corporal and is the most basic organisational unit of the Royal Guard] of Night Guards that were unfortunate enough to have been the closest to her at the time. Indeed, I had heard the CSM’s harsh, heavily-accented voice cutting above the general background cacophony that always accompanies an army on the march from the opposite end of the camp. Red Coat was seated on his rump with his back to me. In one hoof he held an enamel mug and with the other he appeared to be working furiously at something around his mouth, which, as I got closer to him, turned out to be a toothbrush.

As I approached Red Coat turned his head, the toothbrush wedged between his teeth and his check, and he nodded a greeting, which I reciprocated by muttering ‘good morning’. The Company Sergeant Major, however, was so fully engrossed in her task of inspecting the troops that she did not notice me, or simply did not care either way. She stopped in her inspection of the front rank by a soldier who she towered over by a clear hoof or so, and rested her pace stick upon the shoulder of that unfortunate guardspony.

“Private!” she barked, and then brought the brass-tipped wooden stick with sudden violence against the soldier’s cheek piece armour with a dense ‘clang’ of metal. The soldier flinched slightly, but otherwise appeared unhurt by the blow. “You have sleep in your left eye; the corner of! How dare you appear in front of an officer with sleep in your eye!”

“Sir!” The guardspony stamped a hoof and then proceeded to rub at his left eye to remove the rheum that had so offended the Sergeant Major. I exchanged an odd look with Captain Red Coat, who merely shrugged and continued with his morning ablutions.

“Faust almighty,” muttered Square Basher in exasperation. “At ease, you miserable lot.” The imposing mare stepped back from the infantry section, much to their evident relief that the end to their torment was in sight, and then cleared her throat noisily. “If I were a Changeling,” she said, addressing the section as a whole, “and if I was unlucky enough to be facing the bucking Night Guards in battle – the hardest, most bloodthirsty bastards in the entire Royal Guard, and unlike the bucking gung-ho pansies in the Marine Corps, we’re hard enough to back up these claims – then I would be downright disappointed, offended, even, that I was going to be killed, murdered, ripped into bloody shreds by the scruffiest, shabbiest, most wretched bunch of half-arsed amateurs in Their Highnesses’ Royal Guard I have ever seen, who have now disgraced themselves in front of me and the Captain and now the Commissar and his pretty filly. But by Princess Luna’s sparkly blue arse” – the real Princess, standing not more than ten feet away from the completely oblivious Sergeant Major, blushed hotly at that remark – “I will make all of you into proper soldiers that will make those so-called ‘fearless’ Changelings shit themselves in their chitin at the mere thought of facing you in the field of battle! You are dismissed!”

The soldiers all snapped to attention, saluted the Captain, who was still engrossed in tending to his oral hygiene, and then dispersed to do whatever it was they were supposed to have been doing before Square Basher had decided to have a little bit of fun with them. Their tormentor turned upon her hooves, marched up to her commanding officer, and snapped to attention with a stamp of her hoof. It might have been my imagination, but I think I felt a slight tremor reverberate through the ground and up my hooves.

“With your leave, sir,” she said, her voice now back down to a rather more comfortable volume, “I’ll go and check on the readiness of the other platoons.”

He removed the toothbrush from his mouth and spat on the ground before rubbing at the frothy toothpaste puddle with his sabaton. “Very good,” he replied, returning the salute. “I want us to leave in ten minutes, Sergeant Major. Tell them that; we leave in ten minutes.”

“Sir!” Square Basher stamped her hoof once more, saluted, and then cantered away to be subsumed into the swirling morass of grey fur, dark steel armour, and pale dusty that surrounded us like a vortex. Now that we were alone, after a fashion, I approached Captain Red Coat, who was sipping at his tea thoughtfully. Upon hearing my approaching hoofsteps, he inclined his head towards me and nodded a greeting.

“Morning,” he mumbled, suppressing a yawn and then pocketing his toothbrush back into a pouch on his breastplate.

I reciprocated the greeting and sat next to him, while my ‘life guard’ stood by my side and watched the ponies around us with her usual impassive stare. “Did you sleep well?” I asked; I was not particularly in the mood for small talk, in fact, I seldom am if I’m truly honest, but as whether or not I would be around to see my twenty-third birthday depended upon the good Captain’s ability to stay level-headed when we inevitably get into battle, I thought it was best to try and give the impression that I was interested in his well-being for reasons that weren’t entirely selfish.

“Not bad,” he said, taking a sip from his mug of tea. Considering he had only just brushed his teeth I couldn’t imagine drinking tea straight after would taste very good, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. “A little tricky getting off at first but, but when I did I had this weird dream with Princess Luna and she was introducing me to all of the great military leaders of history. Then I dreamt I was a magic hamster flying through space.”

“I see...”

I glanced over my shoulder at the disguised Princess Luna lingering ominously by my side, and she returned my look with a knowing smile. Her ability to invade one’s dreams and interfere with them, usually to dispense some sort of helpful advice or impart a valuable lesson about friendship or some other such nonsense, was already known to me; a few months prior to these events I was enjoying a very pleasant and highly erotic dream involving Fancy Pants’ trophy wife, Fleur-de-Lis, and in mid-copulation Luna had burst in, denounced me as a perverted blackguard, at which point Fleur then transformed into one thousand scorpions. Needless to say, the experience was all rather harrowing and put me off the very idea of sexual intercourse for a good few weeks.

From another pouch Red Coat retrieved the rather beat-up old map that we had been using to navigate our way around this Faust-forsaken blight on Equestria, opened it up to its full size like a small table cloth, and spread it on the dust before us. There was a large tear in the upper left corner which removed precisely nothing of any value from the map, a few brown circles and blotches, some overlapping one another, where ponies had placed and spilt their mugs of tea, and what appeared to be a cigarette burn approximately where Dodge Junction was. Amidst the rippling, rolling contours of the hills that made up the bulk of this map were hundreds of hoof-written notes scrawled to the point of illegibility and a thick blue line that marked our progress. As Red Coat smoothed the map out and placed stones at the four corners, I stared at the vague shapes described by the blocky lines and transformed that in my mind into a three-dimensional shape to plot our route to our objective.

“We’ve made good progress so far,” he said, tracing the blue line with his hoof.

I nodded in response; the sooner we were out of here the better.

Red Coat then moved his hoof to a dotted line that I had drawn the previous day to show what I thought was the best route. “Are you certain this is the best path to take?”

“It looks like it,” I said. “My special talent seems to think so, at any rate. It looks wide enough for our carriages and our guns, and there aren’t many twists and turns to it.” What I did not add was the rather disconcerting notion that had only just occurred to me; as I reviewed the route in my mind I noted that, by comparison to the path we had dragged ourselves through just before, much of this new route looked as if it had been built to a design than created by the random whims of natural erosion. The idea set my hooves itching once more, and though I could rationalise that thought as it simply being marvellous good luck that we had stumbled across a path half-built by the ancient pre-Equestrian civilisation that lived here (perhaps they hired Prench contractors who went on strike halfway through construction), the idea that it might still be in use by Changelings or some unknown presence did not sit well with me at all.

“What about obstructions?”

“My special talent isn’t prescient,” I said, shrugging a little, “it’s just telling me that’s the path we should probably take. If there’s anything in our way, I’m sure Lieutenant Southern Cross will blow it up with judicious amounts of explosives. He’ll enjoy that.”

“Hmm.” Captain Red Coat stroked his chin thoughtfully as he regarded the map before him. As I observed him quietly, I noticed that there was a sense of maturity about him that simply was not there before; though his youthful good looks were still marred by the outbreaks of acne that had blossomed over nearly every part of his face that was not previously occupied by an eye, a nose, or a mouth, or any other facial feature of note, the way that he carried himself seemed to convey a rather more intangible sense that the wide-eyed, idealistic, eager young colt that had bumped into me as I stepped onto the platform at Dodge Junction station was hardened somehow by his experiences in war. He was growing up.

“How are the troops?” he asked as he removed the improvised paperweights from the map and started the laborious process of folding it up again.

“Morale is as good as can be reasonably expected out of them,” I said. “They’re eager to take the fight to the enemy, and the Princesses willing, we will, but they’re frustrated by our lack of progress.”

Red Coat took the now folded map from the ground and placed it back inside his pouch pocket. “Aren’t we all?” he said, smiling in a manner that looked rather forced to me. Well, I certainly was not ‘eager to take the fight to the enemy’ in the slightest. ‘Eager to run home, lock myself in my room, and have a good, long cry before indulging in far too much ice cream and champagne to be considered medically safe’ was rather more like it. At any rate, such an idea was hardly feasible, so I merely nodded my head in a manner that I hoped looked suitably grave and terribly commissarial.

“Please excuse me,” he said, “but I need to speak with the Engineers; they’re using up through our supply of gunpowder a bit too quick for my liking. Could you make sure the troops are ready for me, please?”

“Of course,” I said, effecting a friendly smile.

He saluted, which I returned half-heartedly, and then turned and cantered away.

As I wandered back in the vague direction of my tent, now most likely packed away with its contents on the back of a pony-drawn carriage, I noticed that the soldiers themselves had rallied themselves into some semblance of good, martial order. The baggage, guns, ammunition, and other supplies were lashed to the earth ponies, and already the pegasi platoons had taken flight and were circling above us in standard ‘V’ formations, which for all the world looked to me as if we were about to suddenly be assaulted by a vast mob of geese. Twilight Sparkle, as far as I understood, was already making a nuisance of herself by asking questions and sticking her nose in where it probably shouldn’t be, but as she was safely surrounded by guardsponies and their officers I was not unduly concerned for her safety; rather, I was more concerned about the safety of those ponies around her.

I stepped back from the ponies, with my tail, which had since been cropped in the military fashion [Guardsponies are required to wear their tails short to prevent an enemy from grabbing hold of it in battle. This is not mandatory for officers, but most invariably follow suit], and my hind legs against a the sheer, almost vertical, rock wall that loomed about fifteen feet above us and terminated in a small ‘shelf’ and a rising slope to the hill peaks. Affecting to look as if I was supervising the ponies as they quenched fires, packed their bedrolls, and munched hungrily on feedbags, and satisfied that everypony within earshot was too fully engrossed in whatever it was that they were doing to eavesdrop, I leaned in close to my disguised Auntie and said sotto voce: “Might I be correct in assuming you’ve been helping Captain Red Coat in his dreams lately?”

Princess Luna smiled knowingly and nodded her head. “It is my duty, after all; Red Coat has the potential to be an excellent leader of ponies, but it is his youth and his lack of confidence and experience that are holding him back. With our guidance, I in dreams and you by example in war, we shall mould this foal into a capable officer.”

I snorted contemptuously, but I think I managed to mask that gesture by appearing to be clearing my sinuses of the clouds of dust that the soldiers’ hooves had been kicking up incessantly. Rubbing at my nose, I also concealed the rather irritated snarl that tugged at my lips. “And what was the flying space hamster in aid of?”

“I’m allowed to have a little fun, aren’t I?” replied Luna, grinning inanely. Such an expression did not suit her, thought I.

“Well,” I said, watching with a sense of growing dread as the ponies arranged themselves neatly into the marching column with effortless ease, as they had practiced these manoeuvres over and over until the memory was ingrained more in their minds than that of their first kisses. Resigning myself to the fact that the new day had brought only fresh opportunities for me to die gloriously for the peculiar mare standing beside me and her elder sister and the country that they ruled, I adjusted my cap to what I had hoped was a suitable rakish angle and moved to join the column. “I think all of us will be gaining some experience before this is all over.”

Author's Note

As everyone suggested, I shall be writing shorter chapters to update more frequently. Hopefully this will all work out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this chapter.

Bloodstained (Part 12)

Part 12

I would say that the rest of our journey through the Macintosh Hills passed without serious incident, and I would not be in any danger of being contradicted by my former comrades in the Royal Guard or by military historian eggheads if I did so, but that little phrase may give you, dear reader, the impression that it was in any way easier than the first half. Back then, of course, I had no way of knowing for certain that we would all eventually stagger out of those blasted valleys and into the barren empty fields of the Badlands alive and relatively all in one piece, so I was still under that constant, nagging paranoia that sooner or later, without warning, a horde of ravenous Changelings will crest over the nearest hill and descend upon us like piranhas attacking a dolphin.

This paranoia was only made worse when the pegasus reconnaissance flights reported sighting small patrols of ponies, each consisting of no more than three or four ponies, tailing us in our grinding slog through these hills. The damnable thing was that whenever our pegasi attempted to give chase to these mysterious ponies or even just wave at them from a few hundred feet in the air, our watchers would simply disappear, apparently into thin air but it was theorised by Twilight Sparkle, ever eager to posit a hypothesis, of course, that they had escaped via tunnel entrances cunningly concealed in the cliffs and gullies around us. I myself had caught sight of them briefly; small figures standing upon the edge of a cliff overhanging our vulnerable formation, clutching spears in their hooves and clad in rough cloths that appeared to be of the same colour as the earth upon which we trod. They had watched us intently for a few moments, and it felt as if they singled me out specifically on account of my big stupid hat identifying me as somepony important who must be killed immediately, before disappearing once more never to be seen again.

The other officers did not seem overly concerned about them. Apparently they were harmless; the nomadic tribes of ponies that shared this bleak land with the Changelings and Faust-knows what else horrors that lurked within those hills, and believed, later confirmed, to be the remnants of ancient pony civilisations that had pre-existed Equestria and the rule of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, and who had refused to accept the divine authority of the Royal Pony Sisters over them and thus fled to this inhospitable, useless scrap of dirt. They were welcome to it, thought I, if they were under the bizarre impression that their liberty was worth living in this thoroughly unpleasant part of the world. I also thought that it would have been nice if somepony else had actually told me of these nomads before I started getting all worked up about the robed ponies standing on a hilltop and silhouetted against the empty blue sky; it was mentioned in a few of the briefing notes, and recommended that we simply do our best to avoid them and any unnecessary complications in what was already a messy war, but when I skim-read those notes earlier I must have either not noticed or not cared.

“It’s actually a good thing they’re here,” said Captain Red Coat, once we had reorganised the unicorn platoon that I had called into a square back into the battalion marching formation. [The square formation is the primary defence for ground-based infantry against airborne attack; in such a densely packed formation, unicorns can unleash a withering hail of fire into the sky and earth ponies can present a bristling wall of spears upon which any pegasus or gryphon would impale themselves before they could get close enough to strike.]

I frowned at him sceptically. The grin on his face was a little too smug for my liking. “And why is that?”

“They wouldn’t be here if the Changelings were nearby.”

He had a point, I suppose, but my paranoia failed to be assuaged by his words. Who was to say that they were not in league with the Changeling enemy, or were in fact disguised Changelings themselves? Thus far they had proved to be entirely passive, and somewhat elusive; content with merely standing upon their peaks and watching our slow, clumsy movement, so perhaps they were providing reconnaissance for the enemy? At any rate, Captain Red Coat was keen to press on as quickly as possible, which was a sentiment I agreed with entirely, for the longer we spent in these hills the more vulnerable we were to attack, and we hadn’t the time to waste chasing after such phantoms.

We eventually cleared the hills at around lunch time, and immediately, as the battalion stopped by on the gentle slope of a hill leading down into the vast open space that was the Badlands proper, I was hit by an instant sense of complete desolation. From my perch at the head of the formation, standing by Captain Red Coat and Twilight Sparkle, I surveyed the demesne of the enemy. The landscape itself was almost entirely featureless; a flat plain, populated by dark yellow rocks and the occasional dry shrub or cactus with branches like claws grasping blasphemously at the sky. The ground was pitted and rough like the surface of coarse sandpaper or a particularly amateurish attempt at making a crème brûlée, and it stretched forth seemingly into infinity where it met the pale blue horizon in a quivering, blurred haze. The overall effect was like that of standing on a cliff’s edge and gazing out at the endless ocean. Aside from a few scraps of desiccated vegetation eking out a bleak existence in his inhospitable realm and the vultures circling portentously overhead as if in anticipation of the slaughter to come, I could discern nothing else living before me and yet somewhere, out there, the unnumbered hordes of the Changelings stood poised to strike out at our realm.

Fort E-5150 was the only landmark visible in this vista of utmost emptiness, like a lone ship in a vast sea. The fortress that I had previously seen only as a large dark smudge on blurry aerial reconnaissance photographs stood below less than an hour’s march away from us. It was a large, sprawling structure that greatly resembled a flat-topped hill; sheer cliffs rose from the flat plains to form an oval-shaped structure that reminded me of a table, crested with crenulated walls that crumbled into ruin in places, encircling a central courtyard area that seemed to be the hallmark of the ancient forts built here. At one narrow end of the oval, the main keep rose about three storeys above the fallen walls as a sprawling mess of crippled towers. In places there were great holes ripped into the sides of the keep that were patched with flimsy blocks of sandstone or simply covered with cloth, probably by the Diamond Dogs that inhabited this decaying fort. The opposite end was occupied by a large gate; two vast slabs of clumsily-cast and beaten iron, each made up of smaller, roughly crafted slabs of metal welded and bolted together with no regard for any sort of architectural niceties, rested on suitably blocky-looking hinges, and covered entirely in a thick, splotchy patina of brown and orange rust. The approach to the gates was quite steep, so a winding path had been cut into the rock. There appeared to be no way of opening those gates from the outside.

In an odd way, it reminded me of home. [Blueblood’s ancestral estate in Canterlot, known as the Sanguine Palace, was, and still is, in a state of constant disrepair.]

Our approach to the fortress was slow and cautious, both for our own sake so that we might adopt a suitable defence if things rapidly went pear-shaped and for the benefit of the primitive canine inhabitants to avoid scaring them into doing something that they would likely regret. Nevertheless, I was all but certain that the sight of a full battery of artillery ready to reduce the structure into a big, albeit impressive, pile of rubble would be enough to dissuade them; Diamond Dogs may be a somewhat backward species, but they aren’t quite that stupid (destroying the fortress would have been counter to our mission objectives, but they wouldn’t know that). Captain Red Coat and I stood at the very head of the column in front of the battalion’s earth ponies arrayed in standard battle formation. A young ensign joined us, and in place of the proud standard of the Night Guards he normally carried around with him, he held aloft a white flag. Actually, it was a rather dirty, mucous-stained hoofkerchief belonging to Sergeant Major Square Basher, for, as she proudly told me, only the Prench regiments of the Royal Guard had white flags. Given the historic rivalry between the two provinces of Trottingham and Prance I decided it was best to keep secret exactly where my mother was born and her family lineage.

We stopped a short distance from the tall walls, close to an area where part of the structure had collapsed and the ensuing rubble had formed a large, rocky slope that led up into a gaping hole large enough to park an airship. The ensign, a young, acne-ridden lad whose voice was still rather hesitant about breaking, reared up on his hind legs and waved the white hoofkerchief proudly, while Captain Red Coat announced in what he must have thought was a firm, authoritative tone that he wished to parlay with whoever was in charge of this outpost.

There was no answer.

Fearing a trap, I positioned myself behind Red Coat and the flag-wielding ensign, and scanned the crumbling battlements for any suspicious movement. Aside from the fluttering of torn, ragged banners daubed with crude and garish symbols in the gentle breeze, there was absolutely nothing moving I could see in the fortress itself. Something was wrong; I had yet to face Diamond Dogs in the field of battle, but I knew from firsthoof accounts that, while they might be simple creatures, they were all of the belief that fair play was something only losers whined about (if they survived the encounter first). Were I in their paws and I wanted that menacing army camped outside my doors gone I would have lured the battalion through that invitingly large breach in the walls and then ambushed the disorganised mess of troops as they clumsily blundered into the wide courtyard area.

“Maybe they’re just shy,” I said, trying to lighten the mood slightly. “Perhaps they might be more obliging hosts if we show them the gems.”

Red Coat nodded, and at a single barked order from his Sergeant Major, two soldiers carried the large chest that they had been guarding throughout our unpleasant journey, and placed it at the officer’s hooves. The lid was opened, revealing its contents that scintillated in the dazzlingly bright sunlight and cast kaleidoscopic reflections upon the ground before us for several hundred feet. [Blueblood is likely exaggerating here] As cunning and devious as the common Diamond Dog might be, they were still ruled by their baser instincts, and like many animals and young foals they can be easily coerced with the promise of food.

There was still no response from the castle, and Captain Red Coat was getting visibly anxious as the carefully-laid plan that we had spent weeks and weeks bashing out through long meetings began to unravel. He shuffled nervously on his hooves, incapable of standing still, as he looked longingly up at the fortress walls as if he could coerce the appearance of its inhabitants through sheer willpower alone.

A pegasus section was soon sent to reconnoitre the fortress, though they were instructed not to drift too close to the structure lest their harmless expedition be taken for an offensive military action. The corporal reported seeing tents, piles of gems, armour, rags, and all sorts of random detritus scattered around the courtyard, as was to be expected, but neither he nor his section could identify any of the fortress’ inhabitants or indeed anything else alive down there. Having reached an impasse in the negotiations on account of the second participant simply not being there, the Night Guards decided this was an excellent time to break for afternoon tea and soon the fires were lit and the kettles boiled, much to the continued amusement of the platoons from the Solar Guard, who regarded this behaviour with an understandable sense of bafflement and slight resentment, while the officers moved together for a brief confab. Naturally, Twilight Sparkle was there taking notes as usual.

“We might as well,” I said, taking a sip from my mug of tea when Lieutenant Scarlet Letter made a rather unpleasant comment about the Trottinghamites, the very ponies he claims to represent in Parliament, mind you, apparently wasting time. “We’re not doing anything productive until the Diamond Dogs show their faces, and we don’t know how long it will be before the next chance comes up. Besides, it’s good for morale.”

Scarlet Letter merely snorted in derision, but otherwise said nothing and turned his uninterested gaze up at the fortress looming above us.

“Anyway,” I said, pointing a hoof rather dramatically at the shattered breach in the castle walls, “our orders are to take this fortress by any means necessary; up to and including the use of force.”

“I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that,” said Captain Red Coat. The skin beneath his grey-dyed fur had turned very pale, a rather unhealthy shade of that too, and those chilling yellow slit-eyes seemed to be staring right through me, which gave him a rather disconcertingly vampiric countenance.

I gave a vague sort of shrug, hoping to mask the same sort of inchoate terror welling up within me that Captain Red Coat had done a rather poor job of concealing, for I knew that a poorly phrased sentence here or there would invariably send me charging into the gaping breach just behind me and into certain death. “Neither did I,” I said, being in that very rare situation of telling the truth for once in my miserable life, “but right now we don’t have a choice. Orders are orders, Captain.”

“Well,” he said, licking and smacking his dry lips in a gesture I took to be a nervous tick, “if I remember what I was taught at the Academy right, there’s three ways to seize a castle; starve out the defenders, assault through a breach, or mount an escalator.”

“Escalade,” corrected Twilight almost immediately, not even bothering to cease in her note-taking as she did so. [Probably the most direct method, and certainly one of the riskiest and most costly, of attacking fortresses, an escalade involves scaling the defensive walls with the aid of ladders.]

A slight blush returned a bit of colour back to Red Coat’s sickly pale cheeks. “Uh, yes, that’s what I meant.” He cleared his throat sheepishly and pointed at the vast mound of shattered and broken masonry that led to the gaping rent in the castle walls, and already I could envisage the good Captain here requesting that I lead some sort of glorious forlorn hope into a breach that likely had a large mob of Diamond Dogs lurking just out of sight ready for ambush. “There’s already a hole in the walls,” he said, renewed confidence inflecting his voice slightly.

“Uh, I hate to interrupt you there, mate,” said Lieutenant Southern Cross. The engineer was leaning casually on his axe, with the viciously sharp and spotlessly clean (one of the very things about him that was not covered in a layer of dust thick enough to qualify as an extra layer of clothing) planted in the hard, rocky ground and with his foreleg resting atop the upright handle. A few of the other officers looked aghast at the Horestralian’s casual use of the word ‘mate’ in addressing a superior officer, and had they monocles they would have surely popped out of their eye sockets in shock, but given the seriousness of this situation they seemed content in letting his odd verbal tic pass. “If the defenders have any sense in them they’d have planted a great big mine underneath that pile of rubble to blow us all sky-high if we cross it. It’s what I would have done.”

I nodded my head in agreement. “In war, the most obvious solution is often just a trap.”

There were a few murmurs of polite, if somewhat grudging, assent from the officers around us, save for Captain Red Coat, who was busy gazing at the fortress walls and chewing on the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “So we can’t go through the gap, and obviously we can’t just sit here and wait for the defenders to surrender.”

“And we can’t blow another hole in the wall,” I said. Red Coat cocked his head to one side in mild confusion, which made him look like some form of possessed puppy, so I explained for him: “We may need to defend this place against attack, which might prove tricky if we’ve already blasted several breaches in it for the Changelings to swarm through.”

“Right, right. So that just leaves escalading over the walls then.”

Fortunately, in our planning we had sufficient foresight to procure a number of ladders precisely for this purpose. Together, we hashed out a vague sort of plan (or ‘everypony else discussed the plan and I just nodded my head and made some thoughtful noises at appropriate points to give the impression that I was participating’ to be more accurate a description of how things proceeded) that involved sending a full platoon of earth ponies over the wall, who, assuming that enough of them would survive to actually make to the top of the walls, would fight their way down into the courtyard, assuming again that there was actually anyone there to fight, and open the gates for the rest of the battalion to march through and seize the fort. At the same time, the pegasi would provide close aerial support for the lone earth pony platoon, and the unicorns and artillery were deployed nearby to fire on the walls to keep the defenders away from them.

As the preparations were made for the escalade, I took especial care to remain as close to Twilight Sparkle’s side as physically possible, not out of any particular fondness for her company, mind you, but merely to remind everypony around me that while I would absolutely love to take part in storming the castle, a military operation whose distinguishing feature is that the attacker almost always gets slaughtered, especially in the first wave (which, given the relatively small size of our battalion, would probably be the only wave), I was motivated by my sense of honour to protect this vulnerable young mare, the apprentice of Princess Celestia and a genuine heroine of Equestria, from harm. That I was actually motivated more by my sense of self-preservation need not be mentioned; you were probably aware of that anyway, and likewise it would just as superfluous to mention that my carefully constructed scheme to keep royal head firmly attached to my neck instead of, say, impaled on a spike in some Diamond Dog warlord’s drawing room, completely fell to pieces.

“The escalade platoon is a little jumpy,” said Captain Red Coat, looking rather sheepish and doing his hardest not to look me in the eye. The platoon in question had already assembled at the base of the wall, grouped into three sections each with a long and rather disconcertingly rickety-looking ladder. “They might try a little harder if you were there to keep an eye on them, I mean, if you think it’s a good idea.”

“I really wish I could,” I said, inclining my head towards the little purple mare sitting beside me. Twilight was so intent on scribbling some nonsense into her notepad that she barely seemed to register Captain Red Coat’s presence, which, mind you, was not exactly difficult as the young stallion tended not to radiate the same sort of forceful leadership that Colonel Sunshine Smiles or Shining Armour possessed, and which I pretended to have. A furtive glance over my oblivious ward’s shoulder revealed that her hoof-writing was just as bad, if not worse, than Cannon Fodder’s; my aide tends to make some small attempt at legibility, and at least he has the excuse that his motor skills are rather limited by his complete inability to use any form of magic at all, but Twilight’s was nothing more than a complete mess of scribbles that looked as if it belonged in a modern art gallery. [Twilight Sparkle was actually writing in short-hoof, which Blueblood cannot read.]

I effected a heavy sigh that I hoped sounded disappointed enough for Captain Red Coat’s ears, and placed a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder protectively, from which she recoiled slightly from the exaggerated gesture and shot me a glare that conveyed in no uncertain terms was I to attempt that again. Shrugging, I pulled my hoof back. “I gave Lord Captain Shining Armour my solemn word that I would protect his little sister from anything that might harm her. I truly wish I could join the troops in this battle, but my sense of honour compels me to sit this one out. Besides” –I flashed a warm grin– “I’m sure you can handle it yourself.”

“What if your bodyguard stays and looks after Twilight instead?”

Damnation, the thought hadn’t occurred to me at all. In fact, I had all but forgotten the presence of my ‘life guard’ standing at my shoulder for most of the day, my disguised auntie having been all but completely silent the whole time, but nevertheless here she was once more to ruin my chances of making it out of this war alive as if she had some sort of personal vendetta against me. There was a sudden, unpleasant lurch in the pit of my stomach as I saw my carefully-constructed plan to keep myself out of danger crash spectacularly into pieces before my very eyes, like a skilled artisan placing the final pane of stained glass into an intricately designed and beautifully crafted window in Canterlot Cathedral depicting a key point in the life of Princess Celestia, only for some bumbling imbecile to nudge it with a hoof and cause the entire thing to shatter into a thousand tiny shards, likely ripping the artist to shreds as I would be very soon unless I thought of something very quickly.

Standing there, I stammered uselessly for a few seconds as I struggled to find something, anything to get me out of this mess, but alas I came out completely and utterly blank. I looked to Princess Luna, as if pleading with her to find some way to help me, but instead she merely smiled and nodded her head.

“From birth to death I serve the Blood,” she said robotically, reciting the ancient creed of the Servants of the Blood, which sounded quite chilling in my Aunt’s cold, refined voice. [It sounds much better in the original Old Equestrian.]

Red Coat blinked gormlessly at her. “Ohh-kay.”

“Thank you, Cloudless Sky,” I said, though I fear I could not entirely stop myself from injecting a small amount of sarcasm into my voice. That was that, I supposed, and with little other recourse besides embarrassing myself in front of Twilight Sparkle, Captain Red Coat, and Princess Luna by running to the hills I forced that cocky grin to my face that had somehow become my trademark over the course of my nascent career, despite feeling as if somepony had just torn all of my guts free from my belly and left a huge, gaping wound where they once lay safe and coiled within, and cantered over to the platoon with Cannon Fodder silently following me.

It was only with great personal effort on my part that I reached the small, disorderly mob of thirty ponies without passing out from sheer terror, which probably would not have helped my reputation for casual heroism one bit. The officer in command of the platoon was a young, pimple-faced lieutenant with a nervous stammer, and whose eyes seemed on the verge of popping free from their sockets like champagne corks when he learned that a ‘genuine’ war hero would be accompanying him. Fortunately, it was that same eagerness to get into the fray as quickly as possible that meant that I was not to be the first pony ascending those ladders, as once everypony else was in position at the base of the walls and the ladders themselves were raised slowly, like the pagans of old giving praise to the sky, to rest against the crenulated battlements, the lieutenant cried, “Who w-w-wants to live f-f-forever?” as if he was trying to impress me—if he was, then he had failed miserably, as his stammer had rather robbed his clichéd battle cry of any power it might have otherwise had and he seemed to be of that sort of courage that is nigh indistinguishable from stark-raving lunacy—and then scrambled up the closest ladder like a squirrel up a tree.

I was up next, and as I stumbled to the base of the ladder and looked up at the dizzying heights receding into the distance while fighting a sudden wave of vertigo that brought the bile rising up my throat, and the slowly diminishing sight of the Lieutenant’s backside, I wondered if now was the time to tell everypony that I very much did not like heights. It would not have worked, anyway. Nevertheless, a glance over my shoulder at the two mares observing the proceedings (Captain Red Coat had since left to take charge of the units preparing to assault the gates) provided sufficient motivation for me to start climbing; I feared that whatever punishments Princess Luna had in store for me should I fail to live up to her exacting standards would be far more severe than anything the Changelings could inflict upon me, likely making the famed cruelty and sadism of Queen Chrysalis feel like a sunny day at a petting zoo by comparison, and it was that fear that propelled me to take my right forehoof and place it upon the first rung of the ladder.

If I thought that the ladder looked unsafe from some distance away, then my fears were completely and utterly vindicated, surpassed even, when I found myself face-to-face with the flimsy wooden structure. As I transferred my not-inconsiderable weight –the symptoms of having had too many pies and not enough exercise as a youth– the old and rotted timbers creaked ominously. With no other option, I sucked in a deep breath in a vain attempt to quell the frantic writhing in my gut, placed my rear hooves on the bottommost rung of the ladder, and after bending my hind legs a little to test its integrity, I began to ascend the ladder. Moments later, the ladder lurched suddenly, which told me that my aide Cannon Fodder was right behind me.

My progress was slow, damnably so, for it felt as if I was climbing for an eternity. Part of me wondered if I was in fact dead, and that to endlessly climb this ladder, always below the arse of another stallion in some peculiar, was some form of metaphysical punishment for all of my debauchery and philandering, in the vain hope of salvation and an end to my torment was to be my eternal punishment. At the very least, I supposed, the Lieutenant was in full armour so I was spared that rather unpleasant sight, though the same could not be said for Cannon Fodder directly beneath me, and almost on reflex I tucked the small tuft of hair that remained of my tail between my hind legs to try and preserve my modesty. It was rather odd that my thoughts turned to rather trivial, and I must admit rather juvenile, themes during that climb, but when one considers that the alternative was to think of just how high I had climbed, how far it was to the hard, unforgiving ground below, and how far I had yet to go, I believe I can be excused for that.

Left forehoof, right forehoof, left rear hoof, right rear hoof... over and over again, ad infinitum. It was only by concentrating on the cold, hard mechanics of gripping one rung at a time and pulling myself up only to repeat the process again that I had acquired the mental fortitude to keep myself going. My muscles and limbs ached with exertion, and the shrapnel wound in my right shoulder flared with particularly excruciating pain with each and every single step upwards. The sweltering heat sapped what little strength remained in my limbs, until climbing each rung had become an ordeal of itself, and the sweat ran in rivulets from my much-abused mane and streaked across my hide to form unsightly dark stains in my faded uniform. Glancing down, however, at the sheer drop to the rocky ground below, cracked, parched, and made hard by the hot, dry climate of this region, gave me enough impetus to keep going, if only because falling would have been the most immediate threat of death to me, but if I actually made it to the top then at least I had some small chance, no matter how miniscule, of survival.

The defenders, if there were any hiding up there, seemed content to let us scramble up their walls unmolested. Naturally, my paranoia had decided to take the fact that I had yet to have boiling oil poured straight into my handsome face as proof that the enemy, whoever they were, was leading us directly into an ambush.

Ahead of me the Lieutenant had stopped suddenly, and I had all but rammed my horn against his rear barding. I thanked Faust that he was armoured, otherwise that might have gone much worse for all involved. It was, however, to a sense of both immense relief and growing dread that I realised that meant that we had reached the very top of the ladder, and that somehow I had managed to ascend this far without the likely rotten timbers snapping beneath my weight. With bated breath I watched as the Lieutenant turned his head, grinning, and pulled from the scabbard strapped around his back with his mouth his Pattern ’12 sabre and held it clenched between his teeth about the modified handle for earth ponies. With a muffled cry of rage, or perhaps terror, he vaulted himself over the top and disappeared.

I fully expected to have the Lieutenant’s bloodied and broken corpse thrown back at my face, but against all expectations he popped his head over the side of the parapets, that damned cheerful grin formed a thin line of white that split his face in half, and he waved a hoof down at me as if this was a pleasant day at the funfair. “It’s clear, sir!” he called out, and a cheer rose up from the stallions below me. Either side of us, on the other two ladders, the first stallions of those sections too scrambled awkwardly over the crumbling battlements with all the grace of an obese mule struggling out of the bath.

Well, there was no point putting this off. I pulled myself over the pile of rubble that several hundred years ago might have been the castle battlements and fell clumsily on my backside onto the chemin de ronde [Prench for ‘round path’ or ‘patrol path’, this refers to the protected raised walkway behind castle battlements] with a mad flail of my legs, letting loose a string of expletives that thankfully nopony seems to remember anymore. Despite my limbs protesting painfully, I staggered to my hooves and stepped to the side to allow Cannon Fodder room to follow me in clambering over the small pile of rubble with his usual silent indifference to hardship. It was immensely reassuring to feel solid, hard rock beneath my hooves, and were it not considered unseemly for a pony of my social status to do so I might have kissed the ground.

As the rest of the platoon ascended the ladders and spread out across the wall, I stood as close to the inside edge as I dared and peered down at the central courtyard. As the pegasi attested, I could see nothing alive therein, but everywhere I saw evidence that this place had been inhabited not long before we had arrived. The area could best be described as a sort of marketplace; a sprawling mass of tents, gazebos, and marquees, each made out of a patchwork of brightly coloured but ripped and torn fabrics stretched across flimsy wooden poles, no two identical, filled the courtyard with a riot of sun-bleached colour, each half over its neighbour until they rose up and against the walls of the great keep like a wave crashing against the rocks. There was, however, a central boulevard that led from the still-closed gates to the keep, but even that was by no means neat and orderly, for the small tent structures often encroached on what would an Equestrian road planner might have designed as a perfectly straight lane. Amidst the tents lay all manner of detritus strewed out haphazardly in the narrow alleyways between them, and from my vantage point I could discern piles of broken crockery, spilt bowls of food, sacks of grain, piles of gems, and assorted useless trinkets that the inhabitants of this fort traded with the other societies of this barren land scattered everywhere.

“There’s sod all down there, sir.” Private Marathon, who had served as the regiment’s runner in the previous battle, materialised at my side. She peered over the edge and spat down at the multi-coloured mess of tents below, watching as it made a small, wet stain on the dust-covered fabric of an offensively yellow gazebo that covered a number of barrels stacked upon one another.

“Is that the technical term?” I asked wryly.

“No sir; that would be ‘buck all down there’.”

She grinned inanely, and I let the comment slide for now; it was better to tolerate the rather unrefined badinage the soldiers tend to indulge in, and even take part in it if one feels sufficiently confident to do so, than to do as some of my comrades might have done, and indeed as the big commissarial rulebook instructs, and clamp down on it and be seen as a mean-spirited sort of pony whose personality might be improved by the addition of a spear between the shoulder blades when nopony’s looking. At any rate, there were rather more important things to worry about at the moment.

The platoon, now marshalled along the walls, advanced cautiously around the chemin de ronde towards the gatehouse, beyond which the rest of the battalion waited. With the narrowness of the walkway we marched two abreast, then to single file as we came to a set of stairs that led into the courtyard. One stallion had slipped on some loose paving and crashed into the tents below. Fortunately, his fall was cushioned somewhat by the tent and he suffered no worse injuries than a sprained ankle and wounded pride. We suffered no further casualties, however, as we eventually reached the courtyard. Our hosts, the Diamond Dogs, still had yet to make themselves known, and as we observed the mess of colour that lay before us like a the results of an explosion in an artists’ studio I felt an overwhelming sense of ‘wrongness’ about the scene that was quite impossible to describe in the simple terms of the lack of Diamond Dogs or the stark silence in what should have been a very busy place.

It was then that I noticed the signs all around us that a fight had occurred here very recently.

Splashed by my hooves was what were unmistakeably the dark rust tones of dried blood streaked across the ground in an arterial spray, and as I scanned the disorganised mess of tents I saw that great rents had been torn in the fabric, as if pierced by sword or spear or claw, and in places framed by a ring of blackened ash that indicated a magic missile discharge. Gazing up the boulevard, I now saw that the ripped tents and the scattered piles of broken detritus were not the fault of any inherent messiness on behalf of the Diamond Dogs and whoever else happened to be around, but as collateral damage from a violent battle that must have occurred here not long ago. The destruction that I saw was by no means complete, and quite unsettlingly I noticed that the attacking force, whoever they were, had not indulged in the rampant looting that usually follows a particularly vicious fight and left the many useless trinkets and gems either still in the market stalls or scattered and broken in the dust and the food left to spoil in their barrels. Indeed, I noticed that a few of our soldiers could not control their own impulse to loot and had surreptitiously pocketed a few baubles and cabbages. The thought that the attackers had simply faded back into the Badlands after their slaughter, not even pausing for the traditional post-battle rape-and-pillage festivities, was most unsettling; it implied that their attack was not motivated by strategic concerns, as was ours, or a simple raid, but merely to kill.

We came to the gatehouse, still wary as the platoon adopted a defensive semi-circle formation around the iron gates in case whoever had massacred the Diamond Dogs still lurked either in the keep or lay hidden in ambush within the mess of tents and debris. Now that I was closer to the gate I could see that in addition to the rather slipshod method of manufacture, which was confirmed to be merely large sheets of rusted iron many times larger than the average pony bolted together with crude implements, there were great, horrendous rents scratched into the metal, ripping open the layer of rust and exposing the bright iron that lay beneath. Across the lower half of the gate, where the two doors met, were a number of claw marks and dents, as if somepony or something had been trying desperately to tear them open. Here and there were dark, black scorch marks, and areas where the metal had melted under some intense heat and dripped like candle wax. The implication that the enemy had something that could generate that sort of heat and apply it as a weapon made me shudder involuntarily.

There was a tense moment of waiting as the Lieutenant and a small group of soldiers had disappeared inside the gatehouse to search for a way to open the gates, and during this time the only sounds audible were the faint rustling of fabric being stirred on the hot breeze and something that sounded like a small wind chime. I strained my ears, trying to find something, anything that might have indicated the presence of another, but aside from the aforementioned background noise was absolutely nothing. Abruptly, the gates behind me opened with a series of drunken, halting lurches with a scream of abused gears and pulley systems, as whatever aged, rusted, and poorly maintained mechanism contained within the gatehouse awoke with all of the efficiency and smoothness of the Equestrian Revenue Service.

The flanking battalion poured through the open gates. A quick sweep of the courtyard was conducted but found nothing of note; no Diamond Dogs or Changelings hiding in ambush, no survivors of whatever had happened here, but only more of those gaudy trinkets and random knick-knacks for sale, though I did have to destroy a few bottles of moonshine that the stallions had uncovered in their search. The door to the keep, however, was wide open, almost invitingly so for all its forbidding darkness as the cool, shaded stone promised a respite from the oppressive heat.

I accompanied Captain Red Coat and a few scouting parties into the keep, while the remainder of the battalion worked with the Engineers in clearing out the courtyard and returning it to its proper military purpose. The gates to the keep were small, and clearly designed so as to bottleneck an advancing army, should they have been fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to make it this far, and as the attackers would queue up to squeeze through the doors they would be vulnerable to all manner of projectiles hurled from the high towers of the keep from above; like shooting fish in a barrel, as the old saying goes. The first room was a large entrance hall, which, as the light shone through shattered gothic windows and through holes and rents smashed into the sides of the great walls in bright beams that pierced the gloom, had an almost reverent feel to it. The overall effect was like that of stepping into an abandoned church, with the high, arched ceiling supported by simple and bare stone pillars that gave one an impression of stepping into a vast, open space. The entrance hall receded into darkness, such that I could not possibly make out what lay beyond those beams of light, which, when contrasted with the shadows around them, looked solid enough to reach out and touch. This ambience, however, marred by the most appalling stench that assaulted my nostrils the second I stepped through the threshold.

“Dear Faust!” shouted Red Coat, taking a hoofkerchief to his nose in a vain effort to ward the smell off. The other soldiers around us gagged and protested in rather more colourful tones at the odour, though only Private Cannon Fodder seemed entirely unconcerned. I remained rather close to my aide, for though his aroma was no better I was at least more used to his. “What is that smell?”

“It wasn’t me,” said one of the stallions, who looked sheepish when his attempt at a joke was met by disapproving glares from his comrades and a well-deserved clip around the ear from his corporal.

I shrugged, deciding to ignore it. “Probably the Diamond Dogs,” I said; the stench could be best described being of death, body odour, and raw sewage, which was probably rather apt when one considers who inhabited this castle, or used to, to be more accurate. Against my better judgement, it was decided that it was best that we split up to explore the castle; Captain Red Coat apparently felt reasonably certain that whatever had murdered all of the Diamond Dogs was likely long gone by now, probably having got what they wanted from the fortress in the first place, but I was not so certain. Nevertheless, I was aware that we were rather pressed for time, and the sooner that we could declare this place secure the better, so I stuck close with Red Coat, making sure that he was always in front and that I had a clear route to escape behind me, and followed.

The smell only got worse as we passed through the hall and into the fortress proper, where the innards of the fortress split into a series of long, meandering corridors that seemed to be deliberately designed to leave one as disorientated as possible (unless one happens to have a compass rose for a cutie mark, like me). The corridors would sometimes break off to lead into rooms, which had been converted into warrens or store rooms or, in some places, a makeshift latrine, and with the torches in the wall sockets long since dead we relied on the bright glow of horn lights to guide our progress. The actinic glare illuminated the cold, dripping sandstone walls, but only for a short distance before the all-encompassing darkness swallowed our tiny flickers of light. Nevertheless, what was briefly revealed by our light was chilling, for everywhere I could yet see the signs that much slaughter had taken place here, and not too long ago either; dried blood was splattered across the walls and the floors, sometimes pooling into great cuts scratched into the rock where weapons had swung, missed their target, and smashed into the walls. There was, however, something quite obvious that was missing, which I did not even notice until Cannon Fodder had blurted it out.

“Where are the bodies?” he asked flatly.

Our section [Blueblood does not explain how the battalion was split up to explore the fortress, but from this comment and the testimony of others we can determine that each exploring party was made up of a mixed section. That is to say, an ad hoc infantry section made up of roughly equal parts earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn] came to a sudden, abrupt halt. How could I have missed it? How could any of us have missed the distinct lack of rotting corpses strewed about the place? If this was a hit-and-run attack aimed at just causing as much death as possibly upon the helpless Diamond Dogs then they probably would not have stuck around to helpfully remove all of the bodies. The implication that the enemy merely wanted their meat and nothing else was all the more disturbing, so I tried not to think about it.

Had I any sort of inkling of the true nature of the threat that lay dormant beneath our hooves I would have ordered Lieutenant Southern Cross and Sergeant Bramley Apple to cram this wretched fortress full of explosives and blow it sky-high. But the enemy that lay dormant beneath our hooves did not make itself known for several years after this battle in an attack that has since frequented my nightmares, and thus I remained in blissful ignorance of the horrors to come. [Please note that all evidence pertaining to the truth around the destruction of Fort E-5150 and of the so-called ‘Shards’ is classified at the absolute highest level by the express orders of myself and Princess Luna. Suffice to say, the events that Prince Blueblood has touched upon in this paragraph is described in greater detail in a later entry in his memoirs and are of little help in understanding his place in the history of Operation: Equestrian Dawn.]

“Maybe they ate them?” I posited.

We proceeded warily, our hoofsteps echoing down the corridors, reverberating against the cold stone of the walls, and in the silence even our breaths seemed far too loud. Once or twice, my pricked and twitching ears would hear hoofsteps in the distance, or what sounded like voices and the clatter of metal, which would send my heart hammering against my ribcage and the fur on the back of my neck prickling. The corridors felt very confining, despite my affinity with confined areas underground, and my growing claustrophobia was not helped by the presence of the other stallions around me. Judging by the wide eyes and awkward, jerky movements of the soldiers, it seemed that I was not alone in allowing my nerves to get the better of me; several times Captain Red Coat shrieked in fright, sabre drawn and ready to strike, only to find the half-glimpsed monster lurking in the dark was merely a dancing shadow cast by our horn lights upon something innocuous like a chair.

Branching off from the endless corridors were a series of rooms behind doors, most still swinging gently on rusted old hinges. There, we found the rather poignant evidence of ordinary life for the Diamond Dogs disturbed by sudden and brutal violence; food was still found in primitive pots and plates and arranged upon slab-like tables for meals, tools for mining, clothes, jewellery, children’s toys, and other personal possessions lay strewed across the floor; silent witnesses all to the slaughter that must have occurred here.

Something about the main gates irritated me, and the thought, incomplete and nascent, scratched at the back of my mind, desperate for my consciousness to give shape and form to that idea. It was as we were taking a short five minute break as we trudged through yet another nearly-identical dark, stifling corridor, identifiable from the others only by the rather large claw marks in the floor and walls as if something very big and covered in sharp things tried to squeeze through the narrow passage, that the proverbial penny dropped with a clatter that seemed to echo loudly through my head.

“The gates were damaged from the inside,” I blurted out, half to myself as I involuntarily gave voice to the thought.

“So?” snapped Red Coat, sitting by my side with his helmet tucked underneath a foreleg. The strain of scouting the corridors was clearly starting to get to him, as evidenced by his timid, twitchy movements and haggard expression around his eyes, so I decided I’d let his brusqueness slide for now.

“Don’t you see? It means that the damage was done not by an invading army trying to get in, but by the defenders trying to get out; whoever attacked the fortress did so from the inside.”

From behind came a rhythmic patter of galloping hooves upon stone, and at once the section, previously just sitting around doing nothing, leapt instantly into formation, spears and charged horns aimed down at the black abyss of the corridors. The sound of hooves was joined by clanging metal, armour most likely, and we watched, waited, for a single, horribly drawn out moment as our eyes strained into the darkness to finally see the bulky shape of a guardspony of the Solar Guard, his golden armour glinting brightly from the horn lights projected by the unicorns of our section, coalesce from the gloom. There was an audible sigh of relief from the Night Guards, and not least from me, as I wiped the cold sweat from my brow.

“Sir!” said the Solar Guard between ragged gasps of breath, and snapped a hasty salute. “We’ve found one, sir! A Diamond Dog! He’s in pretty bad shape, but you’ll want to see him.”

Finally, thought I, we would get some answers.

Author's Note

Delayed slightly due to a conference I had to attend for a few days. The delay, however, was worth seeing my boss getting utterly plastered at the open bar there.

Bloodstained (Part 13)

Part 13

At the heart of this fortress, cocooned within a shell of labyrinthine corridors and rooms the original purposes of which could only be guessed at, and above a veritable rats’ nest of tunnels and mines that descended Faust knows how far into the earth below my hooves, was a large, open hall which, millennia ago, might have witnessed many great and noble martial ceremonies held beneath the high vaulted ceiling, but it appeared to have been more recently used as a sort of communal dining area, throne room, and ad hoc sports arena; at least until the Diamond Dogs all got slaughtered, that is. As was typical of just about every room that I had looked into in this thoroughly miserable little castle, it was a complete and utter mess that belied the ancient military purposes of this fortification; at the far end of the hall, from the main entrance where I stood and surveyed the chamber, was a raised dais where ages past a king or noble or some petty warlord might have sat upon a jewelled throne and held court, and from the walls that stretched to many times the height of a pony hung ancient, torn tapestries the designs upon which had faded centuries before.

It was decided that this would be the ideal place to set up both the billets for the soldiers and Captain Red Coat’s centre of operations. Therefore, when the sweep of the castle had been completed and the troops were preparing to scout the complex maze of tunnels and mines upon which this fortress was built, small teams of pegasi were busily sweeping away the piles of rubbish and preparing the hall and the multitude of rooms here fit for pony habitation once more, despite their constant griping that this was ‘mud pony work’. [Presumably because their powers of flight would be quite limited in tunnel-fighting] Others flittered in the air across the great open expanse of the hall, darting like sparrows in the garden between the great pillars that held up the high, gothic-arched ceiling that appeared by some cunning illusion to stretch far higher than the cramped confines of the castle would allow. Upon its surface one could discern the faded, cracked outlines of what might have been an elaborate fresco depicting cherub-faced pegasi dancing amongst the clouds. As I stepped into the hall, my hooves stirred the ancient dust that coated the floor, and the sound of my iron horseshoes striking the cold, hard stone rang out clearly and reverberated across the empty space. I took a few moments to pause and survey the hall, turning my gaze over the groups of pegasi who busied themselves collecting, piling, and removing the unidentifiable bits of refuse that once blanketed the floor of this hall, and in doing so I pulled what I hoped was an appropriately heroic and commissarial expression in order to further instil their somewhat warped image of me being the supposed exemplar of martial perfection.

There, in the dark and dingy far corner of the room where the light of a half dozen or so candles scattered haphazardly in seemingly random spots on the floor could barely illuminate, was a small, hunched figure in dirty rags for clothes being tended to by an earth pony soldier. Captain Red Coat had suggested that I join the earth ponies and unicorns in plumbing the depths of the tunnels, as my skill in navigating underground tunnels and alleged ‘inspiring presence’ would undoubtedly be of benefit to the troops, I managed to convince him – while Princess Luna was busy elsewhere on Twilight-watching duty for the time being – that getting some answers out of the only Diamond Dog survivor found thus far took priority. After all, it was my role to liaise with civilians wherever we encountered them so that the officers could focus on purely military matters, and especially so if it meant I could worm my way out of potential mortal danger again.

As I entered the hall, with Cannon Fodder by my side as usual, I became strangely self-conscious about the manner in which my hoofsteps echoed throughout the chamber; it felt as if the mere act of stepping upon these stones was in some way an act of sacrilege to the ancient ponies, whose civilisation predated that of Equestria and perhaps even ruled this once verdant land longer than our realm has even existed, who had first built this place, desecrated thought it was by the Diamond Dogs who until very recently squatted within these halls. Or perhaps it was merely an acute form of home-sickness – for the thick, tall columns, moth-eaten tapestries, general sense of decay, and the schizophrenic mix of wide open halls and tight, narrow corridors, each crafted by ponies long since dead and apparently possessed of the notion that the concepts of ease of use, of personal comfort, and of a single cohesive building style were of secondary importance to each giving life to their own individual architectural visions, bore an eerie echo of sepulchral confines in which I was born and raised. As thoroughly miserable as the Sanguine Palace is it was home, of a sort, and I found myself missing the cold emptiness of the stones and the claustrophobic feeling of the weight of history upon one’s shoulders. There, however, I was the inheritor, a scion of one thousand years of the Blood, but here I felt as if I was merely an intruder breaking into somepony else’s legacy. It felt as if the ghosts of the long dead were offended by my presence.

“Sir!” The guardspony snapped to attention when he saw me, swinging one forehoof in a wide arc to clang against his helmet in salute and stamping the other upon the floor, which made his ward jump slightly and spill some of the smaller gems onto the floor.

“Stand easy, Private Stainless Steel,” I said. Few things help improve one’s image in the eyes of the common soldiery more than remembering their names, or at least giving the impression that one makes an effort to do so, which is not exactly difficult given the embossed name badges attached to the breastplates of their armour. Besides, Stainless Steel was always rather easy to identify as his armour tended to be curiously shinier than everypony else’s; even after two days of solid marching in the ever-present dust the cold iron reflected darkly the flickering candles as motes of yellow dancing across the metal plating.

“Thank you, sir.”

The soldier relaxed a little, letting his spear rest against his shoulder as he in turn returned to his previous position of leaning casually against the wall, which, I belatedly noticed, was positively covered in graffiti scratched in a wide variety of different languages, some that I understood and some which had been quite dead for some time, into the pale yellow stone walls. As he stepped back slightly the thick, orange light from a nearby sconce illuminated his face, which had been cast in shadow when he was at attention, and revealed across the exposed part of his muzzle three claw marks that were crusted over with dark red scabs. He appeared to have noticed me looking at them, as he rather self-consciously touched an armoured hoof to the crimson lines that marred his large, blocky muzzle and grinned inanely.

“He gave me these when I stumbled across his hiding spot,” he said, his tone of voice remained rather jovial despite having been attacked. “Gave both of us a fright, it did, sir, but he’s only a lad and seeing what he’s just been through I can’t really blame him for that, can I? But just between you and me, if anypony asks it was a Changeling what did this, and there were at least ten of them.”

“Of course,” I said flatly, having no inclination to take part in any sort of light-hearted banter with him, not with the unanswered questions as to what exactly happened here still gnawing away at the back of my mind like a nasty rash. I feared, however, that whatever answers that I would get out of the sad, broken wretch that sat sullenly before me would do very little to help improve my mood. “I need to ask him a few questions; if he knows anything about what happened here it might help us should the enemy attack once again.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, not that he was in any position to say ‘no’ at all. He gave the Diamond Dog a little pat on the shoulder with one hoof and indicated towards me with the other. “This is my ‘boss’. He just wants to ask you a few questions, alright?”

The Diamond Dog did not look up, and instead continued to stare sullenly into his bowl of food. I felt rather at a loss as to what to say; for the most part I find speaking to be rather easy, indeed it’s one of the very few things that I count as one of my skills, and as long as one says something with sufficient confidence and in the correct tone of voice one can gain anypony’s trust with but a few sentences, but when I was confronted with this picture of very real grief and shock I struggled to think of how to begin. Nothing that I, a total stranger and not even of the same species, could have said would help heal the emotional wound within this beast’s soul; as real and as painful, if not more so, than those which scarred his flesh.

I removed the peaked cap from my head, deciding that the questioning that was to follow would be better conducted if the grinning face of death was not leering down upon the poor thing from the very pony purporting to aid him, and sat down on my haunches before him. He was young, damnably so; only a child if my guess was correct, and he would have reached my shoulders if he were standing straight. Instead, the creature was hunched over, as if he was trying to tuck his head in between his own shoulders, and those large paws, clearly built for digging and burrowing, idly fiddled with a small bowl of shiny gems that lay between his crossed legs. His grey fur was matted with sweat and filth, and in places it had moulted to leave patches of raw pink skin, bruised and covered in small cuts and scabs. Clearly undernourished and having been so for some time, one could discern the grim outline of his skeletal structure impressing on his skin.

I did my best to look as sympathetic as possible, which, mind you, is not particularly easy when one is dressed in a uniform that is explicitly designed to project cold, unfeeling authority and dread, and cleared my throat noisily.

“I am called Blueblood,” I said, at length. “I am a prince of Equestria and the commissar attached to this battalion of Their Divine Highnesses’ Royal Guard. Might I ask your name?”

It was a fine start, thought I, as the Diamond Dog slowly raised his head towards me and stared with wide, bloodshot eyes like coals that smouldered from within their sockets. It had occurred to me somewhat belatedly that while the average laypony would be suitably over-awed by the string of epithets attached to my name, like hangers-on trailing the celebrity of the moment at some fatuous social event, to a Diamond Dog, whose society was ordered primarily upon the doctrine that the principles of good leadership are being able to punch the hardest and the drink the most without incurring irreparable damage to one’s liver, such grandiloquent titles, of which I was to garner a rather obscene number later in my career, were likely completely and utterly meaningless to him. [This is a rather simplistic and quite stereotypical representation of Diamond Dog society which, as Blueblood readily attests to, is based upon his very limited prior exposure to their culture. Social status within a clan is decided upon a variety of different measures, though physical strength and tolerance to large quantities of alcohol do indeed make up part of it, but these are generally considered merely to be symptoms of good leadership rather than cause.] The youth looked at me with a blank, unreadable expression on his face, and as a warm draft from some unseen crack in the walls sent the candle flames flickering and their pin-prick reflections in those accusing, penetrating eyes of his dancing like fireflies lost in the inky darkness of a moonless night, I suppressed a small involuntary shudder up my spine. He then turned his head up to Stainless Steel, who offered a kind smile and a reassurance that I am quite safe and trustworthy (two things which I am most certainly not), and then looked back to me.

“I’m Rex,” he muttered quietly.

Odd name. “Thank you, Rex.” I have never felt entirely comfortable when speaking with foals; their inherent volatility and immaturity always makes choosing the correct words to engender the correct reaction from them, and judging their reaction in the first place, rather difficult for me, but I also have this entirely irrational fear that due to their questioning natures and the fact that, unlike the adults that they would later become, they do not have any sort of pre-conceived notion of who I am and what I should be like, that it would be a child who will uncover the truth behind my entirely false reputation.

“We want to help you,” I said, after a few moments of thought. Those five words, however, are probably the most horrifying words one could hear from an officer of the Royal Guard, not least of all from me. “We need you to tell us everything about what happened here.”

“I-I don’t want to talk about it.” The gems in the bowl clattered as he fiddled with them, and I contemplated taking them away if he wasn’t going to answer me. That, however, would have probably upset him and annoyed Stainless Steel, so I decided upon a more tactful approach.

“Please,” I said, leaning forward towards him, “it’s important; I have to know what happened here if I’m going to keep my troops safe and so we can bring whoever did this awful thing to justice. I need you to be brave and tell me, alright?”

“They...” He shuddered, tears welling up like glittering gems in the corners of those over-sized eyes of his. After taking a brief, albeit tense, moment to collect himself, he seemed to gather up his courage and wiped his eyes with the large, slab-like palm of his hand. “They came out of the tunnels,” he said, staring at the bowl of gems in his lap, “we dug too deep and they came out of the tunnels.”

The hall had become almost completely silent, quite unnervingly so, as he spoke, aside from the beating of pegasi wings and of the noises beyond the confines of the stone wall, and I became aware of dozens of pairs of eyes affixed upon Rex and I. As the knot within my stomach grew tighter as my fears were slowly becoming vindicated – that we were all standing atop something completely and utterly terrifying just waiting for the prime opportunity to murder us all – I questioned him further, though uncertain as to whether I truly wanted to hear his answer:

“Who did?”

“Ponies,” said Rex. “Ponies made out of black crystal. They... they came from out of the gem mines.”

“Crystal ponies?” I blurted out dumbly, and then shook my head. It was impossible; one must remember that this happened a full year before the return of that rather vulgar little ‘empire’, little more than a small city-state inhabited by absurdly shiny ponies with mad pretensions to greatness now, and besides, being this far south I thought it would be highly implausible that we would find any indication of their once-vast empire here of all places, or so I had thought. “Do you mean the Changelings?” I said in exasperation. “Was it the Changelings who did this?”

“No!” he shrieked suddenly. I flinched slightly at the voice, filled with the power of the raw horror that he must have witnessed, and I felt rather embarrassed at my mishandling of this questioning. I took a few steps back to allow him some space as he, for the first time since he started speaking, lifted his head to look at me. “I know what I saw! They were... they were like black crystal, and they... and they killed everyone here with magic. I watched them from behind the walls, and they were silent as they killed us all!”

It was over; the Diamond Dog suddenly broke into wracking sobs as the metaphorical dam holding back all of his grief broke. He clung to Stainless Steel’s chest, weeping into the cold steel of his breastplate, as the soldier attempted to comfort him by stroking his head and all the while looking at me with a slightly hurt expression. I made an awkward apology and left; I had gathered all the information that I felt I needed, though incomplete and I was certain a more compassionate individual than I could have handled all of that a damn sight better, it was enough for me to know that as long as those mines and tunnels were left open we were not safe.

The mention of ‘crystal ponies’ did not bother me overmuch at the time, and in truth I did not pay much heed to the Diamond Dog’s outburst; a foal is often blessed with great imagination, and I could only have guessed that he had seen the shiny black carapaces of the numberless Changeling hordes pouring from the tunnels and, since his entire life must have revolved around the acquisition and consumption of gems, merely conflated those with crystals. Still, even then, in my ignorance of the truth, the thought continued to nag at me that there was something else entirely unknown down there. Nevertheless, the idea of vast mobs of Changelings pouring out of those mines like an unstoppable wave of chitin to kill us all while we slept was thoroughly unnerving in its own right, and so with Cannon Fodder behind me and bearing all of this with his unique brand of quiet stoicism I galloped down maze of corridors, relying upon my preternatural skill with navigation to guide me.

We blundered past teams of guardsponies clearing out the rooms to make them ready once more for pony habitation, and the sound of profanity followed in our hoofsteps from those we had rather inconvenienced. From one corridor we took a flight of stairs, twisting and turning this way and that in a manner which suggested that the architect had fallen asleep halfway through drawing the blueprints, left a large squiggle where the stairwell into the basement should have been, and being a rather lazy sort of pony did not bother to correct the mistake. As we descended the air became dank and cool, but still muggy with a strange, thick, soup-like consistency to it, and soon the disorientating spirals of steps deposited us into a broad, underground chamber. The ceiling was quite low; comfortable enough for most ponies, but one of my stature would have had to bend their neck down at quite an uncomfortable angle to avoid banging their head, and very soon I developed quite an unpleasant crick there. The room was mostly empty, though evidence of its use by the Diamond Dogs and the recent passage of the guardsponies through it was plain to see in the hoof and paw prints disturbing the thick layer of dust on the floor. There were blocky square pillars, quite bare and functional compared to the ones that held up the high ceiling of the main hall, from which ancient chains and shackles, long since too rusted to be of any use now, creaked with the sound of hooves upon a blackboard in the thin draft. This place was a dungeon, the aged shackles bearing witness to the brutality that must have occurred here both in past too distant to imagine and too soon to be comfortable.

Acting almost on instinct I slowed as we entered this room and drew my sword, for the light was dim and the deepened shadows retreating into a formless black abyss could conceal all manner of horrors, and we advanced cautiously. Between each hoofstep my ears strained to hear anything, but aside from the incessant ‘drip-drip-drip’ of water splashing down in some unseen corner and the murmurs of conversation and activity muffled by thick stone walls, there was nothing immediate save for the scuffle of our hooves upon the dust and of our laboured breaths. That the time between each drop of water was by no means uniform was becoming quite maddening.

No, amidst scuffling of our hooves I could discern faintly the sound of a quill scratching on paper that had haunted me for the past week or so, and from the gloom a voice called out that seemed to hold more terror for me than anything else those tunnels could have possibly concealed.

“Hello?” Twilight’s voice called out, sounding remote and diffused in the thick, clammy air as if the humidity itself was somehow deadening the sound. I intensified the light of my horn, and the fur upon the back of my neck bristled at the sight of the small, purple unicorn mare stepping out from the blanket of utmost darkness. Held aloft before her were her ever-present companions, the notepad and quill; and I then noticed that her eyes glowed a subtle shade of magenta, before a short flurry of rapid blinking returned them to their normal hue. I thought about questioning that strangeness further and inquiring as to what she was doing here alone in the dark, but when Princess Luna, still disguised as a Servant of the Blood, materialised like a phantasm rising from its tomb and a sudden chill shuddered down my spine I was soon dissuaded of that notion.

“Oh, it’s you!” exclaimed Twilight a little too happily for my tastes. Cannon Fodder had noticed the somewhat manic look in her eyes and retreated a little behind me. “Come, I’ve found so many interesting things in this chamber.”

She cantered away once more into the darkness, and after sharing a look with Luna, which she returned with a rather tired, exasperated expression across her aquiline features, I followed tentatively. I was aware that this would likely be a waste of time, but previous experience with Twilight Sparkle had told me that unless this sort of behaviour was nipped in the bud early it could very well spiral out of control and very soon she would have the entire battalion taking brass rubbings of various monumental plaques. As I groped my way through the darkness, pushing as much magic into my horn to illuminate the gloom as much as I dared without giving myself a crippling migraine, the sound of her voice delivering one of her infamous Twilectures guided me.

“This fortress was built by an ancient pre-Equestrian civilisation upon an even older structure built by an even more ancient pre-Equestrian civilisation called the Haygyptians. It might even have been a trading post of the Crystal Empire judging by the pictograms I’ve discovered; at its height it ruled all over the east coast of modern Equestria, so it’s not only possible that they could have placed colonies and trading posts all over the continent but it’s very, very likely that they did so. And here we are, standing on top of what is probably the best preserved ancient Crystal Empire site in Equestria. There’s just so much we can learn from this place!”

“Lady Sparkle,” I said through set teeth, starting to lose my patience with this increasingly irritating diversion, “you are here on orders of the Princesses to survey the Royal Guard; I would advise you to stick with one project at a... time...”

My voice trailed away as for the first time since I had stepped hoof within this chamber I saw the walls. The effect was rather startling, such that I had temporarily forgotten how tall I am and bashed my horn quite painfully against the ceiling; I briefly lamented the fact that the world around me seemed to be built by midgets. Scratched upon every inch of the stone slabs that made up the walls was row upon dizzying row of writing, like how one imagines the chambers of a murdering psychopath might look like. The language was nothing that I recognised; comprised mostly of pictograms reminiscent of the chicken-scratch scrawl of Cathayan and Neighponese, albeit with a greater sense of structure to it. Circles and lines bisected one another, branched off, and connected other pictograms to form what could have been compound words or sentences. Intriguingly, I noticed interspersed amongst the mess of arcane symbols were the much more recognisable and rather saner hieroglyphs used by the ancient Haygyptians, though that only added another layer to the mystery of this strange complex. It was maddening to even consider the sort of culture that would have considered such hypergraphia to be even remotely appealing. This most unsettling development was only made worse when I turned my head and illuminated the next slab on the wall to reveal a faded, chipped fresco painted there which, even in its decayed state, was unmistakeably that of a stylised pony skull. Surrounding this skull was a circle carved into the rock, from which three lines emerged from its underside like a comet with three tails rising up from below.

Twilight emerged into view once again, and apparently she hadn’t heard me as she continued babbling half to herself. I vaguely wondered how she had been conducting her work in the complete and total darkness, and decided that Princess Luna must have had something to do with it. [Note that the passages imply that nopony had thought to suspend mage-lamps in this chamber and that Twilight was not using her horn to emit light. Therefore, we can assume that she was conducting her work with the use of a night-vision spell so as not to expose the fragile artwork to artificial light that could potentially damage it. The aforementioned glowing of her eyes adds further credence to this theory.] Scattered around our hooves was a veritable forest’s worth of papers scribbled with notes, arcane diagrams, copies of the pictograms, and charcoal rubbings of a few of the more complicated markings.

“We know this to be a Haygyptian temple-tomb complex,” she continued. “It was probably built during the reign of Hamon Rei judging by the images presented on the bas reliefs, and then when the Haygyptian Empire broke apart a fortress was built directly on top of it. The tombs might already be looted, but their burial sites were very complex structures with hidden chambers and traps so there’s still the possibility we can find something interesting down there. I haven’t had the chance to take a look at the rest of the complex, but it could extend miles and miles underground.”

She stopped, and followed my gaze to the ghastly mural before me. “Oh, this?” she said. “I’ve found this motif everywhere in this chamber, and it’s very common in other Haygyptian sites just like this one. It stands for resurrection; the ancient Haygyptians were obsessed with death and the prospect of life beyond, and their pharaohs were specially embalmed so that one day they may be returned to life. My preliminary analysis of these writings suggests that the Haygyptians were trying to harness forbidden alicorn magic to find the secret to resurrecting dead ponies, which, of course, is completely impossible as any student of magic knows that the concept of resurrection violates the second law of thaumodynamics.” [Those looking for further elucidation on the topic of repeated failed attempts by mortal ponies to unlock the secrets to eternal life one can look no further than the seminal work ‘Beyond the Realms of Death’ by Hail Fjord]

“That’s, uh, that’s all very fascinating, Lady Sparkle,” I lied.

“Please, call me Twilight.”

I frowned at her and shook my head, my horn scraping a line noisily against the rough ceiling. “That would be improper of me. Anyway, have you seen Captain Red Coat?”

Twilight Sparkle pointed further into the darkness, where I presumed the chamber opened up into the mines. A soft lambent glow of horn lights and magical lamps could be seen from that direction, framing the square outline of what was probably an open doorway, but it seemed diffused and muted in the inherent mugginess of this room. “He went down there with his troops. I hope they don’t break anything down there; I’d really like to study more of this complex.”

She was rather welcome to do just that, provided that we bricked up the tunnels behind her, though naturally that would have put me in rather poor stead in the eyes of my divine Aunties so I shelved that thought for a later date for when I might feel a bit depressed again and needed a bit of cheering up. I feared, however, that I had come too late, and that Captain Red Coat might be so deep into the mines that I might either lose him or that he might stumble across the Changelings that I assumed wiped out the Diamond Dogs. Nevertheless, I was hopeful that he had not proceeded too far into the tunnels, but I was wary of the fact that every second wasted chatting aimlessly with Twilight Sparkle increased the risk of very messy and violent death for all concerned.

“Lady Sparkle,” I said, trying to inject some tone of authority to my voice which, to my mind, sounded as if it was starting to waver disconcertingly, “I need you to head upstairs with Princess... uh, Cloudless Sky immediately.”

I turned and was about to begin my grim task of locating Captain Red Coat and ‘advising’, which, translated from commissarial-politico-speak, meant ‘giving him a direct order but pretending that he had some say in the matter’, to withdraw from the tunnels and prepare to work with the engineers in finding a way to collapse them, permanently if possible, when Twilight Sparkle’s nose bumped into my chest.

“What’s going on?” she asked, cocking her head to one side quizzically.

“There’s been a change of plans,” I said, wishing that she would just get out of my way while I was busy taking something seriously for once in a lifetime of trying to avoid doing just that. Well, taking something that actually mattered seriously, to be more accurate. “We’re not exploring the underground complex; instead we’re going to withdraw to the castle and seal them off completely.”

Her brow knitted together in a small, slightly disappointed frown, and she chewed on her lower lip thoughtfully. I had thought the matter resolved there and then, as most ponies tended to take whatever I say as profound military gospel completely and utterly without question, despite being severely under-qualified to dispense any sort of tactical and strategic advice as my time in the Royal Military Academy was primarily spent on a varying combination of gambling, drinking, and fornicating. I therefore stepped around Twilight Sparkle and headed towards where I thought the entrance to the mines were, and as I did so I projected the light from my horn into a narrower, more penetrating beam that illuminated a small archway in the direction that she had pointed towards earlier. Unfortunately, I had not taken into account her irritating propensity to question.

“What?” she said suddenly, and I cursed that my own cautiousness in approaching what looked to me as a mouth of immense darkness meant that I could not have fled before the inevitable tantrum. The young mare trotted before me once more, an expression of outrage twisting her face, and then jabbed at my chest with a dusty hoof. “’Seal them off’? What do you mean by that?”

“The Changelings that killed all of the Diamond Dogs here came up from the gem mines,” I said calmly, pushing her hoof away from my breast and smoothing down the print and the creases that she had made in my storm coat. I thought it best at this point not to reveal what Rex had told me about the so-called ‘ponies made of crystal’, as no doubt it would only increase her urge to go down there and start indulging in some more amateur archaeology down there. “The risk that they may attack us in exactly the same way is too great to just ignore.” I shone my light upon the exit; it was a large archway, sans any sort of door, and upon its surface it echoed the chilling motif of the rest of the room in the brutally simplistic pictograms scratched into the polished stone slabs.

“But there’s a chance that they might not!” she said suddenly, the grin over her face cracked wider than I thought possible on a pony’s face, and leaned in uncomfortably close to me. Pinprick pupils regarded me with a manic, hysterical gleam that I found quite unsettling. “A-after all, not doing the same thing twice is one of the most basic rules of fighting a war and the Changelings have proven themselves to have a good grasp of basic strategy, so there’s a reasonably good chance that the rest of the underground complex is safe enough for a small archaeological expedition. This might be the most significant discovery in our lifetimes with all of the knowledge and power of the ancients, and there might even be clues about why the Haygyptian Empire collapsed so quickly—and you just want to brick it all up?”

“Twilight!” I snapped, stressing the familiar use of her name to try and impress upon her the severity of the situation. I looked directly into her eyes, stressing over every word. “We are at war, and I will not place the lives of these soldiers at any undue risk just to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Is that understood?”

That seemed to do the trick; the self-righteous outrage at my presumed cultural vandalism was wiped away from her face to be replaced by an expression of quiet embarrassment, as her shoulder slumped, her cheeks flushed crimson, and an uneasy, awkward smile came to her lips. “I, uh...” she muttered quietly to the ground between my hooves, “I didn’t think of that.” Cautiously, she stepped out of my way, and as she slowly backed away from me with defeat written not only in her face but also in every subtle movement and in her posture I held the most uncompromisingly harsh glare that I could possibly muster. I waited for a few moments, just long enough for that stare to fully sink in, before turning upon my hooves and heading with some trepidation towards the doorway.

“Don’t worry, Lady Sparkle,” said Cannon Fodder, who had hitherto been silent and staring uninterestedly at the rather ugly skull on the wall as if it were merely a poster detailing the health and safety procedures in a train station, “the tunnels will still be there when this war is over.”

If this war is ever over, thought I, but my aide’s words seemed to cheer Twilight up slightly, and she smiled a little more earnestly. “Sorry,” she said, a little more confidently, “I guess I got a little carried away there.”

Well, that was putting it mildly, though I had to concede that as far Twilight Sparkle mental breakdowns go this one was relatively understated compared to the ones that I recall with dread from high school; it was over quite quickly and nopony actually got seriously hurt this time, not least of all me. Nevertheless, as I crossed the threshold from the improvised dungeon area into tunnels carved into the sun-scorched earth and I heard the patter of Twilight’s hooves trotting away into the darkness, the unsettling thought that there was something greater at work here than mere Changelings continued to nag at me, and that it would not be by their fangs and their hooves that I was to meet my untimely but inevitable demise but from Twilight’s own blundering. She was, and still is, a supremely intelligent mare with a fantastic ability to just consume knowledge like Cannon Fodder stuffing his face at an all-you-can eat buffet; the only issue with this is that her same fanatical desire to learn tends to come at the expense of her common sense as she would dive heedlessly into these ‘projects’ with little to no thought about the possible unintended consequences of such behaviour.

I dared to glance over my shoulder, and there, illuminated just barely by the pale light of my horn, stood Princess Luna now stripped of her disguise. A sudden chill crept up my spine at the sight of her; dark and mysterious, and in the dim light the distinction between the alicorn and the darkness surrounding her was fuzzy and indistinct, as if she was somehow an extension of the inky blackness that receded from my light. What surprised me most, however, was her expression, for her aquiline features bore something that was most strange and rare – a smile. It was genuine, so far as I could tell with my aunt’s rather vague and slightly amateurish attempts at imitating the facial expressions of ponies, which often looked as if she had only heard of the concept of a smile as described by a Neighponese tourist with a very limited grasp of the Equestrian language, and despite its apparent warmth the fact that I could not recall a time when she had smiled at me before only made this feel all the more disturbing. Suppressing a shudder, I turned and headed down a single, black passageway, and did not look again.

Author's Note

Another chapter completed, despite my job's best efforts to stop that by forcing me to work overtime.

Bloodstained (Part 14)

Life in Fort E-5150 eventually settled into some semblance of normality in the days following our arrival, inasmuch as anything in the Royal Guard can be considered as ‘normal’. Despite being deep within what was considered to be hostile territory, isolated and alone, and living in less than ideal conditions where what little bodily remains that the previous inhabitants had left behind when they were slaughtered not too long ago had only just been washed from the walls very recently, the average guardspony could be trusted to get on with the gruelling business of soldiering with little or no complaint beyond the usual, sarcastic griping that the lower orders tend to indulge in when being given a task that they feel is pointless. I, on the other hoof, being more cognisant of the very real peril that we were in but not enough to properly voice it, was slowly reaching the end of my tether, and I feared that sooner or later the masque I hide behind so skilfully would shatter under the pressure, and the inchoate terror that lay hidden behind it would overwhelm me. The tunnels below had been sealed by using Lieutenant Southern Cross’ dynamite to bring down the incalculable tons of rock, such that no force in the world would be able to clear it any time soon. The first chamber, with its grisly chains and unsettling display of glyphs and pictograms was left open for Twilight Sparkle to investigate to her heart’s content.

Cannon Fodder had managed to secure for me a suite of spacious and relatively clean rooms on the third floor of the building, which I then had converted into my own private office and bedchambers. My aide and Twilight Sparkle both took a room each either side of my own, and I felt a damn sight safer with a thick wall of solid rock separating me from the slightly unbalanced mare. The room itself was sparsely decorated, but that was simply because nearly all evidence of the Diamond Dogs’ use of it had been cleared away and disposed of. I was surrounded by bare stone walls, and a high ceiling twice the height of the average pony from which hung an ancient chandelier on a rusted chain and decorated morbidly with spikes. In one corner I had placed my cot and in the other was my writing desk, and between those was a large, open window that commanded a lovely view of precisely sod all, leaving a fairly wide, empty space about half the size of a tennis court for me to enjoy. It was this place that I called home for those intervening days between our arrival and the battle, and in some odd way I even found it to be rather comfortable at times.

As for Twilight Sparkle, it appeared that the dressing-down that I had given to her in the catacombs had the desired effect and she appeared to be a bit more quiet and subdued than the irritatingly enthusiastic demeanour that I’m more used to seeing in her. Of course, it might have had more to do with the fact that the full gravity of the situation had finally dawned upon her, and instead of treating her Royal Commission as some small side project, she now threw herself fully into its pursuit. She therefore continued to make a nuisance of herself, generally getting in the way of the guardsponies as they went about their duties of drill, sentry, and conducting basic repairs to the castle to make it at least slightly more defensible than before, though her meddling was certainly not to the same exacerbating levels as the previous few weeks or so since her unexpected arrival at my hooves. That she was in fact frightened – being alone and surrounded by three hundred strange and intimidating ponies, and one even stranger and downright terrifying alicorn – and simply putting on a brave face for the benefit of everypony else around her was certainly a possibility, and upon reflection that seems like the more plausible explanation for her change in behaviour than her, or indeed anypony for that matter, actually listening to anything I say. Perhaps then the two of us were not quite so different, after all.

Despite all of this, I did my best to simply carry on in the best traditions of the upper classes, most of whom believed wholeheartedly in the pleasant fiction that emotions as fear, worry, or even slight concern for one’s own safety were supposed to be anxieties that only the lower orders experienced. With very little of the usual distractions of fine alcohol, impressionable young officers naive enough to think that the principles of fair play apply to gambling, and pretty mares who just find a commissar’s uniform and its contents to be utterly irresistible to help me keep my mind off the fact that very soon I might find my bodily remains being scraped off the walls in the same way that the Diamond Dogs’ had just been, I concentrated on my work. Not that I particularly enjoyed the usual business of filling in paperwork and dispensing ‘inspirational’ pleasantries to everypony I meet like some sort of motivational vending machine, but at the very least, I supposed, it was more productive than simply brooding; if the battalion was to become the highly effective fighting machine that I needed to hide behind when Shining Armour finally got his own affairs in order and the battle would commence, then it was simply logical that I would take steps to ensure that by actually doing my job for once.

Doing so had the additional benefit of keeping my contact with Twilight Sparkle to a bare minimum; I was not overly concerned about her safety here, though, as containing her in a smaller, more constrained, and better regimented environment than the sprawling mess of the Dodge Junction encampment meant that her capacity to get in the way of things was a little more restricted; at least in theory. The absolute worst that happened, however, came late one evening after I had sat through a tortuously long and mind-numbingly dull meeting with Captain Red Coat and the other officers about our meagre supply of oat rations, when I decided that I would pay Twilight Sparkle a visit. It was not a social call, mind you, as I was too tired and irritable (well, more than usual) to spend my time entertaining her, as I find her company to be quite tiresome even in one of my rarer good moods, but merely to check how she was coping so far. You, dear reader, cannot even begin to imagine the horror that took me when I pushed open the door to her room with a small burst of magic to find two of her standing side-by-side in the centre of her room.

“Hi!” they chorused together. It took all of my willpower not to bolt out of the door right then and flee.

It appeared that Princess Luna, who stood a little off to the corner of the room with an expression of quiet satisfaction tugging upwards on the end of her thin, bloodless lips, had delivered on her promise to teach her sister’s faithful student the ancient secrets of the long-lost simulacrum spell, much to my horror. Most common illusion spells tend to have one or two subtle ‘tells’ that give them away; perhaps the light reflecting off the soft fur of a well-groomed mare is not quite right, or maybe the colour of a blood-red rose adorning the mare’s mane is just not vibrant enough, or, as is the case when I attempt these sorts of spells, this illusionary mare is missing one or more of her limbs. Standing before me was a nightmare dredged up from the darkest days of my youth; two Twilight Sparkles, apparently identical in every way such that I could possibly tell which of the two was born of flesh and blood and which was crafted and moulded from primal, forbidden magics. If one had not seen or even heard of Twilight Sparkle before (having spent most of one’s life living in an isolated cave just outside Timbucktoo, of course), then one would have sworn that the two mares standing before me were identical twins. The two bore matching smiles that were relentlessly cheerful in such a way that inspired in me such subtle, terrible horrors. They parted and stood either side of me, flanking me, and I could not help but take a few, furtive steps back towards the door.

Most horrible, however, was that they reminded me of my own twin sisters, right down to the disconcerting manner in which they spoke in short, truncated sentences, one after the other in rapid-fire succession. [Prince Blueblood has two twin sisters younger than him, Duchess Sangre and Duchess Azul, both of whom have married into Prench nobility.]

“Isn’t this spell just amazing?” said the one on the left.

“Just think of all of the extra studying I could get done!” said the one on the right.

“While I shadow you and the officers around, taking notes as you do your job for Princess Celestia’s commission on the Royal Guard...”

“...I can be downstairs studying the entrance hall to the tomb!”

“Oh, I can’t wait to start!”

A low, melodious chuckle came from Princess Luna, and I looked up into the dark corner of the room that she always tended to gravitate to for some reason known only to her. “Twilight has been making such great progress,” she said. “I don’t think I have seen anypony else could have mastered such a complex spell so quickly. I am impressed.”

“I—” I stuttered uselessly for a moment, glancing between the mare in the shadows and the two duplicates standing beside me, doing my best to try and articulate the horror I was feeling. One Twilight Sparkle was bad enough, albeit more manageable most of the time these days, but to have two of her, or at least her having the ability to project herself via this artificial, magical construct which was more or less the same thing in my eyes, was downright terrifying.

It was also rather shocking to once again be a witness to that extremely rare occurrence when Princess Luna pays somepony a compliment. [Princess Luna does not give such compliments lightly, but in this case I agree that it is well-deserved. The simulacrum spell is one of the most difficult known to unicorns, and its continuous usage inflicts significant mental and physical strain on the user. That Twilight Sparkle had learnt much of this spell is such a short amount of time is a testament to both her mental willpower as much as her prowess in magic.]

“I’m sure you are,” I said, at length.

It was at that point that I quickly made my excuses and escaped into the relative safety and comfort of my own room, with little more for company than some much-needed solitude and an excellent bottle of fine Scoltish whiskey that Cannon Fodder had somehow procured for me by methods best left unknown (I can only assume he found it amongst the detritus left behind by the Diamond Dogs), which I then downed with a speed that made a mockery of the fine art of the distiller who crafted this rare drink. Dear merciful Faust, this was almost as bad as the time she presented her high school book report on the Necronomicon. My fears, for once, proved to be somewhat ill-founded, for when Twilight had some degree of direction to her insatiable lust for knowledge she will quite happily pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, at least until something more interesting happens to cross her path. Luckily, that was quite unlikely in this barren, desolate wasteland and thus Twilight was content in using this spell purely to divide her time between her two current projects.

Nevertheless, having four solid walls and an equally sturdy wooden door provided me some measure of privacy, which I took advantage of at every opportunity. Not that there was much opportunity to do so, with my work taking up a large bulk of my time and the fact that being alone and bored invariably led to a lot of idle brooding, and even then what little time I had to myself was often disrupted. Captain Red Coat would often blunder in unannounced, eager to discuss something with me, and he would thus take up a large amount of time that I would have otherwise dedicated to such fulfilling activities as finally getting around to reading the journals of Neighpoleon, albeit with a lingerie catalogue carefully concealed within its pages, or simply gazing out of my window into the vast emptiness that lay beyond and despairing. Of course, these discussions tended to be long, rambling, and never went anywhere in particular, so I shan’t bore all of you here by recanting every single one. The majority of these ‘fireside chats’ (a bit of a misnomer, as I wouldn’t trust the large hole in the wall purporting to be a fireplace within an inch of its miserable life, that and it was far too bloody hot for one anyway) of course gravitated towards military matters and the burden of command, to which I merely parroted a few more quotes that I had picked up from here and there in an effort to sound vaguely intelligent, and he would toddle off thinking he had learned something. It made him happy, I supposed, aside from the time he wanted me to help me compose a poem dedicated to Twilight Sparkle, and that his muse was having great difficulty in finding a rhyme for ‘purple’. I quickly vetoed the idea, for the sake of what little remained of the lad’s dignity.

[Though Blueblood is dismissive of these discussions, Captain Red Coat explains in his own extensive memoirs ‘Through the Fire and the Flames: A Phoenix Rises from the Ashes or an Account of the Re-Establishment of the Night Guards from the Perspective of a Senior Officer’, which I cannot recommend due to its excessive purple prose to the point of rendering the text quite unreadable, that he found such discussions to be quite valuable. Whether this question can be answered by Blueblood’s own self-loathing or by Red Coat’s impressionability at the time I shall leave to your own interpretation.]

Occasionally I used my free time to practice fencing, though I knew that Changelings were hardly ones to pay any heed to the list of complex rules and regulations surrounding what was perhaps the only sport that I ever showed any promise in, aside from croquet, it never hurt to at least ensure that I maintained some familiarity with the large, cumbersome sword that I wielded. Though I would have preferred the large, open spaces of the many fencing halls that I once frequented as a youth, the relatively wide expanse of my personal chambers provided ample room for me to reacquaint myself with the rudimentary basics of the usual cycle of thrust, parry, and riposte, supplemented of course with additional techniques of lunging, feinting, and counter-attacking. Of course my rather clumsy swings of the huge, brutish Pattern ’12 sabre would have given my elderly fencing instructor his fourth and final heart attack were he around to see it, being a weapon designed for hacking and slashing than the refined, precise, and almost delicate movements demanded of the needle-like rapiers that I was used to. After a few more practice sessions chopping away at what is generally referred to as a ‘shadow opponent’, I soon became accustomed to the heavier and more ‘solid’ feel of the larger sword and it was not long before I was able to wield this unsubtle weapon with as much deftness and skill as I would with a rapier blade.

It was late one afternoon that I had an unprecedented one hour of uninterrupted practice, which I found to be slightly disconcerting as not having somepony blundering into my room to demand my input in some command decision, no matter how small and pointless, seemed to imply that something had gone wrong. Well, that was not strictly true; if something had gone catastrophically pear-shaped then the first thing anypony would do is run to their commissar and pray that he is in a good mood. And as my room was bathed in a lambent orange-red flame that made the walls look as if they were drenched in fresh blood, I stopped, panting heavily as I stood still, sweat running over my matted fur and with my blade held before my muzzle, pointing directly at the ceiling to salute the imaginary opponent that I had so heroically vanquished and bowed my head in mock respect.

“Impressive,” a quiet, imperious voice intoned softly from behind me. It was the voice that I had least wanted to hear in my personal sanctuary of all places, aside from that of my mother, and I jerked my head around suddenly to find Princess Luna observing me from atop my cot, her long, gangly limbs folded beneath her sleek body and her ethereal mane and tail flowing in a manner that was quite contrary to the direction of the draft from the open windows. There was a somewhat unreadable expression on her face; quiet, thoughtful, contemplative, and yet still filled with the supreme and unbridled arrogance that was forever etched upon her facial features like a disfigurement. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said.

“No, no, not at all, Princess,” I lied; her presence here was about as welcome as an erection at a funeral (yes, reader, I think things I would never say). “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough,” she said, shrugging her shoulders gently. “Your technique is quite impressive.”

I stumbled over to my writing desk, tossing my sabre down atop its surface and taking a small, slightly damp piece of cloth to wipe the perspiration streaking down my face from my matted blond mop, and regarded her cautiously. “Uh, thank you,” I said, already trying in vain to formulate a way of encouraging her to leave without appearing too rude and thus resulting in my inevitable dismemberment.

Of course, she never gave me a chance. With a few graceful movements she rose from my cot and stepped, no, ‘glided’ is a more appropriate word to describe the way that she walks, towards me, her bare hooves tapping quietly against the rough, bare stones. It took some effort on my part not to flinch from her as she looked down upon me, cold eyes narrowed slightly and with a slight smile on her thin lips. She took my sword from the desk with her magic, and raised it to her muzzle to examine it.

“This is a fine sword,” she said. Her cold, dark eyes ran along the curved length of polished, unadorned Equestrian steel, forged and stamped out with thousands of its identical brethren in vast steelworks of Trottingham, Detrot, and Manehatten to be given to officers across the Royal Guard. Stepping back slightly, she took a few practice swings of the blade, and though I was close enough to feel the air displaced by the sharpened steel slicing through it as a gentle breeze her control over this unfamiliar weapon was good enough that I was never in any real danger. Nevertheless, the thought that she might disembowel me and make it look like suicide or a tragic accident, having tripped over a loose paving stone and fallen on top of my own sword, did occur to me.

“It is amusing that ponies believe that it was I who invented the sport you now call fencing,” she continued, proffering the blade to me hilt first, which I tentatively took and placed it back in its sheath on the desk. “In the rare moments of peace between the wars for Equestria’s unification, I set up tournaments for ponies-at-arms to practice their swordcraft, and after one thousand years of absence I see that the nobility has transformed this martial art into an effete little ‘sport’ for their own amusement.”

I could only quietly nod in agreement at the small tirade, and hope that I could come up with some sort of excuse to leave hurriedly; perhaps Captain Red Coat might need my assistance in whatever it was that he did at this time of the day, writing more awful poetry, perhaps, or Lieutenant Southern Cross might have gotten up to more mischief. Nevertheless, Princess Luna clearly had other ideas, as her horn flickered with a dark aura and seemingly from the thin air clouds of the utmost darkness coalesced into the cruciform shapes of two blades. Watching with no small degree of apprehension, I backed up until my rump hit the writing desk and watched in quiet awe as the vaguely-sword shaped black clouds, like small imitations of her flowing mane and tail, were slowly given shape and form by her magic, solidified, and became twin imperfect simulacra of the battered old Pattern ’12 sabre that I had been practicing with just before.

One such blade pivoted about upon its axis, hilt aimed towards me. “Would you do me the honour of allowing me to spar with you?”

Hesitantly I accepted the phantasmal sword, and was surprised to find that it had the same heavy and solid feel of a real blade, though the fact that it was a mere illusion woven by magic was easily given away by the fact that the light from the setting sun did not reflect in the same manner as one would expect it to and instead the steel seemed too dull and grey. “Right now?” I asked, taking a few short swipes through the empty air with the non-existent weapon to get a feel for it. I was not particularly in the mood for a sparring match, feeling quite drained as only a life working in the military can leave one, but as I already counted her elder sister as one of my regular opponents on the piste [The technical term for the fencing playing field] I was curious to see how I would fare against the pony purporting to be the one of the greatest warriors in Equestrian history (at least, she was over a thousand years ago, as her presence here, hiding away out of sheer boredom, standing defiantly in the face of all military logic and common sense had sullied her reputation somewhat).

“I don’t see why not,” she said, shrugging her shoulders casually in a manner quite unbecoming of her regal and divine status. “Besides, we might not get the chance to do so again.”

The implication that the very reason we might not have another chance was that I would probably be dead fairly soon was not lost on me. It appeared that Princess Luna had that same irritating tendency as Princess Celestia to phrase an order in such a manner that implied that one had a choice where none existed. I have to admit, however, that in terms of Luna’s personality it was something of an improvement, as usually she would simply shout and scream and generally throw a small temper tantrum until she got whatever it was that she wanted or somepony got seriously hurt.

Nevertheless, I reluctantly nodded my head in agreement. The smile on Luna’s lips grew wider, and, as far as I could tell, seemed more earnest than the unsettling imitations of a smile that she tended to use in the past. “Good!” she exclaimed, all but clapping her hooves together with joy. Almost skipping, she trotted away from me to the relative centre of the empty space that made up the bulk of my room, and grudgingly I followed suit and faced her.

“You needn’t worry about injury,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Though this illusion looks and feel real enough, the blades will simply pass through flesh as if it were not there. Observe.” My Auntie demonstrated this by raising her hoof and impaling it upon her blade by the soft, tender parts underneath, and I could not help but wince as I watched the weapon phase harmlessly through her flesh as if it simply wasn’t there. Well, technically speaking it wasn’t there at all, being just an ethereal projection of light and magic to fool the eye and the mind into perceiving something that simply does not exist at all.

“You see?” she continued, jiggling the illusionary blade around in her hoof. “You will be perfectly safe. I fear the days of declaring the victor to be the first pony to draw blood from the torso of their opponent is not something that today’s society would approve of, and the battalion would certainly suffer if I were to deprive it of its commissar, so I hope that these will provide an adequate substitute.”

The term ‘perfectly safe’ did little to comfort me, particularly when it came from Princess Luna of all ponies. Not for the first I wondered how she had managed to talk me out of a very boring albeit quite safe job behind a desk, where the greatest danger to my life was failing to make the tea for my idiotic co-workers on time, and into that of a commissar. Nevertheless, she seemed excited by the idea of sparring with me, and, perhaps for the very first time since I had first met my dark Auntie, the two of us found some sort of common ground.

I took the en garde position, with about ten feet separating the two of us, and Auntie Luna, once she had finished amusing herself with her sabre illusion, followed suit. Our sabres rose simultaneously in salute and our heads dipped slightly in deference to one another, and with those formalities over with the fight began.

We each started cautiously with a few experimental attacks that were easily blocked, sizing up our relative strengths and weaknesses. Princess Luna had almost every advantage over me in terms of her size, strength, speed, and stamina; whereas I had had some small advantage in being agile enough to dodge her attacks and the rather dubious benefit of being just short enough to duck under the wide sweeps of her blade. The room was soon filled with the sound of steel striking steel, which sounded damnably realistic despite the weapons we used being mere illusions, and each time I parried a blow the greater magical strength behind her blade was enough to force mine away with contemptuous ease. Nevertheless, I trusted my reflexes enough to at least deflect the great blows of her sword away from me, and at least here I did not have to concern myself with the weapon shattering under the immense force of her attacks. Yet as we slowly began to get the measure of one another the rhythm of our strikes and parries steadily increased in tempo, until I was under a veritable onslaught of slashing blades and flailing hooves.

Princess Luna’s fighting style was very different from that of her elder sibling; Celestia tends to adopt a cool, disciplined, and calculating approach to fencing, relying upon a distinct set of well-practiced and superbly executed moves studied from the vast array of manuals written about the sport and honed to perfection, whereas Luna most certainly does not. Her attacks came as a series of frantic, energetic slashes with none of her sister’s elegance or grace, but for her complete and total lack of any sort of subtlety, not even attempting any of the fancier techniques such as feinting, it seemed that pure sociopathic aggression was more than enough to make up for it. My own strategy centred around trying to physically dodge her attacks instead of parrying them, which was something much more easily said than done, as while her attacks were entirely predictable and telegraphed to the point that I could ‘read’ what she was going to do at least three moves in advance, the sheer blinding speed and ferocity of the onslaught of illusionary steel and her own deftness in turning back my own counter-attacks meant that I was permanently on the back hoof. I had hoped to tire her out and strike when she was exhausted, but given her nigh-limitless stamina this proved to be a very bad idea.

Lips curled back in a snarl, Luna shrieked in rage as she brought her blade down again and again, prevented from smashing into my skull only by my own sword. Yet each blow pushed my guard down further and further, filling the room with noise such that I feared anypony lingering outside must have heard, until with a burst of energy I forced my blade back and just managed to push Luna’s off to the side where it phased harmlessly into the stone floor. With my horn throbbing painfully from exertion I scampered past her with my tail between my legs to the other side of the room, and even though I knew that the swords could not inflict any actual damage upon me, the same could not be said of the alicorn herself, who I feared may forget that this was only intended to be a ‘friendly’ sparring match.

My opponent spun upon her hooves to face me, murder in her eyes, and stamped a hoof in angry frustration upon the stones. A thin spider’s web of cracks spread across the paving slab. “Stop dancing away like a fairy and fight me!”

Originally I had planned to just throw the fight and be done with it – I would put a brief struggle, lose graciously, and then Luna can leave me alone once more – but as the fight wore on I had become put off by the idea of losing to her of all ponies. I am not a terribly competitive stallion, especially when I know that being in the limelight tends to result in somepony else taking note and dreaming up another highly creative way for me to die in the name of Equestria, even in sporting events, but for some peculiar reason the idea of having to lose to her without at least putting up a decent fight simply felt wrong to me. Maybe it was merely the adrenaline flowing through my veins, energising my system and clouding my mind with bloodlust, or perhaps I merely saw this as the perfect opportunity to vent all of the built-up frustration and suppressed anger that I held towards her without the additional risk of divine retribution, or that I just wanted to prove her wrong for once and that the only way I could achieve this nigh-impossible feat was simply to win.

“Then try harder to bloody hit me,” I snapped. There was one chance for victory, however slim and risky, and it relied on exploiting Luna’s exuberant fighting style; she, like many other opponents that I have faced, was very much a pony given over to her baser passions, and, in theory, if I were to push her far enough she may make a mistake. “I heard Princess Luna was a mighty warrior, not this pansy standing before me!”

My words certainly had an effect, as she paused, staring open-mouthed in apparent shock as her mind appeared to be struggling to process the idea that somepony had dared to insult her. “Foal!” she shrieked, lunging forth suddenly with her blade aimed squarely at my head, as I guessed she might. I rolled out of the way, but not quick enough as I felt the disconcertingly real brush of air being displaced by the wide arc of her swinging blade, and I had barely enough time to scramble to my hooves and raise my sword to block a veritable barrage of blows. The last one stuck, and inch by horrible inch she forced her blade down upon mine, and all the while her snarling face stared down with hollow, pinprick eyes burning.

“Before the first of your lineage was even conceived I was named Warmistress of Equestria; thousands upon thousands of soldiers were at my command and where Celestia’s silver-tongued diplomacy failed I personally brought fire and death upon those ponies foolish enough to think they could resist Equestrian domination!”

[The ‘Warmistress’ or ‘Warmaster’ is the absolute highest rank in the Equestrian military, superior to that of Field Marshal, and thus far has been held only by myself, Princess Luna, and the Iron Duke of Trottingham. Historically, this rank was only bestowed specially during times of total war, such the Unification Wars, the Nightmare Heresy, and the Gryphon invasions of Equestria, in which the entire Equestrian state and its ponies must be organised to fight for their very survival under the command of a single, all-powerful leader.]

The stabbing pain in my horn grew with the exertion that drained my magic, and it spread through that bony protrusion and into my brain like a hot poker straight through the eye sockets. I shouted in pain, and it might have been my imagination but it looked as if Luna was enjoying seeing me suffer. There was but one chance for me to get out of this, and after sucking in a deep breath I snapped my head to the side towards the door, affecting to look as if somepony was intruding upon our fight. Luna’s grin was replaced by a slight, worried frown, and she turned her head to follow my gaze. With my opponent thus distracted I seized my chance and dove to the right, the swinging blade missing me by scant inches. I had barely enough time to thrust forth when she turned and swatted my sword aside with contemptuous ease.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said, taking a few steps back to put some distance between myself and the enraged mare.

Luna shook her head indignantly. “No, what could possibly have given you that impression?” she said, her words positively dripping with sarcasm.

“Can I ask why?”

Slowly and cautiously, with her sword levitating in the en garde position just before her, she stalked forth like a sleek panther approaching its defenceless prey. “What do you know of your own lineage, Blueblood? Of the so-called House of Blood?”

I gave a vague sort of shrug, but not letting my guard down for a moment. There came a lull in the fighting, which I took full advantage of in trying to get my breath back. My chest felt tight, abominably so, and I wondered if today might be a good time to finally give up my cigar habit, assuming that I survived this sparring match first. Sweat soaked into my black jacket, which then stuck to my fur in a manner that felt most unpleasant, and I did not relish the prospect of having to unpeel myself from it later; if there was a later. I probably smelt bad, too. “We’re one of the oldest aristocratic families in Canterlot, having ruled there since—”

“I speak of the first of your line,” Luna interrupted. She now stood close enough for me to be able to touch my sword to hers, but, by some strange, unspoken accord between us the fight had been put on hold so that she could sermonise to me about something. Nevertheless, my plan appeared to be working, though somehow I felt that stabbing her in the face while she was still haranguing me would be quite inappropriate, not out of any sense of chivalry, mind you, but out of a fear of what she might do if I had so cheated to win. “Princess Hotblood, one of the foremost generals of the Royal Guard in the wars for Equestria’s unification. No matter how bleak the situation looked, she was always there leading from the front, not afraid to sully her hooves in the blood of our enemies, and always inspiring our troops forward to greater feats of valour with her powerful rhetoric and undiminished fighting spirit.

“When I was consumed by Nightmare Moon, she remained steadfastly loyal to Princess Celestia, and when I fought with my sister in the Battle of the Everfree, she had put herself directly between us. This lone pony, a unicorn only just elevated to an alicorn, stood before me, the corrupted Princess of the Night with all the Legions of the Nightmare and the daemonic forces of Tartarus fuelling my power, and pleaded with me to end this insane war and to spare Celestia. She said that even after all the horrors that Nightmare Moon had inflicted upon Equestria in the name of Eternal Night there was still some good left in me, crying out against all that I had done. Nightmare Moon...” – she paused, and shook her head as a pained expression pulled at her face – “...I killed her in cold blood. Her sacrifice proved to Celestia that I had fallen completely to the Nightmare, body and soul, and that the only way to save Equestria and was to use the Elements of Harmony and banish me for one thousand years until I could be cleansed.

“And now one thousand years later I find her memory all but forgotten by her descendents, who are nothing more than a corrupt family of soft, decadent, disgusting nobles more content to wallow in their own depravity and excess than doing their duty for Princess and Country, as Hotblood had done so before. But you, Blueblood... I think you might be better than that.”

So I did not live up to her absurdly high standards set by somepony who lived and died over one thousand years ago and is only tangentially related to me. I found this to be a little underwhelming, and quite insulting actually; the majority of ponies who actively dislike me (who became an increasingly smaller minority as my reputation ballooned beyond all proportion, but at this relatively early stage of my life if my list of enemies and their grievances with me, which usually involved various acts of debauchery with many a noblepony’s impressionable daughter or significant amounts of money lost in gambling, were to be published it would have to be spread out amongst more volumes than the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Equestria) did so simply on my own merits and not those set by a long-dead ancestor of mine, but in Luna’s case it appeared to be done so through the lens of how everything about modern Equestria offends her somehow.

No, it couldn’t have been just that; the uncharacteristically quiet and pensive look on her face showed that she must still feel immense guilt at murdering her adopted sister, which, in her own peculiar way of dealing with such things, she was taking out on me rather than confronting the issue directly. She was a pony still stuck one thousand years in the past; either unable or unwilling to adapt to a world that has changed beyond all belief. Well, if there was any progress to be made, I’d have to force her to, somehow...

I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully, internally debating my next move. We could not remain at this impasse forever, but when the fighting would resume I wanted it to be entirely on my terms and to my advantage, and that meant enraging her to the point where she would make a mistake. Yes, it was very risky, and once again the thought of simply admitting defeat crossed my mind; there was no shame in losing to a better skilled opponent, particularly if she happened to be as temperamental as my Auntie Luna, but, with my gorge rising, it felt that if I admitted defeat here then I would do so with everything that she had inflicted upon me over the past two years, especially the more recent insanity of following me here.

“She was an idiot,” I said, inflecting my voice to sound as offensively flippant as possible, which was something that seemed to come naturally to me. “She got herself killed pointlessly.”

“She gave her life for her country!” snapped Luna, and she lunged forwards, her sword aimed directly at my chest. Having expected this, I darted to the side and pushed her blade away with my own. “There is no higher honour than to die for your country!”

With her face twisted into an outraged snarl, she pressed the attack, seeking to remove my head from my shoulders with a wide sweep, which I dodged by leaping backwards. I landed on my cot, though it very nearly ended in disaster as my flailing hooves struggled to find purchase on the soft surface of it.

“That’s very easy for you to say,” I said, wiping my bedraggled mane from eyes, “you’re immortal.”

“What would you know?” she shrieked, her voice raw with emotion. “All I ever wanted was to atone for my sins, but how can I when nopony will give me the chance, and least of all Celestia! I want to cleanse my soul in the fires of battle, but no! I am to stay behind in Canterlot, locked away while others die in my stead, and I refuse to let that happen!”

“Have you tried saying ‘sorry’?”

“One word will not wash the blood from my hooves!”

“Have you even tried?”

Luna frowned for the briefest of moments, considering my words. I saw my opportunity and, knowing I was not likely to get another, I dived forth off my cot. She stumbled back, swinging her blade wildly, but it was far too late. I hit the ground between her forehooves and, with her weapon still raised above me, I rammed my sword straight into her barrel. The blade phased through skin harmlessly, but nevertheless the mare shouted in barely-contained frustration.

“You cheated!” she shrieked indignantly, her dinner plate-sized hooves scrambling away from me as if I was something unpleasant that she might step on, which, given the damage she had done to my floor just moments before, looked like a distinct possibility.

I slowly dragged myself to my hooves and looked to my opponent, who, while not quite as angry as I feared she might be, still looked very much displeased. Her sword evaporated into the ether, and so did mine. “I used psychology to my advantage,” I said, stumbling back over to my desk to retrieve my towel, “in order to make up for my disadvantages, of course. If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t mean any of the words I said.” Well, that was a bare-faced lie, of course, but I didn’t feel like telling her.

Her response was another one of those trademark glowers, which I did my best to avoid by wiping the sweat and muck from my face. My limbs and horn felt as if they had been filled with acid, while my brain swam disconcertingly in a manner vaguely reminiscent of a hangover without the memory of having a good time prior to it, and I felt oddly nauseated by the whole experience. Winning, it seemed, was not all it was cracked up to be, especially when one over-exerts oneself as I had just done, nevertheless, even with my ‘cheating’, Luna seemed content enough to consider that victory well-deserved, and her sour expression developed into a wide, broad grin. I desperately needed a drink.

“I didn’t expect you to fight so well,” she said, and to my surprise she actually bowed before me, “or employ such a clever stratagem.”

“You’ll find I’m full of surprises like that,” I said, truthfully enough.

“Yes, victory provides its own justification. Nevertheless, you’ve taught me an important lesson – never underestimate an opponent, for even the softest, most effete of exteriors can conceal a will of iron.”

“Uh, thank you.” I thought that was a compliment, it was always rather difficult to tell with her.

Her smile widened, and she stepped to my side and, hesitantly at first, stretched a vast wing protectively over me, in imitation of Celestia’s quite affectionate displays. I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable with that, but being rather exhausted and not wanting to upset her relatively good mood I allowed it.

“All warfare is about willpower,” she continued the lecture, “from the highest level of command to the civilians that support Equestria’s war machine to the individual soldier fighting for his life on the field. The sharpest blade in the arsenal is useless without the willpower and the discipline to use it effectively in combat. In you I see the indomitable spirit of Princess Hotblood still survives; against a far superior opponent you remained calm, developed a strategy, and used it to great effect. You used your mind as much as your blade against me, and that is the reason I named you commissar.”

I was about to make my excuses and leave, hoping to take a breath of fresh air and some much needed time to myself on one of the many castle’s battlements when I was interrupted by three heavy knocks on the door, and in an instant Princess Luna was replaced by the smaller form of my personal life guard. The door swung open drunkenly, and in stepped Cannon Fodder, who looked at me with his usual vacant expression for a few awkwardly long seconds, apparently having noticed that I was in rather a state, before deciding that I had everything under control.

“Captain Red Coat has called an emergency meeting for all officers,” he said, in his usual flat monotone. “The enemy has been sighted and is advancing towards us.”

I darted to my window, as if possessed by some strange desire to prove my aide wrong. Yet there, the bleak, empty plains that surrounded this wretched little structure in the middle of nowhere were marred by what looked like a huge black coffee stain on the quivering horizon. There was only one thing that could possibly look like that here, and it was the same sight that I had seen on the side of the Macintosh Hills at Black Venom Pass; a vast horde of Changelings massing, and, like a black tide of chitinous horrors, advancing inexorably upon our exposed little fort, ready to wash it away with sheer numbers. The plan, it seemed, was starting to go awry.

Author's Note

Yes, I know this one is a little late, but I've been out of the country for the past week or so in Italy. It's a lovely place; we stayed in the city of Pisa where, yes, everyone was trying to do that forced perspective 'leaning against the tower' thing.

Anyway, there's more background fluff in this one. I've been mentioning the Nightmare Heresy for quite a while now, and perhaps it might be time to explore that in greater detail. Perhaps a series of stories set during that period? We'll see.

Bloodstained (Part 15)

Part 15

It occurs to me that thus far in my ignoble career I have spent more time attending meetings than I have actually on the battlefield. Not that I am complaining, as I think most sensible ponies, of which there appears to be an ever-decreasing number in Equestria, can agree that it is far better to be merely bored for a few hours than to be in constant mortal danger. But meetings tend to make for rather onerous reading and are even more tedious for me to write about; and as I fear that these writings will one day be read for the purposes of light entertainment amongst ponies with nothing better to do than waste their own time reading the inane ramblings of Equestria's biggest fraud than the sort of serious, scholarly interest that I had originally intended, for the benefit of you, dear reader, I shall gloss over the following as best I can without depriving you of any salient information.

This emergency meeting was held upon the raised dais in the Great Hall, where the dilapidated old throne, its various accoutrements, and the surrounding piles of debris had been cleared and the area repurposed into a makeshift planning centre for Captain Red Coat. In the place of the aforementioned mess was a large wooden table, and piled atop this was the usual array of maps, papers, notes, drafted orders, requisition lists, orders of battle, and other examples of every conceivable sort of paperwork that the Royal Guard accumulates during the average offensive operation. In hindsight, it was rather amusing; the soldiers had worked so hard to clear the rubbish left behind by the Diamond Dogs, the sturdier items of which had been thrown into a large pile where a large, gaping hole in the fortress walls had been torn centuries before in a vain effort by Lieutenant Southern Cross to make it defensible once more, only for the officers to move in and make another mess with their papers and assorted stationary to be cleared up by those same luckless soldiers, should they survive the coming battle, at a later date.

All of the officers of the battalion and Sergeant Bramley Apple of the 16th Royal Artillery Regiment crowded around this non-descript slab of wood, probably a door purloined from elsewhere in this castle, propped up on four piles of bricks, and each stared intently at a rather large chart draped over it like a cloth over a dining table. It was simply a map of Black Venom Pass and its surrounding environment, one of thousands of identical standardised charts printed out and delivered to officers upon their arrival to the frontlines; indeed, I had a smaller copy of this tucked into my coat pocket, another pinned up on a wall in my chambers just above my cot like a poster of some vapid idol of a teenager’s lust-filled fantasies, and one more having served as an impromptu hoofkerchief when Cannon Fodder suffered from a particularly nasty and very messy bout of hay fever. We were all separated from the Great Hall and the off-duty soldiers relaxing by a series of large blank wooden panels erected around the dais, rather like modesty screens seen in the boudoirs of mares for the purposes of changing into some enticing lingerie, though any such attempt at maintaining the secrecy of this meeting was somewhat foiled by the fact that this screen did not block sound, which was proved by the abominable racket that the off-duty soldiers made as they relaxed after a long day of work. At any rate, complete secrecy was probably not an issue here, as the common soldiery would be informed of the impending slaughter in due course. [That the need to set up this meeting as quickly as possible outweighed the commanding officers’ need for privacy is probably a more plausible explanation behind this lack of secrecy.]

Twilight Sparkle and ‘Cloudless Sky’ were also present; the former was quite content to sit in the corner of the room and observe quietly as she was wont to do at such things, while the latter hovered silently by my shoulder as usual. The other officers appeared to have accepted the presence of those two, even if I did not, and though they continued to treat both Twilight and my disguised Auntie as being merely pieces of furniture that occasionally talked and required regular feeding and bathroom breaks (though, to be frank, I was not so sure that Princess Luna even needed those) it was still a relative step up from their previous barely-concealed hostility in the case of the former and their complete indifference in the case of the latter. As for Cannon Fodder, my erstwhile aide, he stood guard by the wooden partitions, relying upon his usual obstinate personality, messy appearance, and ungodly odour as usual to dissuade anypony from trying to spy on our meeting.

The officers wandered into the room one by one, and the forced attempt at small talk made by some of the other officers already present had failed to lighten the mood. An awkward and heavy silence had thus fallen upon our little gathering, as together we each silently contemplated upon what was to be done now that the plan, which in its initial phases had been going fairly swimmingly as far as Royal Guard battle strategies were concerned, was now about as useful as a chastity belt made out of chocolate. The map before us told us in no uncertain terms exactly how royally bucked we were about to be; our position was marked by a small flag depicting the battalion’s standard, the Changeling hordes were represented by a single black flag, entirely devoid of any symbolism for their unimaginative kind has no need for such frivolous things, planted disconcertingly close to ours, and representing the rest of Army Group Centre was the Royal Standard still hovering uselessly at the Equestrian end of Black Venom Pass, apparently ready to advance. It did not take a military genius to work out that our situation was now quite hopeless, though being officers of the Royal Guard none of us, least of all myself, were willing to admit that to one another; judging by the relative distances between us, the Changelings, and Army Group Centre, there was no way that Crimson Arrow's force could launch their frontal attack on the horde as planned before the enemy had reached and slaughtered us all in this fortress first.

“Thank you for coming here on such short notice,” said Captain Red Coat, after the last officer to arrive had stumbled into the room. The subtle change that I had observed in him over the past few weeks or so since his bloody and horrific first experience of the rather less pleasant side of modern warfare had only grown further; in his eyes and in the way that he carried himself there seemed to be a greater sense of maturity than there was the first time that I had met the lad. His youth and inexperience was still apparent, as was his evident fear and anxiety with what we were about to undertake, but it seemed tempered with a greater sense of experience that gave him a sense of maturity in excess of his scant seventeen years of life.

“I won’t beat about the bush here,” he continued, turning his gaze over the ponies assembled around the table, “the Changeling army has moved from its original position occupying Black Venom Pass and is now advancing rapidly in our direction. They’ll probably be here tonight, which is why I’ve called this meeting to work out what is to be done about this.”

It was Lieutenant Scarlet Letter who spoke first, which was profoundly irritating to me as I had spent the better part of my time in this miserable little castle trying to avoid him and thus far I had mostly succeeded. “Are you certain, sir?” he asked incredulously, though the tone of his voice was inflected with his usual pompous, condescending attitude that I found to be just so grating from a pony that I outranked in almost every sense of the word. Although it's not entirely relevant to the description of this meeting, I found myself quietly impressed with the way that he had kept his uniform absolutely immaculate despite the ever-present dust and the lack of time with which to polish it; his golden armour shone brightly even in these gloomy surroundings and the crystal star upon his breast reflected the myriad dim candles as though fireflies were trapped within, and somehow he was able to keep his fur and mane clean and devoid of the usual dust and grime that the rest of us were so caked in. That it was at the expense of his platoon’s own pay and time, having forced the unicorns under his command to buff and clean his armour and surrender their own hygiene equipment for his own vanity had not occurred to me then. It was all unimportant at the time, anyway.

The Captain cocked his head to one side curiously and waved a steel hoof in the vague direction of one of the castle's many portholes. “Have you looked out of the window lately?” he snapped, and the sarcasm that tinted his voice sounded rather unbecoming of pony of his relative youth. I put this uncharacteristic display down to his frayed nerves, though inwardly I was quite impressed; perhaps I was rubbing off on him rather more than I had first thought, though I would have to make sure that it was the better parts of my personality, of which I will admit there are very few, that he absorbs.

Lieutenant Scarlet Letter snorted derisively and shook his head. “I thought the plan was to support the attack on Black Venom Pass? The plan stated that the Changelings would remain by the valley, not attack us.”

“It’s damned unsporting of the enemy not to follow our battle plan,” I remarked dryly, eliciting a few quiet, polite titters from a couple of the other officers, a rather hurt glare from Scarlet Letter, and a slightly delayed and awkward giggle from Captain Red Coat. “Didn’t anypony tell them they’re to stay put?”

While everypony took that as just another display of the sort of casual flippancy and Tirek-may-care bravado in the face of almost certain death that they expect out of a hero of Equestria such as I, it would be more accurate to say that I was trying to mask not only the inchoate terror growing within me for the approaching black mass visible just beyond the window, but also my incredulity at the insanity of Scarlet Letter’s remark. Of course the Changelings aren’t going to follow our plan; it would be utter madness on their part for them to do so if they had somehow became aware of our presence. In fact, given their expertise in guile and gathering information, as seen in their successful-for-five-minutes capture of fair Canterlot, I would have been surprised if they weren't eavesdropping on this very conversation. If they were consciously following our plan then this war of extermination we were embarking on would have become all the more justifiable.

With urgency apparent in his voice, Captain Red Coat impatiently tapped a hoof on the table, though he looked rather sheepish as he did so, and continued with his briefing. “Our overall goal is to destroy the Changeling army in a battle of annihilation by supporting the main assault on Black Venom Pass. Obviously that’s no longer a possibility as the Changelings will reach us before the rest of Army Group Centre can make its attack, so I propose that we remain here and hold Fort E-5150 until General Crimson Arrow’s force comes to relieve us. That way we can still achieve the primary aim of this operation. I have already sent a messenger back to Dodge Junction with an urgent request for reinforcement.”

It was then that Captain Red Coat started detailing our plan, which has of course been recorded by historians and armchair generals as a shining example of how to withstand an assault on a fortified location, but my overriding memory of it could be better described as a general sense of barely-contained horror at the sheer hopelessness of it. His speech was halting, stammering, and filled with anxiety, and from time to time he would pause for seemingly great lengths of time to consult some scrap of paper which had whatever salient piece of information he need on, but he proceeded with his task admirably. Our gallant commanding officer had, apparently by himself, though I could not discount the possibility of him getting some nocturnal assistance in the shape of Princess Luna Though my younger sister likes to maintain an aura of mystique around her unique ability to walk through the dreams of my little ponies, she can confirm that she was providing some assistance to Captain Red Coat in his development into an officer. She would also like it be made clear to those who read this that she ultimately sees herself merely as a source of guidance for her subjects, and that whatever epiphany or personal development may occur during those dreams is entirely up to the pony in question, devised a plan of staggered defence, by which time would be bought by holding the Changelings for as long as possible at a series of defensive lines starting at the outer walls of the fortress, and then receding into the courtyard and into the fortress proper. It was hoped that by drawing the Changelings into the narrow tunnels and corridors of the fortress their advantage in numbers could be blunted, and that in doing so we could hold out for as long as it was necessary for Crimson Arrow to finally come to our rescue. As much as I disliked this plan, when everything else boiled down to simply 'fight as hard as you can until rescue or death, whichever comes first' it was hardly the most extravagant of strategies, thus far neither I or anypony else present could venture any other alternative. That is, except for one other pony.

Lieutenant Scarlet Letter raised his hoof like an over-eager school-colt. "One question, sir," he said. "Have you taken complete leave of your senses, sir?"

"I—" Captain Red Coat spluttered uselessly for a moment, as indeed did much of the other officers present, and his eyes opened wide and were on the verge of popping out of their sockets like champagne corks. "I beg your pardon?"

"Your plan, sir, is bordering on the ludicrous; we number a mere three hundred fighting ponies with scant artillery and engineer support, and out there are thousands upon thousands of Changelings. It's a simple case of mathematics. There's no way we can possibly hope to stand against such numbers."

"Then what would you propose instead?"

"It's simple," said Scarlet Letter, with an insufferably smug expression on his face. "We retreat back to Dodge Junction. The offensive is lost, sir. The plan is in ruins, and we should fall back to preserve the lives of everypony in this battalion."

He had a point, though I hated to admit it, and clearly it was having an effect on the other officers present. A few murmured quietly with one another, while some were more openly nodding or voicing their approval. Retreat, however, was something that just could not be countenanced, at least not while I was still standing here in my death-black uniform and with the stupid, skull-faced hat perched upon my head, and glaring at everypony with an expression calculated to instil the fear of Faust in even the most ardent of atheists. Indeed, Lieutenant Southern Cross, tactful as ever, illustrated this point perfectly by nodding his head in my direction and drawing a line across his neck with a hoof, while making some none-too-subtle gagging noises in his throat.

"Well," said Captain Red Coat, looking increasingly exasperated and in danger of losing control of this meeting as the murmurings of the other officers against him only grew louder. "I'm open to all alternatives. I just think we should try and salvage the plan as much as possible so the offensive isn't wasted."

Of course, anypony reading this would have naturally assumed that I would have advised running away, and I would be lying if I said that the thought had not crossed my mind, but the memory of our rather hellish advance through the mountains was still very fresh in my mind and the risk that the Changelings were trying to lure us into an ambush there was far too great to even consider this course of action. No, as much as I hated it, my best chance of survival lay remaining within these crumbling walls, and if I could devise some way of ensuring that I am kept safely inside and away from the bulk of the fighting, so much the better.

Nevertheless, I couldn't say it in those exact words, at least, not while Twilight Sparkle was scribbling away in the corner, dutiful as ever, and recording these words to be read by every important and learned pony in the land (unlike this scribbled nonsense, of course). "If retreat was an option, then I assure you I'd be the first pony out of those gates and running for the hills," I said, speaking the truth for once in my career but taking care to inflect it as a joke, though all I got for it were a few slightly odd looks.

“But as Captain Red Coat has just said,” I continued, dropping the aforementioned inflection and taking on the more serious demeanour that this situation warranted, “retreat is not an option here. And as far as the Commissariat is concerned, it is never an option unless it is strategically and tactically advantageous to do so.”

To underline this point I affected a glower that would have made Princess Luna flush with pride, and drew this cold, severe gaze across the officers assembled around the table, taking care to focus on those who, in one way or another, agreed with Scarlet Letter’s idea, before turning my attention to the irritating little stallion himself. Again, using that same technique for intimidation that Luna often uses on just about everypony, myself in particular, I held that stare for what must have been an uncomfortably long amount of time for him. He was unable to meet my gaze, and suddenly found something very interesting to look at on the table in front of him, and he squirmed awkwardly like a naughty schoolfoal brought before the headmaster to answer for some egregious sin.

“And I want to make this absolutely clear,” I said, satisfied that he had been suitably cowed into submission. The sound echoed loudly in the dim silence that followed, and even the constant noise from the soldiers beyond the partition seemed somewhat hushed. “The Royal Commissariat will not tolerate any defeatism in the ranks of the Royal Guard, nor will it tolerate any officer trying to usurp the authority of his superior. Our situation is not so dire that we need to fall back. I will overlook this only once, Lieutenant, as you are correct in saying that we are greatly outnumbered by the enemy, and we need every single available officer to fight and lead. That is why you have not been removed from command. My fellow commissars, however, may not be so lenient in the future.”

I left the implications unsaid; better for them to allow their imaginations to fill in the details. Lieutenant Scarlet Letter mumbled something quietly to himself which sounded like he agreed with me, but I could tell by the hurt and somewhat betrayed look in his expression, crestfallen and pale with horror, that this was most certainly not the case. I resolved to keep an eye on him during the coming battle, as he, more than anypony else present, was most likely to break under the strain. And if I were to shove him in the way of the Changelings should they wander too close and claim that he died bravely for Princesses and Country then that would have been an added bonus.

“Is that clear, Lieutenant?” I said, still holding that glare.

Lieutenant Scarlet Letter stammered hopelessly, “I-I… but…”

“I said: Is. That. Clear?” I snapped, punctuating each word by tapping a hoof on the table.

“Y-yes, sir,” he said, all but hiding underneath the table.

The rest of the officers likewise mumbled or nodded, though Lieutenant Southern Cross was grinning inanely as if he found it somehow funny. Captain Red Coat looked at me with a thankful expression, which I returned with a silent, reassuring nod of my head.

At any rate, it seemed to settle the officers for now. There were few other questions, which were mainly related to the exact disposition of the troops, where the most defensible locations of the fortress were, and if there were any gaps that the officers needed to be aware of. I remained silent, stepping back a little from the table to better observe the reactions of my fellow comrades; the overall majority appeared apprehensive while others were more or less confident depending upon their individual dispositions, which was to be expected, but nevertheless all approached the business of battle with the same level of professionalism expected of Their Highnesses' Royal Guards. Each was already a veteran, bloodied in some shape or form in the Battle for Black Venom Pass as I had been, and therefore nopony was under any illusions about the formidable capabilities of the enemy. All, that is, with the exception of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter, who glowered at Red Coat from across the table, his face cast in dim orange by the dying light of the setting sun, and with an expression like he had bitten into a slice of toast spread with marmite after being assured that it was chocolate spread.

"On the ramparts and in the courtyard the battalion will fight according to separate platoons," Red Coat continued with growing confidence, "but inside the castle itself they will have to split into mixed sections, each with a unicorn trained in pyrokinetic magic. The narrow corridors will make flame spells deadly, but we'll need to be careful with them. Each squad will cover a particular corridor or room until we are relieved. I won't lie to you; this will be tough, but I think we'll pull through."

“As the Princess wills,” I said flatly. The words were echoed with equal lack of enthusiasm around the table.

"I think..." said Captain Red Coat hesitantly once he had finished stumbling through his plan to a sea of sober, ashen faces, "I think this offers our best chance of survival and in completing our main objective." There was a mumble of assent from the officers, though a few of the Solar Guard officers showed much more enthusiasm than their darker brethren, and as Sergeant Bramley Apple was not a commissioned officer he was not allowed to show anything more than stoic obedience, which he did so commendably.

"Well, cheer up everypony!" he said with sudden renewed vigour, although the decidedly fake grin stretching across his face and a slight tremor in his voice belied the anxiety that he was feeling. "It could be worse."

At that point I sincerely wanted to murder him. Of course it could get worse; if one is ever in a situation where it could not get worse, by which I mean absolutely anything that happens might be considered an improvement on one's circumstances, then one is in quite serious trouble. Thankfully, I have yet to find myself in such a predicament, though there is always plenty of time and opportunity for that in future, I expect.

One officer, an equally youthful pegasus lieutenant of the 1st Solar Guard Regiment piped up incredulously, "How? How could it possibly get any worse than this, sir?"

"It could be raining," said Captain Red Coat sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders, "I suppose."

***

When it did indeed start raining two hours later, I wished I had murdered him and that bratty little lieutenant as well when I had the chance. The rain in the Badlands, as it is in much of the arid south of Equestria, is quite rare, but when it does come it certainly makes up for the weeks and months of scorching heat and muggy humidity by coming down in one almighty unceasing torrent of precipitation, as if Faust herself was pouring water from a bucket down upon our tiny fortification. The sky was dark and leaden, though the west, where the sun was still rather hesitant about this whole setting business, was still free of the foreboding and dark storm clouds that lingered unsettlingly above us. It was not at all like the rain in Trottingham, which tends to come in small fits and starts, April showers, and the occasional summer downpour; I know this because as I made my rounds to check on how the stallions were doing before the inevitable battle it was all that they would talk about. In hindsight, I think it was merely some form of coping mechanism to deal with the stresses and anxieties that they were undoubtedly feeling before battle, but it still felt damned peculiar to me at the time to see what I had thought to be merely a base stereotype actually had a degree of truth to it.

The soldiers seemed eager to 'have another crack at the bugs', so to speak. Especially after the indecisive battle at Black Venom Pass, and, if anything, they were rather pleased that the enemy was coming to them and not the other way around. The response from General Crimson Arrow, received a few hours after the meeting by way of a pegasus runner, expressing his approval of Captain Red Coat's plan, which proved to me that my friend had a fully-functioning brain cell after all, only helped to boost their already high morale. I, of course, was not so certain, but I put on my usual brave face as usual as I made my way through the fortress and its battlements, getting utterly drenched by the rain as I did so. [It is likely that Blueblood did not protect himself from the rain with magical shielding, as most unicorns would, in order to conserve his magic for the battle.] The troops continued to engage in their lively banter, and it would often devolve into the usual pre-battle rituals of trading friendly insults and decidedly unfunny jokes - their sergeant's face was ‘so ugly that the Changelings would surrender instantly at the sight of it’, for example. Frankly, I am completely at a loss as to how they could have possibly maintained their spirits so well while I was metaphorically coming apart at the seams inside with sheer, unabated terror, but I expect that they, the lower orders of Equestria's society, are somewhat more resistant to such hardships and the concept of their own mortality than the likes of a soft, pampered, effete little thing such as me.

After I had made my rounds for the evening, dispensing the usual pleasantries and making the appropriate noises to keep up the facade that I was still doing my job properly, I elected to spend the remainder of my time before the battle, which could have very well been my last few hours upon this world, alone atop an isolated rampart on the outer walls of the fortress. Cannon Fodder had retreated back to his room, either to complete some more paperwork or to engage in a certain solo gentlecolt's leisure activity with his magazine collection I don't know and I don't want to. I protected myself from the torrential rain by hiding under a small tarpaulin with a few boxes of oats rations, though I was still soaked to the skin, and with naught else for company but a couple of sentries a short distance away doing their hardest to pretend that I didn't exist, an expensively imported Hayvana cigar, which likely cost more than what the peasant who had rolled it earns in a year, a brazier with which to warm myself, and a small hipflask full of what was left of that Scoltish whisky. Before anypony reading this assumes that I am a drunkard who needs to dull his senses before a battle, I would like to assure you that you are indeed correct, but as I am also a pony of moderate temperament, and in having a paranoid streak I took care not to imbibe too much so as to avoid impairing the natural instincts upon which I rely so much for getting myself out of sticky situations. Considering that I might be dead within the next few hours, one can forgive me for wanting to enjoy what might have been the very last opportunity to do so.

The sun by now was halfway buried into the Macintosh Hills, and as I looked out at the bleak, empty vista before me it seemed like a great orange sphere printed on a flimsy sheet of paper torn in half roughly to leave a broken, jagged edge against the rugged terrain of those hills. The dark storm clouds and the tiny sliver of visible sky burned with luminescent yellows, oranges, and reds, like the glowing embers of my cigar, and the very first stars of Luna's night sky battled with the dying light of the sun to make themselves visible to the ponies below. Just beyond the parapet, like a cancerous growth spread upon the flat and featureless plains of the Badlands, were the Changelings, and far closer than they had been when I first glimpsed the vast, numberless horde from my chamber's window. It was a vast, undulating black smear, tinged with an unhealthy shade of lambent green and bathed in the orange-red glow of the setting sun, and stretched seemingly to the quivering horizon itself, and seemed to ripple and shudder like a tumultuous ocean. As I gazed hopelessly into the heart of the swarm, puffing away at the cigar and taking the occasional sip from my flask, I found it had a strange, hypnotic quality to it. The way that the individual Changelings had become subsumed into a singular, vast entity, seemingly without end or boundaries, unstoppable and irresistible, and each individual merely a single component of a greater whole was at the same time both mesmerizing and utterly horrific. And yet, there was a strange sort of beauty to the sight, as there often is in war where one discovers a sight so magnificent in spite of all the terror it might invoke that it is impossible for one not to feel overawed by it all; the sight of tens of thousands of Changeling beasts advancing in perfect synchronicity upon our beleaguered little fortress was one such sight.

Every few minutes or so, the cannons of Bramley Apple's scratch artillery battery roared, with yellow and orange tongues of flame and smoke spitting forth from the soot-blackened barrels. The guns were placed behind me in the crumbling castle keep and atop the roofs where the precious black powder was protected from the rain by a series of vast tarpaulins, eerily reminiscent of the marquees erected for the Canterlot Garden Party. Thin white streaks were cast across the dreary, dark sky; the smoke left by the burning fuses of explosive shells fired by the formidable howitzers, mortars, and cannons (the 'holy trinity' as Bramley jokingly referred to them) into the midst of the storm. A few moments later there would be another dull 'crump', as of a firecracker being set off, and a cloud of fire and smoke and sickly green viscera would bloom somewhere within the black horde where a mortar shell had exploded, or thin streak of blood and gore would be torn into the mass by a cannon ball. Each suitably impressive hit was followed by a ragged cheer from the stallions standing sentry on the parapets, who watched the bombardment intently, though for all the good it was doing against the numberless swarm Bramley's cannons might as well have been loaded with custard pies and candy floss, for each hole or rent torn into the black mass was quickly filled, healed, as it were, until there was no more trace left of the carnage wrought.

My quiet reverie, however, was interrupted most rudely by the sound of a throat clearing noisily behind me, much in that brusque manner of a pony deliberately doing so to grab another's attention. Sighing in resignation that my precious solitude had been interrupted, I turned and tilted my head to the side to find the last pony on Equus that I wanted to see here standing fetlock-deep in the sunken, soaked mud.

"Hi, Prince Blueblood!" greeted Twilight Sparkle, still clad in her armour with the helmet firmly buckled in the way that Sergeant Major Square Basher had instructed her. Levitating a few feet above her was a translucent purple shield to protect her from the downpour; perfectly circular in shape and giving off a lambent magenta glow that bathed the soggy ground near her hooves in that dim light. She ducked under the tarpaulin to stand by my side, and upon dispelling her shield the rainwater which had collected atop its surface suddenly fell with an almighty splash and drenched her utterly. Were I not already so soaked with rain that the cloth of my uniform was sticking like a skin-tight latex flight suit to my body (also making it the closest my uniform had seen to a proper wash since I first donned it) I might have been annoyed at being splashed, but actually I found it to be rather comical.

As she tried to pull the straggly wet strands of her fringe away from her eyes, grumbling in irritation as she did so, I could not help but giggle inanely at the rather ludicrous sight of Princess Celestia's favourite pupil having committed such a silly little mistake. She shot me a rather severe glare. "Good evening, Lady Sparkle," I said, once I had managed to compose myself.

Twilight stepped closer to the brazier, apparently in an effort to dry herself by the heat, and sat upon her rump on the relatively dry earth next to me. "I know, very funny," she snapped irritably.

"Forgive me," I said, doing my damnedest to suppress another decidedly un-regal case of the giggles, "but I'd have thought that Auntie Celestia's personal student would know better than to dispel an umbrella enchantment without getting rid of the rainwater first."

Her glare was held for a few moments longer, until her resolve eventually crumbled from the onslaught of the rather silly grin that tugged at the ends of my lips in a manner that felt most unnatural to me, and all attempts at pretending to be angry with me failed utterly with an awkward smile and a few polite chuckles. "I guess it was a little funny. I should've known better than to do that."

I gave a vague sort of shrug and took a long draw of my cigar. "It happens to the best of us," I said, exhaling a small cloud of that delectable smoke that soon drifted and dispersed on the wind.

Twilight Sparkle nodded her head and turned her gaze across to the vast mass that stretched before us, seemingly unlimited in its proportions as it stretched almost to the thin crest of hills on the horizon, advancing inexorably upon our position with all the grim inevitability of Quartermaster Pencil Pusher relentlessly chasing my outstanding mess charges. She had a quiet, thoughtful expression on her face, and I could see that she was troubled by something. Perhaps she was still feeling some embarrassment for when I had caught her earlier with a group of other mares, the relatively few female soldiers of the battalion [The Royal Guard still tended to favour male recruits at this stage of the Changeling Wars, though the Night Guards tended to have a slightly higher proportion of mares compared to the Solar Guard and other arms of service], watching Sergeant Bramley Apple's artillery ponies, earth ponies all with muscular physiques and stripped of their armour to better deal with the demanding physical work of loading, firing, and cleaning their guns, with the same hungry looks in the mares' eyes that a dog gets upon hearing the sound of a can being opened. I can still see the embarrassment lending a deeper red hue to her cheeks as she insisted that she was merely 'taking notes'. Come to think of it, I was rather more surprised by the idea of the bookish little mare being attracted to anything that was not made of paper with lots of large, complicated words in it or certain powerful unicorns who have been dead for quite some time. The thought, though amusing to me, was unlikely, for her worried gaze was now fixed firmly upon the hated enemy.

"It's quite impressive," I said, trying to relieve the awkwardness of the situation, "isn't it?"

"Yeah," she said breathlessly. "There are some philosophers in Canterlot who say the Changelings have come the closest to reaching true Harmony. They live in a society without any disorder or strife or unrest; just total conformity, total obedience, and total Harmony. It's an interesting theory."

"I'm sorry, Lady Sparkle, but that sounds like a load of old bollocks to me," I said, coining a phrase I had picked up from overhearing the troops' banter that I felt summed up my thoughts on the matter most succinctly. Twilight, being more familiar with Trottinghamite slang that I first thought, suddenly gagged at what I will readily admit to as a rather uncouth expression and certainly beneath a pony of my noble station, but here and in this situation, such things ceased to be all that important to me. [There were, and still are, some ponies who sympathised with the Changelings, at least in their cause if not their actions in provoking this war and their further attacks on Equestrian civilians during its prosecution. In this instance, I can agree with my nephew's assessment of this viewpoint, though not necessarily in such vulgar terms, as being based upon a very warped and corrupted idea of what a truly Harmonious society should look like.]

"That's... that's one way of putting it," she said, once she had recovered. "Do you think we'll win?"

"The battle, or the war?"

"Both."

"Of course we'll win," I scoffed. "One can hardly expect a commissar of all ponies to say 'no' to that question."

"I suppose you can't," she said, chuckling a little to herself.

Huddling closer to the warmth of the brazier in an attempt to dry herself, not that it did much good as the rain continued to drip through via numerous holes in the tarpaulin, Twilight Sparkle looked at me with a rather ambivalent expression on her face. I wondered why, out of all the ponies here, she had to pick me to spend time with; when one considers the past history between the two of us, stretching back through our time in Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns together up to my admittedly rather foalish attempts to sabotage my cousin Cadence's marriage to Twilight's oafish older brother not more than a year prior to this battle, I was probably the very last pony in existence that she would want to even share the same continent with. Nevertheless, I decided that I would humour her for the time being, though I doubted whether either of us would find anything even vaguely stimulating about our awkward, stilted conversation.

"There's something I wanted to talk to you about for a while," she said, at length, "but I just haven't had the chance to until now."

The fur on the back of my neck bristled instinctively at those words, they being among the most terrifying that a mare could possibly say to a stallion, as what must inevitably follow that statement, usually an admission of eternal love or some such rot like that as tends to be the case with me, often does not bode well for one's immediate future. I had, of course, much personal experience in dealing with such things, you see; being Canterlot's most eligible bachelor on account of my stunning good looks and my regal title means having to fend off the often unwanted attention from mares who find the contents of a stallion's money vault equally as enticing as what lies between his hind legs, though I couldn't imagine why she would suddenly take a liking to me of all ponies and here of all places. Not that I found her particularly unattractive; though she was not quite the sort of mare that I tend to pursue during my various trysts over the years and hardly being the sort to indulge in a little harmless fun now and again, I had to admit that she had blossomed into quite a shapely, pleasing little thing since adulthood. Warily, I nodded my head and politely asked her to continue.

"I don't know if you remember, but you made my life very..." She stopped, apparently searching for the correct word.

"Difficult?" I posited. Inwardly I breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief that it was not as bad as I had feared.

"Difficult," she repeated. "Very difficult when we were at Celestia's school together."

"Yes, I remember," I said, not quite sure what she was trying to accomplish here. It was not something that I am particularly proud of, even when I was much younger and actually inflicting the abuse of which she spoke, but to bring it up when the enemy was so close that an expert cricketer could have brained a Changeling in the front ranks with a well-aimed hit was utterly daft even by her standards. "For what it's worth, I am sorry about what happened."

She nodded, which made her helmet, still the same one issued by the stores that was far too large for her head, wobble and bob awkwardly. "I just wanted to ask you… well, why you did all of that. I mean, it's a long time ago and I'm over it, but with the Changelings coming I may not get the chance to later."

"Well," I said, taking a sharp intake of breath at the rather uncomfortable direction that this conversation was being steered towards. Faust knows I do my fair share of contemplating my navel, though I merely have the good sense and manners to keep that to myself, as vocalising it would rather violently destroy the myth that had been built up around me. I suppose I could have made an excuse and just left, and to be frank, as I look back, I'm entirely sure why I didn't; perhaps there was some remorseful part of me that wanted to grant Twilight the closure that she wanted, or perhaps I subconsciously knew that keeping on her good side might prove advantageous for me in the future.

"Why do you think?" I asked hesitantly.

"Mom and Dad said that it was because you were jealous of my academic success," she said, her voice taking on a curiously scholarly tone as if she was delivering a lecture at some sort of formal event held for her fellow intellectuals, "and Shining Armour said it was because you're just a horrible elitist jerk who couldn't stand to see a commoner doing better than you. Neither of those hypotheses stand up to much scrutiny; you never really cared about getting good grades for as much as I can remember, and... you know, I like to think there's a bit more depth to you than just being a 'horrible elitist jerk'."

I like to think so, too; in addition to being an elitist and a jerk I am also a toady, a reprobate, a rogue, a philanderer, a bigot, a blackguard, and, oh yes, an unrepentant coward, but you must have worked that out for yourself by now.

"I suppose all of them were right, in a way," I said, realising that for all her meekness and quiet awkwardness she was not likely to leave any time soon. "The truth is, I was jealous, but not of you getting good grades. It's a little more foalish than that, I must admit. I was jealous of you monopolising Auntie 'Tia's time, which she could have spent doting on me instead. I suppose I must have blamed you and lashed out."

"You just wanted Princess Celestia to spend more time with you?" she asked, somewhat incredulously.

"Something like that," I said. By now my cigar had gone out, as they are wont to do if left unattended for more than a few minutes, and thus as I spoke I busied myself with relighting it with the smouldering coals of the brazier; which rather sullied the taste, I thought. "My father was rarely around, being a noted explorer as much as he was a senior dignitary and favourite of Princess Celestia at court, and my mother seemed to regard my sisters and me as noisy and unpleasant little distractions from her favourite pastimes of doing precisely nothing all day except preening herself for various high society functions and fornicating with father's gambling partners. An aristocrat simply doesn't raise her foals. She can produce them, but she doesn't sully her hooves in the messy business of actually looking after them, oh no, that's for commoners. Instead, that duty goes to a small team of nannies and governesses, and in my case that also included Princess Celestia. When father went missing in the Zebrican jungles and mother's mind broke and she was locked away by the family in an insane asylum, Celestia took me in and raised me. She was the only family I had left that wasn't trying to manipulate me for their own selfish ends. When she started tutoring you, I was left all alone again."

I don't know if that piece of random psychobabble nonsense truly satisfied her, but she nodded thoughtfully and did not pursue the subject further, which was fine by me. The truth is that I behaved in such a manner simply because it made me feel good, not that I am in any way proud or happy about that side of myself, even though it was some time in the past now, but admitting that the reason my cronies and I called her names, pushed her into the mud, and sabotaged her homework on a regular basis was out of nothing more than sheer boredom probably would not have gone down well with her. [I fear that Prince Blueblood might be being a little too hard on himself here, as while his behaviour was certainly deplorable, unjustifiable, and eventually led to his expulsion from my school for gifted unicorns (in addition to his low grades), I like to think that there really was more to it than just him being a 'jerk' as Shining Armour put it. One cannot underestimate the effect that losing one's parents, no matter how distant they might have been, can have on a young foal, particularly in an aristocratic family such as the Blood clan, in which the succession to the title of prince and the dukedom of Canterlot, with their associated privileges, duties, and intrigues, fell on a colt no more than eleven years of age. I fear that taking Twilight Sparkle on as my personal student may have engendered feelings of resentment in the younger Blueblood, which perhaps I should have stepped in to resolve earlier.]

"How is Rarity?" I asked, motivated more by some compulsion to ease our collective awkwardness than anything close to concern for the mare and her histrionics.

"She's still pretty mad at you for leaving her alone in your suite in Canterlot Castle," said Twilight.

I laughed, causing Twilight to pull an odd face at me. "Oh, I can imagine it," I said. Then, twisting my voice into a shrill falsetto in imitation of dear Rarity's refined Canterlot accent when she's having one of her characteristic hysterical fits: "Here I am, trapped all alone in the most opulent and luxurious suite of rooms in all of Canterlot, with a veritable army of servants all employed solely to make my life as comfortable as physically possible, and with naught else for company but the cream of the crop of Equestria's ruling elite! However will I survive in such horrid conditions!"

Twilight did not seem the least bit impressed by my admittedly poor impression of her close friend. "In addition to all of the other things you've done to her."

"The Grand Galloping Gala, still?" I asked, arching an eyebrow in imitation of my darker aunt.

"Yes, that," she said. "She's still rather upset about it. You completely crushed her dreams."

Narrowing my eyes at her, I snorted contemptuously and shook my head. "Her dreams of marrying a prince only for his money and wealth and social prestige?"

She returned my gaze with an indignant frown. "That's not what she wanted."

"Oh please, Lady Sparkle, you're a smart mare, so have a proper think about this. How can anypony expect any sort of relationship to start just on the first meeting? She was never interested in who I am, only what I am. She didn't want a lover; she only wanted a rich husband that would be her gateway into Canterlot high society." As ever, nopony ever cared about what I thought and felt.

"That's not true!" she snapped. "Rarity has her faults, yes, but she's still a kind, generous pony who you could have had a wonderful relationship with if you gave her the chance."

"No," I said. It was quite remarkable that for all her intelligence and knowledge, Twilight was still quite naive about how the real world beyond her books actually worked, and in particular, love and relationships. "Lady Sparkle, even if I was interested in her, there is no way anypony could possibly countenance the marriage between myself and a commoner."

"Why not?"

I confess that I could not, and still cannot, come up with any adequate answer to that question, or at least one that would satisfy Twilight Sparkle's very rational, set view of how the world works. Her inquisitive and questioning nature would simply not accept the rather more insubstantial and unempirical notions of honoured traditions stretching from time immemorial, and that, in my mind, made her quite a dangerous force in Equestria.

"Because it just isn't done," I said, quietly giving up the effort to try and explain it in words she would understand. "She has no blood and no lineage to speak of, and to sully myself in the company of common blood is to bring my family into disrepute. Nobility, you see, simply does not have the luxury of choice in marriage. That liberty belongs only to the common pony. My mother, you see, did not love my father, and neither did he her. Their union was merely the signing of a treaty between my family and that of an ancient Prench dynasty—a purely economic affair for the mutual gain of our two families. And do you think I would be doing your friend any favours by dragging her into such a world? Except, perhaps, as a mistress, which I doubt she would ever agree to."

"True, I suppose," she said in a tone of voice that implied that it most certainly was not. "But that doesn't excuse your behaviour."

I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully, and turned the smouldering cigar over with my magic as I contemplated my next move. Then, deciding that I might as well admit the truth of the matter as there was a real chance that I might be quite dead very soon, unburdening myself of at least one of my lesser sins before my too-short life was judged by Faust, as it were, and that it was likely the only way to get the inquisitive little mare to drop the subject, I said, "Is it not better for Rarity to believe that her dreams were 'crushed' because I am an insensitive blackguard, rather than blaming herself for not being worthy of my attention?"

Twilight frowned at me, humming thoughtfully, and then shook her head dismissively and mumbled something that sounded like an agreement and apparently decided that it was not worth pursuing any further, which was fine by me.

The rain continued to pour with no signs of abating any time soon, though the cloud cover seemed to be breaking here and there to let in the dark blues and purples of the deepening night sky. It was something of a relief, however, as despite the chill freezing me to my bone and the annoying drips of water leaking through the many holes in the tarpaulin under which we sheltered, the torrential downpour ensured that the Changelings' ability of flight was hampered. Faust, it seemed, was smiling down on me, though I could not shake the feeling that behind her back she concealed a dagger of fate with which to impale me when I least suspected it.

"What was it that Captain Red Coat said?" asked Twilight, after a moment's pause. "Something like, 'cheer up, it could be worse, it could be raining'?"

I nodded, though her clumsy attempt at a Trottingham accent was not much better than Luna's butchery of that dialect. At any rate, I was thankful that the conversation was being steered towards more comfortable grounds. "Something like that, yes," I said.

"I don't understand how he can be some calm and blasé about it all. I can't imagine how he's coping with all that responsibility at such a young age."

To be brutally honest, I don't think he was, as, like me, I expected he was merely putting on a brave face for the benefit of not only himself but everypony else around him. If anypony out there denies feeling the slightest amount of fear or trepidation before going into battle, then they are simply lying; everypony feels it, even those ponies generally assumed by others to be fearless, including myself, of course. The difference is merely a matter of how well one can conquer it, and though I appear to be quite able to simply mask it behind a facade of cool detachment and an entirely false casual disregard for my own safety, I tend to fail spectacularly at not letting that fear control my actions. Captain Red Coat, in being able to carry on with the task at hoof without any sense of the cowardice that afflicts me and places the lives of others at risk for his own worthless skin, is likely a greater soldier and a better stallion than I ever will be.

"It's because he's an officer," I said, and Twilight looked up at me with a slightly quizzical expression. Sighing slightly, and taking another small drag of my cigar as if to steel myself, I tried my best to explain it to her. "Every soldier looks up to their officers. They need to believe that their officer is in command of the situation, has everything under control, and always has a plan to get them out of a sticky situation alive if anything goes wrong. That's why Captain Red Coat and every good officer of the Royal Guard, your brother included, puts on this act, because their soldiers are scared and unless officers can present this facade of infallibility there's no way that their orders are going to be obeyed with any sense of efficiency. It's called the 'stiff upper lip', and the Trottinghamites seem to do it the best. It's also why everypony expects an officer to be a gentlecolt; refined, intelligent, cultured, and preferably of good noble breeding. Soldiers simply want their officers to be better than they are."

Well, that was the theory at least. As I spoke, Twilight had retrieved her ubiquitous notepad and quill from the deep recesses of her armour with such speed that I had at first assumed that she had summoned them seemingly out of nowhere, and scribbled furiously. The quiet and pensive expression on her face earlier had evaporated just as quickly, to be replaced with that all too familiar and somewhat terrifying look of eagerness to absorb new knowledge which seemed to come more naturally to her. When I stopped, however, and the scribbling had likewise ceased, she stared up at me with a pleading expression, and I rolled my eyes and struggled to think of something further to say. It then occurred to me that she had thus far interviewed nearly every senior officer and the occasional NCO and private unfortunate enough to be randomly selected; basically everypony who mattered in her eyes to the success of her little research project, with the notable exception of my princely self, which I found to be at once a concern and a relief.

“But I take it that doesn’t always work out,” said Twilight, astutely poking holes in my argument as I expected that she would. “Like that Lieutenant in the meeting.”

“They’re still only ponies,” I said. “Sometimes the mask of infallibility slips under the strain of war, and that’s what the commissar is there for. I provide guidance for the lost, I support the wavering, and I give strength to the weak. I will also punish the cowardly, the treasonous, and the defeatist.”

“Again, like I saw at the meeting,” she said, scribbling some more. She lowered her notepad and quill for a moment, and the aloof, scholarly expression dropped for a moment, to be replaced by a rather more concerned frown. “I was quite… quite impressed by that.”

I took a thoughtful puff of my cigar and tilted my head slightly. “Impressed?” I echoed.

She gave a disarming shrug of her shoulders. “I guess,” she said. “I mean, to see you exercise the authority Princess Luna invested in you when you almost never take anything seriously was very impressive. Kind of scary, too.”

“I think you’ll find that’s entirely the point,” I said, chuckling softly.

The sound of a whistle, shrill and piercing, put an end to any idea of us continuing this increasingly rambling and incoherent conversation. All other noises, except for the rain drumming a dull tattoo against the tarpaulin under which Twilight and I had sought shelter, had ceased or were otherwise drowned out utterly. The lone shriek was joined by another, and another, and so on, until the night was filled with the unholy choir of half a dozen officers blowing into half a dozen regulation brass whistles. In the grim night that closed in around us it sounded like the trumpets blown to signal the end of the world, and considering what I was about to face it certainly did not feel too far from that; for this was the signal, first started by the small coterie of observers stationed atop the castle's tallest tower and carried onwards by the other officers of the battalion, that the enemy had closed to within optimum firing range for the unicorns.

By now this black tumour on the face of our world appeared to have grown and spread to cover almost the entire expanse of the fields beyond, such that when I turned my gaze from the north to the south I could not see even the tiniest sliver of the rough earth beneath the scuttling, crawling masses, save for the ripple of hills to the south west behind which the sun had just ducked behind. I could not identify individual Changelings for the dimness of our twilit surroundings, though the mob appeared to be more 'granular', if that is the correct word to describe it, as if staring at a sheet of quivering black-green sandpaper. The darkness soon enveloped us, and one by one a few lamps, hidden under the castle alcoves or carried by sentries, flickered alight in a vain effort to ward off the encroaching night.

All around us the castle suddenly exploded into activity, as from previously unseen places hidden in darkness, the soldiers of the battalion rushed forth, darting this way and that, jostling past and occasionally colliding with one another in a mad dash to take their pre-arranged positions on the battlements ready for the enemy in a scene that reminded me of viewing the main shop floor of Neighcy's close to Hearth's Warming. [A very large and prestigious department store in Manehatten, and yet despite its upmarket image and well-to-do clientele, Prince Blueblood regarded visiting the shop in his youth with me as 'slumming']. Slowly, one by one, the cacophony of whistles faltered and eventually died to leave the ungodly racket of hundreds of hooves stampeding across the soggy quagmire that was once the castle's courtyard, the clatter of mithril armour and steel weapons, and the gruff, barked orders from non-commissioned officers frantically trying to enforce some sort of order to the swirling, kaleidoscopic chaos of furs white and grey, and armour golden and silver.

"Well, this is it," I said to Twilight, and despite doing my hardest my voice came out as a rather feeble croak, for inside an ice-cold vice was slowly tightening itself around my bowels. I took a moment to collect myself, which, I later found out to my immense relief, she took to be a heroic contemplation of the battle ahead and of the weight of Equestria's survival resting on my noble shoulders rather than me simply trying to halt the rise of fear-induced bile up the back of my throat. "Go back inside the castle to your quarters and stay there with Cloudless Sky and that Diamond Dog. A section of guardsponies will be stationed nearby, just in case the enemy penetrates the keep, so you'll stay safe. You are to do absolutely everything the corporal tells you, understood?"

Twilight nodded her head solemnly and then turned to canter away. She stopped, however, and turned her head over her shoulder towards me. "Good luck out there," she said, apparently earnest in her sentiment. I merely nodded my thanks, and she trotted off to be subsumed into the swirling morass of guardsponies—another armour-clad figure amidst hundreds.

With her gone, I looked once more to the enemy, and was disappointed to find that only an inch or so remained of my cigar. Recalling my father's admonishments that a gentlecolt never finishes a cigar, I tossed the remainder over the edge of the parapet. I watched as the glowing orange ember sailed lazily through the inky darkness and then disappeared utterly, before turning away from the horror of the enemy horde to find Captain Red Coat.

Author's Note

I know this one's a little later than usual, and again I'll have to blame work making me stay behind almost each day - I do admin work for a school, and as it's the start of a new school year there's a crapload of work for me to do. Anyway, at long last here's the latest chapter. I know I said I'd try to lean towards shorter chapters for a shorter turnaround time, but in this case I felt that a long chat between Blueblood and Twilight was long overdue.

Bloodstained (Part 16)

Part 16

The sound of a hundred unicorns firing at will sounds remarkably like somepony popping a sheet of bubble wrap, only much louder. Instead of the disciplined and precise volleys drilled into the heads of soldiers by the likes of Major Starlit Skies, as prescribed by the weighty tomes of various tactical manuals and the sacred gospel that is Princesses' Regulations, the stallions on the ramparts of the castle were permitted to fire according to their own whims into the swirling mass of Changelings. With the enemy horde swarming around our tiny fortification, which increasingly felt like a foal's sandcastle about to washed away by the oncoming tide, it was all but impossible to miss. Even those not blessed with the ability to harness magic joined in by hurling anything that they could find that was not of immediate practical use, could be later exchanged for money or alcohol, or of sentimental value in the vague direction of the enemy. I saw earth ponies and pegasi tossing broken pieces of furniture, empty ration tins, buckets, stones - just about anything that they could get their hooves on. At one point I saw an antique chamber pot, dulled by dust and coated in thick layer of verdigris, likely looted from the repository of artefacts that some previous inhabitant of this ancient fortress had left behind, sail lazily through the rain-streaked sky to disappear over the edge of the parapets and probably brain a hapless Changeling below.

As I cantered around the desperately narrow chemin de ronde and the larger battlements, squeezing past the soldiers as I searched for Captain Red Coat, I too added my own meagre contribution to the fight by firing a few desultory shots in the vague direction of the swarm, probably hitting one or two of the Changelings just to give the soldiers at least some indication that I was doing something vaguely productive. Though I would like to think back and imagine that oh-so-heroically killing or maiming those few Changelings from about a hundred or so yards away and from behind the relative safety of an enormous stone wall might have tipped the balance in our favour, any casualties that our battalion had inflicted upon the enemy at this stage were likely to be negligible at best. At the very least, however, it did make both the unicorns and Bramley Apple's artillery ponies, who by now were pouring a nigh-constant barrage of explosive shells, shrapnel, and cannon balls into the horde that was as ineffectual against an enemy that cared naught for heavy casualties as it was impressive, feel a little more confident about their chances. I, for one, felt rather more sanguine about being on the correct side of our artillery for once.

"I got one! I got one!" exclaimed one excited soldier as I scrambled past him on that narrow walkway, his comrades pouring volley after punishing volley on the enemy. "We're slaughtering the bastards, sir!"

I hesitantly tilted my head over the edge of the parapet, fearing that somehow it might get blasted off my shoulders through means both contrived and implausible, to see that the horde had approached close enough that it no longer appeared as an indistinct black and green smear that stretched from horizon to horizon, as if some landscape artist had inadvertently sneezed while holding a brush loaded with black and green paint and ruined his latest masterpiece. At the front ranks of the unnumbered legion I could discern individual Changelings, their slick black carapaces, oozing with slime and ichor, grimly reflected the orange light of the dying sun and the cold white-yellow glow of the moon masked by the thinning cloud cover. Onwards they came, relentless and unceasing in their advance, uncaring of the casualties inflicted upon them by our unicorns and by our artillery, for the dead and the wounded were simply forgotten and crushed beyond all recognition beneath a thousand galloping hooves. Their cold eyes, devoid of any glimmer of sentience or understanding, nevertheless seemed to shine with the dark and forbidden magics of that sinister intelligence that propelled them forwards in a mad, suicidal rush straight into our guns and our horns. The advance was slow, as the torrential rains had turned the once dry and sun-baked dust into a thick, porridge-like quagmire of mud, through which the Changelings struggled. Nevertheless, their progress was frightening, and it would not be long before they would start to batter down the ancient main gate or swarm through the gaping breach in the walls.

I wondered briefly if they were not so different from the soldiers who stood around me, pouring volley after deadly volley of magical missiles, each a miniature star that stung the eyes in the encroaching night, or hurling random detritus over the edge of the walls in a desperate attempt to hold off the enemy. After all, the ponies of the Royal Guard too were forced into battle, perhaps against their own will and better judgement, by powers and forces unseen and perceived to be uncaring about their individual fates, and for reasons perhaps unknown to them.

The noise had now become deafening, with the constant crackle of magic missiles being discharged atop the stern, sharp barks of orders being relayed back and forth between officers and NCOs, punctuated by the thunderous roar of artillery, quickening in the increasingly rapid and desperate tempo of fire poured out by Bramley Apple's gun crews, all melding together into one unholy symphony of warfare. Underneath all of this racket, just barely audible to my hearing was a deep, low, and thoroughly evil-sounding hum emanating from just beyond the parapets that permeated the horrendous and violent cacophony that assaulted my ears; the sound of a Changeling horde on the march, one which I was to become much too familiar with in the course of my career that even the mere memory of it sends a cold, wet shudder down my spine as I sit here in my chambers and write about it.

Nevertheless, after a half-circuit around the curtain wall and generally getting in the way of the fighting ponies, I concluded that Captain Red Coat must either still be in the castle, likely hiding in a cupboard in his room as I might have done were I in his unenviable position, or down amongst the main bulk of the earth pony and pegasus platoons assembling in their infantry sections down in the courtyard below. I eventually came upon the breach in the walls, which had been filled rather untidily by the Horsetralian Engineers who had piled up as much of the rubble, debris, and assorted rubbish that they had found when the courtyard and inner castle had been cleared into the gap to form a steep, rocky slope leading down into the courtyard on one side and out into the plains on the other. Across this hill of broken stones and mortar, pieces of furniture and smashed timber, and the occasional strips of that sun-bleached fabric that made up what was probably once a thriving and bustling marketplace for the Diamond Dogs and their ilk, the Engineers, laden with dirty armour and equipment strapped to their bodies, stalked amongst the treacherous rubble.

"Oi, Commissar!" Southern Cross' curiously accented voice rang out, though muffled as it was by the intense and disorientating noise that filled the night. I glanced around, looking for him, and found that he was loitering at the foot of his creation. He waved a hoof and beckoned me down.

Though I was rather put off at being called down so rudely, and without the due deference that my rank, both military and social of course, demands, I was willing to let that slide; as a pony of that thoroughly unpleasant outer frontier of Equestria's overseas empire known as Horsetralia, he was likely ignorant of the complex social customs of our homeland and, perhaps due to the harsher environment in which he lived, simply did not care for it. That and I had rather more important issues to be concerned about - about fifty thousand or so issues relentlessly bearing down at us from beyond the castle walls to be more precise. [Blueblood is clearly exaggerating here. However, estimations of numbers is always a tricky issue when documenting the history of the Changeling Wars, as the Changelings had no need of the intensive record-keeping and bureaucracy of the Royal Guard nor of the complex and labyrinthine structure of formations within our armed forces and the propensity of some officers to exaggerate numbers in order to make themselves look good, the best estimates of military analysts and historians today place the size of the Changeling horde at the Siege of Fort E-5150 roughly between three thousand drones at their most conservative and seven thousand at their most generous. Needless to say, however, the flanking battalion here was indeed grossly outnumbered.]

Looking down the rather steep and hazardous slope that this immense pile of debris and rubbish had formed, I wondered how in the blazes I was supposed to descend down that. I briefly scanned my surroundings for a set of stairs to take me down but, finding none, not even a ladder, close enough for me to descend before the Changelings could reach our walls, I elected to try climbing down the slope.

My progress was slow, awkward, and very undignified. The earth ponies of the Royal Horsetralian Engineers were sure-hoofed enough to be able to skip and prance about on this highly precarious artificial hill; they were congregated around a small section halfway down the slope and were very animatedly working at the piled stones and debris there with an assortment of tools that I could only guess the purposes of. I struggled down this uneven, steeply inclined, and slippery surface, which felt as if it was about to give way at any time without warning. The slope was a damn sight steeper than I had first thought, and navigating my way down was made all the more difficult by the growing darkness; it would have been quite embarrassing to die walking down a small hill before the battle had a proper chance to even start. Once or twice a patch of compacted debris or a large stone that I had assumed to be completely secure gave way once I had laid a hoof upon it and shifted my weight, or my steel horseshoes would fail to find purchase on the slick wet stones, sending me scrambling frantically in the ensuing miniature rockslide until I inevitably hit something much firmer and drier.

Naturally, the engineers, who had no problem tackling this treacherous terrain as they carried on with whatever it was that they were doing there, found my problems absolutely hilarious, and my struggle to get to the bottom without injuring myself was made all the more frustrating by their loud and rather colourful jeering. It was all silenced, however, by a series of barked orders from Lieutenant Southern Cross compelling them in tones as vulgar as his voice was loud to get on with their job, followed by an exceedingly creative description of what would he would do to them should they not complete their task before the Changelings arrived. I struggle to recall it, but I think it involved a Parisienne scoop [more commonly called a melon baller] and employing it in a deeply unpleasant manner that I shan't repeat here, even if I could. The sappers, of course, seemed to take the threats in good humour, and few even laughed garrulously, but they did as they were told and stopped taunting me.

The relationship between the sappers and their commanding officer was very much different to what I was used to in the Royal Guard; for starters Lieutenant Southern Cross very much regarded himself as just being 'one of the blokes', much in the same style of leadership that comes naturally to Shining Armour, in the sense that he could converse and socialise with the soldiers under his command with little of the awkwardness that inevitably ensues if I or another traditionally-minded officer were to attempt that sort of thing. Rather than his small tirade being a threat, as is the case with some officers and their NCOs who prefer to command through fear such as Company Sergeant Major Square Basher, it was intended, and indeed taken, as a good-natured joke. It seemed to work for him and his stallions, despite my distaste for that particular manner of directing one's troops, so, as with Shining Armour, I simply left him to it. If anything, I was rather impressed, as in doing so both he and Shining Armour commanded the same sort of loyalty in their stallions that I could only dream of.

The thought of deliberately slipping and falling down this incline, thus injuring myself in some serious but hopefully not fatal manner in order to allow me to spend the rest of the battle sitting comfortably in the battalion's field hospital in the castle had occurred to me, though I dismissed the idea almost immediately. Not only would be far too obvious a ruse to actually work without arousing any sort of suspicion from both Twilight Sparkle and Princess Luna as much as my fellow officers, if this battle did truly go horrendously badly for us - as our survival and deliverance was based entirely upon General Crimson Arrow being competent enough to marshal and deploy his forces as quickly as possible I could not say that I was entirely optimistic about our chances - then I would rather be in a position where I was capable of both defending myself and running away, which would have been rather difficult for me to do if I had broken a leg, or worse, my spine.

I reached the bottom eventually with rather less dignity than I had started, and found that the courtyard had finally been organised into some vague semblance of order; the earth ponies had been deployed very neatly in ranks of three, with the pegasi likewise organised just behind them to protect the rather more fragile flyers, robbed of their advantage of flight in this awful weather. [While flight is not impossible in the sort of inclement weather that Blueblood describes here, it is certainly exhausting on a pegasus, especially if they are expected to provide the sort of rapid air support required of them in combat and to fight. The tactical manuals of the Academy therefore recommend that pegasi remain grounded and support the earth ponies, which, while not ideal, is better than allowing them to drain themselves in the air and thus become more vulnerable to attack.] They were lit only by a small number of lamps held by some soldiers and burning braziers, some shielded from the rain under the same sort of tarpaulins I had been sheltering under just a short while ago and others hidden in the deeper recesses of the castle, which towered menacingly behind them like some great, daemonic horror as it receded into the almost infinite darkness that fell upon us. The rain intensified, though it might have just been my imagination, and by now the parched earth had drunk its fill of water and dark pools, reflecting only the orange pinpricks of feeble light cast by those torches, and the clouds, dark grey and tinged faintly with gold to the west, swirling ominously in the chill breeze.

As I surveyed the scene there was a peculiar and expectant hush, despite the abominable racket that the soldiers on the parapets and the guns in the castle towers were making, as if here in the courtyard we were cut off from the outside world by a vast glass bubble that muffled and diffused the horrid cacophony that I had experienced on the walls. It was peaceful, in an odd sense, as a quiet calm before all hell inevitably breaks loose. Illuminated by the flickering orange lights was the battalion's battle standard fluttering in the chill breeze. I shuddered as a cold breeze plucked at my soaked storm coat.

"Why didn't you just teleport down?" asked Lieutenant Southern Cross, joining me at the foot of the hill.

"I'm saving my energy for more important things," I said, not wanting to admit that I simply didn't know how to teleport, and I certainly did not want to run the risk of getting it wrong and becoming lost in the nether plane that lies betwixt realities, or, as was more likely, appearing next to Southern Cross with my internal organs on the outside. "Namely shooting and stabbing things."

Southern Cross gave a small, quiet chuckle and nodded his head knowingly. "I hear you," he said. He raised his roughly-shaven muzzle skywards, and I noted a strange sense of rugged nobility, much in the same way that a base and savage animal such as a wolf can evoke a sense of dignity beyond its low and bestial nature, in the manner in which he regarded the inky darkness above us. "The stars are all wrong," he said, apparently half to himself.

I followed his gaze up, and found that the skies were still overcast, with nary a star to be seen for the dense clouds, churning like an unsettled sea in a storm. They somehow felt oppressively low, as if the swirling morass of dark greys and subtle blues would suddenly descend and smother us all. "There aren't any," I said flatly, mildly irritated that he had apparently dragged me down here to make the same sort of fatuous comment that a five year old urchin would have made.

"Of course they're there," he said, snorting irritably and giving me a rather sour look. He pointed up at the grimy grey-black clouds with an equally grubby hoof, clad in a steel sabaton caked in so much mud, dust, grease, and Faust-knows what else stains that engineers collect throughout their normal working day. It was almost as bad as Cannon Fodder's usual state of cleanliness. Almost. "They're behind the clouds," he continued, "but they're still there."

"So, what makes them 'wrong'?" I asked, arching an eyebrow and silently wishing that he would start making some sense now.

"Horestralia's in the opposite hemisphere from Equestria, so the stars are different over here," he explained, shrugging his shoulders with a loud clatter of his armour plates and specialised equipment, and I pretended that I understood; science was never my strong point, along with just about everything else that does not involve lying, swords, pleasuring mares, or fleecing money out of impressionable and slightly drunk younger officers in the mess. He had an odd, quiet, and rather contemplative expression, which looked damned peculiar on a face that was more comfortable with a cheeky, Tirek-may-care grin that flouted the notions of authority and class and yet, despite my inherent dislike of such informality, I found to be rather open and welcoming. If anything it was rather unsettling, especially so in the flickering lights of a half dozen lamps and torches. His voice, when he spoke once more was hushed, as if he did not want anypony around us eavesdropping on our conversation.

"My name isn't just a matter of national pride. It's about my special talent: astronomy. Out in the bush I had to learn to navigate my way around using only the stars for guidance. Being under different stars..." His shoulders shrugged despondently, and his mechanical limb made a slight whirring noise at this small movement. "I dunno, mate, it just reminds me of how far away I am from home."

He tore his gaze from the skies above and shook his head, before that grin once more took its usual position stretching across his face, though this time it looked rather forced. Could it be, perhaps, that this colt, whom I assumed to be little more than a slightly dim-witted and vulgar pony of those far and inhospitable colonies, albeit approachable and charming in his own way, had more depth to him than this crude exterior might otherwise imply? Perhaps like me, he too hid his true self beneath a masque, though his was one of a relaxed self-assurance and the apparent inability to take such things as the hierarchical structure of the Royal Guard and its chain of command remotely seriously. If he did, however, I was all but certain he did so purely for the benefit of the engineers under his command, as with all good officers, and not for the same, selfish reasons of ensuring my own personal survival at the possible expense of that of others that I do.

Nevertheless, he indicated towards the pile of stones and refuse that I had just clambered down with his mechanical hoof, and I faintly wondered just how waterproof such prosthetics truly were and just how liable Southern Cross was to suffer some sort of short-circuit as the driving rain seeped into the intricate workings of his false limb. "We're preparing a lovely surprise for the Changelings," he said. "I hope they like it."

"And what surprise would that be?" I said, though the sudden itching in my hooves forewarned me that it was likely to be something deeply unpleasant and quite dangerous. I looked over to where his brass hoof pointed, equally dulled with dust as his armour though I took note that its mechanical works were still kept clean in accordance to the engineers' credo, and saw that the group of engineers on the breach had by now completed whatever it was that they were doing, and skipped down the jagged and precarious piles of rubble and stone with a sense of ease that almost seemed contemptuous of my previous clumsy attempt. It was rather difficult to see in the dark, as the myriad lamps and braziers made it tricky for my eyes to adjust properly to the gloom, but by virtue of my knack in navigating dark and confined places I could see that one engineer was trailing what looked like a cable behind him.

As the penny dropped with an awful clatter, I felt a sudden, horrid lurch in the pit of my stomach as if the oats I had for lunch were attempting to escape. I could literally feel the colour, what little there is of it, drain from my face.

"A present in the shape of several tons of TNT," said Southern Cross, with remarkable casualness.

In spite of this revelation I like to think that I collected myself rather admirably, and at least the darkness around us made it easier for me to mask my horrified expression. "I see," I said, keeping my voice slow and measured, despite the sudden and rapid spike in my heart rate. "And you didn't think to tell me about that before I walked over it?"

Southern Cross nickered quietly, apparently finding my discomfiture at very nearly being blown up and having my princely remains spread like strawberry jam all over the castle rather funny. The dim light of the torches reflected eerily on his toothy grin, which gave his smile, only growing wider and more earnest as I glowered at him with as much menace as I could muster, the unsettling appearance of glowing. "Do you think you'd have come down here if I told you about that first?"

"Of course I bloody wouldn't have," I snapped.

"It's perfectly safe," he said, and his words did very little to make me feel any better; judging from a small number of near-accidents that we had with the high explosives in our trek over the hills and the mystery of what had happened to his original left foreleg, it seemed that both he and his engineers had a rather different concept of what safety meant compared to what is written in dictionaries. "The explosive charges aren't wired up to the detonator yet, so there's no way to set it off unless there's a spark or a naked flame, which" - Southern Cross waved his hoof skywards, and the rain continued to fall - "doesn't look likely right now. But when it does go, it'll make whatever made the original hole in the wall look like a firecracker by comparison, and it should take out a good bunch of Changelings when it does."

"Assuming they fall for the trap," I said, pointing out one of the two main flaws in his otherwise masterful plan. The other, of course, was that he might over-estimate the amount of explosives needed and blow all of us into Tartarus - Changelings, ponies, castle, and all. "We didn't, remember?"

"It's worth a shot anyway," he said dismissively. "Anyway, I wanted to ask you something, sir."

I stiffened on reflex; Lieutenant Southern Cross almost never called me 'sir'. It was almost always 'Commissar', 'Blueblood', 'mate', and, on one occasion before we set out on this suicidal expedition where I think he and his comrades might have drank their entire month's ale rations in one night, 'Blueballs', but never, ever 'sir'; not unless he was being ironic or if he wanted something from me, at least. [Ordinarily, Blueblood would have taken great offense at that nickname, having already fought about five duels with ponies over it, but that he has let it slide on this occasion is likely due to some sort of grudging respect that he had for Southern Cross and/or recognition that maintaining a good working relationship with the Horsetralian Engineers was key to the success of this operation and his own survival.] His expression, when a stallion holding a lamp passed by so that it brought his shadowed face into the light, had become grave and serious, which to me looked rather unsettling. I had seen officers of his ilk pull this trick before, and indeed it was one of the oldest in the book and has a whole seven paragraphs dedicated to it in Princesses' Regulations; my old commanding officer and former Captain of the Royal Guard Stiff Upper Lip would present an image of charming eccentricity, or being relaxed and casual in the case of the stallion standing next to me, but when a situation arose that demanded a more professional level of conduct then they were more than capable of rising to it. If anything, it emphasised just how serious the situation was.

"Some of our explosive charges have gone missing."

My initial response, I admit, was to think 'so what?', and that with our brutal murder or slavery by the Changelings all but imminent this was hardly the best time to bring something like this up. It was probable that he merely miscounted the frankly extravagant amount of dynamite and TNT his engineers were forced to drag over the mountains, and even if a relatively small amount had gone missing, likely dropped or misplaced by a lazy sapper, what difference could it have possibly made? However, the seriousness etched in the lines that his frown had formed on his face, and intoned in his peculiarly-accented voice, soon destroyed that notion in my mind. Despite his outwardly lackadaisical approach to most things, he was rather fastidious about the actual business of military engineering.

"How much is missing?" I asked. The itching in my hooves flared up once more, as my paranoid hindbrain started scrambling in a vain effort to try and tell my conscious mind something important but, like a Neighponese tourist lost in the streets of Manehatten armed with only a poorly written translation guide and a map of Los Pegasus, it was just struggling to make itself understood.

"Only a few sticks," he said, "but that's still enough to cause quite a lot of damage. I'm not suggesting that anypony's stolen them, but if they fall into the hooves of somepony who isn't trained in their use, then... well, it doesn't bear thinking about."

The prospect of one of our soldiers, either through theft or by sheer accident, coming into possession of enough high explosives to blow a hole in the castle walls large enough to drive the larger of Celestia's royal chariots through was most disconcerting. At any rate, there was not much either of us could do about it right now, especially with rather more immediate concerns on our minds, so I gave Lieutenant Southern Cross an understanding nod and my assurances that, once the battle was over and if either of us were still alive, I would keep an eye out for his missing explosives and that if anypony had stolen them they would be punished appropriately. That seemed to placate him for now, and as I galloped away from the mine-laying operation as fast as my hooves could carry me I heard him once more attempt to cajole his sappers into hurrying up with the task with his usual mixture of colourful metaphors and threats of extreme violence.

I eventually found Captain Red Coat standing at the main entrance to the courtyard, and rather sensibly behind three ranks of earth ponies and further three ranks of pegasi. Cannon Fodder was waiting for me there too, and when I stumbled out of the darkness and into the light of the braziers burning at the rotten wooden gates he bounded over to take his usual place just behind my right shoulder with all the eagerness of a small puppy greeting its owner after having been left alone in the house all day. Red Coat, however, acknowledged my arrival with rather less enthusiasm, merely nodding his head in my direction before he beckoned me to come closer with a hoof.

The Captain looked utterly dreadful, more so than during the briefing. I don't know what had happened to him in the intervening time, but the skin beneath his shark-grey fur had turned a deathly shade of white, there was a slight tremor in his quick, nervous movements, like that of a startled rodent, and the dark rings around his amber draconic eyes gave him the thoroughly disturbing appearance of an exsanguinated corpse that had been left to rot for quite some time. I decided, for his sake, to pretend not to notice and hope that by presenting an image of being supremely in control of both myself and of the situation, despite inwardly feeling just as bad as Red Coat looked, if not worse, so that he in turn could derive from me some small degree of confidence.

The soldiers arrayed out on the courtyard were at ease under the watchful eyes of their non-commissioned officers, and they likely had a few more pressing matters weighing on their minds than what their commanding officers were getting up to. Along the way I had noted that a few were quite stricken by fear, and I recall to my distaste seeing one terrified pony dash out of his formation to relieve his bowels by the dead stump of a tree nearby, accompanied by the jeers and taunts from his comrades. Aside from that rather shameful moment, and a few others rendered quite insensible by their terror and who needed a quiet reminder from me about their duty not only to their country and the Princesses but also to the ponies standing next to them (I found that appealing to their desire not to let down their friends often worked better than soliloquising about patriotism), most of the troops remained as professional as one could reasonably demand of them.

As I approached he drew me cautiously to the side, away from the soldiers in their formation; closer to the wall and under the shelter of the stone parapets above. He glanced this way and that, apparently looking for any who might be eavesdropping. Cannon Fodder lingered around for a short while, but as my aide's blind trust in me had led him to deduce that, like most military matters, this was a matter that did not concern him, and if it did that I would probably fill him in on a 'need to know' basis, he had therefore sat in the opposite corner of the gateway to amuse himself with one of his gentlecolt's special interest magazines that he had secreted within his armour. I envied Cannon Fodder; he was easily distracted from such concerns by the most trivial and base of pursuits, whereas I could not.

"Scarlet Letter has gone missing," said Red Coat, his trembling voice barely above a hoarse whisper.

"He's missing?" I blurted out dumbly, loud enough to turn the heads of a few of the closer soldiers.

Red Coat nodded his head gravely. The nearby brazier hissed and spitted as a gust of chill wind swept through the courtyard. I muttered a curse most unbecoming of my regal station, and the young colt blushed slightly.

"Nopony can find him," he said. "His sergeant says the last time he saw him was when he went in the hall for the meeting. He's just vanished."

In hindsight I probably shouldn't have been quite so shocked at this development; the stallion had no stomach for warfare (not to imply that I do, of course) and it should have been a matter of when, rather than if, he would desert us, assuming that was what had happened to him. That said, the notion that Scarlet Letter would simply run away without getting caught - something that I had considered doing myself and dismissed long ago on the account that it was just too easy for me to get caught doing so - had not crossed my mind at all until that point, as I imagined that his little scheme to boost his waning popularity with Parliament and with his electorate would have been rather scuppered if he had been caught fleeing on the very cusp of his moment of contrived glory, or perhaps I had naively believed that my lecture at the briefing had inculcated at least some small shred of decency and sense of duty in that shrivelled-up husk that the average politician possesses in lieu of a soul.

The memory of Southern Cross' missing explosives made a very unwelcome entrance into my mind, followed by the disturbing implication that it could be related to the disappearance of Scarlet Letter.

"How rude of him," I said flatly, putting the rather unpleasant thought of mind and forcing a relaxed smile to my lips. "Don't worry about it, Captain, when this is over I will undertake a full investigation, and if he has deserted then he will be court-martialled and punished to the fullest extent of the Commissariat's authority. Just focus on winning the battle, and leave Lieutenant Scarlet Letter to me."

Red Coat looked up at me with those huge, saucer-like eyes of his and nodded his head. Damnation, but he was far too young to be in this position; he should have been worrying about which pretty, vacant-eyed filly he was going to invite to his high school prom, what he would study at university, going into the family business, and whatever else that colts of the lower middle classes think of, not of the burden of the lives of three hundred ponies and of the fate of Equestria. "O-of course, sir," he stammered out clumsily, rubbing at his chin thoughtfully. "But right now we're missing one lieutenant, and I need somepony to command his unicorn platoon."

"What of Ensign Black Marble and Sergeant Cheque Book?" I asked, dredging their names up from some half-forgotten ledger that I had read weeks ago. It always paid to make an effort to remember a few names and give the impression that one knows absolutely everypony one is about to fight and possibly die beside. "Can they not command in his stead?"

"I don't think they're ready for it at all," said Red Coat, without a hint of irony inflicting his voice. To be fair, however, he did have a point, as what little I did know of the way that Scarlet Letter ran his platoon - former platoon, I should say - seemed to imply that he was rather against the notion of his underlings having any sort of power or autonomy under him (as indeed were most officers of the Royal Guard, but at the very least they tended to try and foster some semblance of competence in the lower ranks).

"It looks like I'll have to do it," I said, resigning myself to the inevitable. I had hoped to spend the battle firmly behind our stallions, giving moral support and checking for any lapses in duty, but with this unfortunate development it seemed increasingly likely that Captain Red Coat would have come to the same conclusion that I did. On balance, volunteering for something that one knows to be inevitable, or appearing to at least, rather than being forced into it will improve one's image greatly in the eyes of others. Commanding a platoon was something that I was already relatively experienced with, having served as a Lieutenant in the 1st Solar Guards Regiment during my late teens, though back then the actual business of commanding often took a back seat to the usual philandering and debauchery that my comrades and I often got up to.

Red Coat tapped at his chin thoughtfully with a hoof, and then shook his head. "I'd rather have you with me."

"Likewise," I said, earnestly enough; not that I particularly found his company to be enjoyable even if we weren't about to be thrust into the heart of a bloody battle, but I merely felt that sticking with the lad and dissuading him from doing anything foolish to 'prove' himself in front of everypony else was the best way to maximise the chances of survival for the both of us. "But I'm sure you don't need me breathing down your neck all the time. Besides, I'm sure Sergeant Major Square Basher will take good care of you."

"O-of course," he said, nodding his head with newfound eagerness. "She's a bit scary, though."

Red Coat glanced off to the side, and I followed his gaze to find that the old adage 'speak of Nightmare Moon and she shall appear' was somewhat accurate. There, Marezilla herself was walking up and down along the serried ranks of soldiers. Her head, clad in that dark mithril steel helmet emblazoned with the three embossed chevrons and a crown that marked out her rank, was visible above those of most of the stallions and mares that she (and I) towered over like an adult above foals. Once or twice she would stop to address one of her soldiers, and, to my surprise, she did so without once raising her voice, without the threat of or indeed the actual use of violence, and not once did she in any way demean anypony under her command. Instead she would offer a few quiet words, though I could not make out what they were, in a voice that had an odd, motherly tone to it despite the roughness of her crude East Trottingham accent, before moving on down to the next pony in the line.

At first I found such behaviour to be rather confusing, and greatly untypical of the loud, unsophisticated, and bullying Sergeant Major. Yet when I thought of my own job, to look to the fighting spirit of the regiment, I realised that while her rigid and inflexible enforcement of discipline was all well and good in making sure that everypony looked presentable and kept themselves out of trouble when there was nothing else to do, it was important that everypony knew that when it came to the horrid life-and-death struggle that was to come that they all had her firm and loyal support. Yes, she was violent and stubborn, and that earned her a lot of enmity amongst the ranks, but ultimately she proved herself to the soldiers to be harder and tougher than anything that the enemy could throw at them, and, more importantly, that all she had done was to help mould them and prepare them for war.

A loud cry came from the battlements above us, followed by another and another. The expectant hush that had fallen on the courtyard had been rudely broken as the soldiers on the outer walls scrambled down the tight and narrow steps and walkways to reach us. The troops already assembled appeared to stiffen at the sound, as the earth ponies were absorbed into their own platoons once more and the unicorns were quickly marshalled into a long, thin line, two ranks deep, like a ring of steel and gold around the earth ponies and pegasi. Almost as quickly as it had started, the noise had ceased, and silence ensued.

Silent, except for the unsettling low hum of the Changelings that had now reached the castle walls.

As the expectant hush returned, and somehow sharper and tenser than before, Captain Red Coat took on an expression of quiet resignation. The fear and anxiety that I had seen in the weeks building up to this battle had gone, to be replaced with a strange expression that I could only describe as 'peaceful', as of an old pony who had come to terms with the aging process and his inevitable death. He sucked in a deep breath and let out a slow, quiet sigh that seemed to carry with it all of the burdens and responsibilities of his command. When he spoke, his voice had taken on a calm quality that equalled the blank and empty look of his face.

"Scarlet Letter's platoon was detailed to cover the breach, flanked by two other unicorn platoons and half of our earth ponies," he said. "It's likely the Changelings will try to charge us through there, or go for the main gate. Either way, they'll be seeking to gain a hoof-hold in the walls. We've put a mine under the breach, so hopefully that'll take out a big enough chunk out of them to help even the odds."

I nodded gravely, and suppressed a shudder as I remembered how close I came to being blown to pieces. "Yes, Lieutenant Southern Cross told me about his little surprise."

"I need you to hold your fire until the mine goes off," continued Red Coat. "That way we can lure as many Changelings on top of it as possible and cause maximum casualties. I'll be with the earth ponies behind you."

"It's nice to know you're watching my back," I said, lying through my teeth of course; I would much rather our situations were reversed, but I could hardly back out now.

With little else to discuss I wished Captain Red Coat luck, to which he responded with a curt salute. I reciprocated with rather less enthusiasm, of course, and trotted off in search of my platoon.

Now, the firm, ingrained discipline of the Royal Guard was in effect, and each and every one of the guardsponies, whose formations I slinked through and around like some sort of cat burglar slinking through the city streets, stood to attention; rigidly still they were, every muscle and sinew taut, strained, and ready to explode into savage violence at but a single word barked by their officers.

The rain had finally ceased now, though the ground was still a soggy quagmire and the sky above devoid of stars. Only the moon, hidden by the dense cloud cover, was visible as a faint, lambent glow of sickly pale light trying in vain to make itself known. The light of the torches could only illuminate but a short distance from the outer lines of the unicorns, and the walls, tall and imposing, were almost invisible against the darkness. By this lambent orange glow the pools of rainwater that had collected across what was once a barren and empty courtyard appeared to have been made of molten gold, poured out across the earth.

At the wall breach, my platoon was waiting. Lieutenant Southern Cross' engineers had finished with their work, and were lingering out just behind the two ranks of unicorns facing the wall. A thin cable, barely visible in the darkness snaked its way across the sinking mud and up the hill, where the explosives that they had planted lay hidden underneath the pile of debris. The unicorns were arrayed directly opposite the breach, and their field of fire covered the broad expanse between this and the hundred or so yards to the keep itself, while behind them the earth ponies and pegasi stood by.

I took my position with Ensign Black Marble, a rosy-cheeked and youngish chap just barely out of high school, who held aloft the platoon's guidon [A smaller, swallow-tailed banner used to identify platoons in the Royal Guard. These are typically emblazoned with the heraldic device of the lieutenant commanding it, or, if no such coat-of-arms exists, a symbol as chosen by the platoon's commander and subject to approval by the regiment's colonel] with the same sort of reverence as if it were the colours of the regiment. I'm rather used to a wide variety of responses when ponies meet me face-to-face for the first time, but very rarely has the other pony been literally stunned into silence. I speak no hyperbole when I say this; the colt was so unbelievably happy that I, the famed Commissar Blueblood, supposed saviour of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and the alleged hero of Black Venom Pass, that he could only grin from ear to ear and jitter excitedly to himself.

Judging him to be of very little use besides holding the flag up and possibly taking a few Changeling fangs to the face in a misguided attempt to impress me, I turned to his more sensible companion Sergeant Cheque Book. He was an older stallion, a little quiet, unimaginative, and frankly rather dull company; certainly not the sort of pony one would expect to be a career soldier, but when the bank that he worked for as a low grade clerk had collapsed as these institutions are wont to do from time to time (as is my understanding of such things. I don't pay much attention to matters of money, having never been terribly short of it enough to cause me any worry) and his life in general fell to pieces around him he joined the Royal Guard out of sheer desperation.

With the pleasantries over I took my new place on the left of the platoon, and if anything they seemed rather pleased that Scarlet Letter was gone and I was in charge. The courtyard stretched out before us like a yawning abyss from whence a multitude of horrors was about to be unleashed; cold, impenetrably dark, and as malevolent as the near-silence that had fallen upon our scene. The artillery had ceased firing, not out of fear of hitting us, but Sergeant Bramley Apple wanted to time a vast salvo of all of his guns at the most opportune moment, and save for the rustling of the banners, the crackling of burning embers, and the occasional chime of armour upon armour as the restless stallions fidgeted there was an almost unbearable hush. And yet underpinning this, and still barely perceptible, the drone of the Changeling horde bore on, as relentless and as implacable as the vast army that this maddening sound accompanied.

Dear Faust, the wait was interminable. I could only stand there, staring into this darkened abyss, my eyes conjuring malevolent beasts and daemons out of the vague shapes half-glimpsed in the dim light, while I waited for the inevitable. The near-silence was becoming interminable, and the seemingly random background noises only exacerbated my frayed nerves, for each individual sound of steel sliding upon steel as one or more stallions fidgeted impatiently, or of the unidentifiable noises that seemed to emanate from beyond our tiny island of light, lost in the darkness, could only amplify the seemingly infinite lengths of time where there was naught but silence and that disturbing hum of thousands of Changeling drones on the march.

Glimpsed in the darkened gloom I saw movement, and the sound of a few small rocks cascading down the hill. At first I thought it was my imagination, driven mad by the fear, but then I saw another and another; shapes of black tinged with a sickly, malignant green as of gangrenous flesh, silhouetted against the black-blue night sky as they crested the debris hill. Very soon the breach was filled with them. Hundred, thousands? Numbers simply became meaningless when one looked upon the swirling black mass that scrambled and crawled upon its belly as a single, misshapen abomination with a million glittering green emeralds for eyes that filled its body. They descended down the slope that I had struggled down with an ease that was almost contemptuous, if such creatures were at all capable of such an emotion.

I held my breath as the horde approached at a frightening speed, and every rational fibre of my being was imploring me to give the unicorns the order to fire, as if our paltry little platoon would somehow stop this onslaught in its tracks. More and more Changelings cascaded down that hill like an avalanche, until the slope itself had become almost a singular, monotone black, somehow distinct and more malevolent from the darkness of the night, with the sheer density of the tightly packed mob that streamed through the gap. Lieutenant Southern Cross had to detonate the explosives now. He just had to. To watch the beasts regroup at the base of the mound, hissing and screeching at us, was maddening. I turned away from the sight, hoping to find the engineer and push that damned button myself.

And then, a rumbling, massive roar filled the sky, and the earth beneath the piled debris lurched upwards violently from the force of the explosion. A wall of hot air hit me in the face, followed by a rush of dust and smashed debris. Blood and torn body parts, smouldering bits of carapace and unidentifiable burnt flesh, rained down upon us, and the soldiers, unable to hold in their enthusiasm, cheered. Nopony stopped them; it would have been fruitless to even try. The cloud of smoke and dust lingered, and through the grimy haze I could discern figures stumbling around awkwardly, shrieking in agony, before collapsing and expiring.

Soon the dust cleared on the chill wind, revealing a charnel house. The carefully constructed blockage in the gap was completely gone, as if it had never been there, and in its place was a vast, yawning crater that smoked and smouldered. Broken bits of masonry and shattered furniture littered the scene, amongst which the bloodied and torn remains of what had once been at least a hundred Changeling drones lay strewed. The survivors scrambled and crawled through the wreckage; limbs torn off by the blast, chitin peeled away to reveal raw flesh, and green ichorous blood flowed copiously from open wounds into stagnant pools.

Any sense of triumph, however, was soon crushed; for almost as soon as the dust had been blown away and the ringing in my ears started to fade, yet more Changelings, seemingly greater in number than before, filled the gap. The real fight was about to begin.

Author's Note

Sorry about the delay again, but here's the latest chapter. Hope you enjoyed it.

Bloodstained (Part 17)

Part 17

"Platoon will volley fire at my command!" I bellowed [As a pony of the royal bloodline, Blueblood has some nascent ability in the Royal Canterlot Voice, though his use of it tends to be accidental rather than deliberate], recalling hazily the memories of unicorn fire drill from my time at the Academy. The order was echoed by the officers of the two other platoons either side of us. "Front rank, kneel!"

The entire front row of the platoon, some fifteen ponies, crouched down, almost laying upon their stomach in readiness for the order to fire their horns glowed with each individual unicorn's aura, presenting a veritable rainbow of colours that shone dimly in the darkness of the night. Despite their previous commanding officer having been a pony with all of the martial skill of a particularly irate goose and with none of the personal charm, the platoon was still as well-drilled and disciplined as any in the 1st Solar Guards, which was a fine testament to the training that they had received and of Shining Armour's own efforts in maintaining such high standards even with Lieutenant Scarlet Letter in command.

The Changelings were a little more cautious about their approach now, and in small groups of twos or threes they trotted hesitantly into this gaping crater. I chewed on my lower lip, fighting that base instinct to turn tail and run; there was little point in firing now, not at this range and with so few targets. This was the key principle of unicorn fire drill - to wait until the enemy presented one with a large and numerous target, until they were close enough for most shots to hit something, and then fire with massed volleys for maximum effect.

With their uncannily efficient method of organising themselves, by virtue of the blasphemous telepathic control that their dark Queen and her henchmen the Purestrains exercise over their legions, the enemy had with frightening rapidity and unearthly alacrity arranged themselves in that crater into something resembling a cohesive military formation, insomuch as a vast rabble of such creatures can be considered organised. My heart pounded against my chest as I watched them, and with agonising slowness as if they were trying to prolong the terror they began to crawl out of that crater and advance upon us.

It is always the times when one is not actually fighting that are the worst in battle. In the heat of combat there is nothing to think about except trying to survive just a little longer until the madness ends; but before, after, or during one of the isolated periods of relative calm that occasionally pop up in the course of the battle, there is little else but the fear and horror that chills my heart and bowels.

The first Changelings pulled themselves out of that crater, and marched forth across this blasted quagmire of mud, rubble, and bodies. I could take it no more.

"First rank, fire!" I shrieked, the terror adding greater urgency to my voice. The soldiers responded with equal enthusiasm, and fifteen bright charges of crackling energy flashed in the darkness, illuminating the front ranks of the enemy briefly before they were cut down, and their remains crushed beyond dust by the hundreds of hooves that marched over them.

"Second rank, fire!" Another volley, this time fired over the heads of the front rank, once more ripped into the Changelings, each finding a target within the densely packed mass. To either side of us the other unicorn platoons too opened fire as well, timing their volleys with ours to maintain a constant barrage of fire upon the advancing enemy. Above and behind us, still stationed in the towers of the castle, the artillery too opened fire, raking the much-battered castle walls and the breach with carefully-aimed shots of explosive shells and shrapnel, which, though I trusted Sergeant Bramley Apple's fire discipline, still felt rather too close for comfort.

I must have screamed myself hoarse as I tried in vain to make my commands heard above the roar of artillery, the rhythmic 'snaps' of magic missiles, and the hideous shrieking and hissing of the wounded and dying Changelings. Nevertheless, despite marching straight into a withering hail of canister shot and magic, trapped as they were between overlapping lanes of fire from our unicorn platoons, they continued to advance heedless of the utterly horrendous casualties that we were inflicting upon them. Any other army would have been routed long ago, but not them, not the Changelings for whom the concept of the sanctity of life inherent in all living creatures is nothing more than a polite suggestion to be ignored at their earliest convenience.

The enemy broke into a gallop. Hissing, shrieking, snarling; lips pulled back to reveal rows of viciously sharp fangs as they screamed down at us across the muddy ground, hooves splashing in the pools of stagnant water and sinking into the mire. A few floundered in the swamp-like conditions to be trampled upon by their comrades in their mad dash to get to us. Grimly, with the sort of clarity of mind that comes with knowing that one is close to death, I unsheathed my sword and held it before me in the ready position. Not that I had any intention of getting into the brutal melee that was to come, for the earth ponies that had waited impatiently behind us swarmed forth through the gaps in our ranks, and presented a bristling wall of steel with their spears. I looked to my right to see that Cannon Fodder was standing by my side, observing as the densely packed formation of earth ponies along with Captain Red Coat and his command section, organised themselves with all of the casual disinterest of a pony watching the traffic from the window of a restaurant. I found his presence to be oddly reassuring.

There was the sound of a heavy 'thud', as of an ancient door being slammed shut with some violence, when the Changeling horde smashed into the front rank of the earth ponies. Our troops held firm, and the noise of sharpened spears piercing hardened chitin and sinking into soft flesh was a thoroughly sickening one, yet through the sheer weight of their vast numbers the enemy burst through the first ranks, and in spite of my best efforts I found myself thrust into the melee.

It was not so much a battle as one might envisage if one has been raised on stories of gallant heroes striding across the battlefield smiting the enemy with holy wrath as much as it was just an ungodly press of bodies, pushing and shoving against one another in a vain effort to achieve some sort of advantage like a marginally more deadly version of the scrum in a game of rugby. [Judging from other eyewitness testimony of this battle, the cramped environment of courtyard meant that Blueblood's description of the battle as a scrummage in rugby hoofball is rather accurate.] The night became a vicious, swirling morass of steel, chitin, blood, rain, and mud. The sound of screams, shrieks, roars, of guns and of flesh being ripped to pieces filled the night. When it became obvious the that the first rank of earth ponies was in no way going to be able to hold back the onslaught I scrambled backwards, giving up all pretence of trying to maintain my entirely false reputation for the sake of trying to save my miserable life. Alas, it was not to be; pushed forth by those stallions around me, I was thrust to the front, whether by accident or by some misguided desire by those soldiers to see the conquering hero doing his job I don't know - in truth I remember precious little of these bursts of violence beyond these flashes of blood and steel, and of the pain and fatigue. I count it as a blessing that I cannot recall anything in detail, though the memories of what I felt, the exhaustion, of feeling sick to my very core, of wanting nothing more than this misery to end, and of the terror, are all too vivid; and in my nightmares, of which I have far too many, I live this battle and many more again and again. I let loose a scream of terror that was taken by those who heard it to be a cry of rage as I hacked and slashed wildly, each savage blow of the heavy, brutish Pattern '12 sabre cutting deep into the toughened chitin and mutilating the flesh within, and with none of the subtle grace or even forethought that was expected of a skilled duellist such as I.

We were mere inches away from the hated enemy, with barely enough space for me to swing my sword, close enough to smell the rancid breath of these abominations as they shrieked and flailed and ripped flesh with their fangs, and for me to see my own face, marred by exhaustion and small cuts that wept crimson blood, stark against my stained white fur, reflected a thousand times over in those malevolent, compound eyes of theirs. Every single movement in that fetlock-deep, sucking, cloying quagmire was a horrid struggle; too many times I saw a guardspony, weighed down by his armour and equipment, flounder helplessly in the mud, to be slaughtered by the enemy while his comrades were powerless to aid him.

The fight had devolved into a hard, brutal slog of attrition. Each time we pushed the enemy back but a few feet, we too were forced back by that same amount. This tug of war continued, and as the dead and wounded piled up we stumbled on the growing mound of bodies, most of them Changelings I think, though in this darkness it was quite difficult to tell. In this tiny, packed courtyard on this blighted little rock in the middle of nowhere, all of the planning, the manoeuvring of vast numbers of ponies, of the logistics that sustained them, the weapons that armed them, and the armour that protected them, it all came down to each pony's single, myopic viewpoint of just trying to survive. For me, the world had been reduced to just myself and the unending assault of horrors out to get me. It was on these individual struggles, of which mine was merely one of hundreds, that the course of this battle, and indeed every battle throughout the history of war, hinged upon.

It was some time, minutes, hours, days, I don't know, I couldn't keep track of the passage of time in that fight, when the Changelings finally began to slink away from us. They did so slowly, breaking off one by one into a slow, cautious retreat under an unceasing hail of artillery fire at near-point blank range.

"Hold!" I shouted. A few of the more eager troopers lunged forwards, heedless of my order as their bloodlust took hold, thrusting their spears and blades at the retreating foe before scrambling back to rejoin their formations at the behest of their non-commissioned officers.

As I watched the enemy retreat, still maintaining that unearthly discipline and unity of purpose despite being decimated by the close artillery barrage, I felt an overwhelming sense of exhaustion take me. For as the adrenaline and the rush of blood that had sharpened my instincts in that fight slowly began to fade away as with the Changeling's remarkably swift withdrawal beyond the wall breach and out of sight, the pain, dull, throbbing, and seemed to sap what little strength there was in my frame, slowly spread from within. The pain of wounds that I could not recall receiving had returned, too; my muzzle was split from the ridge of my nose diagonally across my cheek, my nose had been bashed repeatedly by Changeling hooves and was thus bleeding profusely, and across my chest, forelegs, and barrel a multitude of small cuts and bruises smarted painfully. All of this, however, was nothing compared to the pounding, throbbing headache I was feeling, rather like some awful hangover only without the vague memory of a good time to offset its unpleasantness.

But what I remember most is simply feeling sick; I had learned from my experience in Black Venom Pass not to charge into battle on a full stomach, as my alleged heroism was marred somewhat when my chin and hooves were splattered with the half-digested remains of what I had for lunch, but there was a horrid, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that sent me dry-heaving. The sight that stretched out before me, like a vista of the worst torments of Tartarus, of the bodies, pony and Changeling alike, bloodied, ripped, torn, or otherwise seemingly left un-marred as if merely sleeping, were strewed before us in a vast, unbroken sea of the dead, and from the rippling waves of mangled flesh and blood and ichor broken limbs and heads emerged at grotesque angles like rocks by a shore, certainly did not help my disposition.

I was relieved to find that Cannon Fodder was still by my side; in the swirling chaos of the fight I had lost track of him, though I was certain that he had remained steadfastly by my side throughout, but in combat one's view and senses of the outside world becomes all but blind save for that which is necessary to one's immediate survival. Aside from a few scratches on his muzzle and a few more dents and stains added to his already much-battered armour he seemed to be relatively unscathed. His usual expression of slight boredom, as if what we had just gone through together had all of the excitement of a particularly dull lecture series on the reform of the Equestrian taxation policy, was quite reassuring despite all of the pain and death around us.

The formations were a mess. While the heterogeneous mess of earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns that had fought in this first skirmish had by and large organised themselves back into their respective racial groups in preparation for the second wave, with platoons and sections now under-strength, officers and non-commissioned officers dead or otherwise incapacitated, and ponies displaced far from their original units they all simply had to attach themselves to whomever appeared to be in charge. The platoon that I commanded was now a jumble of gold and silver, white and grey, each equally dulled by dust and marred by blood, drained from the fight but judging by the impatient stamping of hooves and irritated snorts they were still eager for more.

"Is that it?" said Cannon Fodder, sounding rather disappointed. He punctuated that remark by spitting into the ground and rubbing at it with a dirty hoof.

"Of course not," I said, shaking my hoof and trying to fight the taste of bitter bile that rose up my throat. "That was just a probing attack to test our defences."

My aide snorted. "Not very fair of them."

Despite the brutality of this vista of death stretching out before us, in the hush there was a strange and morbid serenity about the stillness of those mangled corpses. I would be hesitant, however, to suggest that there was any sort of dignity about it, as ponies who speak of dignity in death clearly have never seen a pony, or indeed any living creature, slip from this mortal shell and into the next life. Turning my gaze over the horror, I looked to the right to see that the main gates of the castle still stood firm, despite the corrosion of the ancient iron, and that the Changelings had not even attempted to bring them down. Judging by the way that the enemy dead were piled, layered, in the area immediately between myself and the wall breach implied that they had not bothered attempting to climb or fly [As the rain had ceased by now flight was now possible, which the pegasi veterans interviewed after the war described as an immense relief not to be trapped in the mud] elsewhere over the still-formidable walls, which had all but proved my hypothesis that the worst was yet to come.

At that moment, however, I had very little idea of just how much worse things could possibly get.

In this brief, awkward period of relative hush, as if some cosmic referee had just called half time on the battle, I used this moment to step away from the platoon, leaving it in the now-bloodied hooves of Ensign Black Marble and Sergeant Cheque Book to prepare for the second wave in my absence, to try and find Captain Red Coat. I hoped that he had survived, as it would have reflected rather poorly on me if he had been martyred in the name of Equestria and the Princesses while being ostensibly under my protection, even if really there was not much that I could have been done about it.

After a few moments of searching I found Red Coat leaning against the cold stones of the castle wall, just by the main doors made of rotting wood and sheltering underneath the tall parapets from which the artillery still took one or two pot-shots at the enemy massed unseen behind the walls. Despite my concerns it seemed that the lad had acquitted himself rather well in the fight, and aside from a few scratches and bruises on his muzzle and limbs where his mithril plate armour did not cover his body he seemed to be relatively in one piece. Nevertheless, I felt a small twinge of envy when I saw the deep scratches upon his armour, and the bare metal underneath the dull grey lacquer marred by dirt and dust shone brightly in the flickering lights of the still-burning braziers nearby, which would have killed him had he not been wearing an inch-thick breastplate, and yet I still had to make do with a thin piece of cloth that by now had been torn and ripped and stained with blood from the resultant wounds inflicted.

Around him and crowded around the door, which stood half open, the wounded and the dying were laid out in long rows, not more than a few dozen yards from where the battle was fought just moments before. The medics, standing out amongst the tarnished silver and gold stallions around them by the red cross insignia and their pouches and bags laden morbidly with scalpels, needles, phials of medicines, saws, and other decidedly grim-looking medical equipment, stalked amongst this mass of misery and pain to administer triage. Those who simply needed patching up were quickly attended to and, despite a few vocal protests on part of the patient, sent back to their unit, while the more serious cases, with limbs and flesh and faces mangled beyond belief, screaming and whimpering horribly with the pain, were taken onto stretchers and carried over to a large tent for surgery. [Blueblood does not mention this, as hospitals and the like tend to make him uncomfortable, but the tent was merely a temporary casualty-clearing station, and that the main hospital area for the most serious injuries was inside the castle itself.] The ones beyond any mortal help were simply given a heavy dose of painkillers and simply left there to mercifully expire in their own time. It was here that the stench of death, blood, decay, and waste was at its worse, and despite the horror of the sight before me I found it difficult to tear my eyes away from it.

Although I myself felt utterly drained after that 'burst' of combat, the Captain was a bundle of nervous energy running on pure adrenaline. He twitched incessantly, like a startled rodent, with wide eyes darting this way and that and with peculiar, bird-like movements he fidgeted as he leaned awkwardly against the cold stone walls. In his hooves he clutched his spear, aimed towards the black sky, and still-warm Changeling blood trickled down from the chipped and battered blade onto the wooden pole.

"Commissar!" he exclaimed as I delicately pushed my way around a small gaggle of medics bandaging up a comatose soldier's severed hoof. "I saw you charge straight into the enemy horde!"

I blinked vacantly at him for a moment; it took a while for his words, sounding rather distant, faint, and somewhat muffled as if he was speaking through a paper bag, to be fully comprehended by my addled mind. Did he not see me desperately trying to escape? No, of course not. Ponies only seem to remember what they actually want to remember, and nopony wants to remember that same pony who had allegedly saved Princess Cadence and saved an entire regiment from destruction flee.

"I was feeling a little bit left out just standing by the sidelines," I said, inflecting my voice with the usual bravado normally expect of me, which Red Coat lapped up with his habitual enthusiasm for hero-worship.

Standing by his side rather protectively was Company Sergeant Major Square Basher, who, I have been told, had lost her weapon in the chaotic melee and had to resort to crushing Changeling skulls one after the other with her bare hooves, if the soldiers' increasingly unlikely stories were to be believed of course. As I approached, the mare snapped to attention and saluted curtly, and only relaxed slightly when I told her that she could stand easy.

"When do you think they're coming back?" he asked quietly.

"The Changelings?" I asked flatly. The fact that my head felt like it had been immersed in jelly was further compounded by the worsening of my headache, with the pain throbbing seemingly with every rapid beat of my heart.

Red Coat nodded his head quickly. "Yeah. They'll be mounting another assault soon, I guess."

"It'll be very soon, I think," I replied glumly. "I can't say what goes on that twisted hive mind of theirs, but it's probable that they'll try to take this fortress as quickly as possible. That way they can turn the full brunt of their forces against the main assault from Black Venom Pass, thus inflicting defeat in detail on Army Group Centre."

"Unless the main force can reach us in time," he said, that small shred of hope colouring the tone of his voice. "They won't leave us out here alone, right?"

I forced a good-natured chuckle, and it did much to put the Captain at ease, inasmuch as anypony could possibly be relaxed when surrounded by scores of the wounded and the dying. This metaphorical silver lining, however, was to be soon obscured by another storm cloud, as such spots of hope invariably tend to find themselves crushed mercilessly frequently throughout my life. The door beside Captain Red Coat flung open with a shriek of protest from the un-oiled and rusty hinges, and with such force that several of the old wooden panels groaned, cracked, and then snapped into a shower of splinters. An earth pony ensign of the Night Guards burst through the open door with equal violence, startling two medics carrying a stallion, his face covered in bloodstained bandages, on a stretcher.

It was not the nature of the stallion's arrival that was most shocking, however, for his physical appearance gave a much-needed excuse for it. As he ran he limped, and as he approached Captain Red Coat and me it was evident that he had sprained his hoof in some manner. His lacquered grey armour was covered in a great many scratches, and indeed was much of the colt's body that was not protected by the thick armour plates. His face, which might have otherwise been considered to be quite handsome for a pony in his late teens, was marred by blossoms of large, purple bruises and three horrendous lacerations long and straight ripped across his thin and rather delicate muzzle, and opened up like ravines in a flat country.

Despite his wounds he brushed off the assistance of a medic, and continued to half-gallop, half-wobble towards us with the peculiarly single-minded determination of an aspiring young officer eager to please his superiors.

"What happened?" exclaimed Red Coat, pushing himself off the castle wall he was leaning upon for support.

The Ensign stopped before Red Coat with a mad flail of his three remaining good hooves in the soggy ground, and slapped a muddy fore-hoof against his helmet in a clumsy salute. I noticed that his right eye had been gummed shut by the blood trickling down from a wound on the ridge of his brow. His nose, too, appeared to have been broken, and the whispy, adolescent beginnings of a moustache likely intended as imitation of the extravagant facial hair preferred by the more old school of officers was matted with blood from his battered muzzle. He panted horribly and swayed awkwardly on his hooves, as if he was on the verge of collapsing in a heap before us.

"Things are a bit sticky, sir," he said, at length, in what was a prime example of that admirable, if rather unhelpful, tendency of ponies from Trottingham towards understatement in the face of mortal peril. When translated into proper everyday Equestrian as you or I or any other pony of our vast and diverse realm might understand it, however, it roughly meant 'we're all fucked'.

It took a short moment for that short phrase and its dire implications to sink in, and already a half-dozen nightmare scenarios raced through my mind one after the other, each more horrifying and fanciful than the last. Sergeant Major Square Basher was the first to speak, as she regarded the relatively diminutive Ensign in the same manner that a mother would her injured foal.

"You what?" she said flatly.

"Sticky," repeated the Ensign, as if somehow doing so would make his meaning clearer. "The Lieutenant said to tell you things are a bit sticky. His exact words, sir."

"Dammit!" Red Coat snapped angrily, his face twisted into a snarl as he approached, nostrils flared and snorting steam. "Speak plainly, will you!"

A chill wind from the north howled through the courtyard, plucked at the soggy fabric of my uniform and chilled me to my bones, and the torches flickered and danced in protest. The Ensign gulped awkwardly, and I gave him a reassuring smile and a nod, despite feeling just as impatient as Captain Red Coat, if not more so. I beckoned those medics that he had brushed off earlier to tend to his wounds, and, as gently as I could, implored him to elaborate.

"It's the Changelings, sir," he said, wincing a little as a medic dabbed at the cuts on his muzzle with a cloth soaked in some foul-smelling antiseptic. "They came up from below without warning. We were caught by surprise, so we barricaded ourselves in the rooms and collapsed the tunnels where we could, but it's only a matter of time before they'll break through. The Lieutenant sent me out with two other ponies to get the message to you, but I'm the only one who's made it out alive."

"Is the artillery safe?" I asked; though my knowledge of strategy and tactics was still rather poor, I knew enough that our advantage in long range firepower was probably what was keeping us from being overrun.

"Yes, sir, and the hospital too. For now, at least. The Changelings have full run of the main hall and the corridors, but we still hold the entrance and the upper floors, but the barricades we set up probably won't last long against them. I think there's a Purestrain with them."

"What of Lady Twilight Sparkle?" Not that I was overly concerned, as I was all but certain that with Princess Luna by her side no harm could possibly come to Celestia's most faithful student.

He gave a vague sort of shrug. "I don't know, sir. We were all separated in the attack. I think she's still in her room with that bodyguard of yours, sir, unless the Changelings have got her."

I shared a concerned look with Captain Red Coat, though I felt a shiver ripple down my spine like something cold, wet, and slimy had just crawled down the back of my shirt. Despite my terror, the knowledge of just how completely and utterly 'sticky', as the stalwart ensign had so elegantly put it, our situation had become had invoked a peculiar sense of calm in me; as that of a condemned criminal coming to terms with his fate on the long, lonely walk to the gallows. Or perhaps I was merely too exhausted and sick to actually feel anything but the pain of my wounds and the aching fatigue that deadened my brain as much as it numbed my limbs and joints. This development, however, felt like a vindication of my suspicion that the old adage of anything that can go wrong invariably will, and as I regarded the Captain's bug-eyed horror at the Ensign's words what he had said in the briefing, to 'cheer up' as 'things could be worse', echoed in my mind. It made me want to punch him.

"That's impossible!" exclaimed Red Coat, his voice becoming quite desperately shrill. He took a few steps towards the Ensign, who was struggling to stand with his wounds but nevertheless put up a valiant effort in maintaining his dignity. However, I touched a hoof to Red Coat's shoulder as he moved, and shook my head gently; I had to do something before the lad allowed his emotions and fears to get the better of him. Far better, of course, to merely suppress them as far as possible and put on a brave face, while making plans to excuse oneself from the source of said fear, as I do.

"The engineers sealed the tunnels, did they not?" I said. "Either there are other tunnels that we don't know about, or the Changelings have something in their arsenal that could breach our barricades."

"Or somepony let them in," said Cannon Fodder in a somewhat dreamy fashion as if he didn't really mean to. He gave a vague, slightly meek shrug when he noticed ponies were looking at him. "Just saying..."

"I bet it was Lieutenant Scarlet Letter," Red Coat said darkly. "Must have moved the stones with unicorn magic... things."

There was a sharp intake of breath around us, and even those medics attending the more serious cases stopped whatever it was that they were doing to stare. I gave the Captain an accusing look, which he didn't appear to notice now that his blood was now well and truly 'up', as it were; one did not call into question the competence of a fellow brother-officer of the Royal Guard in front of the common soldiery, for doing so was to damage the myth of the infallibility of the officer class that the rigid hierarchy of our military relies upon, even if Scarlet Letter was a damned traitor in addition to being a pompous imbecile. It was simply good manners to wait until after the court martial, or his summary execution depending on what mood I would be in when I eventually found the stallion, assuming that I would survive to do so, before speaking so openly about his shortcomings.

"We don't know that," I said firmly, despite my gut telling me that Captain Red Coat's assumption was correct, albeit in rather more eloquent tones than the teenager's unprovoked assault on the Equestrian language. "Besides, talking about it will waste time and lives. We need to act now."

Red Coat frowned at me, before calming down somewhat. "You're right," he said, nodding his head quietly.

Of course I was right, I'm the Commissar, I get to decide what's right and what isn't. Rather than vocalising that rather facetious thought, which had entered into my mind unbidden and, as ever, entirely at odds with the situation at hoof as if my hindbrain had developed a shield of sarcasm and dry wit to protect itself from the horrors I now faced, I merely imitated Red Coat in nodding my head in agreement. Naturally, I was to be rewarded for helping diffuse the situation by steering the young officer on the right track with yet another opportunity to get ripped apart for a good cause.

As if to punctuate my words, our conversation, such as it was, was then interrupted by three shrill, sharp blasts of a whistle from the castle keep high above us. A moment later, as I stepped back and looked up at the towers that seemed to stretch into the infinite darkness of the overcast night sky, and from those broken spires the desultory fire of the artillery could be seen as thin streaks of light that flashed into existence and swiftly faded. A pony's head, illuminated by the torch that he held levitating dangerously close to his face, appeared over the edge of the parapet.

"Changelings, sir!" he cried, though his voice sounded damnably faint as if he was speaking from the other side of a thin wall. "Thousands of them! They're advancing again!"

I looked to Captain Red Coat, and saw that he was frozen by fear and indecision. He trembled in his armour and his mouth flapped uselessly as though he was struggling to put into words the abject terror that he must have felt. To be fair on him, were I in his position I'd have likely responded in the exact same manner, albeit with more dignity.

"What are your orders?" I asked firmly, trying to prompt some sort of response out of him.

Captain Red Coat didn't appear to hear me at first. Instead, he stared straight through me with wide, uncomprehending eyes, before they suddenly and starkly focused upon me, as though his consciousness had momentarily vacated his body and was now suddenly returned to it by my words.

"We're entirely surrounded now," he said. "We'll still have to try and hold them here, but if we can send a few units and the engineers in to ensure that the keep is absolutely secure then we may be able to hold out until Crimson Arrow's force comes to relieve us."

There was always one other option, but as a commissar of Their Highnesses' Royal Guard I could not possibly be seen to countenance the dreaded 'S'-word, not unless it was swiftly followed by either a court martial or a sabre to the throat of the pony who dared to utter it. The idea of surrendering had occurred to me, but the rumours whispered between off-duty soldiers over their camp fires and over ale rations of what Changelings do with captured ponies had rather dissuaded me from pursuing that course of action. Though the average guardspony has the rather frustrating tendency to exaggerate just about everything, from the unpleasantness of whatever messy and tedious task they had been given to do to exactly how big the Changeling that nearly took his head off in the last fight was, I decided to err on the side of caution. Besides, I didn't think it would be possible for me to surrender without anypony seeing me, unless I happened to be the only survivor, and frankly that didn't look terribly probable.

CSM Square Basher was thus sent to rally the troops once more, and it was not long before the battalion, though disorganised and still reeling from the last scrap, was prepared for the attack. As I watched her, her loud voice rising above the roar of the artillery and the rhythmic 'snaps' of magic missile fire I mused that had she been born to the correct family with the right connections and with the appropriate amount of wealth and education that she might have made a decent commissar. A better one than I, at least.

With no other option, I nodded my head and quietly conceded that his plan was likely the best course of action, for the simple fact that nopony else, least of all me, of course, could come up with anything better. As the saying goes, we were up a certain creek without a certain paddle, and the best we could manage is simply to delay the enemy for as long as possible.

"We'll need to make sure that Twilight Sparkle is safe, too," said Captain Red Coat. "You, uh... you swore an oath to Lord Captain Shining Armour to keep his sister safe, right?"

My stomach lurched at the mention of that rather hastily-sworn oath, causing the bile to rise up the back of my throat. I suppressed it, however, and nodded slowly. "Of course," I said. "A prince never forgets his oaths." No matter how ill-advised, I added mentally.

I could see what was coming next a mile off, and truth be told it was not something that I particularly wanted to do. Though Captain Red Coat would never actually order me to lead a rescue party and Lieutenant Southern Cross' engineers into the Changeling-infested fortress, as while ordering a commissar to do something is not necessarily against the rules most officers are at least civil enough to phrase their requests merely as polite suggestions, Red Coat was evidently trying to coax me into performing that duty in his usual adolescent and ham-hoofed attempt at subtlety. And although it was well within my power to tell him that I'm staying put, the expectation of what Prince Blueblood, Hero of Equestria, would do in this dire situation had all but prevented me from doing so.

"I don't suppose you could let me borrow a section or two," I said, striking a suitably heroic pose and gazing contemplatively at the castle gates. "I don't want to keep Lady Sparkle waiting."

***

There was no time to waste, and thus I was forced to grab the closest collection of earth ponies and unicorns [Though Blueblood does not say, we can assume the pegasi were overlooked due to the equally important duty of theirs to keep the skies above the fortress clear, now that the rains had ceased, and that they would be disadvantaged in the narrow tunnels] unfortunate enough to be wandering around nearby looking for their respective sections. Eventually I settled on a mixed section of ten ponies made up of roughly equal parts earth pony and unicorn. Though I would have much preferred a larger mob of guardsponies between myself and the Changeling hordes, this would simply have to do, at least until I could find any survivors within the keep. The Ensign, too, insisted on accompanying us on this mission, despite having sprained his ankle and therefore being in absolutely no condition to fight. However, despite having this golden opportunity to spend the remainder of the battle on a stretcher and in the company of some rather attractive nurses in uniform, there was simply no dissuading this foolish young lad. I therefore resolved to stick close to him; the Changelings were more likely to attack a wounded pony than me, I reasoned.

Commanding this section, for as a commissar my remit was to monitor the command decisions of ponies rather than giving those orders in the first place, which, I might add, helped greatly for dodging blame on the all-too-frequent occasions that things go well and truly pear-shaped for me, was a grizzled old unicorn corporal of the Night Guards. He was apparently in his forties, judging by the lines that creased his face like somepony had scribbled on it with a quill and the flecks of grey that tinged what could be seen of his military buzz-cut from under his helmet. His personality, such as it was, seemed cultivated to match his unrefined exterior, and when he spoke the mystery of how he had remained a mere corporal despite having spent much of his adult life, some twenty-five years or so, in the Royal Guard.

"Alright, you pansies," he said, addressing the three Solar Guard soldiers and two Horestralian engineers who had been roped in to help with this mission. "You're in my section now, and I don't want you airy-fairy types with your pretty gold armour and perfect teeth slacking off just because you're afraid to get your hooves dirty. Faust almighty, it was bad enough being one of you bloody girlies for two boring decades before they transferred me to Luna's Night Guards, but I'll buck you sideways if I catch any of you prissy little snobs embarrassing me in front of the Commissar here."

The five guardsponies exchanged a few awkward looks before one, who appeared to have been elected their leader by some silent accord, spoke. "Don't you worry, Corporal, we'll fight."

The Corporal gave a nod of his head, and from his armour retrieved a small, stubby cheap cigar and clamped his jaws around it. "Alright then," he said, and the unlit cigar wagged awkwardly between his lips, "let's get this over with."

One by one the soldiers slipped through the open gates, followed by the Ensign limping hopelessly behind, while I stood by, ostensibly making sure that everypony was suitably prepared and motivated for the task at hoof but really I was ensuring that I was closer to the rear of our unit and therefore the least likely to be killed in a Changeling ambush. Cannon Fodder was with me too, which I found reassuring if the enemy had any sense and ambushed us from the rear.

One pony stopped to speak with me. There was a mad, manic glint in his eye, and a sadistic grin that looked much too gleeful for my liking. 'Mister Yellow' he was called, though I doubted that was his real name, and I only recall that due to the sheer amount of times that I had to have the pony disciplined for attempting to start fires. It was only his preternatural skill in pyrokinetic magic and a fear of what he might do unsupervised in the civilian world, and a misguided desire on part of his previous handlers that he should have some productive outlet for his mental illness, that stopped the pony from being discharged from the Royal Guard entirely. I had seen his power exercised on the practice range as the target dummies were consumed in a sea of flames; it was a fate that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, but they're all dead now so it doesn't matter.

"Will Mister Yellow get fed tonight?" he said, much too quickly so that his words ran together. "It's been a long time."

"Yes," I said, doing my best to hold in my innate disgust at this twisted little pony. "I, uh, suppose it has."

Cannon Fodder came to my rescue once more and pointed a hoof lazily at the open door. "You're holding everypony up," he said, and the pyrophile pulled a sulky face and slinked through the gap.

The noise of battle just beyond the rows of soldiers, not more than a few hundred yards from my location, rose to an unholy crescendo as the Changeling horde once more smashed into the ranks of the Royal Guard. As the roar of cannons and the screams filled the night as it had done so earlier, conjuring the all-too-recent memories of blood and steel into my mind, I gave thanks to Faust that I was not out there again. Yet, as I turned to the door after the last of the soldiers slipped through the narrow gap, and gazed into the cavernous entrance hall that seemed to recede into an infinite darkness that the burning torches fixed upon the crumbling stone columns failed to illuminate, an almost overwhelming feeling of dread took me. I took one last look to my companion, who was staring at the half-opened doors with all of his usual lack of interest, before I too followed the soldiers inside.

Behind me the door slammed shut, and the torch flames flickered and danced in the sudden and brief draft of wind. The shadows cast by crumbling statues and piles of broken rubble bobbed and swayed drunkenly, before finally settling down once more. With the noise of battle outside somewhat muted, I felt strangely isolated and alone in this dank and rather dismal place, despite being in the company of twelve other stallions. No... as the lights settled and I stepped into the room proper, I could see that standing sentinel besides a heavy wooden door barred shut with a hefty-looking steel bolt were three other stallions of the battalion. They clutched their weapons and eyed the door that they guarded warily.

The door was opened, albeit rather reluctantly, but not before being warned that beyond here the Changelings were running riot through the labyrinthine mess of corridors and rooms. Once the last of us had filtered through, the door was slammed shut behind us with a dreadful sense of finality, and an impenetrable darkness descended upon us. Tentatively, I cast a dim light with my horn, knowing full well that it would make us damnably visible from a mile away, but on balance being able to see where we were going felt like a fair compromise. The cold, actinic light illuminated the slick cold stone surrounding us, and little else, and thus the corridors, with their torches put out, seemed to stretch away into a void of infinite darkness. The silence that fell too, despite the laboured breathing of the dozen ponies crammed into this tight space, felt as oppressive as the weight of the stone above me.

I led the way towards Twilight's chambers, though only out of necessity, as my special talent of navigation was once more proving itself to be far too useful for my own liking. Our progress was slow, as each sound, distant and diffused, caused me to stop and wait, ears straining to find and identify the mysterious rustling sounds that felt far too close to me. I don't know how long it was, as in all of the twists and turns and stairs I had rather lost track of time, but as we scrambled onto the first floor [he may mean the second floor here] onto yet another corridor that receded into absolute darkness, I saw a vague flicker of movement, so barely perceptible that I had thought that it was merely my mind playing tricks on me.

We stopped, and with a wave of my hoof I brought the unicorns forth, filling the corridor in three abreast just in front of me, and their horns charged with magic. I waited, and all I could hear was the pounding of my heart in my ears. Something moved again, and then something else. The darkness rippled and flexed, as though it were some sort of obscene flesh on a grotesque nightmare creature, before it was suddenly filled with a dozen pair of glittering gem-like eyes and fangs. As if birthed from the darkness itself, the Changelings themselves emerged, hissing and shrieking, and tore straight towards us.

I didn't even need to give the order; the unicorns at the front opened fire before I could open my mouth. A dazzling volley of magic missiles lit the hallway with a flash of multi-coloured light that stung my eyes, and felled a couple of drones, whose corpses were simply subsumed into the oncoming mass. The enemy poured into the narrow corridor in a flail of hooves and fangs, each scrambling over and trampling one another as they closed the distance between us with frightening speed.

"Flamer!" I shrieked, hoping that the fear in my voice would merely be taken as urgency by the ponies around me. "To the front! Burn them all!"

Mister Yellow forced his way past his comrades, the earth ponies jostling for position to lay down a wall tipped with steel with their spears, to the front. The pyrokinetic pony's horn flickered briefly, and hot yellow flames danced about its tip. I screamed at him to get a move on, though my voice was lost in the volley of magic missiles and the banshee wail of the enemy bearing down on us. Then, a blast of heat hit me in the face. The corridor before us was flooded with magical fire, and the Changelings died shrieking in agony. It was a sight that would continue to haunt me to this day; the enemy was consumed utterly by the flames, and in the midst of the boiling morass of fire, melting the ancient stones into slag, I saw the horrid and macabre dance of creatures driven mad by the flames. Limbs, heads, wings, all stark against the undulating sea of brilliant oranges and yellows and stifling blacks, flailed at grotesque and broken angles. Amidst the crackle of flames were the dying shrieks of the drones, and it was then that I learned that while under the thrall of their hive mind they did not know fear, they still knew pain.

One beast stumbled drunkenly out towards us from the flames; its flesh burning, underneath the blackened and cracked chitin, flames wreathing its body in an unholy aura. Eyes that had burst in the heat wept fluids that streaked down its face, swollen and blistered. The flesh under its chitin, visible through the plates that had cracked and shattered from the intensity of the heat, bubbled like molten candle wax, and the fats sloughed off in great lumps. It staggered helplessly out towards me, the burning eye sockets appearing to plead with me for some end to its torment, and its jaw was twisted open in some sort of silent scream. We watched it emerge from the flames, before it collapsed in a smouldering heap before us.

"That's enough, Private," I said, and the unicorn reluctantly stopped.

The flames had ceased as abruptly as they had started, leaving a glimpse into Tartarus. The stench of burnt flesh was overwhelming, such that one of the ponies next to me was suddenly and violently sick on my hooves. Cracked shards of chitin and pools of melted fat and lumps of singed meat, all arrayed out into grotesque mockeries of the shapes of ponies, each shrivelled up and curled inwards on themselves, littered the corridor. The stones themselves were blackened with soot, and in places had melted into slag, leaving strange and nightmarish shapes.

"Alright," I said, taking a moment to make sure that everypony else was ready. "Let's go."

Author's Note

Woop, one more chapter again! Slowly getting there towards the end.

EDIT: Fixed some formatting issues

Pointless trivia of the day - For those of you vaguely interested, the 'things are a bit sticky' statement is lifted from an incident during the Korean War, in which a British Officer of the Gloucestershire Regiment informed an American general that his situation was 'a bit sticky'. What he meant to say was that his battalion of 650 was isolated, cut off, and under attack from 10,000 Chinese. Understandably the Americans took this to mean 'everything is fine'.

Bloodstained (Part 18)

Part 18

We encountered very little other opposition before reaching Twilight Sparkle's room. Only a small number of Changelings, likely survivors from previous clashes with the other guardsponies still hiding within the fortress or merely small scouting parties delicately probing our defences, dared to attack us in small groups of twos or threes. Our losses were minimal; a few scratches and bruises here and there, but nothing that would have put a soldier out of action for very long. If anything, the initial shock of suddenly being set upon by those Changelings when one least expected it was far worse than the mostly cosmetic injuries that some of the soldiers suffered. However, if they simply wanted to unnerve us then they were certainly succeeding on that front, and our progress through the single corridor that led to Twilight's room slowed to a veritable crawl. I found this all to be rather disquieting, as though the enemy was simply leading us into a trap of some description. After all, the Purestrain leading the drones had to be aware of our presence by now, and if it wanted us all dead (as the numerous enemies of Equestria seem to have a rather unhealthy obsession for killing me of all ponies, as opposed to somepony else more important) then it clearly could have done so before we even stepped hoof in this damned corridor.

Of course, the Changelings could simply have been too pre-occupied with the battle occurring just beyond the stone walls to notice a small band of guardsponies stumbling through these corridors. At the time the thought never entered into my mind, and after that large skirmish in the corridors where we were saved only by the timely intervention of Mister Yellow's rather unhealthy enthusiasm for burning things I was still not willing to put my guard down even for a second. The smaller fights, barely lasting for more than a few seconds before the rather suicidal Changelings, who were apparently under the same delusion that they could take on twelve heavily armed and rather twitchy ponies (and one all but crippled and about to collapse) that usually affects drunken revellers, only heightened my paranoia.

As we stalked through the cramped passageways, which at times narrowed awkwardly so as to allow ponies to pass through them in single file, we came across the aftermath of other skirmishes that had occurred here. Indeed, the sounds of fighting, muffled by the layers of stone surrounding us, would at times flare up, reminding us all that the battle both within the depths of this castle and without was still being waged. Every one of these vague noises or half-imagined glimpses of movement in the murky abyss that our horn lights failed to penetrate was interpreted by my fractured nerves to be evidence of a veritable swarm of drones lurking just beyond our notice. As we delved deeper into the fortress we found more and more clusters of the mutilated bodies of ponies and Changelings alike sprawled on the floor in pools of blood and each dreadfully still as only the dead can be. We passed them by with no time to give the dead ponies the proper respect that they deserved.

After what felt like an eternity we saw a faint purple glow in the distance that was unmistakeably Twilight Sparkle's magical aura. It was faint at first, all but swallowed by the darkness, but as we approached tentatively, pausing every few steps to stare into the all-consuming gloom and strain our ears to detect any sign of another Changeling ambush, it became stronger and clearer. The aura surrounded a door, which, after a momentary inspection of our surroundings, I deduced to be the one leading to Twilight's room. We passed my quarters, and I saw that the door had been torn from its hinges, and my personal belongings, though relatively sparse in number, were spilled out onto the floor in an apparent gesture of pure spite by the Changelings. [It is more likely that the Changelings were searching for intelligence; as a race that excels in covert operations such as infiltration and deception on a large scale, any important documents that would grant them knowledge to disguise themselves and blend into Equestrian society would have been highly prized. Such behaviour was observed during their brief occupation of Canterlot.]

The guardsponies fanned out into the corridor around the door, while I squeezed past the rows of armoured ponies in the awfully cramped passageway. The lambent purple glow that enveloped the door illuminated the surrounding area rather dimly. Strewed around the door were a couple of dead ponies, mutilated horrifically, and a number of Changeling corpses each with a neat, cauterised hole in the middle of their foreheads just beneath their jagged and mutated horns, and what little brains that they had congealed like pink jelly on the floor - all evidence of an extremely precise magic missile shot at close range.

I tentatively touched a hoof to the door, only to find that the aura was instead an impenetrable force field. It felt cold, smooth, and rather slippery to the touch, as if I had laid my hoof upon a window covered in condensation. In the translucent purple-pink screen covering the rotting wooden door I saw a vague reflection of myself, and I was rather disturbed by the grim, haunted mockery of the face that adorned the bedroom walls of countless teenaged fillies and had been kissed by countless daughters of petty nobility and the occasional peasant mare, staring mockingly back at me. Pushing my hoof against it, I found that this barrier was completely and utterly solid.

Nevertheless, this all meant that she was certainly still alive, which was something of a relief. I therefore drew myself up to the door and tapped my hoof politely on the force field; I didn't feel particularly confident about trying to dispel the barrier myself, or ordering the unicorns to do it for me, considering the pony casting this particular spell happens to be one of the most powerful in all of Equestria and that she would probably be rather irate even if we could.

"Lady Sparkle?" I said. My voice sounded rather hoarse, and it was quite painful to speak. I realised that I desperately needed some water. "It's Prince Blueblood. Open the door."

The door creaked open slightly, and Twilight's small and rather dainty little muzzle emerged into the gap, followed by two large magenta eyes focused into a scowl, and the horn above her brow glowing dully. Behind her, I could only glimpse the cold bare stone of the walls of her room lit by some strange dull light, tinged faintly with a shade of blue that looked damnably familiar, but I couldn't quite put my hoof on where I had seen it before.

"Yeah right," snapped Twilight. The aura surrounding her horn grew brighter, and flickered with powerful magic. "I'm not falling for that one again."

I resisted the urge to give her sneering muzzle a slap with great fortitude; it would have proved futile anyway considering the all but impenetrable magical barrier separating us. Nevertheless, I felt rather piqued that our valiant efforts to come to her aid had been met with such rudeness; even in this dank, miserable place a little gratitude would not have gone amiss. In truth I was a fair bit desperate now, and I just wanted all of this misery to end. It took a few moments, and a couple of glances back at the Changeling corpses scattered around my hooves, for me to realise why exactly she had responded in such a strange matter.

"I'm not a Changeling," I said awkwardly. There was a twitchiness to Twilight's whole demeanour that implied that one wrong word or misstep would result in my brains being forcefully ejected from the back of my skull before I could even realise my mistake.

Twilight Sparkle inclined her head in the direction of the bodies that surrounded the door. "That's what Shining Armour said," she snarled, pointing a hoof emphatically at the corpses closest to the door, "and Princess Celestia, and that one there was supposed to be Starswirl the Bearded, but he didn't even get the bells right. And Starswirl has been dead for thousands of years, too."

"Twilight," I said, once more using the familiar form of her name to try and emphasise my point. As I lowered my head down to her level, and all but pressed my cheek against the cool, slick surface of this magical barrier, she flinched slightly away from me. "The Changelings take the form of somepony one holds dear to their hearts to better manipulate their prey and feed off their love. So, unless either of us has feelings for each other that have been repressed ever since I first made fun of your lack of noble blood and your frankly awful manecut, then it's very unlikely that a Changeling will disguise itself as me of all ponies, not when there are so many of your friends that could be impersonated instead."

She hummed thoughtfully. Despite her outwardly confident, if still anxious and twitchy, exterior, I could detect between the cracks of her masque the signs of the deep underlying fear that she held; it was rather jarring when I noticed the look in those gaping eyes of hers, tinged red as if she had been crying, and the slow, measured movements of her body belied the horror that she must have felt. Was she afraid? Twilight Sparkle was the pony who had faced and defeated so many of the monsters that threatened Equestria, from psychological torments of Nightmare Moon to the corrupting influence of Lord of Chaos and everything in between. She should have had no reason to fear these beasts; she had prevailed against them before and, arguably, in a more dire situation than the one she was in now. Stepping back away from the door in an effort to show that I was no threat to her, my hooves tripped over the bent and twisted limbs of a dead Changeling and splashed in the puddle of congealing ichor and brains that spread from the corpse. Looking at the lifeless body I realised the source of her fear; in all of her adventures with her coterie of friends she had never before seen death, and certainly she had never been forced to take the life of another living creature. She had wanted to see what war is really like and she had gotten her wish; now she would have to deal with its consequences should she survive long enough to.

"You could just try and dispel the Changeling disguise illusion," I said, wondering why I didn't think of saying that earlier.

"Alright," she said, after a moment's pause. She nodded her head with a kind of nervous energy that showed one more crack in her facade. As her muzzle withdrew from the door the barrier disappeared with a loud 'pop' of displaced air and the slight smell of ozone. I was about to step through when I found my legs suddenly arrested by some irresistible force. Looking down I saw that my fetlocks had been surrounded and held secure by four glowing bands of purple energy wrapped around my limbs tightly. Pulling against them proved fruitless - I was completely stuck.

The soldiers around me reacted about as well as could be expected, and in less than a second two spears encrusted with the congealed ichor of Changelings were aimed squarely at Twilight's delicately proportioned neck and three unicorn horns charged with energy were aimed directly at her head. She hesitated, eyed the soldiers warily, and scrambled backwards on her hooves. In the corner of my eye I saw Cannon Fodder doing his best to try and push his way around his comrades crowding around the door, but, though his abilities would certainly have been useful, his efforts were confounded by the narrowness of the corridor and all of the ponies in his way. He looked rather distressed, though to a pony unfamiliar with my aide's rather limited range of facial expressions he just looked as though he had merely lost an umbrella just as it started raining.

"Alright, stallions," I said, chuckling a little and inflecting a little humour into my voice to try and deflate the tense situation. "You're scaring the civvy. Just let her do her spell and get this over with."

The soldiers only reluctantly withdrew their weapons. Twilight hesitated, and then her horn flickered again, and a diffused purple light bathed me briefly. Satisfied that I was not in fact a Changeling she breathed a sigh of relief, as did I, and the magical restraints around my hooves vanished, leaving only a faint tingle around my fetlocks.

"Sorry," she said sheepishly, blushing slightly from the embarrassment.

"Apologies aren't necessary," I said, forcing what I hoped was an amicable smile to my lips. "You were merely being cautious, and rightly so."

Soft melodious laughter sang from behind the half-opened door - a sound that, once I had deduced its origin, sounded quite alien to my ears, but nevertheless filled me with a sense of quiet dread. What was she planning now? The door swung open and Twilight Sparkle stepped to the side, revealing the room bathed in this dim blue glow, and standing in the centre was its source - Princess Luna herself, shed of her disguise, and with an expression on her face that I could only describe as 'playful'. She was nude, and levitating around her at about the level of her neck were items of armour, ancient and baroque in appearance and clearly designed for ceremonial purposes than actual protection or comfort (not that such protection was truly needed for an alicorn), orbiting like satellites around some celestial body. As I half-walked, half-fell into the room, the presence of the more mysterious of my divine relatives, of the magical aura that tinged all within a pale shade of blue, and the exhaustion that muddied my mind and dulled my limbs, I felt as if I was merely trapped inside some strange and almost ethereal sort of dream from which there was no waking.

The Corporal followed behind me, grumbling irritably about the unnecessary delay and the apparent lack of progress with our mission, whereupon he saw for the first time Princess Luna standing before him with a mildly amused expression on her face. The effect, I admit, was rather interesting, as the gruff and crude stallion had immediately stopped speaking mid-tirade, and in doing so had accidentally bitten his still-unlit cigar clean in half. The bisected stub fell to the ground, followed very quickly by his muzzle as he prostrated himself before the Princess.

A few other stallions filtered into the room, and responded in much the same manner - a moment of bewilderment before they remembered the correct etiquette for seeing royalty (which, of course, still applied even in battle) and bowed politely. Cannon Fodder too wandered into the room, after having negotiated his way past the soldiers crowded in the narrow corridor and around the door, and regarded the Princess with a distinctly unimpressed expression on his face that the other stallions seemed to find rather baffling judging by the way they watched my aide by the corners of their eyes. I can only imagine that he took my order to never speak about Princess Luna to its logical extreme.

"Rise, my stallions," intoned Princess Luna softly. The soldiers obeyed instantly, and watched her with quiet awe.

Well, that was that, then; her cover was now completely blown and any hope of keeping her presence here a secret was now extinguished, which I suspected was her aim all along. Of course, I could have forced the stallions to take an oath of secrecy, but the truth always has a tendency of making itself known and soldiers will inevitably gossip. Other commissars in my position may have threatened summary execution, or even skipped the threat and gone straight for the cold-blooded murder in the case of the more psychotic of the colleagues that I have had the great misfortune to have worked with later in my career, but, call me squeamish if you will, the idea of killing a pony for whatever reason has always felt rather distasteful.

"Princess Luna," I said, stepping forward and struggling to try and think of a way to stop her from doing something stupid without offending her, while keeping up the pretence that I was just as surprised as the other stallions around me. "What are you doing here?"

From the armour dancing around her she selected a sabaton, lacquered black and polished to a high sheen that reflected the glow from her horn, and elegantly slipped a hoof into it. "The songs of battle call to me," she said, binding the sabaton to her hoof with the straps, "and I can no longer deny them, Blueblood. I can no longer stay here with Lady Sparkle, pleasant company though she may be, and wait while ponies out there are dying for me."

"No, of course not," I said, flatly. "But what of Parliament?"

"Don't bother," said Twilight dismissively, waving a hoof. The young mare trotted languidly over to a pile of cushions in the corner of the room and rested her petite frame over them. "I've tried talking her out of it, and she won't listen."

The Princess of the Night snorted with contempt and shook her head. The remaining three sabatons were slipped onto her waiting hooves. "Worry not, Blueblood. As promised, I shall deal with those foals myself. Though this edict forbids an alicorn princess from leading ponies-at-arms into battle, it says nothing about fighting under the command of an officer of the Royal Guard."

She had a point, I supposed, and I wasn't one to question her knowledge of the convoluted mess of traditions, acts of Parliament, customs, conventions, and stuff just made up as ponies went along that made up what politicos referred to as the Equestrian constitution. That is, if I wanted to live to see the next morning. At any rate, if I survived long enough for that herd of corrupt and personality-deficient wastrels that is the House of Commons to become a nuisance to me then I would consider myself lucky, given the circumstances.

The larger pieces of her armour drifted from their orbit - her saddle around her midsection, the barding around her flanks, greaves around her long, elegant limbs, and finally a neck guard and breastplate, embossed with a crescent moon symbol crafted from lustrous platinum and situated roughly where the mare's heart lies. The lacquered black armour was studded with thousands of tiny diamonds, glittering like the stars on clear and moonless night, arranged into constellations. Weaving across the armour plates, thin lines of a paler blue could be discerned as if it were made out of exotic marble. Regardless of its purely decorative appearance, the Princess' regalia of war certainly gave her a much more menacing, daemonic appearance, much more than usual, of course, and, now fully clad in this ornate mithril plate armour, she truly looked like the feared Warmistress of ancient Equestria; divine judgement incarnate and the bringer of ruin to all of those foolish enough to threaten the safety of our realm.

Finally, she selected the last piece of her suit of armour - a black helm ridged with fine silver filigree in delicate, swirling patterns that rippled across its surface. It covered only the top of her skull down towards the back of her neck and a shining mithril plate extended to cover the bridge of her nose, yet despite this it seemed to in no way interfere with her flowing ethereal mane. Behind her horn was a raised blade of metal, much like the decorative fin on Night Guard helmets, only far larger and etched with intricate patterns of stars and crescent moons. [Historically, rank in the Night Guards, and to some extent the Solar Guards, was denoted by the size and extravagance of the helmet fin or plume. This practice was later replaced during the Reconstruction era with the system of rank insignia that we are familiar with today. Furthermore, judging by Blueblood's description, Luna donned a facsimile of the armour that she wore during the wars for Equestria's reunification just prior to the Nightmare Heresy. The original suit of armour was destroyed in battle.]

Now that she was apparently satisfied with her armour, the light from her horn faded and the room was plunged into near darkness, save for the dim light of the horns from the unicorn guardsponies around us. Luna strode confidently towards me, and it took a considerable amount of willpower on my part to resist the urge to turn on my heels to run away and try my luck with the Changelings stalking the corridors. The resemblance to Nightmare Moon, of the monster that had brought so much ruin and death that her name lives on as the epitome of all evil in the world, was only enhanced by the dim, murky light. There she stood, towering over me like an adult over a terrified foal, with a bemused smirk on her face as if she was contemplating my death in increasingly painful and imaginative ways.

So you, dear reader, can imagine my surprise when she suddenly lowered her head and bowed before me.

"I therefore place myself at your command, Commissar Prince Blueblood," she said, her eyes closed and her voice, though soft, seemed to hold some degree of reverence and strength behind it. "Command me, and I shall obey!"

It was an embarrassingly long amount of time before I managed to collect myself, overcome the initial shock of seeing the Princess prostrate herself in front of me of all ponies (though I knew that it was merely a cheap attempt to appeal to my ego), and respond. "I don't know," I said dumbly.

Luna's eyes opened and fixed upon mine, and smouldered in the darkness that drowned the room. "You have no choice," she said, rather quietly. "What are your orders?"

As much as I hated to admit it, Princess Luna was completely right. Nevertheless, I found myself rather relieved by this turn of events, as the intervention of one of the most powerful beings in existence, who was alleged to be one of the greatest warriors in Equestrian history whose leadership had brought about the fastest acquisition of land ever, could only result in our victory. Having one more body between me and the Changelings, especially one that was for all intents and purposes practically invulnerable save for the most powerful magic, certainly would help my dwindling chances of survival. Her slightly unstable mental state aside, Princess Luna was, to coin a phrase, our 'ace in the hole', and one which the enemy would have in no way expected and would have no counter to.

As ever, my assumptions would soon prove to be entirely incorrect, which really should not have come as such as surprise to me, as this incoherent mess of half-remembered thoughts will soon prove to you.

"Very well," I said, trying to sound much more confident than I truly felt. "We must secure the fortress, and your orders are to assist us in any way possible."

"As you command." Luna rose to her hooves with a loud clatter of armour plates clashing against one another, and with an imperious flick of her head her horn ignited. A sudden chill filled the room for a moment, and just as quickly as it had come it evaporated. The shadows in the corners of the room momentarily receded into absolute darkness, and the colours around us appeared to be somewhat muted, as if they had been drained. Nevertheless, despite the effect being rather brief, it was no less disturbing for its apparent lack of permanency.

"It is just a hex to confound our enemy's senses," said Princess Luna, a curious smile playing upon her thin lips. "I have clouded their sight, and now they shall stumble blindly in a world of darkness; a rather dishonourable trick to play upon them, but it is no less than what these wretches, unfit for life, deserve. Besides, victory wipes away all dishonour. But be careful of the Blank," - she pointed a hoof at a rather sheepish-looking Cannon Fodder, who had very thoughtfully moved to the far corner of the room to avoid draining her spell. I noticed that around him the colours had returned to their usual vibrancy, like an aura - "for his dispelling influence will mean that those Changelings who wander too close to him will regain their sight, but I trust that would not be an issue. Now, come my stallions!"

She strode towards the door, her head held high and proud, looking more like the heraldic symbol on the 1st Night Guard's standard than ever. The tapping of her armoured hooves upon the ancient stone rang louder than before, and the stallions crowded around it parted with greater alacrity than they would have done for me. Twilight Sparkle moved to follow, but I darted to intercept and stopped her with a hoof, cracked and in desperate need of a hooficure if I ever managed to get home to Canterlot after this, on her chest.

"You need to stay here," I said, silencing any attempt at protest from her. "Put the barrier up around the door, and don't lower it until either Princess Luna or I return."

"But..." Twilight muttered, pushing my hoof aside and rubbing down the soft fur on her chest.

"Don't worry," I said, forcing the sort of carefree smirk to my face that ponies usually expect of me, "we shan't be too long. Just do what I say and you'll be safe here."

Twilight opened her mouth to say something, but apparently thought better of it and slunk away from me without a word, though I think that her reluctant acquiescence had more to do with Princess Luna staring at her over my shoulder than it did with what I had said. Nevertheless, with that out of the way I reluctantly turned to follow my Auntie. Though I had considered the idea of remaining here under the rather flimsy pretence that Twilight Sparkle, one of the most powerful unicorns in existence and who had thrice saved Equestria from conquest, required my protection, I had rightly suspected that when Luna referred to 'her stallions' she also meant me.

Before she crossed the threshold into the corridor, to where the guardsponies crowded around the door each virtually scrambling over one another to catch a glimpse of their Princess in a manner reminiscent of a gaggle of foals, she summoned forth from the ether a sword crafted out of pure white mithril. The blade was about the length of a pony from nose to tail, perfectly straight, and despite its brutish size it had a peculiar sense of elegance to it. The gleaming length of metal was etched with stars and arcane symbols representing the moon and other heavenly bodies, dotted amidst ornate swirling patterns that danced their way across the blade from the crescent-shaped cross guard to the razor-sharp tip, all of which glowed softly in the colour of the Princess' aura.

I followed Luna into the darkened corridor, and she stood before the bewildered guardsponies who watched her with a mixture of quiet awe and confusion. Smiling softly, she stretched her great wings as wide as the cramped confines of the hallway would allow, seemingly filling it with her bulk, and addressed the soldiers.

"My stallions," she said, her voice slicing through the quiet hush like a Pattern '12 sabre through chitin, and with a great deal less subtlety. "Together we are going to teach the Changelings a lesson - to fear the dark."

***

[Prince Blueblood's description of events from here on are rather fragmented, comprising of little more than scribbled notes on scraps of paper arranged loosely into a narrative. His participation in the battle at this point was minimal at best, and owing to the self-centred nature of this account it appears that he did not feel it was necessary for him to describe what happened in much detail until the situation had developed to the point where he was forced to intervene. For the purposes of his personal account, what little I have been able to uncover and compile should suffice. However, although the threat of Changelings infiltrating the keep through the lower catacombs was most pressing on his mind moments before, he merely glosses over its resolution here. For the sake of completeness I have therefore appended an extract from an after-action report written by Corporal Glittering Diamond, whose style of prose is almost as idiosyncratic as Blueblood's.]

'We encountered more and more resistance as we went down into the tunnels. Progress was difficult, even with the Princess's magic helping us, but us Horsetralians deal with worse than Changelings on a daily basis back home. Changelings might be bigger than most critters found in the Outback or in the mines I used to work in, but they ain't got nothing on the spiders. Those eight-legged bastards will inject poison that can paralyse a sheep within seconds, turn its insides into mush, and then pop its head off like the cap on a bottle and slurp it all down. [Corporal Glittering Diamond may be exaggerating here, or attempting to tease whomever reads this, as I cannot find any example from Horsetralia's diverse and deadly array of wildlife that kills and consumes its prey in that manner.] Private Pickaxe got a nasty wound in his leg when a Changeling chomped down on it and wouldn't let go even after we cut its head off, but we couldn't leave him behind so we dragged him along the floor. He was holding all of the explosives anyway, and he still owed me a pint.

'Pickaxe slowed us down a little, and he was complaining the whole bloody time. We guessed that the Changelings were likely coming up through the same tunnels that Twilight Sparkle was studying earlier. If we could collapse the tunnels then we could stop the Changelings coming up, but there was an entire army of the bugs between us and even with the Princess' magic it would have been impossible. I had an idea, and to be honest even I thought it was a bit silly, but nopony could think of anything better. We fought our way down to the ground floor again, the one just above the one with the basement Twilight was playing around in with the funny drawings on the walls. Private Pickaxe and Private Butter Spread didn't make it. They were good mates of mine.

'It was hard, but we found the room just above where we thought the Changelings were coming from. We sealed the room and did what we diggers do best - dig. The stone around these parts is quite soft and easy to dig through, especially with the help of magic and some explosives and good old earth pony hard work. We eventually made a hole big enough to stick your head through, and we could see hordes of the bloody Changelings running through the dungeon. I reckoned we had the right place, and it was the only way into the castle from underneath short of digging your own tunnel and I don't think these Changelings know much about mining.

'I lit a big stick of dynamite and tossed it in, and then we ran away as fast as we could. After the explosion we came back, and it looked like it caused a massive cave-in. The basement and room we were in were completely filled with rubble, and there was no way anything could get past that. All of the weird pictures Twilight was looking at were gone too, and I thought it best I made myself scarce if I saw her again.

‘When we met up with the Equestrians outside some officer threatened to have us court-martialled for nearly destroying the property of the Crowns. Lieutenant Southern Cross told him he trusted us to use only enough explosives to do the job, not to demolish the castle, and no one was hurt anyway. Except for the Changelings.’

***

The more astute of you reading this drivel will note that it took Princess Luna less than a minute or so to break her word and start issuing orders to the soldiers. One could justify this as her simply executing my commands as she saw fit by directing the stallions who were ostensibly under my authority anyway, and given her status as a Princess of Equestria and her past rank as Warmistress, along with the sort single-minded loyalty that she commanded from the Night Guards that all petty tyrants and dictators can only dream of, it was not at all surprising that she had naturally fallen into her 'unofficial' role here as leader. Nevertheless, as I had stated previously I still had much greater things on my mind.

What followed was no longer a battle, but merely pest extermination. That is not to say that the fight had become a metaphorical walk in the park at all, for a Changeling rendered blind was still a fearsome thing, as their senses of smell and hearing were still potent enough for them to determine one's rough position and approximately where to swing their hooves and chomp their fangs. Nevertheless, we would find them stumbling clumsily about the corridors and halls tripping over one another and bumping into obstacles. When they had become alerted to our presence, usually by Princess Luna shouting what she must have fondly imagined were battle-cries to embolden our hearts to war, they would come scrambling towards us with their usual utter disregard for their own lives in a manner I would have found to be almost endearingly pathetic were it not so utterly disturbing to watch. They would flail their hooves and gnash their fangs in our vague direction, their eyes shrouded by the darkness of Luna's enchantment, only to be cut down with contemptuous ease with sadistic glee by the grinning, taunting soldiers.

I continued to tag along with the soldiers, finding some comfort in that while I was no longer in charge it also meant that it if and when things started to go pear-shaped, which they inevitably do for me regardless of the situation, I could no longer be blamed; it was all Princess Luna's fault and only the insane and the suicidal amongst of us, of which I am neither, would have dared to contradict her. She led our merry band of soldiers, minus the engineers and a number of guardsponies sent to collapse the lower tunnels and prevent more Changelings surging through the catacombs and into the keep, through the veritable maze of corridors. We turned left and right, ascended and descended stairs, and slaughtered our way through the myriad empty rooms. The few soldiers remaining barricaded in their rooms, who were fighting desperate last stands until they had mysteriously found their enemy all but completely incapacitated, joined us, and thus our depleted infantry section grew.

Far from feeling disappointed at being sidelined, however, I found that no longer being the centre of attention, for the time being at least as by virtue of my noble status I have throughout my entire life almost always been the cynosure of eyes in every gathering, to be quite refreshing. Naturally, I made my usual token efforts to look as if I was actively contributing to the fight, usually by firing a few desultory shots or swinging my sabre in the vague direction of the blinded Changelings, but all eyes were firmly fixed upon Princess Luna, who waded into the fray, her sword slicing the enemy into gratuitous chunks with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for foals assaulting piñatas. There was a strange, rather manic energy to her movements that I had only glimpsed briefly during our sparring match together just the day before (though at the time it felt like a lifetime away); with the nauseating sound of steel ripping into chitin, the discharge of magic missiles, and in the flames that swept the corridors and reduced the Changeling hordes into ash and charred meat, I saw for the first time in those smouldering blue eyes of hers, normally cold and piercing in a way that felt as if a stare, held long enough, would flense the hide from my body and lay bare the shrivelled up husk that I possessed in lieu of a soul, something akin to life and animation.

We came into the great hall where Captain Red Coat had detailed his plans just a few hours ago. Much of it remained the same, other than the complete lack of ponies amongst the bedrolls laid out morbidly like coffins on the cold stone floor. The small piles of personal effects, mostly crammed into kitbags and left by the side of their owner's bedroll in the hope that they would be collected after the battle, added a certain sense of poignancy to the scene. Stalking on the raised dais, groping and feeling their way blindly around the piles of books and the table upon which the maps, scraps of paper, communiqués, and the other assorted paraphernalia of military planning were still strewed about with the Royal Guard's habitual assumption that the concept of a decent filing system was something that the enemy wanted them to do, was a small horde of a dozen or so Changelings, clustered around a tall and gaunt figure roughly the size of an alicorn that could only be a Purestrain.

The soldiers crept into the room as silently as ponies heavily laden down with heavy armour and spears could, though the enemy appeared to be completely oblivious to our presence. The Purestrain, its eyes still shrouded in darkness from whatever hex Princess Luna had cast upon the enemy, must have been too distracted with the task of directing thousands upon thousands of blinded Changeling drones to have noticed our presence. Around its long, sinuous legs the Changelings hissed and shrieked at the nearly empty hall as if expressing their master's frustration and anger on its behalf.

The guardsponies started to advance, but as Princess Luna raised a hoof they stopped, almost as if they were somehow subject to the same sort of mental control that the enemy had used, and eyed her warily. I stood away off to the side, watching the proceedings quietly and taking the opportunity to catch my breath, which felt like fire filling my lungs, and take stock of the many painful wounds that I had suffered in the past few hours and ponder what interesting shapes that the new scars might take. Whatever Princess Luna had in mind to do with the hapless Purestrain and the gaggle of Changelings around it that might charitably be called an honour guard of some sort I had only a passing interest, but I was reasonably confident that the insane old mare knew what she was doing. If she didn't, I had an escape route and somepony to blame if whatever it was went horribly wrong as always.

Luna stretched her great wings wide, and pumped them once, twice, wafting me with the stale air of the hall, and then she was airborne. The Night Mare ascended up to the high ceiling of the hall, where the great wooden beams supported the arched ceiling from which mouldering banners, whose ancient symbols had long since faded into dull grey and brown splotches on ragged fabric, hung limply. Up there she was almost invisible against the darkness, and it was only the gleam of her sword and the glittering pinpricks of the diamonds upon her breastplate that I could see against the vague blue and black smudge perched upon a small alcove in the walls.

Something dived down from the roof. Princess Luna was gone, and there was a gurgling shriek from one of the Changelings. It was so quick that I barely had time to register it, but I saw that one of the enemy had its throat slit open and bled profusely as it flailed frantically against its comrades. Looking up and actually paying attention this time I saw Princess Luna once more glide gracefully close to the ceiling in a lazy and wide arc before. Then, having reached the opposite end of hall, she retracted her wings tight against her body and dived steeply towards the enemy. At the very last moment, her wings spread, arresting her descent in time to allow her to slash her blade once more into the throat, sending a spray of arterial green blood fountaining, and then she was away once more.

It soon became evident that she was merely toying with them, specifically the Purestrain who she appeared to be sparing for the last. For as she killed the drones one by one the Purestrain's terror, being the only Changeling creature intelligent enough to feel such an emotion [this is not strictly true, as Changelings who have been separated from the Hive Mind for a sufficient length of time will begin to exert a degree of free will and feel emotions regardless of intelligence], only increased. The grotesquely tall beast tried to scramble away blindly from its invisible attacker and tripped over the piles of haversacks and bedrolls and its own drones, also attempting to scramble away from their unseen attacker, in a frantic flail of hooves. Magic arced in seemingly random directions from its jagged, misshapen horn, scorching the stone walls and burning holes through the hanging tapestries but hitting nothing of any worth. Even from this distance I could hear the laboured, frantic breathing and the shrieks of terror as, one by one, the drones fell dead from Luna's sword.

"Show yourself!" it screamed, terror adding a shrill tone to its raspy, dry voice. "Face me, you coward! When I find you our Queen will drain you of your love until you are nothing more than a withered husk!"

Around me the soldiers jeered mercilessly, casting colourful aspersions on the Purestrain's lineage and taste in mares, but if it noticed them then it paid them no heed. A swift bound brought the creature back atop the raised dais and it crashed into the thin sheet of wood that served as a table with a shower of splinters and paperwork. Its limbs flailed in an effort to right itself, and it was then that Luna, apparently having run out of drones to murder, descended from the air slowly with only a faint flutter of her outstretched wings to slow her fall. As her hooves touched the floor with a faint, ringing chime of mithril, the soldiers and I approached tentatively.

The dais was surrounded by Changeling bodies - Luna's hoof-work - each with a neat, precise cut that split their throats almost from ear to ear. My hooves splashed in the growing pool of congealing Changeling blood, and I recall feeling rather faint at the sight of so much ichor. I'm not certain as to why I found the idea of walking in the stuff so nauseating, as, despite my evident refinement and noble birth, I don't consider myself to be particularly squeamish (being part of a family whose ancient patriarch had a rather unhealthy obsession with blood tends to help one get over any natural aversions to it), so it was probably a side effect of exhaustion.

The dark fog that clouded the Purestrain's wide, terrified eyes soon evaporated, and it gasped and flinched as it saw Princess Luna looming over it, sword ready to strike.

"On your hooves," snapped Luna, her voice icy. The Purestrain remained completely still, and only by the frantic flickering of its damnably intelligent eyes, the rapid rise and fall of its broad chest, and the faint tremor in its thin insect limbs did it show any sign of life. A subtle narrowing of her eyes was enough to force the Purestrain to comply, and it scrambled clumsily to its hooves, only taking two or three attempts to do so.

With her blade pressed against the long and grotesquely thin neck of the Changeling beast, drawing a thin line of sickly green as the fiendishly sharp edge dug easily into the thick armoured chitin, she forced her muzzle uncomfortably close to the Purestrain's. "I want you to deliver a message to your queen," she said, and her voice never rose much higher than a whisper. "I want you to run away to her, and when she makes you beg for your wretched life and demands that you explain why you had failed to take this fortress I want you to tell her that we will be coming for her next. Is that understood?"

The Purestrain stared back at her with wide, terrified eyes the size of dinner plates. Pupils no larger than pinpricks flickered from Luna's face, to the blade at its neck, and then to the soldiers now crowded around the beast in a sort of semi-circle, before it nodded its head rapidly with that odd sense of eagerness that only those threatened with a violent and messy death can show. Slowly, the blade withdrew from its neck, though it was still positioned in a perfect position to be thrust into the vulnerable gaps between the armoured plates of thickened chitin, and a thin, almost sadistic smile tugged at the ends of Luna's lips. By Faust, she was enjoying this. I expect that for one as long-lived and as alienated from the concept of mortality and from the lives of the ponies she ruled over as she, and with a mind as foreign and incomprehensible to ours as the concept of subtlety and personal restraint was to Pinkie Pie, it was inevitable that I and other sensible, well-adjusted ponies (of which there is a depressingly small number these days) would find her emotional responses to be quite jarring given the situation.

"Go," said Luna, and the Purestrain reacted at once. As if suffering a sudden electric shock the beast jolted backwards with a clumsy lurch of its stick-thin limbs, and thin, membranous wings like that of a grotesque insect extended from the slick, black carapace on its back. The fluttering of these wings became a frantic blur, and in an instant it was airborne and soon gone via a tall, arched window whose glass panes had long since shattered and whose beams had long since rotted away.

I was a little more wary of the Princess than usual as she turned to address us, a triumphant smile stretched her mouth wider than I had ever seen on her. "Your victory is imminent!" she cried. "You have only to eradicate this filth from this fortress. Now go, my stallions, and claim the victory that all of Equestria deserves!"

The stallions cheered as one, stamping their hooves and whooping wildly as though their favourite sports team had just scored, or something. In hoping to maintain that quiet and reserved detachment required of an officer and a gentlecolt I remained silent, as did Cannon Fodder, but it was always difficult to provoke any sort of reaction out of him anyway. Princess Luna once more spread her wings and leapt into the air, and with unrestrained eagerness she flew through another empty window, her hooves tucked against her body and her wings curved back to fit through the small and narrow aperture so that for a moment she resembled a thrown dart, in what she probably thought was a suitably dramatic exit.

With that done and the reins of command apparently thrust once more into my unwitting hooves I decided that our best course of action was to go outside and see how the battle was progressing there. I could trust the engineers to do their jobs, particularly with the enormous advantage that Princess Luna's spell had granted them, and some time into our long and meandering stroll through the castle fortresses a distinct rumble reverberating through my hooves reassured me that whatever it was that they had planned had been executed and done so in a manner that likely involved an excessive amount of explosives, which would, of course, do wonders for their morale.

As we walked, passing the piled-up bodies of Changelings, some burnt to cinders amidst stone that had melted and then solidified in strange and baroque shapes, I could not help but feel some disquiet about what Princess Luna had said at her parting. It was all far too easy and far too 'neat', and though I had only participated in one battle thus far, I felt that I knew enough to know that the end of the battle was never as truly clear cut as she had said; they tend to simply lose energy and peter out as the two armies simply become too exhausted to continue, and the side that does so the first is invariably the one that loses. Despite her optimism, things could still go horrendously wrong, and with the usual sort of almost supernatural bad luck that seems to follow me around and ensure that my life is never as easy as I would like it to be they inevitably did. That, however, was not what I found most disquieting about her words, though that idea did loom heavily in my mind like the rather creaky old chandelier above the seventh seat in my banqueting hall, but the implication that all that she knew about war was, in fact, completely wrong. To voice such thoughts would have been heresy; Luna was once Warmistress, and in a series of bloody campaigns that lasted a scant few months she had conquered almost the entirety of what is now modern Equestria, and if anypony knew about war then certainly it was her. But what she had said over the past few weeks since she had been hiding with me and just now seemed to imply a terribly naive and almost foal-like view of war. I wondered if the one thousand years she had spent banished to the moon had addled her mind somewhat. [Though I would not have put it in quite such terms, Blueblood is largely correct in saying that Luna's confinement on the moon with only the Nightmare for company would have taken its toll on her psyche. It would be some time before she would adjust fully back to life here in Equestria.]

The riotous cacophony of battle, with its myriad noises, screams, and clashes blurring into one ungodly mess, greeted us as we stumbled tired and somewhat wary out of the main gates and into the courtyard. It was all but impossible to discern what was going on, only that the battle was still raging as fiercely as before. I noted that the distance between the triage centre clustered around the gate and what I perceived to be the front lines, where the exact borders of Equestria and Changeling country were determined by the hooves of their respective soldiers, seemed to be much closer to the walls than before. A small sense of elation filled my heart as I came to the conclusion that we must be winning somehow, as the enemy, still throwing an obscene amount of drones against our troops despite their blindness, was gradually being pushed back and that this nightmare would end soon.

Looking back up at the fortress behind me I saw that the clouds had parted, and the moon, huge and yellow, appeared to be impaled upon the tallest spire of the castle from which the artillery still continued their murderous work. Around the moon the clouds spun in a dizzying maelstrom that made me feel nauseated looking at it, and silhouetted against the vast disc of light a dark figure climbed atop the jagged pinnacle of the spire.

"SOLDIERS OF EQUESTRIA!" Princess Luna bellowed from atop the tower, her Royal Canterlot Voice cutting through the almighty din of battle. It might have just been my imagination, but it felt as if the entire battle, and indeed time itself, had stopped for her speech. Luna spread her wings against the moon, and despite the distance I could see her eyes ablaze with fire. "HEAR ME! YOUR PRINCESS HAS ONLY ONE ORDER FOR YOU - PURGE!"

Author's Note

Well, now that I've recovered from the Christmas/New Year/Burns Night binge here's the latest chapter. Hope you all like it - it was probably the hardest one I've had to write so far.

Bloodstained (Part 19)

Part 19

[One of the more frustrating elements of compiling and editing this document, aside from correcting the persistent spelling and grammar errors, is that Prince Blueblood was somewhat lacking as a chronicler, as he will continually gloss over or simply ignore events that he felt were unimportant. In this case, however, I can only assume that he believed that what followed immediately after the previous entry was such common knowledge that describing it in any detail would have been a wasted effort, or that he himself did not know exactly what had transpired. Either way, I feel that a more comprehensive description than what Blueblood provides here would prove useful, and I am once more forced to resort to using a secondary source to provide the appropriate elucidation. I have asked my sister, Princess Luna, to provide an account of the battle.

It appears, however, that Princess Luna had misinterpreted my request for a concise, factual account of these events from her perspective. Her flair for the dramatic and her fondness for the sort of epic tales of heroes sung by court bards that were popular over one thousand years ago (and enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity following her return) is certainly evident in the following text. Nevertheless, despite her antiquated prose and meandering style, which borders on the unreadable at times, it serves its purpose in expanding the relatively bare and imprecise descriptions Blueblood provided for these events. Anypony with younger siblings will sympathise with me when I say that I hadn't the heart to tell Luna that what she had written was not what I asked for, especially when she was evidently so proud of it. As with Prince Blueblood's own writing I have endeavoured to keep my editing to a minimum, despite my better judgement, and aside from further editorial notes and the inclusion of those punctuation marks invented during her exile on the moon what follows is Luna's unadulterated work.

For those readers with a fine appreciation of the Equestrian language I can only apologise in advance.]

Lo! I, Luna, by the Grace of Faust, twice-crowned Princess of Equestria and the her Dominions and Territories beyond the Seas, Ruler of the Night, Mistress of the Moon, Sovereign of the Stars [My sister goes on describing her titles and style in full for about four more pages of what I believe is colloquially known as a 'wall of text' - a most apt description, I believe. For the sake of brevity I have included only those titles which most of our subjects are familiar with and still hold any relevance in this age], pray you heed this tale well, my subjects, for it is a tale of how even the greatest amongst us may drink deep the wine of our own hubris, and drunk on this heady elixir strive to climb the summit of our pride, only to be laid low by our own arrogance. Through this account I shall tell you of how even an alicorn princess may fail to heed these lessons of the past, and that to learn them once again is painful indeed.

Of Prince Blueblood much has been written, and through his deeds is his name gloried amongst the greatest heroes who have delivered our great nation from damnation in the ancient past, and perhaps standing as equal in glory with his ancestor Princess Hotblood, whose memory and sacrifice for her Princesses and her country I shall forever hold dear. In truth, however, I admit with great shame that in the first years I had known this stallion I treated him poorly, as my memory of his noble ancestor had clouded my sight and I could not see the bravery and strength of character that he possessed beneath his soft and fat exterior.

I can picture him now standing before me in the prime of his life, scarred by battle and clad in the black uniform of a Commissar like the holy vestments of a priest of war, with his sword for a sceptre and his peaked cap for a mitre, and pride swells greatly within my bosom. I had taken this soft, pampered, and supposedly 'noble' unicorn, and in the furnaces of Equestrian military tradition and warfare I had brought out the steely muscle and iron heart that lay hidden and suffocated by the fat of indolence and luxury that so chokes the arteries of the youth of today. In him we see that the noblest and courageous of all heroes may yet rise from the most incongruous of origins, as the beautiful lotus flower blooms only in the stagnant and decaying swamps of exotic Coltcutta. Likewise, in each of the soldiers of Equestria, every one of them a gallant and dedicated warrior in their own right, I saw despite whatever life they might have lived before their rebirth in the fires war that the same spirit, as strong as the mithril that protects them and the steel with which they slay those who dare oppose our will, that drove our great empire to conquest and victory thousands of years ago yet lives. They may have been led by effete, weak imbeciles, but the time-honoured martial traditions of the ancient warlike Pegasus tribes had yet moulded these stallions into true warriors.

In the cold depths of this ancient fortress I beheld Prince Blueblood and the stallions he commanded, and I saw in them the salvation of the Equestrian race from the Changeling threat. Most stallion-like was he, and though he presumed to question my judgement in lending aid to the beleaguered troops, I admired his dedication to following his orders. Yet in battle one must be flexible, as the mighty oak is felled by the storm and the weeping willow bends and twists in the wind. He heeded my counsel, and I had thus imparted an important lesson to him and to those learned ponies who have studied this in great detail; for though a commissar must enforce the rule of military law with great alacrity, so too must he readily adapt and change according to the unpredictable actions of the enemy, and thusly take advantage of whatever boon has been granted to him. I felt no shame in kneeling before him, and he was most gracious in his acceptance of my assistance.

From thence we smote with sword and spear and magic, and the enemy, robbed of their sight and thus made helpless, fell before the righteous warriors of Equestria. As we purged this corner of Equestria of the filth and degradations of the hated enemy, the soldiers with whom I fought alongside would speak to me of the great honour that had been bestowed upon them for a Princess to fight by their side. To them I spoke truthfully: "Nay, it is I who have been honoured by you, for to spill the blood of the enemy together with the flower of the youth of Equestria is the highest honour I can receive."

Blood we indeed spilt together; we waded through this emerald-hued ichor, scouring the enemy from the sight of mother Faust. In the Great Hall, in which, millennia ago, the now long-dead lord of this place did pay homage to my sister and me, I had found the prey I had been seeking since I first tasted his magic, sickly sweet, corrupting, and putrid, pulsating through the shell of this structure - the captain of this enemy legion, whose blasphemous mental powers directed its drones with uncanny and disturbing precision. To eliminate this Purestrain would be to cripple the enemy force here, more so than I had already done with magic, as one kills a dragon by cutting off its head, but yet I had greater things in mind for this lumbering monstrosity.

For the laypony war is purely about killing, and whomever inflicts the greatest casualties on the other must invariably win. To such ponies I say that they misguided, and that perhaps a suitably long lecture from Princess Twilight Sparkle might be sufficient to dissuade them of such a notion. Nay, a true warrior does not seek to take the lives of the enemy soldiers, but to destroy the willingness of the population that they represent to continue fighting. Slaying the Purestrain would have had very limited strategic advantage, as I was all but certain that the enemy would have had the forethought to provide more than just one to direct the horde, but the opportunity to instil within the beast's black heart the fear of the Princess of the Night and spread it amongst its brethren and even to Queen Chrysalis herself was too great to miss.

Its sight was restored and my blade rested against the creature's neck. Oh, how I wished to sink it into its exposed gullet as I had done with the drones that lay scattered around my hooves. But nay, I drank deep of the fear in the Purestrain's eyes, savouring the cold sweat, the wide, terrified eyes, and the shivering wreck trembling before me that was once a beast that inspired such fear in my subjects as my sister would a fine exotic tea. Inspiring such terror is invariably something that comes quite naturally to me, and here, in the turmoil of war, I finally had the chance to use my gifts for the greater good of the Equestrian state and not just entertaining foals on Nightmare Night, as I had done so over one thousand years ago.

I bade the Purestrain to flee like the wretched coward that his kind are, who are content to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of their drones upon our blades and yet quail in terror when the fight finally comes to them. With the Purestrain cowed and sent fleeing for his dark mistress like a frightened foal to its mother I took my leave of Prince Blueblood; the battle for me, it seemed, was almost over, and with only the mopping up of the last remaining elements of the enemy before our victory could be complete. [Princess Luna was unlikely to know at the time, but though the battle had undeniably turned in Equestria's favour the overall bulk of the Changeling force was still intact and committed to the fight, though they were very disorganised, and General Crimson Arrow's relief force was still some distance away.]

I then ascended to the highest tower of the castle, from which the artillery, new and fanciful weapons to me, continued to fire. Each roar of a cannon sounded like an exultation to the old pagan gods of war, and though my initial instinct was to mistrust these weapons that killed from afar, I was nevertheless impressed by their efficiency and killing power. The Changelings did not deserve the honour of a good death, anyway. In the heat of the desert night I watched from high above as our troops swept the enemy before them to the very walls of the courtyard, and from this vantage point I exhorted my stallions to purge the enemy from my sight. Oh, how I marvelled at how my stallions fought; only frail mortals destined to die and yet they did not despair of their limited time on this world, instead for reasons quite alien to an immortal being such as me they continued to strive and fight and conquer even if doing so would be to shorten their already desperately ephemeral lives. How could they want to fight, knowing that sooner or later their existence will be at an end, their souls elevated to Elysium or cast into the pits of Tartarus depending on their sins? And for what reason? To better Equestria and all of her subjects, so that their fellow equines might live in a world of harmony and friendship dominated by the Equestrian crowns. Truly, they who have fallen in battle have greater claim to divine immortality than any alicorn, for those who have given up that which is most precious to them for my sake shall indeed live forever in my memory.

Though I had resolved to keep my participation in this battle to a minimum, if only to avoid further political entanglements with Parliament, I soon tired of my inaction upon the spire. With the battle still raging both below and in the skies above I felt the call of war tug once more upon my heart, and the martial spirit within me proved stronger than my feeble attempts at self-control. Nay, while a single Changeling yet lived my task was not complete, and I there vowed under the sight of our mother that my sword shall never rest until Equestria was truly safe from the Changeling menace.

I took wing once more and hurled myself into my night sky; amidst the constellations and the patchy cloud cover that formed a dark, amorphous landscape of vast towers, deep valleys, and sheer cliffs rolling and undulating and forever shifting in a manner that reminded me of when the world was young and when my sister and I strode across the land like titans and moulded the landscape with our hooves. The noble pegasi of our Royal Guard hunted the blinded swarm as vicious predators would attacking a vast herd of helpless prey beasts. I joined them eagerly, and soon bodies and blood rained down upon the already grisly field of battle below.

It was when the slaughter was at its height, when Changeling after Changeling fell to my blade until it was drenched in ichor and my armour splattered such that not a glimpse of the fine engravings and delicate carvings could be discerned for all the sickly green life fluids, that by chance I saw something dark and wholly malevolent streak across my moon. Recognition was all but instant; the creature had the tall, elegant form of an alicorn, much like my graceful sister, but its flight, though undoubtedly skilled, was far too quick and jarring in its movements to be that of any true winged equine. No, there was something more disturbingly insect-like about the way it swept this way and that through the air, changing altitude and direction seemingly on a whim, but unerringly heading straight for me. I thus beheld Queen Chrysalis, the monstrous ruler of the Changeling hordes, mistress of a billion drones.

Powerful magic swept from her like a tidal wave, and I saw that her eyes, glowing with the dark intelligence that masterminded the near-defeat of Canterlot, were clear and unmarred by the powerful blinding spell that I had cast before. Excitement rushed through my being as she raced towards me; finally, perhaps she would be a foe worthy of my attention, with enough power and cunning to be a suitable challenge even for me. A duel between two rulers of powerful empires, of two demi-goddesses who command the most primal forces of magic, was certain to become legend; I envisaged bards penning great poetic epics, crafting in words the images of honourable combat to enflame the spirit and embolden the heart of those weak-willed foals in Canterlot who yet quailed at the thought of war, and those sagas would make them all think themselves accursed that they were not there to witness the destruction of their enemy, and their stallion-hood shall be cheapened when ponies would speak of those who were present to this glorious struggle.

Indeed, our battle would certainly become remembered, but not necessarily in the way that I had envisaged it, for in my arrogance I imagined myself as I had been in the past, vanquishing champions of those who opposed us in the earliest days of Equestria, to drag their bloated, bleeding carcasses back to Canterlot and throw them at my sister's hooves. Blueblood was right; in one thousand years, even war had changed so much. Nevertheless, my heart was filled with the hymns of battle, and my judgement was shrouded by the bloodlust coursing through my veins. Would things perhaps have gone differently if I had kept a clearer head, if, like my beloved sister, I could keep myself dispassionate and distant from such events, observe them quietly, and therefore make my decision based on purely objective matters? Alas, I fear such behaviour is beyond me, for ever have I been ruled by passion - as loathed as I am to admit it, it is my most grievous fault.

I was determined to make this fight worthy of song, and indeed as Chrysalis darted towards me, it seemed as if time itself had stood still to observe us. Circling around her, I raised my hoof to my foe to challenge her in honourable single combat in the manner of the champions of ancient Equestria, and bellowed with the Royal Canterlot Voice:

"I am Luna, Princess of Equestria and Ruler of the Night! The entire might of the Equestrian Empire is mine to command: eighty thousand stallions-at-arms stand behind me and ten thousand years of darkness and struggle and warfare. You think that you know darkness; you are foalish, for I am darkness. I have lived and breathed it, tasted it and bathed in its cloying mire, so what insanity has possessed you to think that you can harm my beloved subjects and not be repaid in kind? I have seen thousands of kingdoms and empires rise and fall, forgotten by history and remembered only by me, and yet my diarchy endures. I endure. So come, and know that your empire will soon join those others now long dead in my memory, consigned to the graveyards of history as all tyrants must be, and you will know that you are naught but dust before my hooves!"

Chrysalis did not answer, and instead smote me with the force of a lightning bolt. How dishonourable that she did not return my challenge! Yet I should have known that one as craven and low as she would have no inkling of the concept of honour. But nay, I believed that I should not lower myself to her level, so I bade my stallions not to interfere with our fight, much to their dismay. The blow had sent me reeling across the sky, but if anything the shock of her attack was far greater than the minimal amount of pain that had been inflicted upon me. I recovered with grace and alacrity, and I was more than eager to repay this grievous insult a thousandfold. Therefore I summoned forth my blade once more, which reflected grimly the bright light of my moon, and this glint of steel felt as if an old friend had been returned to me.

"I got your message," said Chrysalis, her voice hissing like the rain beating off a tin roof. Her appearance should have felt incongruous, but nay I was too wrapped up my delusion to question why she had decided to appear before me. Although it was known by all that she was unafraid to take direct participation in her own malicious schemes, as her kidnapping and impersonation of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza had proved, but it was known by all that she would only do so if assured of total victory. To face me in single combat was much unlike her, and that she appeared to know of my presence despite my best efforts to keep myself hidden from not only our own soldiers but from her spies as well was most disconcerting. For why else would she have come to the battlefield if it were not for me? As I remember these events I cannot help but feel that I must share some of the blame for what happened next, for it was my arrogance in ignoring my sister's advice that had invariably brought the hated Queen of the Changelings here.

Through the dreamlike vista of vast, undulating grey clouds and underneath the disc of the yellow moon shining brightly against a tapestry of stars and nebulae I danced with my foe; turning, twisting, diving, rising, pirouetting gracefully around one another as partners to a divine symphony of warfare. We would fly, turning this way and that, diving through the clouds and banking through the stretches of the muggy warm night air only to turn and strike at one another with magic or with steel, and the dance would continue. My early assessment had led me to conclude that I was the stronger in terms of magic and martial skill, but in terms of sheer flying ability Chrysalis was the clear superior. I was certainly the faster flyer in a straight line, but in combat pure speed, though useful, is only a secondary advantage compared to manoeuvrability; instead, her movements were jittery and unpredictable as befitting her disturbingly insect-like appearance. Each time I turned and twisted to strike at her, certain that had she been a pony or a clumsy gryphon that my blow would have landed true and inflicted a most grievous wound, only for my blade to slice through empty air and that my enemy had darted around me to strike with her horn against my flanks.

The exhilaration of the duel gave way to frustration and anger, but I recalled my sparring match with Prince Blueblood, and despite the evident cowardice of my foe I resolved to keep my passion under control. Nay, it was hard to do so, for every tiny and superficial cut upon this shell of flesh that my divine immortal spirit is contained within felt like a personal insult, and each only served to inflame the thirst for blood that swelled within my heart like a tide threatening to burst over the collapsing dam of my self control. That she was even able to wound my flesh was greatly troubling, for it implied that she was still empowered with the love that she had glutted upon from Prince Shining Armour, Captain of the Royal Guard, or that her origins were divine in nature.

I roared in annoyance at her cowardly ways; she was not even attempting to put up a decent fight. No longer wishing to indulge my opponent I dove down towards the ground with the sound of her mocking laughter ringing in my ears, ostensibly to open up some space between myself and Chrysalis, knowing that her delicate gossamer wings would be rent from her body should she try to follow, and gain some speed. In my descent I turned this way and that to avoid the blasts of eldritch energy that followed in my wake, though her shooting was pathetic at best, and accuracy was clearly something she and her kind were most deficient in. Those half-hearted shots harmlessly passed through the cloud cover, and where they impacted the soggy ground dirt and mud blossomed. The clouds parted, and as I tucked my wings and limbs in to take on the shape of an arrow loosed from its bow the ground rushed up towards me. With the wind rushing through my mane I revelled in the freedom that only those capable of flight could know, and as I swooped past the castle in wide arc and over the unicorns and earth ponies in the blood-soaked courtyard, crying their exultations to their Princess and to Faust, I could not help but feel pity for they who must spend the entirety of their lives fixed to the ground. Of the battle below I could only catch brief glimpses as I rushed over the heads of the combatants, but from my very limited perspective, rushing over the vast, writhing masses of pony and Changeling alike, that the battle was still not yet won. [Princess Luna does not mention it here, but further research into the battle indicates that Chrysalis' appearance on the field also heralded the arrival of considerable Changeling reinforcements.]

With a mighty thrust of my great wings I soared upwards, using the high speed that I had gained. In beating my wings in large, powerful thrusts I lost little of that velocity, and as I burst through the darkened steel of the blanket of clouds and emerged once more into that ethereal and tenebrous dreamscape betwixt heaven and earth I turned erratically to search for my foe. I found her lurking below by the amorphous, ever-shifting mass of a dense cloud that loomed high above us like the mountains around Canterlot, as I had expected her to, with the Changelings lingering close to her and darkening the murky greys and blues of the clouds beyond. Against the steely blue-grey of the clouds she appeared as a barely perceptible blackish-green speck that buzzed and flittered from side to side, like the pathetic insect that she is.

I wasted little time in adjusting my flight in a wide, albeit swift, arc, gaining as much altitude as I could but remaining cautious so as not to lose my advantage of speed, and I dived towards her once more. Blade readied, I focused upon my enemy, looming larger and larger in my vision. There, drifting alone but nevertheless resolute and implacable as only those about to face their imminent destruction can be, Queen Chrysalis stood alone in this expanse of sky. Oh, how perfect it would have been for her to face her own defeat at my hooves with the same quiet dignity and resolution embodied by Neighpoleon when he surrendered to me so long ago, but I knew that was simply not to be.

Moments before my blade could slice into the exposed neck of the Changeling Queen she darted to the side; her movement was so swift that it was as though she had somehow teleported instantaneously three feet to my right flank in a way reminiscent of that that rather disconcerting manner that Twilight Sparkle teleports frantically on those occasions when she forgets that doing so is rather unnerving to most other ponies. A slash of her long and jagged horn, a blasphemous mockery of the elegant spiralled form of that of a unicorn, scratched a thin, albeit deep, line across the mithril barding covering my flank. At that moment I spread my wings wide and beat them forwards, arresting my forward momentum in a risky manoeuvre that wrenched the muscles upon my back. I ignored it, for pain and I are well-acquainted bedfellows, and twisted my form around mid-flight to face my enemy.

Chrysalis did not expect this, for she was still hovering there, snarling in impotent rage as a second thrust of my wings, already burning with pain from that previous exertion, propelled me straight into her. I collided into the Queen of the Changelings clumsily, and I wrapped my limbs around her grotesquely thin and lithe body tightly so that she would not escape. In our embrace I fought the overwhelming sense of revulsion that flooded through my being when my skin came into contact with the disturbingly cold and smooth layers of chitin that stretched over skeletal frame like armour over a lifeless mannequin. She writhed and shrieked, but I held firm; her limbs thrashed wildly and her neck twisted and snapped in vain effort to blind me with that repulsive horn of hers, but I proved to be the stronger.

I was far too close to her to swing my sword comfortably, so I dismissed the weapon back to the ethereal void. Instead, I drew directly upon the most primordial forces of creation, summoned forth through the horn upon my head, which shone brightly as the moon on a cloudless night. With my horn charged with magical energy, such that the pressure built greatly through this appendage until it felt as if it was about to burst, Queen Chrysalis' attempts to escape only grew more fierce. Her hooves flailed wildly against my chest, but though the blows inflicted some rather painful bruises upon my flesh the force from her limbs, whose thin and wasted appearance belied the power and strength behind those emaciated appendages, was absorbed by my breastplate.

I let loose the magical energy in the form of a beam directed at Chrysalis' head, with the aim to stun her so that I might take her back to Canterlot alive, to throw her manacled and humiliated form before the hooves of my sister and prove to her that I was not some weakling princess to be kept merely as an ornament but that I still remain what I have always been - a Princess of action, warfare, and divine vengeance. The Warmistress of Equestria, as I have been one thousand years in the past and I shall continue to be so long as our diarchy yet lives and I still draw breath. The blast of energy was met with resistance, and through the iridescent glow of magic I discerned within the soft, pale blue of my aura a sickly, diseased shade of green. Beyond the clash of energies I saw Chrysalis, her haggard, twisted face made even more grotesque by this radiance of magic, snarling in rage.

"No!" she shrieked, and the emerald aura pulsed, almost knocking me back with the force. "No!"

I poured more power to compensate, but I had grossly underestimated her power. In the violent discharge of energies I was thrown back by the force of her spell, and I arced through the heavens in a clumsy, broken wreck. I had assumed that Chrysalis had been drained in her expulsion from Canterlot, but either she was still glutted from taking in Prince Shining Armour's love for Princess Mi Amore Cadenza or that she had recovered using love from another source entirely. I was unharmed, however, and, if anything, was merely surprised by Chrysalis' sudden aptitude for magic. Nevertheless, when I spread my wings and righted myself, laughing inwardly at how she had only inflicted a few mere bruises on me, I found to my utmost horror that I was surrounded completely by Changeling drones.

Where before they had merely observed our fight with a quiet and dispassionate outlook that was nevertheless menacing, this time they seethed with their dark queen's hatred for all that is good and pure in this world. The sky around me was virtually filled with drones, such that the air itself was permeated with the relentless buzzing sounds of thousands upon thousands of pairs of insect-like wings beating frantically. For each pair of wings a pair of compound eyes, devoid of all intelligence and yet gleaming with the purest malice imaginable, gleamed in a most wraithlike manner in the grim moonlight. It was then that I realised that I had fallen into a trap, and that it was not the subterfuge or malice of the enemy that had been my downfall, but my pride in coming here in the first place, in believing that I could destroy Chrysalis myself, and my naivete that she would necessarily follow the same rules of honourable combat that I do.

Without a word the Changeling drones advanced. I scoured them from the skies with blades of lunar fire, impaled them upon my steel, and crushed them beneath my hooves but yet they came on in a vast, organic mass of chitin and fangs. Soon I was overwhelmed, and all that I could see or feel were Changeling drones clinging to my body, biting and scratching in vain against my armour or divine flesh, and yet that did not deter them. Restrained, I struggled against the grotesque accumulation of so much horrid chitin that suffocated me, and though I could kill a few to send their frail, lifeless bodies falling to be dashed upon the unforgiving but welcome arms of Mother Equus below, they were soon replaced by what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of drones.

I knew not of what happened beyond the Changelings surrounding me as a hive of bees swarming a hornet, for I was occupied merely with trying to free myself from their cloying grasp, but beyond the writhing, wriggling mass of so much disgusting, putrid flesh I could feel within the ether a pulsating mass of magical energy growing, swelling, almost spilling over from the vessel struggling to contain it. I could do little except brace myself for the blast to come, and all of the magical defences that I could throw up in time would be in vain. Nevertheless I had managed to raise a shell of magical armour just before the blast hit me. The Changelings surrounding me were all vaporised instantly as a blindingly bright flash of emerald-hued energy washed over my frail protective bubble. I poured more and more energy into it until my horn ached and my spirit felt as if it was being wrenched from my body, but alas it was not enough; the structure crumpled, and a spiders' web of cracks formed over the thin surface of this eggshell form.

The magical shield crumpled in on itself, and was then shattered entirely and the residual energy drifted back into the primordial chaos from which all magic originates. The eldritch blast of obscene magic bathed me, filling my very being with a pain that I had not known since the Elements of Harmony had first banished me to the moon over one thousand years ago. My bones had become white-hot daggers that dug into the taut, strained flesh which was burned and shredded by the sheer force of the spell. I could only cry out as the agony wracked through my thrashing, flailing form, before, mercifully, this abominable spell was ended and I fell from the skies.

I willed in vain for my wings to spread and arrest my descent, but alas the muscles on my back refused and had become a burning knot that throbbed awfully with every single attempt at movement. It would have been futile, for as I turned my head this way and that, and stabs of pain seized my neck, I saw that the delicate feathers had been reduced to ash, the flesh below charred, and the hollowed bones snapped such that my once graceful wings resembled useless balls of crumpled burnt paper.

As I saw the barren and lifeless desert below rush up towards me through the dense cover of clouds, the ancient ruined citadel was at first a dull grey smear upon the rippled and cracked canvas of sombre yellows and greys. For the first time in an age I felt the fear of death take hold within me, amplified by the pain and by the ringing echo of Queen Chrysalis' sadistic laughter as she followed me down with a lazy glide that was almost contemptuous in its manner. It was a curious experience, in hindsight, that was at once both thrilling and terrifying; yet I know that for an immortal such as myself I cannot know the terror of a true death, for my spirit shall return to the primordial chaos until such a time that from this maelstrom of energies that a new form of flesh shall be knit for me to inhabit once more, but that, perhaps, would take millennia once more, and by then Equestria as we know it shall be all become ruin. [It is indeed accurate that alicorn princesses such as my sister and me were originally birthed of magic, and the physical form in which we inhabit is merely a vessel we use to interact with our subjects in a manner that is more pleasing to them. It is rather difficult to explain this using the limited forms of the Equestrian language, but this inelegant explanation will have to suffice. Times have changed, and loud ominous voices from the heavens and cryptic visions to soothsayers in dreams fell out of fashion shortly after ponies learned how to write.]

Nay, the fall would not kill me, though the impact from such a height would have certainly slain a mortal pony, but I knew that a fate worse than death awaited me; to be captured by the Changelings and forced into one of those infernal devices that clouds one's mind with a pleasing illusion to keep one sedated while they drain one of love until there is nothing left. Against all hope I struggled for the last time, my wings could only twitch futilely as I tried once more to extend them and glide the insurmountable distance back towards friendly lines, but pain was my only reward for trying. The fortress over which so much blood had been spilt rushed up towards me, and I plummeted past the crumbling towers and crenellated battlements from which the noble guardsponies made their stand. I then hit the ground on my side and darkness rapidly overwhelmed me. Such was the price paid for my own arrogance.

Author's Note

Okay, this chapter was a bit of an experiment for me, and I hope it's worked out alright.

Bloodstained (Part 21)

Part 21

I take it as a small matter of pride that I didn't immediately void my bowels at the first sight of Queen Chrysalis, as unlike some of the ponies that now lay dead around me I had the foresight to use the latrines before the battle. If I was to die then I was determined to make my death as dignified as possible, not that the state of my corpse would be the most pressing thing on my mind when I inevitably find myself standing before Faust Herself with my soul weighed against all of the sins that I have wilfully committed over my too-short life. Nevertheless, as the dark mistress of the Changeling race glided towards me upon cadaverously thin limbs, her damnably intelligent eyes glinting in the weak glow of my horn and lips pulled back into a triumphant snarl, I began to silently pray that when I would see the Maker of All in the next few minutes to judge how I was going to spend the rest of eternity that She was in a particularly generous mood tonight. Considering how Changelings treated their prisoners, dying and facing eternal damnation in Tartarus for a lifetime of indulging in all manner of carnal pleasures might have been the more preferable outcome.

"What a lovely family reunion," said Chrysalis, her voice positively soaked in the self-assured smugness of somepony who knows without a doubt that they have won. "It's such a shame that Princess Celestia isn't here to join us, but I expect you'll see her again shortly when we march on Canterlot and the Tyrant of the Sun [Not one of my favourite titles, as this one had somehow endured since the end of the re-unification of Equestria by those ponies unwilling to accept our rule. Despite those ponies being long dead now, this epithet is still widely in use in the modern era by the enemies of Equestria] kneels before me."

The Queen stopped, and regarded me with a chillingly proud expression on her face as if she had just noticed me standing there, sabre hovering limply between us, doing my absolute best not to collapse from exhaustion and sheer terror. Around us the Changeling drones had formed a circle around us, as if standing in audience to a duel that was about to take place between two offended aristocrats. Indeed, there was a peculiar sense of formality to the proceedings that was only enhanced by the eerie silence [From this we can infer that the artillery bombardment had ceased, presumably for fear of hitting any survivors from the failed attack. Either that, or Blueblood is once again exaggerating], and one that I found disturbingly out of odds with the pure violence that I had just gone through. A multitude of glistening, unintelligent eyes stared at me seemingly from all directions, and I recall feeling most conspicuous at the time; that is, under all of the fear that gripped me by the throat with its ice-cold talons.

"I remember you," she said, the tone of her voice dancing in a strangely playful manner as she addressed me. "In the catacombs beneath Canterlot. It was you who disrupted my servants' spell and stopped the summoning ritual. It was a bit of a setback, but, as you can see, things have worked out just perfectly for me regardless."

"I'm so glad," I remarked flatly, though I think the fear I was attempting to mask with my usual brand of faux-glibness was betrayed when I took an involuntary step back from her.

As the dull ache at the root of my horn grew more painful and seemed to envelope the front portion of my brain like an awful hangover with none of the knowledge of the pleasant times that must have preceded it, I had no choice but to let Princess Luna drop the few scant inches back down to the ground. She groaned as she hit the dusty earth, and lay sprawled by my side. Her chest rose and fell sharply with every ragged, dry breath, and those wide, ice-blue eyes of hers fixed upon mine with no small amount of fear behind them. Her lips, caked over with dried blood and swollen with bruises, opened, and moved with what looked like considerable effort. I quickly divined that Luna wanted to speak with me, perhaps to apologise for the hell that she had put me through both since her return from the moon and during this most recent insanity that I've had to endure. If she was, then it was rather too late for that. I glanced warily to see Chrysalis watching with an offensively satisfied expression on her face, and lowered my head as if to inspect the Princess' injuries.

"Stall her," whispered Luna. Her voice was dry and rasping, and her words were slow and measured as if each syllable took herculean effort to speak. "Reinforcements are coming." Her eyelids closed and her neck fell limp, making her head loll awkwardly to the side and splash onto the oozing mud as she once more slipped into unconsciousness.

I wanted to slap her bruised, bloodied face and demand exactly how in Tartarus was I to 'stall' the Queen of the Changelings of all ponies, and for how long? That the main attack force must strike at the rear of the Changeling army, and with Chrysalis presumably distracted, somehow, by me, a faint glimmer of hope danced like a tiny firefly amidst the all-consuming darkness, provided that I could do one of the very few things that I have any degree of talent in and waste everypony's time over something trivial. Chrysalis didn't seem the type to tolerate the usual sort of mindless, empty chatter that I tend to employ at parties that are too boring to hold my attention for very long and are devoid of any shapely mares, guests or staff, for me to seduce, and judging by the expression on her face I very doubted that she would have been up for that either. No, if I 'read' her correctly, the creature that stood before me was possessed of a sizeable ego, and such ponies tend to be rather in love with their own voices. My only chance, therefore, was to try to appeal to that particular facet of her personality, and encourage her to gloat to her heart's content. I thus took a moment to compose myself, and turned to face the embodiment of one of the greatest and most insidious threats to all of ponykind my generation has ever endured.

Against all logic, sense, and reasoning, I positioned myself between Chrysalis and Luna, my blade held high as if to strike at the long, sinuous neck of the Changeling Queen at a moment's notice. I squared my shoulders and straightened my posture until I looked like the very picture of Equestrian defiance in the face of the overwhelming savagery and cruelty of the enemy, at least I damn well hoped so, for all I really wanted to do was shrivel up into a little, broken ball and simply wait for the inevitable.

"That's about as far as you'll go," I said, trying, and probably failing, to inject some confidence into my voice. I jabbed my sword towards my nemesis' armoured neck in what I had hoped was a suitably threatening gesture. "You won't harm the Princess."

Chrysalis chuckled softly. "I have no intention of harming your dear, precious little pony princess," she said, though the still-playful tone of voice certainly implied that it was clearly not the case. "As for you, princeling, that all depends upon what you do next. They say that in her throne room in Canterlot, Princess Luna merely has to speak a single word for concealed snipers to strike a pony who has dared to offend her dead. [I would like to reassure ponies reading this that this is an unsubstantiated rumour with not a single iota of truth to it; any snipers concealed in the alcoves of our throne room are there for the protection of our subjects.] Here," -she waved a hoof at the writhing mass of Changelings that surrounded us, and they all shrieked wordlessly seemingly at her unspoken bidding- "I won't even have to open my mouth before my dear children tear you to pieces."

"I'll have to bear that in mind," I said, eyeing her 'children' around us, those slavish, drugged, mindless drones. "But if you want the Princess, then you're going to have to go through me first."

Damnation, that mouth of mine was going to get me killed one of these days. Faust knows I've accidentally offended more than my fair share ponies to the point of murderous vendettas, only for it all to end like this because I happened to push the Queen of the Changelings a little too far. I was fortunate, however, that she seemed to find my reckless defiance to be more humorous than threatening.

"It may have escaped your attention, but I've won," she said, sweeping her hoof over the dead bodies that surrounded us and then at the castle that loomed darkly behind me. I was about to point out that there were still rather more Changeling corpses than there were dead ponies, but I remembered that she probably didn't care in the slightest. "You are alone now, and I don't want to have to kill you, princeling; you're far more useful to me alive than dead. So I'm going to offer you the chance to lay down your sword and come peacefully."

I tilted my head to one side, and I lowered my sword slightly. "Forgive me if I say that I don't entirely trust you."

Something certainly felt wrong, and by that I don't mean the fact that I was alone, surrounded by the enemy, confronted by the evil Queen of the Changelings, and that one of our Princesses was slowly dying next to me. No, I mean that there a singular, nagging doubt at the back of my mind and once more itching at my hooves that there was one facet of this whole situation that simply did not fit - that I was still alive. If she wanted Princess Luna and only her then I should have been lying dead in a pool of my own blood along with the other, unfortunate ponies whose corpses stared accusingly at me with sightless, dead eyes; no, Chrysalis wanted me alive for some reason, and I was not looking forward to finding it out.

"It's not a matter of trust," she said, with a contemptuous swish of her mane. The thin, silky strands floated and drifted like a disturbed spiders' web before settling once more across her muzzle and neck. "If you want to live, then you will throw down that weapon of yours and kneel. It's as simple as that, princeling."

Dear reader, if I may address you directly, whomever you are, if you wish to preserve your image of me, the great hero Blueblood who saved not only one but two princesses, who rescued the 3rd Regiment of the Solar Guard from destruction, and who would later go on to such feats as recovering the lost Royal Standard and saving Ponyville, then I advise that you skip the following paragraphs. In my defence, it took a few moments of careful thought, by which I mean mentally flailing at ideas until I exhausted all but the only sensible option, before I severed the magical hold on my blade.

My sword, one of the few things that I could rely on in this world not to disappoint me, fell to the soggy ground with a strangely threatening squelch of congealing mud. The weight upon my horn was lifted, but inwardly I instantly felt awful. I expect this emotion was what others might call disgrace; it was a hideous, sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach and in my chest far worse than any sensation of raw terror that I had felt before. It was as if my insides, unclean and diseased, had been scooped out and I had been left hollow. Yes, I had committed the cardinal sin for which there can be no forgiveness for a commissar, and indeed I am greatly ashamed to admit that my colleagues have executed less deserving ponies for merely considering the option of surrender yet I continue to be held as the ideal by which all of my kind are measured. I ask any of you reading this, would you have done anything else in my situation? Certain ponies would of course think that they might have attacked and slain the Queen instead, or simply allow themselves to die for their Princesses and their country. To such self-righteous ponies I say that only when one faces one's own mortality as I have done does one find the measure of a pony, and they who boast that they would have performed differently are either liars or very foalish.

It was not by choice that I then fell to my knees, and in my defence I will say that it was due to sheer exhaustion than in genuine supplication to the malevolent horror standing before me. If knowing that I had voluntarily surrendered my blade has coloured your opinion of me, I care not, but I expect most ponies would expect me to say that it had all been part of an elaborate ruse. It was not - I simply had enough of pretending and I just wanted to live.

"See, we can be reasonable after all," said Chrysalis mockingly. She stepped forwards, and cupped my chin with a hoof that felt ice-cold to the touch. My head was lifted uncomfortably so that I had no choice but to look into the vast, pale green eyes of hers, like alchemical flasks filled with noxious poison swirling and congealing, uncomfortably close to mine. I suppressed a shudder through my spine. "Would you like to come quietly, or shall my children drag you kicking and screaming?"

"That, uh, won't be necessary," I said, or whimpered, to be more accurate. With a weak shove I pushed the desiccated, yet somehow elegant and certainly hooficured appendage from my face, and in a gesture that showed that the arrogant flame of aristocratic pride had not yet been extinguished within me, affected to wipe my muzzle clean with a slightly stained hoofkerchief.

Chrysalis grinned mockingly at my tiny show of rebellion, but otherwise seemed content to let me struggle back to my hooves. My legs quivered and shook beneath me, as if they were about to simply collapse under my own prodigious weight. Nevertheless, I felt that my lineage - over two thousand years of the famed and feared House of Blood - could not end so ignominiously. My situation certainly looked hopeless, yes, but in this dank pit of despair the prospect of rescue by the main attacking force, should it actually arrive in time, was like a rope to pull me free dancing just inches away from my outstretched hooves.

"I just want to ask something," I said, at length. My mind raced with my heart hammering frantically in my chest; a myriad of jumbled thoughts and ideas seemingly flittered through my head with no semblance of order, and all I could do was metaphorically grasp at them blindly and hope whatever words, sentences, and themes that I could successfully pluck from the miasma of raw ideas and hope they made some sort of sense. Or that I wouldn't be torn into thin strips at a moment's notice.

"Now?" she said incredulously.

I pointed at the multitude around us. "We appear to have plenty of time," I said, doing my best to keep the irony from showing in my voice.

Chrysalis paused, and then snorted. "Very well, then."

"How did you know Princess Luna would be here?" I asked, saying the first coherent thing that my fractured and sleep-deprived mind could piece together.

There was that mocking laughter again, and the tall, stick-thin creature circled about me with an absurdly arrogant gait, though despite her strutting around like an overly-confident peacock in one of the more extravagant gardens of Canterlot I found very little to be amused by at the time. As she walked, I followed to keep myself between her and the Princess, as if I would be little more than a momentary delay should she get bored of humouring me. Of course, it went against my initial instincts to use the limp, unconscious body of Princess Luna as a pony-shield, but, again, I feared that given these particular circumstances it would have hardly made any difference at all.

In watching her skulk about, apparently only to indulge her own ego, for I often find that creatures such as she are often in possession of very large but ultimately fragile egos that must be constantly nurtured by their own self-aggrandising behaviour and by belittling others, the Princess and me in this case, I studied her carefully. She was as tall as the kinder of my two aunties, though her form was quite grotesquely thin even compared to that of Celestia, whose slender and elegant physique had been regarded as the standard of beauty by which all other mares have been measured. [I'm flattered, though I find such attention from stallions to be rather grating after half a dozen millennia.] Despite her slenderness bordering on extremely unhealthy for a mare of that size, and despite the thick, armoured chitin layered upon taut skin, underneath which well-toned and firm muscle could be seen rippling with every fluid movement, there was a strange and ultimately disturbing sense of sensuality about this 'mare' standing before me. The way that the thin, gossamer-like strands of her mane were coyly draped to partially conceal a disturbingly pony-like eye, the sharp and patrician features of her face, and the otherworldly grace granted by her delicate form, which belied the power that lay in the sinew and muscle that propelled it, was all very alluring in a way that I couldn't quite put my hoof on.

"What makes you think I did?" she said, not stopping in her circuit around me. A playful smirk tugged on the ends of her lips, if she had any that surrounded the thin opening on her face she called a mouth.

I affected a nonchalant shrug, one entirely in keeping with that false stiff-upper-lip persona of mine that she may or may not have even been aware of. "Why else would you lead your drones into battle personally? Why would you put yourself at risk unless you could be assured of your prize?"

Chrysalis stopped, for which I was thankful because following her walking around in a circle was starting to make me feel dizzy. "There is little that goes on in Equestria that I'm not aware of," she said.

"But the Royal Guard has been completely purged of your drones," I said, doing my best to keep the fires of her ego going by feigning ignorance. Ponies, I find, tend to lower their guard when they think they're dealing with a blithering idiot; I should know, since I've made that mistake far too many times to count. In actuality I had already put two-and-two together, so to speak, and came to what I had thought was a fairly accurate conclusion.

Her thin, slit-like mouth opened as if to speak, and remained open long enough for me to view the rows upon rows of razor-sharp fangs, before cold maw settled into a wide grin that looked far too wide for the noble lines of her deceptively elegant face to allow. "I'm not a fool, princeling," she said, after a moment of thought. "I know what you're trying to do, and you'll receive no villain's exposition from me. I shan't waste any more time here discussing this."

The Changelings advanced on me, and it was a great sense of resignation that I hung my head in quiet shame, and readied myself for whatever fate awaited me in their monstrous hive cities. It was then that a sudden roar of flames shook me from my self-inflicted fugue, and as I looked up to see through the cloudy haze that fogged my vision the orange and yellow glow of raw fire danced and writhed energetically in the distance. Shrieks of Changelings burning horrifically to death filled the air, amidst the rising clamour of the battle rejoined. Hope flared once more within me, rekindled by the advancing flames that consumed the enemy, as Chrysalis snarled in anger and turned to address this new threat.

The drones swarmed around me and I was knocked to the ground under a flurry of hooves. Splattered in mud, dozens of hooves scrambled frantically, yet more lashed out upon my already battered body. Pain flared across my frame as hooves trampled on me - against my chest, flanks, and limbs mainly. That they seemed only interested in inflicting pain, rather than outright killing me, did not occur to me at the time, and I could only flail my aching limbs, joints and muscles shrieking in protest of this new exertion after nearly a full night of battle, against the onslaught of hooves.

Something warm and wet splattered onto my face, and when I dared to open my eyes I found that the beatings had ceased. I was alive, but why? Through the bleary fog that shrouded by eyes I could see a vague shape looming over me, and strong hooves gripped roughly around my aching shoulders and brought me back up to a quite wobbly standing position. My vision soon sharpened, though I didn't need that to tell me that it was Cannon Fodder propping me up, as his peculiar and unique aroma of body odour, an unwashed tunic, and stale brown stew and ale rations identified him almost immediately. There he stood, a grubby, dirty hoof clad in dirtier steel held me by the shoulder, while in his maw he proffered my fallen blade.

"Sorry I took so long," he said, or at least that's what I think he said. His usual disregard for the niceties of elocution was worsened by the steel in his maw.

I gratefully accepted my blade, and I was never happier to see my erstwhile aide before. "Better late than never," I said, with an earnest grin despite the sheer exhaustion that deadened my muscles.

Around us the battle still raged, yet Cannon Fodder, apparently seeing that I was injured, though at the time I was only aware of a dull ache that seemed to encompass the entirety of my body, had decided that making sure that I was still alive and of relatively good health, in spite of my injuries, his highest priority. I was flattered. The wall of steel and gold, fringed in fire, slaughtered the bewildered drones, but the element of surprise would only provide an all too brief advantage.

Mister Yellow, I saw, was at the forefront, and he was amongst the first to be slain. Under a barrage of blows from the enemy, he wrapped his hooves around a Changeling drone in a morbid embrace, and his body burst into flames. A vast, burning inferno of intense heat ripped through the horde as he and at least a score of the drones were immolated in a roiling sea of fire. In the chaos I saw Captain Red Coat, his spear tipped with green and flashing by the light of those drones burning alive, and his eyes were ablaze with the barely controlled fury of battle. Screaming exhortations to his stallions, he directed them to form a wide defensive ring around Cannon Fodder, Luna, and me, and before I could thank him for his assistance he was once more overtaken with that maddening bloodlust that clouds a stallion's mind and sight with the deep, primal urge to kill that lies hidden and waiting in the depths of the equine psyche, and he plunged straight into the fight once more.

"Did they arrive?" I asked Cannon Fodder, who blinked vacantly at me. "Did Shining Armour arrive?"

He shook his head no. "Nothing yet, sir. Messenger said they'd be here by sunrise."

I looked to the east to see that the sky had been tinged with purple, but that the stars were still visible and the promised dawn was still some time away. "So, what are you doing here?"

"I saw you were in trouble so I asked the Captain to help me get you out of here."

I felt rather touched by his comment, inspired by his rather dog-like devotion towards me. However, with the fight still raging around us there was no time for me to indulge in the niceties of such sentimentality. Despite his initial success, Red Coat's ill thought-out plan was rapidly falling to pieces. With the initial shock of the attack gone and Mister Yellow now a charred skeleton lying entwined with the smoking husk of chitin amidst a field of burning corpses, the momentum had turned against us. The horde had recovered and was pressing its counter-attack on this beleaguered little pocket of Equestrian territory. We had to fall back to the relative safety of the fortress, even if it meant retreating back into the stygian darkness of the keep's labyrinthine corridors.

"Alright, we've been dallying around out here for long enough," I said to Cannon Fodder. "Back inside. Now!"

My magic was drained, and so Cannon Fodder and I had to resort to dragging Luna along the ground by her hooves in a manner that was rather undignified and reminded me of the time when I was sixteen years old and had to be dragged back to school in the like manner after an interesting morning with a crate of illicit champagne. Twilight Sparkle—or rather another two of her magically-created simulacra—appeared by my side and took hold of one of Luna's forelegs each. The Princess cried out in pain, and let fly a string of exceedingly colourful and loud curses in florid Ancient Equestrian, invoking some violent sexual imagery that I shall not repeat here, but would have made the lowest of the street scum of Trottingham blush with embarrassment. At the very least, however, it proved that she was still alive, awake, and somewhat lucid.

We found our route back blocked by more drones, who swarmed around Red Coat's soldiers. I caught sight of the Captain, who looked to me, murder burning in his eyes as the lust for blood seemed to have taken him utterly. His dented and battered armour, with scratches so deep as to expose the fresh, shiny mithril beneath the dull grey lacquer and grim decoration that coated it, was splattered in green ichor and crimson blood, to give the previously fresh-faced and eternally optimistic teenager a darkly malevolent aura about him. Nevertheless, he still had enough control of himself to have recognised my frantic pointing towards the keep and divined my meaning. He responded by bellowing an order, lost amidst the roar of the fight, but nevertheless obeyed by his stallions with the alacrity expected of their military training.

The troops formed a cordon around Luna and myself, fending off the Changeling attacks that ebbed and flowed like the relentless tide crashing against the jagged rocks of a tiny island. I couldn't see as much, for my vision had once more become fogged, and brilliant yellow stars flickered over my eyes as I struggled to drag Luna back towards the breach in the walls. The fortress loomed tantalisingly close, with the foot of the pile of rubble leading upwards into the breach and the relative safety of the courtyard like a stairway to heaven. I had but to drag the limp form of my Auntie, who seemed somewhat lighter now that she was awake, up the sloping pile of broken masonry and rubble.

For a moment it looked as if we were going to make it, but fortune once more decided that it was being far too generous with me. In my initial elation at having been rescued and in the franticness of our disorderly retreat back to the keep I had, against all logic and reason, completely forgotten about Queen Chrysalis. A stark reminder came when the ground before me erupted in brilliant green flames that I would have only just been able to see over were I to stand up straight. I dropped Luna's leg and stumbled back away from the scorching heat that singed the fur on my muzzle, and desperate not to be trapped I tried to dart around the column of fire only to find that it had spread. A burning ring of eldritch green flames had enveloped around Luna, Cannon Fodder, Captain Red Coat, the two Twilight Sparkles, and me, separating us from the soldiers who were escorting us.

"Dispel it!" I shouted at the closest Twilight clone. "Quickly!"

Twilight Sparkle's horn crackled uselessly with wasted energy, and she looked at me with a deeply apologetic expression on her face. "I'm sorry," she said, apparently on the verge of weeping. "I can't."

"Not your fault," I said with a quiet sense of resignation, despite internally screaming at her. Looking back now, I can hardly blame her; she had gone through a lot that night for a civilian, and though she was certainly extremely powerful and skilled in the magical arts she was by no means omnipotent, so the well of energy from which she drew must have been nigh exhausted by now.

I was about to order Cannon Fodder to march through the fire instead in the hope that his magic-draining abilities would simply remove them. Quite why I didn't ask him to do that before asking the obviously exhausted Twilight Sparkle to try dispelling the flames I'm still not sure, aside from my own weariness weighing down on my mind like the entire contents of her personal library crushing down on my skull. Cannon Fodder's own dog-like devotion to me meant that it was likely he would have walked straight into those searing flames even if he was not a Blank if I had so ordered him to, it was quite endearing in a rather pathetic sort of way. Nevertheless, before I could even finish giving him the order a dark shadow loomed behind the flames, and through the flickering, dancing spectres of green and black this amorphous, shifting shape coalesced into the shape of a grotesquely tall pony. The flames parted, like a curtain being opened, and Queen Chrysalis strode through, the ashes crunching beneath her hooves.

Red Coat let loose a scream of incoherent rage and charged straight at Chrysalis, spear lowered for the creature's exposed, elegant throat, with the sort of disregard for his own safety that the Commissariat has been struggling to inculcate into the common soldiery since its inception. Before I could raise a hoof to stop him the Queen of all Changelings lowered her head, took aim, and a coruscating beam of brilliant green magic was cast directly towards the charging stallion. One of the Twilights had darted forwards and pushed the charging stallion out of the way. There were two shrieks of agony; the clone was immolated utterly in a puff of ash, having taken the full brunt of the blast, while Red Coat was only clipped by it. He crumpled to the ground motionless.

I was in too much of a state of shock to do anything productive, but the remaining Twilight simulacrum, after she had finished screaming out in some worryingly unseen pain, darted to Red Coat's side, apparently heedless of the monster that had just so callously murdered her twin. [These simulacra, of course, cannot be considered to be alive, being mere puppets animated and directed by their master. Nevertheless, it is known that the caster experiences everything that the clones 'feel', up to and including the pain of their deaths. Sadly, some unicorns can suffer great mental trauma if this should happen, which can take a great deal of therapy and support for them to overcome.] As Twilight fussed over the limp form of the teenaged Captain, Queen Chrysalis strode forth with a bearing of supreme confidence about her deceptively elegant posture; one that belied the untold malice and hatred that lay beneath those sharp, patrician features of hers.

"He's alive!" exclaimed Twilight. She shifted out of the way, and in the light of her horn I could see that Red Coat's right foreleg had been reduced to a bloody, smouldering stump. His armour was scorched, with the ornamentation on his mithril plates burned away. The right side of his face was burned horribly, such that I felt my stomach heave at the sight of the flesh melting and sloughing like molten candle wax, until it solidified into a cracked, blackened ruin of those once-youthful good looks, interlaced with a horrid lattice work of congealing blood. "Oh Celestia, I don't think I can... The wound's cauterised, he won't bleed out. He's... he's gone into shock."

Chrysalis ignored them, and simply strode past to approach Princess Luna and me. "Enough," she snarled, punctuating that with a stomp of her hoof that sent a faint tremor through the rubble beneath us. The battle around us seemed to stop, save for the distant rumble of artillery and the roar of the fight continuing further away from us, as the surviving guardsponies beyond the ring of fire grouped together and watched the shrieking Changelings warily with spears lowered and horns charged. The Queen's horn still glowed with charged magic, and she aimed it squarely at the half-conscious Princess by my side. "Surrender, Princeling, or you and your precious little Princess die!"

I had barely any strength left to raise my sword, but both Twilight Sparkle and a considerable numbers of guardsponies were watching me, so the surrender that would have spared my life (if Chrysalis could be trusted to follow her word, of course) was out of the question. By now the skies to the east had become a canvas of blazing pinks and reds, and the thinning cover of cloud too was tinged and highlighted with those ethereal and otherworldly colours of the twilight just before the dawn. In the early light the ruination of the battle had become plain to see for all, and beyond the green flames that encircled us like a ring, amidst the groups of guardsponies and Changelings alike standing in silent audience, the dead lay still, their bodies desecrated beyond recognition by war. The dawn was coming, and I had but to survive to see it.

Cannon Fodder stood by my side, resolute and blindingly obedient as always with an almost defiant expression on his usually blank and placidly bovine face. I noticed that the fires closest to him were weaker than the rest of them, and another spark of hope flared within and soon spread like a fire. Doing my best not to let on that I had just thought of something, I locked eyes with my aide and surreptitiously tilted my head towards the chitinous abomination slowly approaching us. It was most fortunate that he had understood my intentions clearly, and that Chrysalis was apparently so distracted by her evident frustration of her imminent victory being repeatedly confounded by the likes of me bumbling around like the confused little imbecile that I am. He nodded his head quietly, and as Chrysalis glided towards me like a lioness stalking a helpless gazelle fawn he stumbled awkwardly out of her way but remained close.

"No," I said, and once more I had another brief fit of suicidal insanity and placed myself between Luna and Chrysalis. The Changeling Queen stopped, and tilted her head to one side. "I don't think you will."

She snorted, and shook her head. "I tire of these games," she said, and her horn flared menacingly with barely restrained power. "What makes you think that I should spare your lives?"

"Celestia."

There was a quiet pause, disturbed only by the distant, muffled roar of the fight still raging beyond my sight and the closer crackle of fires. [Blueblood does not give any further information on how the battle progressed elsewhere. Once again, readers desiring further elucidation on the subject are directed to Paperweight's excellent 'A Concise History of the Changeling Wars’, and those who seek even greater detail are recommended to read the relevant seventeen chapters devoted to the subject in Twilight Sparkle's 'Blood in the Badlands'. For the benefit of those readers who do not have access to those books, the bulk of the battalion remained within the castle walls fighting a fierce defence under the leadership of Company Sergeant Major Square Basher at the gates and at the breach.] I felt as if I was going to vomit, except that there was actually nothing inside for me to throw up. Of course, splattering the remains of last night's dinner of brown stew and that bottle of scotch I kept secreted in my office was unlikely to have made Chrysalis feel more inclined to sparing my life and listening to what I had to say. Speaking of her, the Queen snarled at me, her face twisted into a foul expression of hatred and spurned victory; I could tell by that look, one that had been directed at me many times before in my life by those ponies I had wronged and, by either the result of guile or the threat or use of bloody violence, watched me get away completely without consequence, that she was merely seconds away from blasting my head from my neck.

"Celestia?" she repeated, and then threw her head back in a brief, callous burst of mocking laughter. "The Princess of the Sun and ruler of all ponykind, and I defeated her in mere seconds. The pony you are so foolishly trying to protect put up a more challenging fight than she did! I have nothing to fear from her."

I shook my head. By this stage I was getting desperate, or rather more so than I was before. With little other choice I merely spoke the first coherent thoughts that came into my head, and hoped beyond hope that they would stall her long enough for aid to come. But then what? Even if General Crimson Arrow's attacking force could arrive soon, they would still have a veritable army of Changelings to fight through before they could get to me, and by that time I would either be long dead or already on my way to the Hive. Nevertheless, a slim, minute chance is better than no chance at all, as I have always said, and thus I continued rambling.

"She was holding back," I said, spreading my hooves broadly and affecting to straighten myself up like a stallion, in spite of the waves of agony that wracked through the muscles in my back. "She could have blasted you into ashes, and in my opinion she should have, really. Princess Celestia always believes that everypony is deserving of another chance at redemption."

"For once we are in agreement," she spat, "in part, at least - she should have killed me when she had the chance. She is weak, like all of your kind; constrained by such naïveté and blinded by that pathetic ideology of Harmony that blinds her to the reality of the world. Very soon she will pay the price if what you are saying is correct."

"No, that's what makes her stronger," I said, between rasping breaths. I was tired beyond reckoning, and felt as if I was in a daze, as if exceedingly drunk but without the pleasant feelings that usually accompany several bottles of a fine Chablis.

In truth it felt as if my mouth was running independently of my conscious mind, which was telling me to shut up, curl up in a foetal position on the ground, and pray that my imminent death would be swift and painless so that I might berate Princess Luna in the afterlife for having gotten me into this position in the first place. Nevertheless, whatever it was that my subconscious was making me speak seemed to be working, as the impatient snarl on the Queen's face slackened somewhat. If I could lull her into that false sense of security, by letting her believe that she had won (after all, at the time it certainly looked as if she had), then that might just buy us enough time.

"She could have destroyed you," I continued, fighting the waves of nausea that assailed me, "in the same way she could have killed Nightmare Moon. The crimes she committed during the Nightmare Heresy should have earned her the death penalty a thousandfold, and not one pony would have questioned it. Yet Princess Celestia knew that there was some hope of salvation for the monster that her beloved sister had become, and had instead banished her until such a time that she could be redeemed. Celestia holds back because she believes that everypony has a chance to redeem themselves. Kill us here, and you'll find out what happens when she no longer believes that you are worthy of redemption."

Chrysalis paused, clearly mulling over the idea in her head slowly as her brow furrowed into a small, concentrated frown. Whatever it was that I was half-consciously, half-drunkenly doing, seemed to be working, against all reasoning, and more importantly, she still had not noticed Cannon Fodder lingering rather closer to her than would have otherwise been considered normal for a pony when presented with the supposed arch-enemy of all Equestria. Even his unique aroma, cutting through even the stench of blood, death, gunpowder, smoke, and effluvia, she seemed blissfully unaware of. My hooves continued to itch, and deep down I knew that the real reason why I was still breathing was not due to my clumsy oratory, but simply because the Queen believed it was more expedient to keep me alive.

"No," she said thoughtfully. "If Celestia had the strength she would have used it."

"Who was it who bound Tirek within the darkest depths of Tartarus? Who was it who overthrew Discord and imprisoned him in stone? Kill us now and I swear it, the whole fury of the sun will come crashing down on you. Nothing will remain of your kingdom, save for blackened ash to stand as a silent memorial to your foolishness."

[In the interest of fairness, and that my sister would never forgive me if I did not assign her due credit, in both of those events Princess Luna played an equal part to mine in ending those threats to Equestria.]

A hot breeze from the south buffeted the sweat-soaked clothes that clung to my body. Queen Chrysalis took a few steps forwards towards me, and as she did so, unknowingly wandering within Cannon Fodder's magical null field, the ethereal flames that encircled us flickered, spluttered, and then died as if doused in water. The soldiers around eyed us warily, though a warning glance at the Lieutenant, his left foreleg bandaged up and his helmet replaced by bound bandages stained with blood about his head, dissuaded them. The timing had to be right, and I thank Faust nightly to this day that Chrysalis was far too occupied with me to notice that her powerful magics had been sapped by the void that my aide possessed in lieu of a soul.

"Shut up," she said curtly. "One last chance - surrender or..."

She stopped. The sun rose to the east, and the battlefield was flooded with bright, yellow light that blinded us all, more radiant than the first glimmers of sunrise had any right to be. I raised my hoof, ignoring the stab of pain in my shoulder from a bite wound that I had not noticed before, to shield my eyes from the blazing sun and saw that this new light came not from the fierce orange-red sliver emerging slowly from the shimmering sands, but from a far brighter source that appeared to be hovering some dozens of feet in the air above us.

The light faded a little; enough for me to discern the shape of a pony amidst the golden radiance. Tall and statuesque, this heavily armoured pony, clad in shimmering golden armour etched with baroque and ornate embellishments upon the sweeping curves of the lacquered mithril plates, was held aloft by the slow, graceful beating of two great wings. Behind this figure, emerging from the cover of clouds, was an entire company and more of pegasi clad in silver and gold, like flickering specks of dust dancing in the rays of the sun.

The dawn had come.

Author's Note

Next chapter completed! Originally it was going to be much longer, but when I got around to the 11,000 word mark I decided that it would be better to split it into two and post them as two chapters. Hopefully, this'll mean that the next posting will be relatively sooner than usual as half of it is already written.

Bloodstained (Part 22)

Part 22

"CHRYSALIS!"

Princess Celestia’s roar, enhanced with the full power of the Royal Canterlot Voice, filled me with equal parts hope and raw terror. Resplendent in her brilliant golden armour, I knew that this was what it must have felt like to have seen the Princess of the Sun in those first battles for Equestria's reunification. She tossed her head back, her shimmering mane fluttered in the warm breeze, and her horn glittered with motes of white light. A flare of yellow and orange blossomed from the highest point of the sun peeking out from behind the rippling mountains beyond, and arced high, tracing a thin thread of light through the pink and purple stained heavens overhead.

Chrysalis turned to face her new opponent with a defiant snarl tugging on her lips. Eyes narrowed, she took aim with her horn, but the long, jagged appendage merely spluttered with sickly green flickers of useless magic. She shrieked in frustration and tried again, earning little more than a few more bright sparkles and a dull 'crackle' of energy dissipating for her efforts.

"What?" she cried, stamping a hoof indignantly into the soggy, bloodstained ground. "No!"

She snapped her head to face me, the gossamer strands of her mane for a moment becoming seemingly weightless before they settled limply over her head and neck. Her forehooves gripped around the frayed lapels of my stormcoat and lifted me up, such that my forelegs dangled a few inches off the ground. She pressed her muzzle to mine with fury burning in her eyes, but more than that there was terror, pure and ice cold within that callous stare.

"What did you do to me?!" she screamed. Flecks of spittle sprayed on my face and my poor abused coat.

"I didn't do anything!" I protested, beating pathetically at her armoured chest with my hooves, as if that would do me any good.

She threw me to the ground, and I fell in a tangled mess of limbs. Pain shot up from my withers to my shoulders as I lifted my head to see Cannon Fodder thrust his spear at Chrysalis' flanks, only for his clumsy attack to be easily dodged by the dextrous mare. A long, elegant hoof struck my aide in the cheek and dashed him to the ground.

As the dread Queen proceeded to stamp upon the prone form of Cannon Fodder, I fought the dull aches in my body and dragged my beaten form to my hooves once more. My aide had saved my life twice already, and as I had grown strangely attached to him it was only fair that I balanced the books. Damnation, I couldn’t let him die like that. My sword lay half-buried in the mud, positively caked in the stuff such that the keen cutting edge was now dulled. Nevertheless, I seized it eagerly as I rose and in an act born of pure desperation I hurled the blade with as much force as my horn could muster.

The Changeling Queen saw the attack coming and darted back, but not nearly quickly enough. The butcherous Pattern ‘12 sabre ripped through armoured chitin and then soft flesh, and Chrysalis cried out in pain. Thick emerald ichor oozed from what appeared to be a grievous wound upon her left shoulder.

It was then that the arc of light from the sun had completed its journey through the vastness of the void between worlds, and beyond where the bulk of the Changeling horde lay a disconcertingly close distance to where we stood a vast fiery pillar struck the earth with a sound like a heavy cathedral gate being slammed shut in the depths of Tartarus. The ground shuddered beneath my hooves, and a blast of searing hot air swept through the field as though the door to a furnace had just been opened. The exposed skin in my face smarted painfully from the intense heat.

I don't know how many Changeling drones were incinerated in the conflagration, but it was enough to wither the heart of their Queen. When I eventually tore my eyes from the awful sight of the pillar of fire, Chrysalis was already gone, presumably fleeing with the drones that swept around us in a mad dash away from the vengeful guardsponies. The fight was over; the Changeling horde had turned to a rout and fled back into the vast emptiness of the Badlands with the might of two full regiments of the Royal Guard and a motley band of the local militia snapping at their heels. For me, however, I had had enough, and simply stood there with the wounded Captain Red Coat. Cannon Fodder, though somewhat battered, was no worse for wear, as the thick armoured plates had absorbed the brunt of the attacks. Apparently fine, he simply sat up with a slight groan and then clambered back up to his hooves, though as he walked he limped slightly.

As the soldiers swarmed around us, a sense of both victorious triumph and bewildered confusion enthusing the masses, Twilight Sparkle tended to the limp, unconscious form of Red Coat until the medics moved in to assist him. He was lifted carefully onto a stretcher and carried away back to the fortress for treatment. As for Luna, however, the medics, unused to the unique physiology of alicorns, could only apply various salves and alchemical ointments to the burns that spread over her skin in great ugly splotches.

By Faust, I was exhausted. Indeed, I was so tired that I barely registered Princess Celestia landing by my side with an elegant flutter of her great wings. Stars spread across my vision as I observed the now quiet field; armoured soldiers stalked across the plain between the ruined bodies of the dead lying so dreadfully still in the dust, putting to death those drones still somehow alive. The solar flare had died away, though in its place rose a great pillar of smoke that stretched into the heavens, and the stench of burned flesh and smoke filled the air.

Celestia approached Princess Luna without acknowledging the bewildered guardsponies dropping to press their noses into the dirt in reverence around her. The medics tending to Luna crept away quietly, and against the quiet protests of one of the bolder surgeons the injured Princess rose to stand on quivering limbs. The two rulers stood before one another in silence, with Celestia regarding her younger sibling with a cold, emotionless expression that seemed somehow terrifying on a face more fit for a loving smile than this stern visage.

“Celestia, you have an excellent sense of timing, as usual,” said Luna, her normally confident, rich voice rasping between great ragged breaths, and her face was a mask of blood that ran from a grievous wound on her scalp.

An awkward silence ensued, and even the constant sound of hundreds of ponies around us trying to organise themselves into some semblance of order were somehow dulled too, though I suspected that had more to do with my slightly unstable mental state at the time than anything else. Celestia's expression did not change at all, and instead remained as a blank, expressionless mask with all of the life and animation of an exceptionally well-crafted waxwork. Yet in the subtle lines that were etched over her porcelain facade and in the tension in her confident stance I could sense a certain rage burning away within her, as though her heart itself smouldered beneath her glittering breastplate. Evidently, Luna could detect that too, as she gulped anxiously and visibly withered under her elder sibling's glare.

"'Tis a most glorious victory, no?" said Luna in an apparent attempt to break the tension. As the dust around us began to clear I saw a young stallion, no older than sixteen years perhaps, sat dazed a short distance away from the Princess, his guts spilled out onto the ground between his outstretched hind legs. He regarded them with an almost intellectual curiosity, before he mercifully expired as yet another bloodied heap.

"Sister," said Celestia in Ancient Equestrian. Her voice was calm and measured, but underneath those cool tones I felt an undercurrent of power. "We have much to discuss, in private."

There was a flash of light, two loud 'snaps' of suddenly displaced air, and the two alicorns were gone. A faint scent of ozone became infused with the general rot and decay of war, and I was left standing there gormlessly with Cannon Fodder and Twilight Sparkle. Wherever they went, I couldn't imagine that Luna was having a particularly good time of it; Celestia's coldness towards her sister surprised and disturbed me somewhat, though ponies often forget that the normally serene and composed Princess of the Sun is just as capable of feeling and succumbing to emotion as the rest of us mere mortals. At any rate, whatever happened in whichever realm they had momentarily disappeared to was likely none of my business, and nor was I in any particular mood to inquire. [I had taken my sister to a small pocket plane to allow her to rest and recover from the injuries that she had received in her fight with Queen Chrysalis. As for what we had discussed together there, I hope that readers will understand that I would desire some privacy on the matter, and that the details of our conversation are merely tangential to this document's purpose in examining Blueblood's character. Blueblood, however, does continue to describe the effects of what happened to Luna further in this document.]

There was little else for me to do and with no further direction, for Red Coat was incapacitated and any authority higher than he was nowhere to be seen. So I stood there, my limbs shaking and my stomach tying itself into knots as the rearguard of the advancing army remained behind to assist with the clean-up. Twilight Sparkle stood by my side, and despite the evident drain on the last remnants of her magic that maintaining her link she insisted on using this puppet to observe the proceedings and take notes on the notepad that always seemed to be with her wherever she went. The young mare was still shaken by her ordeal, but nevertheless composed herself admirably. She could not, however, help but weep as she saw the piles of the dead, and the soldiers who collected the bodies of their fallen comrades, arranged them neatly into seemingly endless rows, and stripped the corpses of equipment and personal effects.

"Dispel the simulacrum and get some rest," I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

"I'm not a simulacrum," said Twilight, more to her notepad than to me. "This is the real me."

I furrowed my brow and tilted my head to one side. "But why?"

Twilight Sparkle shrugged tiredly, and then turned her gaze, eyes tired, bloodshot, and rimmed with tears. "I ran out of simulacra. I didn't see any other choice. I couldn't stay up in that tower while everypony was out here."

A pony can only take so much, and eventually she gave up, as the horror of what we had just gone through and the continued misery of what followed, and what was to follow, became too much for her. Twilight clung to my side for support and, no longer able to hold back, cried into the dusty, ripped sleeve of my coat. I tentatively held her to me with a foreleg in a half-hearted attempt to comfort her; in truth, though I was not adverse to the touch of a mare, I felt somewhat awkward with her and her sudden outpouring of grief. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel sorry for her, and develop some need to protect her from what she had just witnessed. After all, a guardspony, and even an officer, undergoes considerable training to help them endure the psychological stresses of combat, often brutalising them to the point of emotional numbness. She was a mere civilian who, though she certainly endured much in her service to Equestria, had yet to be exposed to the reality of war. Until one has seen the fields of the dead, one cannot fathom what it feels like.

I therefore bade Cannon Fodder to take her back to the fortress to get her checked over by the medics despite her protests, though she eventually acquiesced and stalked back with my aide to the slope of debris that led into the newest breach in the walls, where they were subsumed by the mass of guardsponies milling about aimlessly on the rocks. Alone, after a fashion, I continued to watch the soldiers working, and though history records how despite my injuries and such I refused to tend to my own needs until their work was done, in truth I merely wanted some time to myself undisturbed by the demands of whatever duties would require my presence in the keep.

My near-solitude, however, was broken when I spotted Colonel Sunshine Smiles, his already-battered armour showing a few new scratches and dents, wandering towards me with an almost lazy gait. The two-pounder cannon that he had liberated from the Battle of Black Venom Pass was strapped across his broad shoulders, and was encrusted close to the muzzle with congealing Changeling ichor. He approached, and I then noticed that he was limping slightly, and that the cause was the stained medical gauze wrapped tightly around his right foreleg. Nevertheless, despite his injury and the fatigue evident in the distant, glazed look in his eyes and the dark rings around them, he carried himself with his usual patrician bearing, which was enhanced somewhat by the cold sneer forced upon his thin mouth by his grotesque scar.

"I would ask what's been going on here," he said, stopping a few feet away from me and surveying the remnants of the carnage before us, "but I doubt even you will be able to give me a straight answer."

"It's a little complicated," I said, and then drained the last dregs of stagnant water from my dented water canteen in a vain effort to parch my dry throat. "But I think what has just happened here is 'victory'."

The Colonel raised his eyebrows, and the un-marred side of his lips joined the other in a somewhat bemused smirk. "I wasn't referring to that," he said, stepping to the side to allow the soldiers behind him, a unicorn and an earth pony of the Night Guard carrying another smaller figure, to approach. As the dust began to clear I slowly recognised the pony being restrained by the other two was a certain lieutenant in resplendent, untarnished golden armour that, despite the dust, glimmered gloriously as if he were on parade. Lieutenant Scarlet Letter stared back at me with a reassuringly gormless expression.

"I expect that you want this returned?" said Sunshine Smiles, indicating towards the rather miserable-looking Scarlet Letter.

I arched an eyebrow and put away my now-empty water canteen as I limped on over towards the snivelling little sycophant cowering before me. No doubt the blood and ashes staining my once pristine uniform only enhanced the aura of grim authority I was trying to project, as, despite my flesh complaining, I straightened my posture and stance to something that I hoped looked appropriately commissarial. Scarlet Letter tugged uselessly at the forelegs of the two burly guardsponies restraining him.

"Not particularly," I said, and then turned to address the despondent Scarlet Letter. "The Commissariat takes a very dim view of deserters, Lieutenant."

The two stallions released Scarlet Letter at a nod from Sunshine Smiles, and he tumbled forwards into the dirt with a clatter of clean armour plates. Nevertheless, he collected himself quickly, and stood to his usual ramrod-straight posture as if to make up for his distinct lack of height. Despite his recent embarrassment and the new scuff marks that stained his gilded sabatons where the two soldiers had grabbed him, the air of appropriated superiority and the intensely aggravating smugness of a seasoned politician, very obviously rehearsed to the point of appearing fake but seemingly always on the verge of just collapsing in a very public career-ruining outburst, had returned.

"Deserting, sir?" he asked, his voice incredulous. "I was merely trying to retrieve some reinforcements, which I have just done so, sir! Yet these unsavoury brutes see fit to pony-handle me most disagreeably for leading them here to your timely rescue."

Of course, I didn't need to see the disdainful look on Colonel Sunshine Smiles' face to know that Scarlet Letter was lying through his teeth. What was most impressive was his belief that I would somehow accept such a transparent falsehood as being true. At least when I lie I have the good sense to try and make sure my lies are as plausible as possible; though a rather crude and arrogant pony of the past might have mentioned something about how others are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one, a lie is more easily swallowed if washed down with the truth. I would have been well within my rights to drive my blade through the rolls of wobbling fat that the Lieutenant called his neck right there and then, like the more bloodthirsty of my fellow commissars who seem to regard such things as due process and fair trials as being mere recommendations that get in the way of their gleeful slaughter, but though I knew his guilt to be unequivocal, I thought that I may as well pay lip-service to being fair.

"Strange," said Sunshine Smiles, "I distinctly remember you telling me that everypony inside the fortress was dead, including Commissar Blueblood here. Now, either everypony around us are so stricken by our grief at losing our beloved Commissar that we have all been afflicted by some bizarre communal hallucination, or you have been lying to us."

Scarlet Letter's face blanched at the Colonel's little speech, though he did manage to collect himself somewhat. "Now see here!" he snapped, turning indignantly to face the far taller earth pony. He jabbed a hoof against Sunshine's dusty and bloodied breastplate, and snarled up at scarred face that watched him with a peculiar expression that looked remarkably like that of a pony struggling to remain calm after having been insulted. "I have a brother high up in the War Ministry and friends in the House of Commons; if anything were to happen to me, they would be most displeased!"

"That's a rather odd thing for an 'innocent' pony to say."

"Enough! I don't have to stand here and listen to these baseless accusations." Scarlet Letter growled in frustration, and then turned to address me. "Who are you going to believe, sir? A pony who has dedicated his life to serving Equestria, or this disgraced noblepony whose misdeeds stain his soul as much as the scar does his face?"

I cleared my throat and glowered at the both of them. Sunshine Smiles did not react, but merely looked to me with a somewhat expectant look on his face, while Scarlet Letter visibly quailed as I straightened my cap and fixed my glare upon his shivering form.

"That's no way to speak to a superior officer, Lieutenant," I said, keeping my voice calm and measured despite the swell of frustration building up within me like a tidal wave threatening to subsume the levees of my patience. "The fact remains that, as well-intentioned as your motives might have been, leaving your post without permission is desertion. Therefore there can be only one penalty for this."

Scarlet Letter stepped forwards, slinking low like a rat that had just crawled out of a sewer. When he spoke, his voice was a quiet hiss that was quite at odds with the deliberately refined accent that he had cultivated. "I have a brother within the War Ministry and connections in every part of government, Blueblood. I can make life extremely difficult for you."

I was far too stunned by his audacity to say anything, except to splutter: "H-how dare you?"

"You are part of a dying breed, the aristocrats," he continued, apparently heedless of the Colonel by his side. "Equestria is changing, and ponies will no longer wish to bow down to those who have been granted wealth and power just because some lord's distant ancestor slaughtered a bunch of helpless villagers, stole their land, and then gave himself some grandiose title. You have a choice, sir, whether to cling to those old ways and be crushed beneath the wheels of progress, to be remembered only as a relic of a poorer, more ignorant era, or I can help you find a place within this new order."

I saw that Sunshine Smiles was about to lunge forwards and strike Scarlet Letter, but I stopped him with a dissuading wave of my hoof. He reluctantly stayed put, though his hoof gripped tightly around the dagger strapped about his belt and a glimmer of untarnished steel could be seen where blade had been drawn slightly from its scabbard. [Officers were given a certain amount of leeway in customising their own uniforms and weaponry, as they were expected to pay for their own equipment. The addition of a dagger, often engraved with a symbol important to that pony, was in common use as a back-up weapon.]

"Are you threatening me?" I said.

"No, of course not, sir," said Scarlet Letter. "I was merely..."

"Do you know what the penalty is for attempting to threaten a commissar?" I snapped, interrupting him before he could launch into another tirade.

There was a brief, awkward pause as Scarlet Letter thought on the subject, and the expression of dawning horror on his face just about made up for the weeks of misery that the irritating little stallion had put me through. Eventually, he decided that shaking his head no was the best option, as indeed it was the only option that did not result in his head becoming separated from the rest of his body.

"There isn't one," I continued. "The ponies who wrote Princesses' Regulations could not imagine that a pony would be stupid enough to even try." I narrowed my gaze on the whimpering wreck before me, and stared down from behind the dark shadows of the brim of the cap that had become the symbol of my authority. "But if you do that again, then I'm going to have a lot of fun dreaming up such a punishment for you. Is that clear, Lieutenant?"

At the risk of sounding petty, though I will freely admit to possessing that particular flaw next to all of the others that have been catalogued within these scribbled notes to be recorded for posterity, the look of utmost horror and defeat on Scarlet Letter's face was immensely satisfying. After the rigors of battle and the strain of warfare, the near-constant boredom and the bursts of sheer, unremitting terror, one learns to appreciate the more base pleasures of simple, unrepentant schadenfreude, especially after all of the headaches and admittedly minor annoyances he had put me through. Indeed, there was an almost foal-like glee welling up within me, in spite of the misery that I had just endured, at seeing the smirk wiped clean from his face.

"Place the Lieutenant under arrest," I ordered, and the two soldiers duly seized Scarlet Letter firmly by the shoulders. "Inform Shining Armour that I want a court martial at his earliest convenience."

Scarlet Letter did not resist, which was a shame, as if he had then I would have had the perfect excuse to have him killed right there and then and save me a lot of trouble later on. My colleagues in the Commissariat might call me sentimental, and indeed many have called me much worse over the years, but I am rather squeamish about killing ponies, no matter how much I feel that they deserve it. Of course, I'm quite happy to have somepony else perform the unpleasant deed in my stead, and I expect that ponies reading it would consider that to be merely another facet of my cowardly, selfish nature. Nevertheless, what I truly wanted from the Lieutenant was not the base satisfaction of his death, which would have put an end to some of the misery that I had suffered as a result of his actions, but answers.

As I watched him being dragged away, though he stopped part way and insisted that he could damn well walk by himself, I struggled to work it out by myself in my head. I had no proof, of course, but that was what the court martial was for, or so I thought at least. Nevertheless, I deduced that while everypony else was distracted by the preparations for battle, Scarlet Letter had somehow cleared the blocked passageway into the catacombs beneath the fortress, probably with the use of explosives and magic, to allow the Changelings to enter before he fled back into the hills. As for the reason why he went for this insane scheme, I could only imagine that he was so certain of our defeat that he could claim to be the only survivor to escape our doomed battalion, and, having eliminated all witnesses to the contrary, would be able to spin whatever fanciful tale of heroism with which to boost his ailing political career. I confess that such an idea did occur to me briefly, though I had quickly dismissed it for the very same reason that I am still alive today: the chances of survival should never be underestimated.

"Bloody awful mess, this," said Sunshine Smiles, the Trottinghamite tendency towards understatement apparently having rubbed off on him over his time leading the regiment. He shook his head as Scarlet Letter and his escorts disappeared into the crowds of soldiers, and there was an odd look of mild disappointment on his face; probably some other, more apt emotion twisted by the scar that mutilated his features. "But the fact remains that we have won, Commissar. I think that's some cause for celebration?"

I forced a smile to my face, and together we walked between the rows of bodies and the great, black, smouldering pyres of burning Changeling corpses to the fortress. So this is what victory felt like, thought I. It didn't feel any better than the inconclusive result of the previous battle I had endured.

***

The very first thing that I did when I returned to the fortress was lock myself in the ruined mess that was my quarters, throw my battered form on the cot, only to find that one of the legs had collapsed, and take a nap. Sleep, however, was troubled and restless, and when I woke up a few hours later to the sound of activity just beyond the door, which leaned drunkenly on its hinges and disconcertingly seemed to be held up only by the rusty lock, I felt no better than before. If anything, I felt worse, as the uncomfortable sleeping position probably did nothing to help the many injuries that I had endured moments before. Nevertheless, I decided that it was probably best that I do something, or be seen to be doing something, to be more accurate, and thus I clambered to my hooves, despite the white-hot stabs of agony that flared in my shoulders and ribs.

Cannon Fodder was away, presumably sent on some sort of errand. I left my quarters and tried the door to Twilight's room, but found that it was locked. I reasoned that she wanted some time alone to recover, and so with little else to do I thought it prudent to visit the visit the hospital to visit the wounded, as if my appearance would somehow lessen the pain of my injuries. The corridors were crawling with activity; soldiers swarming through them like blood through an artery, out delivering messages or on errands or simply looking for somepony to give them orders, while others busied themselves with clearing the debris of battle from the halls. Further down, I could see the smouldering, blackened stone, half-melted into slag and re-solidified to form grotesque, baroque shapes, where the late Mister Yellow had reduced a veritable horde of drones into ashes. I suppressed a small shudder as the image of the burning figure stumbling from the flames, its face twisted into a silent cry of horror, appeared unbidden in my mind.

The hospital was set up in one of the smaller halls in the keep, one probably once used for lesser events that did not merit the use of the larger, more grand hall that the bulk of the battalion squatted in. There, nestled deep within the bowels of this ancient structure, an array of beds were laid out row on row, and when I had arrived approximately a third were occupied by ponies exhibiting injuries that ranged from cuts and bruises, through dislocations and broken bones, up to severed limbs and severe lacerations. As I stalked glumly past the injured soldiers, some rendered blissfully unconscious by a potent cocktail of anaesthetics or simply passed out from their injuries, some wailed and groaned in pain horribly, while others, more lucid and rather more hale than their colleagues rendered senseless from drugs or pain, were rather more cheerful. Indeed, as I passed by the rows and rows of beds, those soldiers hailed me as the pony who had saved a Princess and wounded a Queen. I accepted their compliments with as much grace and modesty as was expected of me - oh, if only these poor souls knew the truth.

In the corner of the hall and disconcertingly close to the other patients was an area that served as the makeshift operating room, cordoned off by large, grimy-looking curtains made of thin, translucent plastic. The actinic light cast by a bright lamp projected the stark shapes of surgeons and nurses operating on a stallion onto the curtains like a particularly morbid shadow puppet theatre. What was worst, however, were the quiet whimpers of pain that could be heard, occasionally rising to a chilling crescendo, and the horrid wet sound of flesh being sliced open, once heard never forgotten. With but a brief glimpse of the dark shapes moving behind the damnably thin curtain and the nightmarish sounds emanating from beyond, my mind's eye conjured a myriad of increasingly disturbing procedures that the poor stallion might have suffered while conscious, and a wave of nausea swelled from the pit of my stomach.

Between the agonised cries and the application of the scalpel I could hear a mare's voice, presumably a nurse, doing her utmost to comfort the patient, in lieu of anaesthetic it seemed, by assuring him in a warm, motherly tone that it would be finished soon. The stallions resting on the beds closest tried to do their best to ignore the ghastly sounds and their awful implications, either by attempting awkward conversations with one another or taking sudden great interest in the small potted plants, limp-leafed and evidently neglected, that were collected in corners or placed seemingly at random on bedside tables. Nevertheless, that young mare's voice offered some element of comfort that assuaged the awkwardness that the barely-concealed surgery had created.

I felt sick and wanted to leave. As I turned around, however, I almost walked straight into the pony standing behind me. He darted out of my way easily enough despite his rather advanced years; a unicorn of at least sixty years and probably should have been retired from the Royal Guard's medical corps long ago, yet from what I heard his skills with scalpel and needle remained undimmed by age. Doctor Surgical Steel was the commanding officer of the small detachment of Their Highnesses' Royal Medical Corps assigned to our regiment, though I did not have much chance to speak with him I knew him by reputation at least to be a pony of rural Trottingham; a pony for whom a good life consisted of the open countryside, Sunday cricket, and lukewarm beer.

"We're all out of t' anaesthetic," he said, nodding to the improvised surgical theatre behind me. His thick accent was nigh-unintelligible even at the best of times, but was made worse in this instance by the mask that covered his muzzle. He was a small unicorn, perhaps closer in terms of physique to a pegasus, though paradoxically his cutie mark proudly displayed a rugby ball. Surgical Steel certainly did not seem the sort of pony who would play, let alone enjoy, that thuggish 'game' that always seemed like a more socially acceptable way for drunkards to fight one another without the risk of somepony sending the local militia in to break it up.

"No anaesthetic?" I repeated dumbly.

"Aye," he said, nodding his head quietly. Mercifully, he tugged his surgical mask free to reveal a stubbly grey beard around his muzzle. The thin flap of protective fabric dangled around his neck atop the once-white coat stained with blood and other, unidentifiable bodily fluids. "There's nowt left; ran out five surgeries ago. I sent a runner out to get some more from t' other regiments, but while he gets back we're having to make do with brandy."

"Not my brandy, I hope?" I said, and then immediately regretted it. Fortunately, by forcing a grin on my face, he took my comment to be the usual sort of gallows-humour liked by the lower orders in the Royal Guard.

"We all have to make sacrifices, sir," he said, returning my grin. Behind me, the patient's screaming had ceased, and instead he sobbed quietly while the nurse continued to comfort him. "Come along. I expect Captain Red Coat will want to see thee."

In my daze I had all but forgotten about the lad, but learning that he was still alive felt like an immense relief to me. At the time it was a bit of a mystery as to why I would indulge in the sort of puerile sentimentality that I had sought to avoid through much of my early life, but looking back, older but not necessarily wiser for it, I can see that I genuinely held some affection towards these ponies.

"How is he?" I asked.

The doctor gave a vague sort of shrug of his shoulders, and began to lead me through the serried ranks of beds to the corner opposite the door I had just wandered through. "I can fix his body alright," he said with a sigh, "and what I can't fix I'll have to replace. But it's what inside his head that I can't help with. Tha'll put these poor lads through fire and hell and blood and I'll piece them back together as best I can, but it's the injuries in the mind and soul that are the worse. Never mind, eh? Tha'll give him a shiny medal and that'll make it all alright."

Before I said anything in reply we found Captain Red Coat, or what was left of him, propped up on a bed with Lieutenant Southern Cross standing by his side. The colt looked awful; one half of his once youthful and handsome face had been burned, and where the unicorns' magic had tried to regenerate his burnt and scarred flesh there was only rippling, puckered bare skin that nauseated one to look upon. One eye, now rendered sightless, was concealed by white gauze fixed in place by a bandage wrapped around his head. His arm too had suffered badly, by which I mean that what little remained of the appendage when it had been caught in the beam from Chrysalis' horn had to be amputated at the shoulder, and in its place was a prosthetic that meshed grotesquely with his bare shoulder and torso. Where the shaven skin met the cold brass of the false limb, being the sort of utilitarian design provided by the War Ministry for free for injured soldiers, was similarly blistered, puckered, and deathly pale as if somehow decayed, and thick, distended veins were grafted into rubber piping. Lieutenant Southern Cross was busy fiddling with the intricate array of gears, levers, pulleys, and other arcane machinery inside the prosthetic itself.

He was awake and alert, which was something, at least. As I approached he smiled slightly and sat up a little straighter, though a wince of pain flittered across his face, at least the part that had not been deadened by his injuries. Southern Cross, apparently unscathed saved for a few scratches from the battle, looked up and nodded in greeting, but otherwise said nothing and continued with his tinkering.

"I take it we won, sir?" he asked quietly.

"We wouldn't be here if we didn't," I said, hoping that my words would be taken as charming bravado instead of facetious and insensitive. To make sure, I added, "We did, Captain, and we couldn't have achieved it without you."

A weak smile came to his lips, or at least the half that had not been burned away. It seemed pained and forced, as my words, however comforting they might have been to him, could do very little to dull the very real pain, only vaguely deadened by a cocktail of drugs, that he must have felt. I did my best to maintain a suitably detached demeanour, knowing from experience that soldiers tend to prefer their commanding officers to carry on behaving like everything is perfectly fine despite various life-threatening injuries over any sympathy, real or otherwise. As I looked at him and all of the other wounded around us I could not help but feel a twinge of grief at the suffering these ponies had been put through in the name of Equestrian Harmony. I recalled how Red Coat had received his commission in the Night Guards as a birthday present from his parents, and I wondered how much of the colt they had sent to war would come home.

"It, uh..." Red Coat paused and stared into space blankly for a single, uncomfortable moment that seemed to drag horribly. "It doesn't much feel like that, sir."

Apparently finished, Southern Cross covered the complex workings of the prosthetic and covered the exposed wiring and gears with a brass plate, which he then screwed on tightly. He grinned proudly as he stepped back to admire his work, and Captain Red Coat stared down at the ugly, ungainly false limb with a look of quiet resignation to his mutilated face. The limb twitched in violent paroxysms, shoving Southern Cross back forcefully and then crashed into the bedside table in a shower of jagged splinters before its new owner managed to get the thing back under control. Cradling the cold metal prosthetic, Red Coat stared first at his new leg and then at the broken table. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he sobbed quietly.

"I'm sorry," he blurted out. "I didn't mean to."

I thought accidentally breaking the table was a rather odd thing for him to be upset about, but I did my best to look sympathetic and told him that tables can always be replaced.

"You just have to practice using it," said Southern Cross, tapping Red Coat's false limb with his own, which made a dull, chiming sound of metal striking metal. "It took me months to learn how to shave without punching myself in the face. When the doc here's finished patching you up, I'll help you. 'Sides, the fillies dig a good war wound."

Surgical Steel frowned at Southern Cross and shook his head. "Don't encourage the lad."

I was about to say another useless platitude and move on when I felt a presence emerge from the shadows just behind me, as though a dark and heavy cloak had been suddenly draped across my shoulders. I did not need to look behind me to know who had approached, as the rather surprised and somewhat fearful expressions that emerged in unison on the faces of the three ponies I had been conversing with and my all too close familiarity with that peculiar sensation in recent years had all but confirmed her identity. For the sake of courtesy, I stepped out of the way and turned.

It was surprising that Princess Luna looked about as healthy as she ever did; whatever magic that her elder sibling had performed to restore her physical form back to its imposing, imperious countenance must have been powerful indeed. Her body was unblemished by the horrendous injuries that I had seen wrought upon it just hours before, and in her usual regalia consisting of a small gorget lacquered black and emblazoned with the crescent moon, sabatons, and the tiara upon her head she looked positively regal. And though her outfit was put together with civilians in mind, there yet remained a certain martial air despite the lack of weapons, insignia, and other military accoutrements. Her bearing, too, had recovered greatly since I last saw her staggering to her sister and grovelling pathetically; she stood tall, ramrod-straight and towering above the stallions here, and even then her confident posture projected the raw power and authority that I’d always known her to possess. Her face wore her more familiar expression of barely concealed contempt, albeit with a stern, patrician bearing.

"Captain Red Coat?" she asked, and the colt nodded his head quickly.

As she stepped past me and I scurried out of her way to approach Red Coat, he looked up at her with a bewildered, wide-eyed expression and fidgeted a little as if trying to escape the confines of his bed sheets. She stood by Red Coat's bedside and stared down at him with that curiously unreadable expression that she always wore when having to deal with an emotion that was not either mild annoyance or all-consuming rage (at least when dealing with ponies other than those few that she fully trusted and indeed loved). As she watched him curiously, I could almost see the gears and mechanisms within her mind working as she tried to find a way to word what she wanted to say, despite the impassiveness of her expression.

"I understand you risked your life to save mine," she said.

"Y-yes, Your Highness," stammered Red Coat.

Luna nodded her head softly, and from seemingly out of nowhere a small black box, roughly the size of a jewellery box for a necklace of some sort and decorated with the crescent moon and stars upon its top, appeared before her. The box was levitated gently onto Red Coat's lap, and he looked at it curiously. "And that is why you have been injured most grievously. I believe that such heroism and self-sacrifice must not go unrecognised nor unrewarded. Therefore, I am honoured to award you with this."

The box opened, and from it the Princess withdrew a medal - a circle of deepest black stone, save for a thin sliver of shimmering platinum that formed a 'U' shape around the lower portion of the circle, like a crescent moon, and suspended from a dark blue ribbon the same shade as her fur and specked with silvery dots of white. The medal was held aloft for those ponies around us to see, and with a sense of quiet reverence it was affixed onto the bloodstained bandages that criss-crossed around Red Coat's barrel. Luna then leaned forwards and over Red Coat, and kissed him once on the left cheek and once on the right in the Prench manner.

"Wear this with pride," said Luna, smiling genuinely in one of those rare occurrences in which she deigns to do so, "for it is the first Order of the Crescent Moon to be awarded in over one thousand years." [This is not strictly true, as Orders of the Crescent Moon were awarded to Loyalist Night Guards during and following the Nightmare Heresy until the disbandment of the Night Guards in the Reconstruction era. To be more accurate, this is the first time that my sister herself had personally awarded the medal for over one thousand years.]

Red Coat stared at the decoration on his chest for some time, and then wiped at his eyes with his remaining good forehoof. "Thank you," he said, at length, and it appeared that he was speaking more to his medal than to the Princess.

If Luna thought this was rude she made no outward sign, and, with her usual lack of social skills, simply turned away to leave without saying goodbye. However, before I could breathe a sigh of relief, she stopped and levelled her accusing gaze down at me. The urge to turn around and flee was only suppressed by virtue of the extreme tiredness that I still felt and the headache pounding against the inner walls of my skull like a mental patient throwing himself against the padding. Nevertheless, my heart beat faster than it had ever done in the battle moments before, and that familiar hollow feeling in my stomach once more made a void within my being.

"I will speak with you in private," she said. "Now."

Luna walked away down the seemingly endless rows of beds, not even turning her head to see that I would follow or slowing to allow me to catch up. Naturally, she did not need to, as by some strange compulsion I found myself following after her. Though her movements appeared slow, measured, and as graceful as that of a dancer's, I had to maintain a brisk trot in order to keep up with her. As we walked, or rather she led and I merely followed, neither of us said anything; the Princess appeared not to have deemed it necessary to fill the ensuing awkward silence with meaningless small talk, as most ponies including her elder sister might have, and I was not about to risk her ire by being the first to do so.

We left the hospital hall via the same door that I had entered, and as we walked through the sprawling mess of claustrophobic corridors, I noted that Luna was leading me back towards my quarters. The guardsponies milling around the corridors darted out of the way of the Princess, who stepped past them without breaking her stride or offering the slightest indication that she was aware of their existence. As we walked, jumbled thoughts and half-formed notions of my imminent disembowelment raced through my mind; had she been conscious when she heard me surrender to Chrysalis? And how exactly was I to be punished for this treason? Oh Faust, it was almost too much to bear, though I praise Her that I was firmly behind Princess Luna so that she could not see me shivering like a leaf in a thunderstorm. Soon, we came to the splintered remains of the door to my chambers, and to my surprise the Princess walked straight past it to the one next to it - Twilight Sparkle's room.

Luna's horn flickered briefly with light, as did the lock on the door, which opened with a quiet, subtle 'click'. She pushed it open gently with a hoof, revealing the dimly-lit room within and allowing a faint but reassuring scent of hot tea to waft into the corridor. From the half-open door I heard a soft voice that was unmistakably Princess Celestia's, quietly reading aloud from the latest Daring Do novel in the sort of gentle and maternal tone that instantly brought back the earliest memories of my childhood. Spurred on by this strange sense of nostalgia for those bedtime stories, and a melancholy longing for those days of lost innocence, I stepped into the room as quietly as my steel horseshoes would allow.

The room was dark, but the presence of Princess Celestia, sitting upon a small, plush cushion by Twilight's bed, made what should have been a confining and oppressive atmosphere warm and inviting. Levitating just in front of her muzzle was a small paperback novel [Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, for those curious], from which she read to what looked like a small collection of lumps under the sheets that must have been Twilight herself. The only light came from a thin stream where the curtains of the window did not quite meet together in the centre and from the soft glow of Celestia's horn. As I entered, Celestia stopped and smiled warmly at me, which I did my best to reciprocate.

"How is she?" I asked.

"She's well," said Celestia, looking over the sleeping form of her trusted student. "The magic has left her exhausted, but she only needs a little time to rest."

Luna followed and shut the door behind her with a dreadful sense of finality, and my all-too brief good mood was shattered once more as she stepped around to face me. This time, however, there was none of the pure arrogance inherent in her countenance, and instead she looked rather more 'normal', if such a word can be used to describe an alicorn princess. In the presence of her elder sibling, one unconscious mare, and me, she seemed somewhat more relaxed, as though whatever steel rod that had been inserted into her rear had finally been removed.

"Blueblood," she said, and with none of the venom that normally inflects her voice when she speaks my name. That she addressed me by my given name and not by a flurry of insults was a miracle in and of itself. "It would appear that I owe you my life, or my freedom, at least."

I blinked gormlessly at her; was this some sort of trick to get me to lower my guard and confess everything? "I was just doing my duty," I said. "I'm sure anypony else would have done the same." Of that I had no doubt, thought I darkly.

"No," she said, with her usual lack of tact or subtlety. "What you did out there was above and beyond the demands of duty; few ponies would have had the courage to face down Queen Chrysalis, and fewer still would have had the cunning to feign surrender."

Relief swept over me like the yearly floods of a river nourish the parched desert soil of Haygypt, though the sickly feeling in my stomach remained and would do so for quite some time. Nevertheless, I felt safe that the secret of my cowardice and self-serving nature would stay unknown to all but me and you, whomever you are, reading this drivel. Such was my relief, however, that I could scarcely think of what to say next, and thus stood there like a brain-dead imbecile, staring slack-jawed at the Princess standing before me. It was fortunate that she remained as ignorant of social cues as ever, and didn't seem to notice.

"It is for such heroism, level-headedness, and dedication that you too are awarded the Order of the Crescent Moon," said Luna, her voice warming with pride. She summoned yet another one of those little jewellery boxes, and from it retrieved another medal identical in every way to the one that she had awarded to Red Coat just moments before. With a suitably dramatic flick of her horn she fixed it to the tattered fabric of tunic where it hung proudly, and then kissed me twice, once on each cheek. Her lips felt strangely cold, as though I had just been kissed by a corpse, and I suppressed the urge to flinch from their icy touch; it seemed that she still had yet to learn the virtues of at least feigning body heat.

I looked down at the medal pensively, not quite certain what to make of the shiny bit of metal and ribbon on my chest. It was not the first medal that I had ever been awarded, as I had already received a Good Conduct Medal from my earlier career in the Royal Guard that must have been awarded to me with a sense of great irony, and it would certainly not be the last. As I looked at the thin sliver of platinum cradling the jet black stone - the old moon in the new moon's arms - the words of Doctor Surgical Steel echoed through my mind.

"Thank you," I said, doing my utmost to appear as grateful as possible without appearing sycophantic.

"There is something else," said Luna. She stepped back a little, retreating a little into the darkness of the room such that it seemed all but impossible for me to determine where Luna began and the gloom ended. Her expression, what I could see of it, was rather more subdued and had none of the arrogance that her sharp, aquiline features held.

"I have been selfish of late," she continued, her voice quiet, and lacking in the calm but forceful power that usually underlies every single syllable. She lowered her head to my level, which was something she had never done with anypony as far as I could tell, and looked me in the eye not as an alicorn Princess, but merely a pony. "I realise that my actions placed an undue amount of strain upon you, interfered with your duties as commissar of this battalion and protector of Lady Sparkle, and forced you into an uncomfortable position of having to choose between your duty to the stallions and to your Princess - a situation that no officer of our Royal Guard should ever be put in. I can only say by way of explanation that I wished only to prove myself worthy of the title of Princess once more through the fires of war, and that my judgement was clouded by this foalish desire for an acceptance that I already had. I am...."

Princess Luna stopped suddenly and sucked in a deep breath through set teeth. She turned her head to look over her broad shoulder to her elder sibling, who watched intently from behind the sleeping form of Twilight Sparkle. Celestia smiled softly, like the sun cresting over the horizon on a crisp, clear Spring morning, and nodded her head supportively.

"I apologise for my un-Princess-like behaviour," said Luna at length, her voice came out more as a sigh than actual speech.

I felt slightly lightheaded at hearing Princess Luna apologise to me of all ponies, and this time without it merely being an insult with the word 'sorry' tacked on half-heartedly towards the end of a tirade, and, as far as I could tell, without any indication that she might have been disingenuous. Then again, I always suspected that Princess Luna was a particularly good liar, which may have contributed to my inherent distrust of her, as those skilled in deceiving others are often capable of uncovering such deception in other ponies. Auntie 'Tia must have put her up to this as part of whatever it was that these two demi-goddesses had discussed away from the ears of us mere mortals, thought I. Truthful or not, it was still an improvement I felt, and I was not about to let the opportunity to finally be on top of my darker Aunt slip through my hooves.

"Apology accepted," I said quietly, still rather unsure of what else to say at that point.

A heavy sigh of relief escaped through Luna's lips, before she rapidly composed herself. Indeed, she had slipped back into her old, autocratic demeanour with such speed and efficacy that it was as though an entirely different pony stood before me - the stern, uncompromising, and arrogant Princess of the Night of old. Perhaps what I had just seen was what lay behind this masque; could it be that the Princess Luna that I had known and feared all this time was merely a front for her to hide behind, as I do behind my reputation?

"Excuse me," said Luna with renewed confidence. "I would spend more time with the soldiers."

"Of course," I said. "They would be grateful for that."

Luna nodded her head and looked back to her sister. "Will you join me?"

"In a moment," said Celestia, then she returned to her quiet vigil over her faithful student as though guarding her.

"Of course, sister." Princess Luna stepped forwards, her hoofsteps chiming loudly on the stone as if amplified. She stopped just short of the door, her magic already enveloping the knob, and once more turned her head to address her sister. In the darkness, her eyes smouldered, and those narrowed slits, burning with sudden fire, focused not on Celestia but on the unconscious bundle resting on the bed. "She crafted two dozen simulacra," she said in Old Equestrian, apparently believing that I would not understand her. I saw no reason to lead her to think otherwise, but nevertheless pretended not to comprehend her words. "I have not seen such power for millennia. I think, sister, she might be ready."

With that ominous statement Luna left through the door behind me, thus leaving me alone with Celestia and Twilight. It would be a year until I understood her meaning, but at the time I paid it little heed.

That, however, is something for another night of pointless scribbling. Feeling a little unsure of myself, as I wanted to spend some time with my favourite aunt but I did not want to intrude upon her if she wanted to spend some time with her unconscious student (which I might add is about the only time Twilight's presence could be considered tolerable for an extended period of time), I approached the bed cautiously. In stark contrast to Captain Red Coat's appearance, the young unicorn looked perfectly hale and healthy as she slept, though I knew that the damage suffered was not one that made itself known on mortal flesh and blood, but on the soul. Closed eyes gazed upwards, though ringed with dark patches of exhaustion, but asleep and dreadfully still she looked rather peaceful in the dim light.

"Thank you for taking care of her," said Celestia. When I realised that I had been staring at the soft, delicate features of Lady Sparkle for what must have been a thoroughly uncomfortable length of time I blushed slightly, and hoped that in the darkness my Aunt couldn't see the tinge of red colouring my white cheeks. "And for looking after my sister, too. She can be a little headstrong, but in her own way she only meant well. I hope that this experience has taught her a valuable lesson."

"What's going to happen now?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied, shaking her head softly. "I shall have to return to Canterlot soon and answer to the House of Commons for my actions, and those of my sister. I fear what I have been forced to do to save my sister will drag Equestria into a constitutional crisis that we can ill-afford now."

I shook my head and snorted disdainfully. "Had you not intervened, we would all be dead."

Princess Celestia smiled softly, and stepped gently around the bed to my side, such that despite the steel upon her hooves they barely made a sound on the ancient stone. Her presence, the warmth of her body and gentle scent that evoked thoughts of warm summer mornings, gave comfort to my battered and fractured nerves. Simply being in the same room as her helped me to forget the pain and horror of the night before, if only for a short time.

"Don't worry about me," she said, extending a wing protectively over me. "Let us not forget that we have won a great victory here - Black Venom Pass is in our hooves and Queen Chrysalis has been cowed. In my experience, ponies have a tendency to forgive most transgressions, so long as victory has been achieved. Everything, my nephew, will turn out fine."

As she spoke, a thought occurred to me - the timing of her intervention was exceedingly fortuitous, almost implausibly so. After that doomed tea party, which felt like a damnably long time ago, she was engaged in solving yet another land dispute with the buffalo tribes around Appleloosa, which I felt could have been more easily resolved by simply taking their land. Once that had been finished, she and the simulacra that she believed was her sister would have likely returned to Canterlot to continue their roles as heads of state. For even an alicorn to travel from the royal capital to the Dodge Junction encampment, take command of General Crimson Arrow's army, and march on the fortress would have been impossible to complete in such a short amount of time. That is, unless she already knew about Luna's deception.

I felt a churning in my gut as I silently pondered this, only half-listening as Celestia rambled on to explain the various potential ramifications for Equestrian politics. I wanted to believe that I was wrong in this assumption, but I found that I could not deny the possibility that the Princess of the Sun could have seen through the magical simulacrum that accompanied her on her diplomatic mission, or that she could not have seen that the younger sibling whom she had loved for longer than our great nation had even existed would attempt such a stunt. No, the more I thought about it, the more plausible it became; Princess Celestia, rarely involving herself directly but always gently pushing and nudging her little ponies, as she always liked to refer to her subjects, to do her bidding unknowingly. She must have known that Chrysalis would also learn of Luna's presence within the battalion, and would use that to advantage to 'cow' her, as she put it.

Celestia had stopped speaking, and offered an enigmatic smile as if she had somehow heard the chaotic jumble of thoughts and theories that clouded my mind. Behind that loving smile, the gentle voice, and that motherly demeanour lay something darker than even Princess Luna's neuroses; were we, her subjects and even her sister, merely tools and implements to be used for some higher end? I knew that her goals were pure, and I would never doubt her dedication or her love for her subjects, even one as craven and useless as I, but the feeling of being used so sickened me. I could only force myself to return that smile, and try to put the disturbing idea out of my head. Whatever it was, it was over, for now at least.

I remembered what Shining Armour once said to me, when we spoke of the Battle of Canterlot: victory wipes away all dishonour.

[It is on this pensive note that this entry in the manuscript ends. As for the theory that Blueblood raises in these last paragraphs, I can only offer by way of closure that in war one must take advantage of all opportunities that present themselves, even if the risk appears to be too high. I make no apologies for my decisions, as they have been vindicated by history.]

Author's Note

Finally! We've reached the end of this instalment. I'll post a retrospective as a journal and then take a short break for a bit.

Also, the 'rural Trottinghamshire' accent is a Yorkshire accent - think Sean Bean early in his career.

Don't worry, Blueblood will return!

Honour and Blood (Part 1)

Honour and Blood

Prince Blueblood and the Royal Colours of Commander Hurricane

Part One

The following entry in what has been named 'the Blueblood Manuscript' by our close circle of readers, chroniclers, and those who appear to be reading these writings for the purposes of light entertainment instead of actual serious scholarly work takes place roughly a year after the previous instalment. One can only assume that Prince Blueblood believed that very little of interest happened between the successful capture of Fort E-5150, which ensured Equestrian control over the strategically important Black Venom Pass, and what would later be known as the Twisting Ravine Incident. While his own life had for a time known a short period of the sort of relative stability and dull tedium that he had always craved, it would be incorrect to imply through lack of further embellishment that just because my nephew believed that nothing particularly noteworthy happened to him that the intervening period was uneventful.

Though I seek to keep these editions of the manuscript as true to Blueblood's original text as possible, his tendency to both only describe events that concerned himself, and to assume that the reader, if he intended this document to be read by others, is already knowledgeable about the historical context in which these events occurred invariably means that any peripheral knowledge, however useful, is either glossed over or ignored entirely. Therefore, I will continue to insert these explanatory notes into the following texts, as, despite feedback from various readers, I feel this is the best and most unobtrusive way I can make up for Blueblood's deficiencies as a chronicler.

I have thus prefaced the following chapter with an extract from Paperweight's 'A Concise History of the Changeling Wars’, to provide the reader with the much-needed historical context behind Blueblood's narration. Once again, those looking for a more detailed account of the intervening year between this entry and the previous are encouraged to look through chapters four hundred and eight to nine hundred and eighty-six of 'Blood in the Badlands: Volume One' by my Most Faithful Student Twilight Sparkle, provided that one has the free time to do so.

- H. R. H. Celestia

Extract from Paperweight's 'A Concise History of the Changeling Wars'.

[The following extract provides a condensed description of both the events described in Blueblood's previous entry and its immediate aftermath, though it neglects to mention the suspected treachery of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter. It is thought that Paperweight's editors did not wish to risk a political backlash and excised any mention of Scarlet Letter.]

The Battle of Black Venom Pass set the tone of the first stages of the war - inconclusive, muddled, and only just dragged back from the very brink of disaster by the tenacity and discipline of the humble Guardspony and by the heroism exhibited by Commissar-Prince Blueblood. The Siege of Fort E-5150 that followed just a month after had proceeded in very much the same way. Operation: Equestrian Dawn (often viewed by many historians that it was merely a continuation of Operation: Enduring Harmony, and that the new name was merely a transparent attempt by the disgraced General Crimson Arrow to boost morale by offering a 'fresh start') had likewise been marred by the general staff's continued assumptions of the predictability of Changeling strategy.

The new offensive, the second and last of the first year of the war, aimed to capture the entirety of Black Venom Pass and destroy the Changeling Army in a single battle of annihilation. This was to be achieved by an audacious pincer movement. A battalion sent through territory previously thought to be impassable by a large army to capture a ruined fortress and use it as a base from which to outflank the enemy. Although the Royal Guard had only achieved the first of its two main objectives, in hindsight it is obvious that the second objective of the complete encirclement and destruction of the horde was little more than wishful thinking on Crimson Arrow's part.

It would be unfair to place the blame for this near failure entirely on Crimson Arrow, as contemporary documents, minutes, and diagrams indicate that the operation was as robustly planned as it could have been given the state of the Royal Guard's general staff at the time. Neither he nor his advisors could have predicted Princess Luna's deception, and they certainly could not have foreseen that despite tighter vigilance against Changeling infiltration the security of the operation was still compromised by deep-cover spies. However, the offensive is justly considered to be a success, and was certainly welcomed as such by the Equestrian public.

The plan itself was devised almost entirely by Crimson Arrow himself with Field Marshal Iron Hoof's grudging approval, and unlike the previous operation it exhibited a rare flare of talent from the general. It was bold, and unlike his previous command he showed an ability to react to unforeseen enemy action with competence, if not with alacrity. The shape of his career if he had been allowed to remain commander of Army Group Centre has been the subject of much debate among historians and military analysts, with the hypothesis that the relative success of this operation showed that Crimson Arrow was capable of learning from his mistakes and that with time he may have become a competent general, if not a great one, continuing to be quite popular among revisionists. Such debate is beyond the scope of this book, however.

The ramifications of the battle were profound for Equestria, as the involvement of the Royal Pony Sisters led to the most severe constitutional crisis in our history since the Reconstruction Era. Princess Luna, by hiding herself among the soldiers of the 1st Regiment of the Night Guards, forced Princess Celestia to disobey the Parliamentary edict barring alicorn princesses from personally leading ponies-in-arms in battle. Though her timely arrival certainly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, it was feared by the more progressive members of Parliament that it signalled a return to arbitrary rule by the Princesses and to the destruction that characterised the Nightmare Heresy. The ensuing debate over the validity of the one thousand year-old edict dominated the halls of Parliament for months, and this distraction was one that Equestria could not afford.

With the debate raging and the re-appearance of the Crystal Empire to the north, the Changeling War took a back seat to these new issues. The reinforcements needed to continue the war were diverted north and to the overseas colonies, and the replacement of General Crimson Arrow with the inexperienced General Spring Blossoms and the subsequent adjustment period that must inevitably follow the reassignment of a general officer delayed any further exploitation of the victory at Fort E-5150 until it was far too late.

These factors, coupled with growing antipathy towards the war from Equestrian subjects when the promised victory failed to materialise in time, led to a change in overall strategic direction of the war from the total destruction of the Changeling threat to its mere containment. It was believed by Field Marshall Iron Hoof and by the War Ministry that as the Royal Guard had effectively completed its total envelopment of the Changeling-held Badlands it was now possible to stop all enemy infiltration of Equestrian society. The theory went that the growing Changeling population would then be starved of the love required to sustain them, which would either force their surrender or sufficiently weaken them to the point where their resistance would crumble.

For over a year the Royal Guard did not mount any further large offensives into the Badlands, though patrols and raids were common along the Eastern Front where the frontline was more fluid. What was originally intended to be a quick, decisive war of extermination that would be over in time for Hearth's Warming turned into a long and brutal slog of attrition.

I have many regrets over my long and distinguished career, the main one simply having this career in the first place, but one that stands out as I look back on the past few decades has to be not killing that insufferable oaf Scarlet Letter when I had the chance to. A typical war adventure story would have likely resulted in the Lieutenant being found guilty in a court martial, and, depending upon the author and what message he was trying to convey, the cowardly traitor would either be hanged and his body burned, as per military tradition, or be made to see the errors of his ways and repent. Reality, however, tends not to be quite so neat. Though the War Ministry is a slow and ponderous bureaucracy upon which the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers depend, word of Scarlet Letter's arrest and his scheduled court martial had reached his brother the Secretary of State for War, and, with the sort of speed that everypony wishes that this convoluted organisation truly possessed while processing requests for leave or transfers into the reserves, I received a letter informing us that the defendant was to be taken back to Canterlot for an internal inquiry and that all commissarial investigations into the matter were to cease. All of this happened before I had even the chance to complete the necessary paperwork to convene the court martial.

Needless to say I was furious, by which I mean I kept my anger suppressed while I maintained an outward air of quiet, aristocratic indignation. I am well aware of the fact that my outrage that this cowardly wretch had managed to get away with his actions almost entirely without consequence paints me as a hypocrite, so there's no need for anypony to point that out. Besides, I have been called far worse by better ponies than you, dear reader. And so it was with the signing of a piece of paper and the application of a wax seal that Scarlet Letter was spirited away from the hangpony's noose and on the next train back to Canterlot, and, more importantly, out of the reach of the Commissariat before I had the chance to take matters in my own bloodied hooves. Though my esteemed colleagues including the Lord-Commissar General himself [at the time this was Gale Force] made the necessary complaints to the very organisation that they were supposed to be overseeing, the ensuing legal arguments and political posturing only made it easier for the slimy Lieutenant to wriggle free of the righteous hooves of the Commissariat until he was completely untouchable, and all further attempts were simply blocked by yet more political wrangling that we could ill-afford.

[The War Ministry is responsible for implementing the defence policy set by our government and thusly oversees the Royal Guard's management and administrative affairs under the Secretary of State for War, but as a ministerial department of the state it is not considered part of the Royal Guard and is therefore beyond the oversight of the Royal Commissariat. The idea behind this arrangement was to curtail the power of the Commissariat, as it was felt that a paramilitary organisation with such power over a civilian arm of a democratically elected government (democratic for this era, I might add) was dangerous.]

Still, this was not something that I wished to dwell upon, though I often entertained the notion of storming into the House of Commons and ramming the rather heavy ceremonial mace kept in that chamber for some reason lengthwise up a certain orifice of Scarlet Letter's person that even the most depraved daemons of Tartarus would dare not touch with a ten foot bargepole, and then claim that he had somehow sat on it very, very hard. In the days and weeks following our apparent victory I was not in want of things to distract me from Scarlet Letter's latest and hopefully final insult; as the frontline moved about a mile or so from just north of Black Venom Pass to just south of it, it of course generated no small amount of paperwork for me, or rather Cannon Fodder, to do. The Dodge Junction encampment followed the advancing frontline, and with it the usual groups of camp followers and hangers-on who do their utmost to ensure that a soldier's life outside of duty is as comfortable as possible, while turning a healthy profit as an added bonus, helped to provide further distraction from the misery of war with their usual carte du jour of debauchery and gambling with younger officers who have yet to understand the value of money.

My life, such as it was, thus settled into another one of those all-too-brief periods of relative stability, albeit a rather tedious one, in which for once my life was not in constant danger from medal-hungry officers and incompetent generals, all of whom appeared to think that just because I had coincidentally been in the same general location as somepony else saving the day that I was somehow responsible, and that I perhaps wouldn't mind doing it again and again. My work, when I deigned to actually do some of it, was dominated by dealing with the various disciplinary issues that inevitably arise when large groups of young soldiers are not kept busy with important work. After all, there are only so many times you can send them out on uneventful patrols or march them around the square before it just becomes boring and they start looking elsewhere. They were therefore forced to alleviate their boredom as all colts and fillies do in their late teens and early twenties by descending upon Dodge Junction and drinking super-equine amounts of cheap, tasteless beer.

Small crowds of drunk and disorderly soldiers could be handled by the local militia and the provosts, so it was a very rare occasion that I was required to intervene directly in an incident. For the most part my role simply lay with deciding the fate of the guilty parties, as though the night in the cell, the pounding hangovers, and the acute embarrassment were not enough. In accordance with the established wisdom on the subject the majority were sentenced to additional latrine duty; 'Don't get shit-faced or you'll be face-deep in shit' as Company Sergeant Major Square Basher had so eloquently put it.

For the first time since I had donned the macabre uniform of the commissar my life became comfortable, or as comfortable as one can reasonably expect living so close to enemy territory that I could probably hit a passing drone by carelessly opening a champagne bottle. All of that, however, was bound to change rapidly. I knew it was coming, as the condemned prisoner led to the gallows appreciates the last few moments of life before the terminal, fatal drop; it was only a matter of when and in what manner our glorious leaders would tire of our utter lack of progress and once more hurl the youth of Equestria, myself included, at the unnumbered Changeling hordes and hope that enough of us survived for them to try again later.

The first clue should have been when I was notified that a small detachment of the Wonderbolts would join us. At first I merely assumed that they were only visiting to put on a show for the troops, as if flashy stunts, obnoxious music, and pretty colours would somehow improve the creeping sense of malaise seeping through the bored ranks. However, I recall feeling equal parts bewildered and terrified when Cannon Fodder succinctly reduced the contents of a twenty page memo plus helpful diagrams from the War Ministry into a single sentence: the Wonderbolts will join Army Group Centre, and that I was to act as liaison between the real soldiers and the overpaid stunt flyers.

Things were starting to go downhill. To be fair though, things didn't start very high up on the metaphorical hill in the first place, so it was more like things were descending further through the earth's crust and into the depths of Tartarus.

At the very least I was not alone in my derision, which became readily apparent when the Wonderbolts themselves arrived on another stiflingly hot summer's day. It was mid-afternoon, probably the hottest part of the day when the soldiers were allowed a short break from marching around under Celestia's merciless sun. As I stared with growing impatience at the clear blue sky for any sign of pegasi, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was wearing thick wool dyed black and that I had left my water canteen in my office. There were a few false alarms, where my hopes that my misery would soon end were crushed when the little specks flitting about in the endless expanse above turned out to be just routine patrols.

The fortress had changed somewhat in the past year; in addition to mopping up all of the blood and corpses, the gaping holes in the walls, one of which was torn open on my orders, were repaired. Further improvements were made to the ancient fortifications, and here and there on the weathered stone walls one could discern the newer sandstone, reinforced with mortar and bolstered by more modern building techniques. Our meagre defences were further bolstered by a large ditch that served in lieu of a moat; it was my belief that it was dug purely to give the soldiers something reasonably productive to do, as it would be utterly useless against an enemy universally gifted with wings. Beyond the walls and deep within the tight, narrow confines of the Macintosh Hills lay the encampment within an hour's march over the rugged, broken terrain that I and three hundred other ponies had been forced to slog through. There, amidst the narrow clefts between steep hills, the bulk of Army Group Centre and its accompanying baggage train, families, merchants, and ponies of ill-repute lived as they had done in Dodge Junction mostly under the open sky or in small, squat tents.

I was joined by Cannon Fodder, who for some reason had elected to spend his rare off-duty period sweltering in this abysmal heat with me, rather than catching up with work or engaging in a certain favourite solo activity locked away in his quarters. For a moment I was touched by his willingness to give up his free time to provide me with some company, albeit silent and rather awkward, but then I remembered finding a rather suggestive Playcolt centrefold of Captain Spitfire, commander of the Wonderbolts, pinned on the wall next to his bunk and wondered if my erstwhile aide possessed ideas above his station. Even without the oppressive heat and choking humidity that caused him to sweat so much that a veritable puddle started to form around his hooves I doubted his chances, but judging by the growing dark patches under my armpits and across my chest and back even I would have struggled to impress her.

After a while, Cannon Fodder offered his water canteen to me, which, despite the dryness of my mouth and the distinctly unpleasant sort of headache that comes with slight dehydration, I respectfully declined on account of the thick layer of grime that lined its mouth. It looked like something that would greatly interest the Royal Guard's Biological Warfare Division.

[The controversial Biological Warfare Division was set up in the early stages of the war by Colonel Chlorine, who sought to find a quick way to end the war by spreading disease among the Changeling horde. The division was shut down and their work destroyed following protest from both Parliament, officers of the Royal Guard, and my sister and me, arguing that a quick victory was not worth the ecological damage to the region and, in Princess Luna’s words, was considered to be ‘damned unsporting’. That it existed at all remains a point of embarrassment for the War Ministry.]

The afternoon wore on with all of the urgency of a paraplegic tortoise. The off-duty soldiers who didn't fancy the long trek to the encampment or to Dodge Junction sprawled languidly in what little shade was provided by the stone walls. Most had sensibly shed their armour plates in favour of nudity or the ever popular cotton work shirt. Some napped, others simply stared silently into the middle distance, while one soldier described to a small group his problems with constipation and the potential efficacy of relieving his problem by ‘digging it out with a stick’. I felt slightly nauseated and did my best to ignore the enlightening conversation.

Fortunately, respite came in the form of Captain Blitzkrieg, which might have been one of the first and very few times that I was thankful to see him. I spotted the pegasus officer skulking towards me from the shadowed doorway of the tower to my left, clad in his dress uniform as many of the more prudent officers who wished to avoid dehydration and heat stroke but still wanted to look as presentable as one can in this sort of horrid climate had done. What was curious, however, was just how smart he looked wearing the midnight blue tunic. When he put the effort in, the normally vulgar, arrogant, and often downright hostile stallion cleaned up rather nicely; his tunic was clean and neatly ironed, and the white sash tied about his waist was pristine, seeming to glow as he emerged into the bright sunlight. His movements were completely silent, and he seemed to glide effortlessly from step to step with his head held low like a stalking cat. Every motion evoked that of a murderous predator, and I shuddered to think how many ponies had met their end unknowingly from one of the unseen stiletto blades that he kept concealed within his sleeves and if I would ever count myself among that number any time soon.

"You look thirsty," he said in greeting, apparently having noticed that I was staring at the water canteen attached to his belt with the same expression on my face that Cannon Fodder gets when he reads his specialist gentlecolt's interest literature.

I nodded dumbly. Blitzkrieg unhooked his canteen and tossed it to me with a deft movement of his hooves. I caught the flying bottle in my magical aura, and with the sort of desperation only seen by the truly thirsty I hastily unscrewed the lid and took a sip. It took a monumental effort not to gulp the whole contents down in one go, as the cool, refreshing water soothed my tongue, which was as a dry sheet of cardboard in my mouth. I drank a few small sips, not nearly enough but it still helped somewhat, and returned the canteen to its owner.

"Thank you."

"It's a nice day today," he said, grinning inanely as he re-attached his canteen, but not before surreptitiously wiping the lip with his sleeve.

I shrugged my shoulders, not wanting to indulge in that Trottinghamite pastime of discussing the weather; it is almost always unbearably hot and humid here with little variation on those themes, aside from the sporadic torrential thunderstorms every few months or so [To be more accurate, rain tends only to fall during a very short period in mid-winter. Historically, military campaigns waged in this region of the world seek to avoid fighting during this period; however, as described in Blueblood's previous entries, storms outside of this window are rare but not unheard of]. "You're looking smart," I said. "What's the occasion?"

"I wanted to meet the Wonder-bitches," he said, instantly ruining his rather admirable efforts to look the dashing and sophisticated gentlecolt-officer in his smart dress uniform with but one word. Judging by the smirk on his face he must have thought what he had just said was very funny. "Might as well try and look like a proper officer."

Though he might dress like a 'proper officer' he still had a very long way from behaving like one, thought I. "Your epaulettes are on back to front," I snapped in irritation, pointing at the offending articles on his shoulders.

Blitzkrieg looked at me with an odd, confused, and slightly hurt expression. Was that embarrassment colouring his pale, high cheeks perhaps? "What do you mean 'back to front'?" he said, his raspy, heavily-accented voice becoming a little quieter and meeker as he started fussing at his shoulder flashes.

Feeling a little sorry for having humiliated him like that in front of the troops, though they were paying very little attention to us and probably had absolutely no interest in two officers being exceedingly pedantic about uniforms, I padded on over closer to him and unbuttoned his epaulettes for him. He was a small stallion, as most pegasi tend to be; slight, thin, and without an ounce of extraneous body fat to weigh him down or otherwise impair his manoeuvrability and speed in the air. Yet despite standing about shoulder-height to me [Prince Blueblood was unusually tall for a unicorn, which was one manifestation of his very distant alicorn heritage] and looking as though I could probably snap him in half if I so wanted, there was an intangible aura of menace exuded by his almost feline manner. One did not need to read his extensive background files to know that this stallion had committed some dreadful crimes; one only needed to see the murderous glimmer in those cold, disturbingly draconic eyes to know.

"Your rank insignia," I explained as I removed the rank slips from his freed shoulder straps and arranged them in the correct way. "The three moons are supposed to face away from your neck, not towards your neck. Don't ask why. It's tradition, so we just do it. It's easier for the Solar Guard, I suppose; the sun doesn't have a direction."

"Alright, alright," he muttered. He then stared awkwardly at my chest as I fiddled with his epaulettes, but I supposed he didn’t particularly feel like straining his neck to look up at my face, until he tapped at the Order of the Crescent Moon medal fixed to my tunic. “What’s that for?”

“Bravery,” I said flatly, doing my utmost not to let any sense of irony colour my voice.

“Hm. Princess Luna gave you that?”

I nodded my head, and did my best to suppress the memory of that awful night, standing between the beaten Princess and the vengeful Queen of the Changelings and just how damned close we came to utter disaster. As for Captain Red Coat, I made a mental note to myself to visit him later and see how he was getting on; he had become even more sullen and withdrawn after losing his arm, and I felt a twinge of concern for the poor lad.

“When can I get one?” Blitzkrieg asked.

“When you do something brave, I expect.”

“I think eating brown stew is enough for a medal, but then everypony in the Royal Guard would get one, which would defeat the point, right?”

“Something like that. There, nearly finished!”

Blitzkrieg made a quiet, impressed noise and brushed at his shoulders in an odd effort to diffuse my magical aura trying to tidy up his epaulettes. "What did you call these things?"

"Epaulettes."

"Huh." Blitzkrieg regarded the three winged crescent moons, signifying his rank as a captain of the 1st Night Guards' pegasus company, as though he had never seen or given them much thought before. "'Ep-ah-lets'. That's Prench, right?"

"I think so." I nodded my head and smiled politely; it was like talking to a foal at times, then again, I didn't think the stallion here had the expensive education that I had received courtesy of my late father's generosity and subsequently squandered. Nevertheless, despite feeling a little awkward and somewhat confused at one of the rare times that Captain Blitzkrieg took a more civil tone with me for once, rather than bombarding me with fatuous comments and violent sexual imagery as he tends to, I decided to humour him. Beneath that gruff, aggressive exterior I saw something within him that wanted to rise above his low birth and his violent past. If he could muster enough strength of will and patience to actually do something about it, of course, but he was making small steps in the right direction at least.

Captain Blitzkrieg snorted and looked out into the sky to the north where the Wonderbolts were supposed to arrive from, still clear and blue with nary a cloud or flock of pegasi to mar this vast and empty expanse. "Here, how come so many military words come from Prench when they're so shit at fighting wars?"

Oh, so close, but then he lost it. If he truly wanted to be a proper officer then he needed to engage that part of his brain that governed the pathway between unconscious thought and his mouth that others call 'tact', but I didn't hold out much hope any time soon. Besides, I had more important things to do with my life at the time, like making sure that I would continue to have enough of it to write this damned thing you are reading right now.

I was about to say something when I was rudely interrupted by a sudden, bright flash. To the north across the empty and barren plains a second sun crested over the horizon, and then blossomed into a growing sphere of scintillating light and colour. All of the colours of the rainbow flickered in an expanding halo around this ball of light, which soon began to shrink and fade as the rainbow around it grew. Seconds later, a deep roar like that of cannon being fired broke the silence that had ensued and reverberated from the ground through my legs to my core, and I felt the shockwave as a blast of hot air against my face and plucked at my sweat-stained tunic. From the arc of colours a dozen white streaks tore through the empty sky, like the rays of a stylised sun, before they converged together in a standard 'V'-shaped formation and darted at high speed towards us.

The soldiers, or at least those alert enough to notice, roared and cheered as the squadron of Wonderbolts swept above them, low enough for us to see the skin-tight blue and yellow flight suits and the glints of light from their goggles and insignia. Amidst the frantic whooping of the excited troops, I could hear from seemingly out of nowhere the obnoxious sound of a squealing electric guitar and a stallion singing in an absurdly high-pitched voice that “he is here” and that he will “rock us like a hurricane,” whatever that meant. The pegasi darted like mayflies around the tall spires and battlements of the fortress, leaving a criss-cross pattern of white vapour trails that marred the once perfectly clear sky. One dived low into the empty parade ground, trailing a glittering rainbow behind her, and streaked past me with enough speed to nearly knock my hat off. I caught only a fraction of a glimpse of a mare in a Wonderbolt-blue flight suit with a cocky, self-confident grin on her face as she raised a hoof to her forehead in a quick-fire salute before she managed to pull up just in time to avoid smearing herself across the castle walls like strawberry jam.

The pegasi regrouped rapidly in the air above us, and descended to land with all of the pomp and ceremony that normally accompanies a royal state visit. Oh, how I missed being introduced with dozens of fawning sycophantic admirers and the sounds of trumpets. The juvenile rock music had mercifully ceased, leaving only the unrestrained applause from the watching soldiers, which the Wonderbolts soaked up with relish. As they landed before me they all snapped to attention with the sort of military precision that Sergeant Major Square Basher would have deemed to be just barely acceptable, but I supposed that drill was hardly a key part of these stunt flyers' training.

While I did my best to look as uninterested in their self-indulgent aerobatic display as possible, as demanded by my station as both a commissar and a prince of the realm, the foal within me who used to beg my governess to let me see the Wonderbolts was metaphorically squealing with joy at the display. It certainly looked very impressive, I'll grant them that, but it was their efficacy in battle that I was most concerned about. I looked to Captain Blitzkrieg standing beside me, and saw an expression that was halfway between disbelief and barely-concealed rage - he was most certainly not impressed at all.

Their leader, the mare with the ostentatious rainbow vapour trail, approached me. She was not unattractive by any stretch of the imagination, though I thought that she was rather too thin for my tastes. Her toned, athletic build was accentuated by a skin-tight flight suit that seemed to conform to every line, cleft, and bulge of her taut musculature, which all gave me the disturbing impression of one of those medical drawings of a pony flayed of his skin. Her mane and tail were a shock of wind-blown, rainbow-hued hair that shimmered with sweat in the hot afternoon sun. I might have called her handsome, but not pretty. A mare, I feel, should be made up of curves and not straight lines, but then again neither the Royal Guard or the Wonderbolts were the sorts of organisations to find the sort of mares considered to be conventionally attractive.

She stopped just in front of me, snapped to attention, and in a swift movement reminiscent of a salute lifted her goggles to reveal bright cerise-coloured eyes. [Lifting goggles from one's eyes is the Wonderbolt equivalent of a salute. The origins of the Royal Guard salute comes from this practice.]

"Sir! Equestria's finest are reporting for duty, sir!" she bellowed in my face. I wiped the flecks of spittle off my face with a dusty sleeve.

Casting my eyes over 'Equestria's finest' I wondered if the mare had a different definition of the word from what was found in any common dictionary, and judging by the set of Blitzkrieg's jaw and his narrowed eyes he agreed with me. There were twelve pegasi standing before us in total; I had assumed that we would have received at the very least a full platoon, if not a whole company, but I soon realised that with the sort of bad luck and sociopathic glee that fate seems to take in ruining my life that these were all of the reinforcements that we were going to receive. Perhaps this was merely a detachment sent in advance of the greater force, but somehow I doubted it. They were all young, at the peak of physical fitness, and while superbly trained in distracting the easily-entertained common folk from their daily misery at air shows and other public events, their ability to actually fight was something that I doubted. I am far from an expert on such things, but perhaps wearing armour instead of latex might have been a good start, but then I was still forced to wear dress uniform and a silly hat into battle so I could hardly complain.

"And you are?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash commanding Wonderbolt Training Squadron Nineteen 'Flying Tank' ready to serve in the name of the Princesses, sir!"

Of course, the garishly-coloured mane and tail should have been a dead giveaway, really. I had seen her before at that Grand Galloping Gala where she and a number of enraged wild animals had inadvertently demolished a greater part of the ancient and historic Platinum ballroom, albeit at a distance as I was rather preoccupied with Rarity doing her utmost to satisfy her delusions that I would instantly offer to marry her over the thousands of the far richer mares available in Equestria. I took an instant disliking to Rainbow Dash; I had known her for only a few seconds now and already I found her to be brash, irritating, and probably the sort of pony who believes that it is not only acceptable to wear a baseball cap outside of that particular sporting event, but to also wear it backwards.

"Stand easy," I said. "You're not in basic training anymore, so there's no need to prefix and append every single sentence you say with 'sir', understood?"

"Yes, sir!" Rainbow Dash's ramrod straight posture slackened only slightly with the order, and I thought about having a little fun in belittling her for not following a direct order from a superior officer to the letter, but I decided in the interests of keeping my job over the next few weeks or months working with this mare as easy as possible to refrain and just get on with it. Besides, I assumed that her nerves would not allow her to relax fully in the presence of two superior officers and a pony who looked like he bathed in a septic tank every morning.

"That's a start, at least," I said, shrugging my shoulders. "I am Commissar-Prince Blueblood. These stallions are Private Cannon Fodder, my equerry-" I paused to see if Rainbow Dash had spotted my intentionally obvious error, and was somewhat dismayed when I saw that she did not, thus proving her worrying ignorance of Royal Guard command structure "-or aide if you prefer, and Captain Blitzkrieg, the commander of the pegasus company of our regiment."

[An equerry is an officer assigned as an attendant to senior members of the Royal Household. What Prince Blueblood is referring to here is the fact that it is impossible for Cannon Fodder to be his official equerry, though he performs more or less the same duties as one, as he was not a senior commissioned officer. To be fair on Rainbow Dash, it is unlikely that most ponies not versed in the minutiae of the convoluted command structure of the Royal Guard would have known.]

Captain Blitzkrieg grunted wordlessly in response, and cast a critical eye over the Wonderbolts assembled before us. "Did you just describe yourselves as 'Equestria's finest'?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes, sir," said Rainbow Dash, puffing her chest out with pride. "The Wonderbolts are the best flyers in all of Equestria! Everypony knows that!"

"Sorry, I beg your pardon," I said, cutting in before Blitzkrieg could say something inane and probably offensive again. "You are an Acting Squadron Leader? And this-" I swept my hoof at the ponies lined up in front of me "-is a training squadron?"

"Yes, sir."

I tilted my head to one side and looked at her curiously, while a sinking, unpleasant feeling of horror slowly being realised gestated in my guts. Sucking in a deep breath, as if I wanted to put off vocalising what I had just found out, I said, at length, "You have not completed your training."

"No, sir." Rainbow Dash shook her head and then tapped at the two chevrons on her epaulettes, which I was sure signified something but I must have just glossed over that bit of pointless information in the briefing notes, as usual. "The ancient pegasi warriors that formed the first Wonderbolts Corps believed that the best training for battle was battle itself! So, when Captain Spitfire said that it was about time for us to do our bit for the war we were selected to carry on this tradition. When we return with your approval, we'll all be fast-tracked to graduation as full Wonderbolts!"

It seemed more likely that Spitfire had got tired of Rainbow Dash's company and tried to send her as far away from the Wonderbolt Academy as possible where she could do less harm. True or not, it was still a deft political move from the wily Captain; to send a single training squadron meant that if something was to go very wrong,then the whole incident could be quietly swept under the rug with a minimal amount of fuss, but if it went well then she and the rest of her small gang of obnoxiously gung-ho stunt flyers can cover themselves in all of the glory that rightly belonged to the distinctly unfashionable dregs of the Royal Guard that were the common soldiery. As I considered this point I found myself feeling quietly impressed by Spitfire's subtle politicking, and wondered if I could pull that off myself by transferring Rainbow Dash and other undesirables off to a brand new front in Tartarus.

Then again, I thought it couldn't possibly be that bad. There was, of course, scope within Spitfire's alleged plan for me to keep a close eye on these rank amateurs pretending to be soldiers, get this insanity over and done with, and receive a nice pat on the back from Canterlot for a job well done integrating the Wonderbolts into the Royal Guard. Hopefully, it would be in the form of a massive pay raise, not that money was ever an issue for me but it's nice to look forward to one.

"I see." Blitzkrieg narrowed his cold, beady eyes at the mare, and glanced from her to the pegasi still at attention and then back to her once more. I didn't know where he was going with this, but I was rather curious to see what sort of point that he was trying to work towards so I let him. "You ever been in a fight?"

The subtle change in expression on Rainbow's face -the slight furrow of her brow and the almost imperceptible twitch of one side of her mouth- implied that she thought this was a question with a painfully obvious answer, but that her military training, such as it was, did not allow her to voice it in quite the same manner that she wanted to. To spare her the eternal quandary that every enlisted pony must endure when a commissioned officer says something in opposition to all sense, logic, or one's own personal sense of right and wrong, in spite of my initial animosity to her arrogant demeanour and insufferably peppy attitude, and because I was in no mood to let Blitzkrieg here make my life any more difficult than it already was, I said:

"Come now, let's give her some credit. She's a Bearer of an Element of Harmony, after all, so I think she's seen a fair few scraps before."

That seemed to do the trick, thought I, as Rainbow Dash nodded her head eagerly as if the tendons around her neck had snapped and her skull was merely pivoting upon her spine by momentum alone. "Yeah," she said. "I was there when Canterlot was attacked by Changelings helping Twilight Sparkle recover the Elements."

"Oh, I don't doubt that," said Blitzkrieg, shaking his head quietly. "All I'm saying is that I just think it's stupid sending amateurs into battle against the Changelings instead of proper soldiers. I mean, what the hell were you thinking with that little stunt just now? You've just announced your arrival to the entire bloody Changeling horde, and farting streams of rainbow clouds out of your arseholes is a sure way to get yourselves spotted and killed."

Rainbow Dash grimaced in annoyance. Apparently forgetting her very low position on the Royal Guard hierarchy, she spread her wings aggressively in that strange manner that pegasi believe makes them look bigger and more imposing but always reminds me of a strutting peacock. "Who're you calling an amateur, chump?"

"Careful," said Blitzkrieg, grinning widely and shaking his head in a condescending manner. "You're addressing a superior officer here."

I cleared my throat in that very noisy and very fake-sounding manner that one uses to get the attention of other ponies discreetly, or not discreetly as the case may be. I pulled what I thought was a moderately stern, commissarial expression that was somewhere between 'my toast has gone cold' and 'I have lost all but one of my slippers' in terms of severity so as not to scare them too much. Rainbow Dash straightened her posture to attention and stared fixedly at a single brick in the wall just behind my right shoulder, as all soldiers have been trained to do when being reprimanded. Captain Blitzkrieg remained thoroughly unperturbed; it is rather difficult to intimidate a pony who has done things he's done without waving a paternity test result slip in his face.

"Be that as it may," I said, "I will remind you, Captain, that we were all 'amateurs' until Black Venom Pass."

"Some of us were, mate." Blitzkrieg snorted and shook his head. "Alright, maybe I didn't word it properly. We're at war, and I don't want her risking the lives of my stallions with silly stunts like that."

"Which is why," I said, just as Rainbow Dash started to open her mouth but before any words could come out and make the situation worse, "it might be best for you, Captain, to provide Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash and her squadron with some additional training."

The rare moment of sudden realisation that forms on a pony's face when they discover exactly how deep the hole they have just dug for themselves is an exquisite one, and in the case of Captain Blitzkrieg I savoured the sudden, bug-eyed and slack-jawed expression that formed on his face. He recovered quite quickly, however, returning his brow back into that habitual frown of his which always made him look as though somepony else around him had just passed wind but he couldn't quote work out who was responsible.

"You what, mate?" he said, at length.

I tried to suppress the rising smirk that tugged on the ends of my lips, and failed. "I think these 'amateurs' would benefit greatly from your experience, Captain," I said. "Who better to teach them how to fight than you?"

Blitzkrieg narrowed his gaze at me, and his face twisted into a snarl, but aside from a characteristic snort of derision and an impatient stamp of his hoof that made clear his displeasure at my decision, he kept his thoughts to himself. I wondered if I had overstepped the mark, but decided that to rescind would be to undermine the fragile authority that I maintained over him and his ilk in the long term, which, thought I, outweighed whatever short term misery I might have to endure.

"It ain't necessarily fighting that's the issue," he muttered half to himself, "but the killing."

Then, I looked to Cannon Fodder, who, apparently disappointed that he was not going to meet his idol after all, stared blankly at the horizon, seemingly having lost himself in thought. "Cannon Fodder, please help the Acting Squadron Leader find a place for her and her stallions."

With a quiet grunt of acknowledgement, my aide approached Rainbow Dash, apparently not at all offended when the mare wrinkled her nose and waved her hoof dramatically in front of her muzzle as if that would somehow waft away the lingering odour of unwashed socks and stale sweat. "This way, ma'am," he said, offering a yellow-toothed smile in what I later deduced to be an attempt at getting friendly with a mare, and led the pegasi back into the castle keep behind me.

"And as for you," I said, turning on Blitzkrieg once the Wonderbolts were out of earshot. "I want a word with you in my office. Now."

Author's Note

Welp, about time.

Honour and Blood (Part 2)

"Forgive my bluntness," I said, shutting the door behind Captain Blitzkrieg as he skulked into my office in the manner of a puma investigating the cave in which its helpless prey resides. "But what in Tartarus do you think you're playing at?"

Blitzkrieg stopped in the centre of the room, standing upon a small woven rug that I had bought from Dodge Junction in a vain effort to make my room feel less like the medieval dungeon in the castle's basement, and blinked in mock innocence at me as if he had no idea what I was complaining about. Chances are, however, that with this stallion's severe lack of social skills, which were rivalled only by those of Cannon Fodder (who was only beaten by the fact that Blitzkrieg had more friends than you can count on a single hoof) it was likely that he was truly ignorant of just how difficult he had just made the next few months or so for me. That is, unless I took steps to fix it.

"What do you mean?" he said.

The surprisingly large chamber that served as my office had been my home for nearly a year now, or at least I had done my best to make it feel as close to home as possible without filling it full of priceless baroque furniture, antique torture equipment, and the occasional tastefully erotic sculpture masquerading as art. While it lacked the sheer decadent opulence that the relatively few occupied rooms of the Sanguine Palace exuded, it certainly made up for that shortfall by matching the oppressive atmosphere that my distant ancestor and architect of my not-so-humble home Prince Coldblood had so expertly crafted into every gothic arch, fresco, and disturbingly graphic bas-relief with the sort of obsession with grotesque morbidity that exemplified his bloody reign. Nevertheless, the general sense of rotting decay that simply could not be removed no matter how hard the soldier-servants scrubbed and cleaned did help to alleviate just some of the feeling of homesickness that refused to leave me; the inescapable sensation that I had lost something vital to my life forever nagged at the back of my mind.

It certainly didn't help that the partially melted corridor I had led the rather morose-looking Captain Blitzkrieg through to get to my office served as a permanent reminder of the horrors that I had endured through that one night, which, though a year prior then and half a lifetime ago as I write it, featured heavily in my all-too-frequent nightmares. In truth, I don't think I ever really got used to living -'enduring' is a more appropriate word for what one does in the Royal Guard- there, or indeed in any other of the thoroughly miserable places I was stationed over my long career.

As I reached my desk, or rather the planks of wood crudely nailed together and held up by four stacks of bricks combined with a small, half-collapsed chest of drawers that could charitably be called a desk, I stepped behind it and levelled a suitably stern gaze at Blitzkrieg. "With the Wonderbolts just now," I said, keeping my voice measured and level, but still firm. "You're an officer of the Royal Guard, for Faust's sake. You represent your regiment and the Princesses; you can't go around talking to ponies like that."

"Oh, that," he said, shaking his head dismissively. "Can you believe it? Luna's flanks, Commissar, they're sending civilian stunt flyers- no, no, I stand corrected, trainee civilian stunt flyers here, and now you expect me to turn them into proper soldiers? It's bollocks, mate. It's utter, utter bullshit."

He stamped a hoof and snorted in anger, but then apparently remembered exactly with whom he was speaking and calmed himself down before he said something that I might make him regret later. To be completely truthful, for once, I was entirely on his side, but as I have made perfectly clear several times in these writings honesty is not a luxury that one can always afford, especially for a political officer. Sophistry, as much as everypony likes to condemn it, can be an extremely useful tool in the hooves of a capable pony; a little white lie properly employed will diffuse a tense situation with far greater ease than the truth ever could. My job, ultimately, was to make sure the regiment and, by extension the war effort as a whole, continued to run smoothly, which in this case required using a great deal of tact to get both Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash working together without descending into foalish insults or worse. That doing so would also increase my chances of survival was merely an added bonus.

"I know it is," I said. Blitzkrieg opened his mouth to say something, but I instantly raised a hoof dramatically to stop the impetuous pegasus from interrupting me. "But an officer of the Royal Guard is expected to behave with a sense of decorum and courtesy towards others."

I saw by the twisted expression on his face that it was best that I did not continue with this line of conversation, and thus rapidly switched the topic with all of the subtlety of, well, Rainbow Dash's entrance not more than half an hour ago. "The Wonderbolts are an organisation with a proud military history; you can't expect them to simply sit this fight out."

"Yeah, I know that," he said with an undercurrent of sarcasm barely detectable in his voice, and fortunately he appeared to have ignored my earlier comment. "But that was two thousand years ago. They ain't soldiers any more. Even those prissy, upper class toff officers who look down their perfumed noses at me, at us, are tougher than they'll ever be; the ones that survived so far, I mean. I won't let their inexperience and her cockiness cost the lives of any soldier in my company, in my regiment, or in the whole bloody Royal Guard for that matter."

[On a historical note, what Blueblood and Blitzkrieg have said is true - the Wonderbolts were initially founded as an elite military formation of the Royal Guard, akin to the special forces of the modern militaries, and can trace its heritage back to the personal honour guard of the first Captain of the Royal Guard, Commander Hurricane. In the era of peace that followed the Nightmare Heresy and the Reconstruction Era, the Wonderbolts wished to avoid being disbanded and were thus transformed into the stunt flyer group that most ponies are familiar with today. Elements of their martial past are evident in their customs and esprit de corps. Blueblood's description of their involvement in the Changeling Wars should be sufficient for most readers, but as ever I encourage all to conduct their own research.]

I made a vague, shrugging motion with my shoulders and said, "Very well, I understand if you don't think you're up to the task of training them. I'll ask one of the Solar Guard pegasus officers to train them instead."

"Now look here," he said suddenly, his voice switching from his usual loud, aggressive tone to a much quieter, subdued, but somehow far more menacing snarl. There is a property unique to the speech of ponies of Trottingham, the common, inner-city East Trottingham tongue especially, that in contrary to every other accent and dialect of our fair language the quieter the voice the more threatening it becomes. "Ain't no one's a better fighter than me; I will fight harder, faster, and more brutal than anypony out there. So don't think I ain't up to the task, mate, 'cause I am. I'll make them into bucking killers. You just watch me."

"So what's the issue, then?" I said, doing my damnedest to show him that I was not the least bit intimidated, and probably failing. Nevertheless, this was what I wanted; Captain Blitzkrieg was so incapable of controlling his emotional reaction to things that he could be almost pathetically easy to manipulate at times, such that I barely needed to put any effort into thinking carefully about how to nudge him into the correct frame of mind to accept whatever it was that I wanted him to do.

"The issue ain't with me, if that's what you're insinuating. It's with that lot." Blitzkrieg pointed a hoof at the large empty hole in the wall behind me that served as a very primitive window. "I can train them fine, but whether they want to be trained properly is something else entirely. A soldier's got to want to be a soldier for any of the training to sink in, even if that's got to be forced out of them. That blue filly, Rainbow Dash; she's going to be trouble, mate, just you watch. A pegasus fights as part of a squadron, which fights as part of a larger army, in harmony with the other squadrons in the air and with the stallions on the ground. She's not interested in that, I can tell. She's only here because she wants to show off, and I tell you, my stallions won't put up with that in a life-or-death situation."

Again, I agreed with him almost entirely, but once again it seemed that honesty was most certainly not the best policy; that is, not without twisting it a little to become more palatable. As much as I wanted to send Rainbow Dash back to Captain Spitfire with an emphatic 'NO' tattooed onto the mare's pretty forehead or something to that effect, I knew that a deft touch was required to resolve this issue and make everypony, or at least most ponies, if not happy then reasonably content at best. I beckoned Captain Blitzkrieg closer with a hoof, despite the primal part of my hindbrain warning me that doing so was a bad idea, and he crept around the desk to my side.

"This doesn't leave this room," I said, taking on a conspiratorial tone to my voice, "as what I'm about to tell you is top secret." Actually it wasn't, and I didn't particularly care even if he repeated everything that I was about to say verbatim to Rainbow Dash herself; this little piece of acting, however, encouraged Blitzkrieg to think that I trusted him enough to confide supposedly confidential and sensitive information, and thus make him that much more agreeable to what I was proposing if my none-too-subtle digging at his terribly fragile ego was not enough.

My words had the desired effect as Blitzkrieg leaned in closer, close enough for me to smell the distinct aroma that accompanies all soldiers, officers included to some extent, on an extended campaign that consisted of cheap chewing tobacco, cheaper beer, and rank body odour. Next to Cannon Fodder, however, his was the scent of twenty year old single malt Scoltch whisky and fine Hayvana cigar smoke wafting through the rarefied air of the Imperial Club's main common room. [The Imperial Club is one of the oldest, most prestigious, most exclusive, and most ill-behaved gentlecolts’ clubs in Canterlot, of which Prince Blueblood was a member. Their membership criteria are so strict that Blueblood himself was briefly barred from the club when it was felt by the governing committee that his personal fame had become far too 'celebrity' in nature, owing to his mass appeal with the common ponies. His reinstatement as a member came only after he had personally saved the life of the chairman, but judging by entries in this manuscript he would continue to hold a certain degree of resentment for a long time.]

"It's all political," I said. "You're right, the Wonderbolts aren't soldiers anymore, but you can't fault them for wanting a return to their glory days when the first major conflict for nearly two thousand years breaks out. You'll teach them how to fight, we'll send them out on a few little sorties, and then they can go back to Canterlot feeling like heroes and Faust willing we'll never have to see their like again. We don't want to put them through anything too dangerous, just a few patrols into enemy territory; something exciting enough for them to feel like they've contributed to the war effort."

Blitzkrieg tapped his chin thoughtfully, but then shook his head. "No, that'll only encourage them to send more trainees here; more kids for me to look after like I'm some damned foal minder."

Damn. He was more intelligent than he looked, but I suppose one doesn't become the head of a large crime syndicate feared across all of East Trottingham with an IQ hovering around room temperature. I gave myself a few extra seconds of thinking time to sort out my response by opening up a drawer and taking from the jumbled assortment of papers used to conceal its true contents: a bottle of a fairly inoffensive brandy that I had delivered here hidden amongst a shipment of paperclips and saved for this precise purpose.

"That depends on how well you train them," I said, uncorking the bottle with a satisfyingly loud and dramatic 'pop' and then decanting the caramel-coloured liquid into two small tumblers that I had left lying around on my desk. I am certain that if my father could see me serving such a drink, even if it was a rather more inferior distiller than the sort I usually choose for my libation, in these glasses he would have had me beaten again, but it would suffice for now.

There was a brief look of scepticism that flashed across Blitzkrieg's face before he was distracted by the promise of free alcohol, though I thought even this common and relatively inexpensive bottle was wasted on a palate as thoroughly unrefined as his. When I finished decanting, I grasped both tumblers with my aura and levitated one to him, which he accepted with relish.

"Wait." He held his glass with a grubby hoof just inches from his stubble-mottled chin. "Are you saying that if I do a crap job I'll scare her away? Because I'm not sure how I feel about that. I like to take pride in my work."

"Oh, I would never suggest something like that," I said with mock offence. "Not everypony is cut out to be a soldier, Blitzkrieg, and sometimes we need to be brutal in sorting out those who are unsuitable in mind or body. They may be forced to quit."

A smile tugged on the ends of Blitzkrieg's disturbingly thin, almost fleshless lips, and he raised his glass as if in salute to me. "I see what you're saying now."

I masked my grin by holding the glass under my nose, as though to sniff its contents. Where reason fails, bribery often succeeds, thought I, even if it's something as simple a free drink that will have been forgotten about within a few hours. Doing this was too easy, sometimes embarrassingly so which rather took the sport out of it, although the nagging sensation that scratched at the back of my mind from deep within the depths of my subconscious warned me that it was all merely a prelude for everything to come crashing down upon me once more. That, however, was a problem for the future, and as long as I was careful I could always take steps to ensure my survival.

"I'm not going to force you to do this," I said, taking a sip and instantly regretting it as the drink burned my throat. "But frankly, you're the best damn captain of a pegasus company that I have ever worked with, and if you're teaching them to fight then we can all be assured that they're being taught properly. Your fighting techniques and small-unit pegasus tactics will be passed back to Canterlot and used to train more Wonderbolts, so they won't have to keep relying on wasting the time of busy Royal Guard officers like you. You'll only need to do this once, and, who knows, maybe there's a commendation in it for you too. If they meet our approval by the end of it, that is."

Blitzkrieg hummed thoughtfully, and took a sip. If the strong liquor had likewise burned the back of his throat he gave no sign, but as his usual taste in alcohol tended to extend to the same sort of industrial-strength drain cleaner that his fellows amongst the common soldiery have been illicitly brewing where they seem to think I can't find them, I shouldn't have been so surprised.

"Alright then," he said with great reluctance. "But I won't treat them any different from my soldiers, so don't think I'll go soft on them just because they're civvies."

"I would never think that you would, Blitzkrieg." I tapped my glass to his with a chiming sound that seemed to cut through the stale, muggy air, and then I took another sip. A suitably sly grin formed on my face in a further effort to enhance in his mind that I trusted him enough to bring him into this secret plan, the one that I had formulated only just now to ensure that my head continues to remain firmly attached to my neck for the foreseeable future. "You can start tomorrow morning, then. Be brutal and don't hold anything back. Turn them into soldiers or send them home in disgrace."

The good Captain returned my grin and nodded his head. "Alright then," he said. "I'll do it, but I don't want them to come crying to me if they can't handle it."

There was a heretic's chance in Elysium of that happening, thought I; it didn't take an expert in the dubious field of equine psychology to see that this Rainbow Dash filly had an ego that would make Princess Luna's over-inflated sense of self-worth seem inadequate by comparison, and my aunt's an alicorn princess too. If anything, any abuse that she would suffer in the course of her 'training', either physical or verbal, from Captain Blitzkrieg would only serve to encourage her, provoking that immature part of a pony's brain that seems over-active in most ponies with an unhealthy obsession in competitive sports that drives her to do better than her 'instructor's' very low expectations. I expected that this would cause me no small amount of misery in the near future, but if it meant getting rid of them forever then it was worth it.

With that apparently settled, and with the tight ball of growing anxiety twisting away in my gut, Blitzkrieg then downed the rest of his drink with admirable enthusiasm. He muttered something by way of excusing himself, which I reciprocated with an equally non-committal reply. Just before he turned to leave he touched a hoof to the peak of his cap in what I took to be an awkward attempt at being polite, which was entirely incongruous with his normal demeanour, and then placed the now-empty tumbler onto a wad of reports that I should have read last week with a muffled 'thud'.

As the Captain of the Pegasus Company crossed the short distance to the door, I sat myself down on the rough, itchy cushion behind my alleged 'desk' and set about flicking through the small piles of papers, forms, reports, and books to give one the impression that I had something extremely important to be getting on with and that I shouldn't be disturbed further. Eventually, I settled on pretending to be very interested in an extremely dry report from Captain Pencil Pusher, our little pet pedant who by some bizarre turn of events had been appointed our quartermaster for reasons known only to Colonel Sunshine Smiles and to Faust herself (and indeed how he rose to become Regimental Sergeant Major in the first place to qualify for that appointment), [Quartermasters in the Royal Guard are traditionally commissioned from the ranks, usually former Regimental Sergeant Majors. According to his military service records, Pencil Pusher only reached the rank of Sergeant before receiving his commission. Blueblood does not appear to realise that it was Pencil Pusher's knack for 'pedantry', as he put it, and a devotion to enforcing Princesses' Regulations bordering on single-mindedness that resulted in his appointment in the first place] complaining about some minor infraction of some irritatingly obscure regulation that had been committed by somepony, or something - I wasn't really reading it, you see.

"Actually," said Captain Blitzkrieg suddenly. I looked up and was disappointed to see that he was still in the room, standing by the door with a hoof on the knob and a somewhat worried expression on his face as if he had done something wrong and was trying to gather up the necessary courage to confess it. In hindsight, I would have sympathised. "I wanted to ask you something."

I put the report back down to be lost amongst the other assorted piles of paper and office paraphernalia, trying to mask my irritation at his continued ineptitude with social cues in somehow missing the universally-accepted indication that all business has been concluded by shuffling sheets of paper around. "What is it?" I asked, hoping that I sounded just busy enough for him to consider leaving but hopefully not annoyed enough that I might offend him. Not that I was overly concerned about his feelings, just what he might do to me if I had accidently caused him some upset.

Blitzkrieg stared at me for a few uncomfortable seconds, as though he was either sizing me up for a coffin, shortened to account for the fact that after he had finished with me I was unlikely to still have my head, or, most likely, simply trying to work out using his rather limited mental capacities what to say to me. "You promise you won't tell anypony?"

"That depends if whatever it is poses a threat or not," I said, idly tapping one of the many quills that I had somehow acquired over the course of my career (probably having stolen them all by accident) against my desk in another measured attempt to convince Blitzkrieg that I was, in fact, busy. It didn't work.

"Nah, it's more of a, uh-" Blitzkrieg tapped his hoof against the barren stone, "personal thing."

I thought for a single, horrible second that he might have been trying to 'come onto me', as the common expression goes, and thus I inched back slightly in my seat to prepare to leap out of the window and onto the conveniently-placed pile of soft hay that I had ordered be positioned there just in case I needed to make a swift escape. In my defence, I was still exhausted and my mind was not quite in the right frame of mind, which was not entirely helped by the idea that Blitzkrieg would at all want to talk to me about feelings of all things. For the most part, I was still under the impression that if he had any at all that he decided long ago that he was far better off without such things.

In hindsight, I should not have really been so surprised; the common soldiery and a few of the younger, junior officers had taken to seeing me as a sort of counsellor, which I was always perplexed by, but nevertheless I always went along with it, safe in the knowledge that all that would be required of me was to sit there and listen and occasionally spout off a suitably profound-sounding platitude until the 'patient' felt happy enough to leave me alone again. It just made me wonder who in Celestia's name I was meant to turn to for help.

[Following the Twilight Sparkle Reforms of the Royal Guard and the expansion of the Commissariat, potential commissars were subjected to a barrage of psychiatric tests to ensure recruits have the mental aptitude and grit needed. As Blueblood has alluded to throughout his writings, the great responsibilities resting on a commissar’s shoulders of maintaining the spiritual and emotional well-being of a regiment in addition to stresses suffered by all senior officers of the Royal Guard often has a severe impact on a commissar’s psyche. However, Blueblood would later refuse to take advantage of the counselling support granted by the Reforms in a misguided attempt to maintain his ‘cover’, as he put it.]

"I think I have some time free." I waved a hoof invitingly at the cushion in front of my desk, and wondered inwardly if this was simply a lead-up to a humiliating prank of some sort. That I could always have him flogged to death later helped to cheer me up a little.

There was a brief moment where it looked like Blitzkrieg was going to give up on the idea and leave right then and there, but to my dismay he tentatively approached the desk once more and sat inelegantly on the cushion. The rough, 'rustic' pillow seemed to almost swallow up the slight pegasus, having been made for the large frames of the earth ponies who live in Dodge Junction.

"You won't tell anypony?" he asked again.

"You can trust me." Those four little words might constitute the most blatant lie that I have ever spoken in my life, aside from 'it wasn't my fault' and 'that's definitely not my foal'. Of course, the fact that I am writing about this conversation right now for the perusal of whomever is curious or bored enough to read the utter drivel that was my life damn well proves that.

"Alright." Blitzkrieg leaned forwards and rested his forehooves on my desk, and started fiddling annoyingly with the military-grade stapler I had left there amidst the other assorted detritus that I had accumulated over the years as part of an obscure and arcane system of organisation known only to myself and Cannon Fodder. "I want to be a proper officer."

A faint, warm gust of wind blustered through the empty window behind me, plucked at my sweat-soaked tunic, and stirred those sheets of paper on the desk that had not been weighed down. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw something blue dart past my window, and then another and another, each leaving a tell-tale streak of clouds in their wake, save for one whose trail was rainbow-hued. The juvenile rock music was back, seemingly emanating from out of nowhere, but at least it was quieter this time. With an irritated growl in my throat I seized the curtain with my magic and tugged it to cover the window; the room became darker and gloomier, with thin bars of light that shone through the moth-eaten rag, illuminating the motes of dust that danced in the air, and lit up Blitzkrieg's face in spots as if he had been burnt.

"Bloody show-offs," muttered Blitzkrieg. "I hope one of them smacks right into the walls."

"I'll have a word with them later," I said. The sounds of faint cheering could be heard from beyond the window, and I realised that perhaps our assessment of our new friends was not immediately shared by the rest of the common soldiery. Maybe this would not be quite so bad as we feared.

"Anyway," I continued. "What makes you think you're not a 'proper officer' already?"

Captain Blitzkrieg looked at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head. "Oh come on, mate, you know exactly what I mean. You know what all the other namby-pamby officers in the Solar Guard say about me: I'm a criminal, a violent thug who knows only how to fight and how to kill. And they ain't wrong on those accounts; violence is the only thing I've ever been good at, you know? But an officer ain't supposed to be like that. Bloody Tartarus, even that kid Red Coat's more of a proper officer than I am, and he's still single-hoofedly putting everypony's foals in the entire facial cleansing industry in Equestria through university."

I arched an eyebrow and leaned forwards, folding my hooves onto the desk. This sudden outpouring came as a tremendous shock, I must admit, for I had always acted under the impression that the stallion sitting before me, shuddering like a bowl of jelly and staring at me with wide, feline eyes, had all of the emotional depth of a stagnant puddle after April showers. By a lack of anything more profound or reassuring to say, I did my best to look sympathetic and said:

"So what is a 'proper officer', then?"

A hoof caked in dust jabbed at my chest roughly, and it was all I could do to avoid flinching away from Blitzkrieg's unwashed appendage. "Like you," he said. "Dead posh, basically."

"Oh please," I said, delicately pushing his hoof away from my tunic, not that he could have made the state of the battered, frayed, dust-covered, mud-soaked thing any worse at all. "I don't think I'm really that 'posh'."

A grin formed on Blitzkrieg's face. "'Oh please'," he said, doing a rather bad imitation of the refined Canterlot accent that had been so thoroughly impressed on me practically since birth. "You're so posh you probably cum perfectly-chilled champagne."

I don't know what sort of face I pulled at that frankly bizarre statement, but I imagine it was somewhere between complete and utter uncomprehending shock and 'just about to vomit'. Despite wanting nothing more than to reach over the desk, seize Captain Blitzkrieg by the ears, and then slam his face with the cheeky, insufferable grin plastered over it as though he imagined that grotesquely offensive comment to be the very pinnacle of refined wit repeatedly into the table until the horrid mental image went away, I inwardly told myself that if he truly wished to learn the necessary manners to be considered a gentlecolt then it was probably best he got all of this out of his system now rather than later. The scandal he would cause should he say something like that at the Grand Galloping Gala would be the absolute worst thing to happen there since, well, the last one I had attended.

"If I could do that," I said, after first sucking a breath of air through set teeth to help me compose myself, "then I wouldn't be here now, would I? Besides, I've been relieving myself in the same hole in the ground as a hundred other stallions for a year now, so I don't think I have the right to be called 'posh' anymore."

A quiet but still somehow threatening chuckle rose from Blitzkrieg's throat, and that grin of his only grew wider. "Probably better than using one of those pot things under your bed."

"This isn't the Middle Ages. I have indoor plumbing at home."

"But are you going to teach me or not?" he asked, finally putting the stapler back down on the desk. I inwardly thanked Faust for the conversation being steered, however clumsily, onto safer, saner ground.

I rubbed my hooves together awkwardly as I considered the pony sitting opposite from me carefully. It wouldn't have hurt to try, though it would been a waste of time for everyone involved, thought I. Although one can certainly teach any pony willing to do so the manners and etiquettes as espoused by a veritable legion of writers for whom writing such manuals forms the entire basis for their living (and, in personal experience, often fail to live up to the examples as described in their trite literature), as Auntie 'Tia often explained to me during our treasured times together such things are merely the symptoms of a gentlecolt's natural courtesy towards others. Having proved her point by being an insufferable, uncouth blackguard to one of her most valued servants, Rarity, despite my prior 'training', I feared that Blitzkrieg, being a pony of the lower classes, simply did not have that inner courtesy required to be a gentlecolt. However, I was more concerned about his stiletto blades in the dark than the embarrassment of failure, so I reluctantly nodded.

"Might I ask why?" I said. "I didn't think you'd be interested in that sort of thing."

Blitzkrieg clenched his teeth and stared at me intensely, such that I found myself unwittingly squirming in my seat under the gaze of those amber slits of eyes. A moment, silent save for the muffled, distant sounds of wing-beats and cheers from beyond the window behind me, passed, before he mercifully broke the hush that had descended, as it often tends to do, in this barren chamber and sighed. He slumped back in his seat and looked away from me, massaging the bridge of his nose with a hoof.

"You really won't tell nopony?" he said.

To be fair, at the time I had very little indication that decades later I would sit here safe in my study feverishly scribbling his words down at this ungodly hour in the morning; driven by shame, guilt, some desire to save my soul by making the truth known, or simply being unable to sleep. I nodded my head and thus assured him that everything that he said would be kept confidential, which I shall now repeat for you:

"You don't know what it's like, Blueblood. You're a prince, so I bet you never had to worry about whether or not there's going to be dinner on the table, or been forced to make matchsticks for seven hours a day, or beaten by the guv'nor 'cause I got one of my letters wrong. I grew up in a spike. You know what that is?"

"I'm familiar with the concept of workhouses," I said. Not overly familiar, mind you, but I had a general idea of how those abominable places operated.

['Spike' is a colloquial term for a workhouse, which at the turn of the century were places where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment. Life in such places was deliberately intended to be as harsh as possible, both as a means to deter the able-bodied poor and a misguided attempt by the newly ascending middle classes to punish the unemployed for the perceived sin of idleness. It is curious to note that the aristocratic elite of Equestria, including Prince Blueblood, remained firmly opposed to the workhouse system not necessarily for compassionate reasons, but because it severed the paternalistic ties between a noblepony and her vassals.]

"It was in the East End of Trottingham," he continued, "in the slums; Dad got in some debt with the wrong sorts of ponies, so he had no choice but to send us all there. A shitty place it was; I remember seeing rats the size of bloody cats running around and we'd have to fight them for our food. I remember the guv'nors telling us that we were all just a useless drain on society and that we'll never, ever amount to anything, and after a while the other ponies there just sort of accepted it. Not me, though. I fought back. I wanted to prove to all of Equestria that I'm not worthless, and I've been fighting all my life to do just that, but it's got me nowhere! In the cold bunkhouse I had this dream that after I left that wretched place I'd come back, and I'd show them all, show everypony, that they were all wrong. I'd be wearing fancy clothes, I'd have money and wealth and respect and everything else they said I didn't deserve. Except I still don't, because I'm still that bloody-minded thug everypony hates."

After he spoke, I became suddenly aware of the way that my grip around the plank of wood jutting at my chest tightened. Not once did Captain Blitzkrieg look away from me when he spoke, and I must admit that it took quite an effort to return that stare. It was only after silence had descended for more than a few seconds that I realised he had finished his rant and was expecting me to say something.

"Is that where Princess Luna came in?" I asked.

His eyes lit up at the mention of his saviour like that of a foal on Hearth's Warming. Blitzkrieg's warped image of the Princess was not in any way undimmed by her less-than-honourable behaviour prior which predictably resulted in what could only be described as a failure of spectacular proportions, such that I consider it to be a bloody miracle that she walked away with her reputation as some sort of military heart of our great nation intact. Dear Faust, I realise now I probably have enough in these documents to bring down the entire Equestrian diarchy if I wasn't so invested in ensuring that the status quo remained. Ponies, it seems, are very willing to forgive certain sins committed by certain other ponies, especially if they happen to have both wings and a horn.

"When I escaped the workhouse, I fell in with the East Trottingham gangs," said Blitzkrieg, interrupting my idle musings. "I thought I could get the respect I wanted, and for a while I thought I did, until I ended up in jail and the Princess saw me, and... well, you know the story from there. She gave me a second chance when everypony else had given up on me, even my own gang, and I just don't want to let her down now."

I gave an understanding nod of my head, one that I had practiced to appear suitably reassuring to others. "I'll have Cannon Fodder find a place in our schedules," I said. "If anything pops up, I'll let you know."

Blitzkrieg seemed somewhat mollified by that, and with a quiet word of thanks he rose from his cushion and left silently through the door. Now alone, I unceremoniously allowed myself to slouch languidly on the rough pillow in a manner that would have made the more stern of my various nannies and governesses strike me across my flanks with a cane and order me to sit up straight. I felt one of my moods coming on; everything was starting to fall apart at the seams again, and once more all I could do was be patient, wait, observe, and plan the best way to ensure my survival. It was this sense of powerlessness, endemic in just about every level of the military hierarchy, that could drive one to despair if one was not so well-acquainted with the uncomfortable sensation that my fate was increasingly in the hooves of psychotic, self-obsessed imbeciles as I am. There were, however, ways of distracting oneself from the uncomfortable truth.

Despite knowing that it was a very bad idea, especially in this heat and with water strictly rationed, I reached for the still-open bottle of mediocre brandy and set about pouring myself another glass. Damn the consequences, thought I. I could always worry about them later.

Author's Note

Well, I've finished moving house and settled into the new flat, which meant I finally had enough time to write this chapter. So, apologies for the delay, but hopefully normal service will now resume.

Honour and Blood (Part 3)

Part 3

It must have been four in the morning when Cannon Fodder's distinct aroma entered my office a few moments before he opened the door. I was still awake, having only endured a few hours of fitful sleep before the sensation of having my skull slowly compressed by a vice dragged me unwillingly back to the realm of stark, remorseless consciousness. The warm, comforting embrace of a dreamless sleep continued to elude me, though the threat of yet another nightmare was the dagger concealed beneath her welcoming robes. Princess Luna, it seemed, had rather more important things to do with her time while nearly every night I saw the fields of the dead.

Wrapped up in the layers of rough, itchy wool that felt as if it would shred the skin from my bones if I rolled over without due care and attention, I laid on my cot wrapped up in a tight ball and stared at the murky, indistinct image of the barren stone wall against which my primitive bed rested. I heard the door close, and then the sound of clumsy hoofsteps on stone as Cannon Fodder approached with apparent disregard for the fact that I might still be asleep. Staring at the wall and waiting for him, I considered pretending to be asleep until my aide gave up and went away, except that my aide never gives up on anything once he has set his strangely-ordered mind to it. Besides, I had correctly reasoned that he would only try to wake me up if he felt, or if somepony had the necessary patience and sheer strength of will to convey the idea to him, that the situation had deteriorated to the point where it demanded my complete and undivided attention. Thus when he none-too-gently shook me by the shoulder and asked if I was awake or not I only gave a token effort to appear as if I was still sailing down the river of dreams with Luna at the helm, before I reluctantly rolled over and pulled myself out of bed.

"What is it?" I said. My mouth was dry and my voice had the unnaturally deep baritone imparted by a night of quite heavy drinking. When I lifted my head from the bag of hay that could only be called a pillow if one had never seen an example of one before and had been forced to produce one with only a description written by a four year-old for guidance the whole room spun violently.

"It's Captain Blitzkrieg and the Wonderbolts, sir," he said, stepping back to allow me some space.

That short, terse sentence went some way in clearing the fog from my mind. "What are they doing?"

"Training."

I knew I was unlikely to get more information out of Cannon Fodder, and certainly not in my current state, so I asked him to lead me to the source of whatever problem had arisen. I shrugged on my storm coat and put my cap on quickly before I left, hurriedly doing up the buttons as I followed my aide down the dark, empty corridors. In the dead of the night the corridors of the fortress were unsettlingly quiet; the majority of soldiers were asleep outside and the only ponies still awake would have been those on sentry duties on the walls. The only sounds I could hear were our hoofsteps, though the quiet and subtle murmurings of background noise whispered and scratched agonisingly just beyond the scope of normal hearing, thus enhancing the thick atmosphere that drenched these ancient walls.

The feeble light of my horn illuminated only the slick, damp walls either side of me and Cannon Fodder's armoured rear end. Nevertheless, despite the gloom, my aide seemed to have no problem navigating the confusing maze of corridors, hallways, and mostly-empty rooms in the pitch-black darkness. However, it felt like a frustratingly long amount of time before we stumbled out into the courtyard with the majesty of Luna's night sky to greet us, the cool night air to clear the fog from my head, and the sight of a section of Blitzkrieg's pegasi huddled around a number of the trainee Wonderbolts, each with their limbs tied together tightly with strong rope, to make me wonder if I was just having some unusually perverse dream again.

Alas, I was still awake, and I like to think that I composed myself relatively well; it was dark so hopefully nopony noticed the expression of abject shock that appeared on my face for a few brief seconds. I forced the usual stern, reserved expression of quiet disdain that had been drilled into me from a young age, and cast what I hoped was a suitably withering gaze over the assembled ponies. The Night Guards, as expected, looked rather pleased with themselves, and the sight of them huddled around the trussed-up Wonderbolts morbidly reminded me of seeing photographs of Gryphon jaegers in Zebrica posing with the latest group of large animals that they had just murdered for 'sport'. [Gryphons, being carnivorous predators, have traditionally held hunting for their food to be a cornerstone of their martial culture. However, in modern Gryphon society, hunting has become an activity exclusively pursued by the ruling aristocratic classes, and in particular the caste of society roughly analogous to the old knights of Equestria. As Blueblood has hinted, the glorification of hunting as a noble pursuit, however justified by their biology, is regarded as distasteful at best by equines and horrifying at worst, and thus remains an unfortunate cultural barrier between our two species.]

"Captain Blitzkrieg?" I said, and the pegasus in question emerged from the small huddle carrying an extremely miffed Rainbow Dash behind him. A strip of tape covered the mare's mouth, which was constantly flexing as if to try and wrench it free. "The explanation you are about to give me for what I see here must be phenomenally good. Understand?"

"I'm training them," he said in an off-hoof manner, as if that was justification enough. The grin on his face glinted brightly in the dim torchlight, and his amber eyes, and indeed those of all of the pegasi, seemed to glow eerily. "Trust me."

I was willing to humour him, at least until my patience ran out and the relative comfort of my bed called me from this miserable courtyard. The night air, at least, was cool, unlike the stifling heat radiated by the vast stone that surrounded my cot, absorbed after a long day of being bombarded by Celestia's remorseless sun, so I derived some pleasure from that. So thus I stood there, and watched as Captain Blitzkrieg crouched down besides the bound and gagged Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash and peeled away the tape covering her mouth with the sharp, unpleasant sound of fur being torn from skin, leaving a pinkish-white patch on the end of her muzzle.

"Hey!" she shrieked, her voice loud enough to rouse the ancient dead from these catacombs. Even with her hooves and wings bound by rope she had somehow managed to shove her face right against Blitzkrieg's muzzle. "What's the big idea? Huh? We were sleeping! Do you think this is funny?"

Blitzkrieg calmly stepped back, and circled around Rainbow Dash. I felt as if I should probably intervene, but as I recalled hazily the conversation that I had with him in my office the previous afternoon I decided that I should just let him carry on for the time being; if things were to get out of hoof, which I inwardly hoped they would so that I may be able to call this whole venture off early, I could always step in and put an end to this ridiculous, badly thought-out farce.

"You left no night watch," he hissed.

There was a slight pause, before Rainbow Dash snapped her head to follow Blitzkrieg. "Huh? What do you mean we 'left no night watch'?"

"Faust almighty," snarled Blitzkrieg, now facing his captive student and gesturing emphatically with a hoof. "You didn't leave a flaming lookout while you slept! We crept in and captured you all before you even had the chance to bloody wake up. If we were Changelings you'd all be dead by now; your pretty throat" -he delicately stroked a hoof along the width of Rainbow Dash's taut, slender neck in a manner that made even me, the infamously lecherous cad of Canterlot high society, shudder involuntarily- "slit neatly from ear to ear, and nopony would know until the Commissar here stumbles across your pale, still corpse bathed in a pool of congealing blood when he's looking to see why you haven't reported for the morning reveille!"

Steam snorted from Rainbow Dash's flared nostrils as she stared daggers at the pegasus standing above her. "We're safe inside a massive fortress and surrounded by armed guards, for pony's sake! Why would we even need to set our own lookouts when there's dozens of them already looking out by the walls?"

"Listen," said Blitzkrieg. "Lesson number one: when you get down to it, the only ponies you can trust to keep you safe are yourself and your brothers and sisters in battle. All of us here have fought over these walls and we know they ain't as secure as you probably think they are. We're fighting an enemy that can look like any one of us, and it's only because of the horn-heads like the Commissar here that we have any chance of finding them. The section over in the next tent could be compromised, and without one of your own you can trust on lookout the only way you'd know about it is when they wake you up to use your bloody guts as a skipping rope."

Oddly, Rainbow Dash giggled like a school filly. "I didn't think Changelings would like skipping much."

"Shut up," snapped Blitzkrieg. "We're going to untie you and your, uh, your mates here now, so no funny business. Then the training will begin."

A glint of steel flashed in the dim light as Blitzkrieg drew a stiletto blade and with a deft movement of his hoof cleanly severed the ropes that bound his captive's limbs. The rest of the pegasi followed suit, and soon enough the Wonderbolts stood, wide-eyed, bewildered, and definitely awake now as they rubbed their sore hooves and probably wondered just what their illustrious leader had dragged them all unwittingly into. Rainbow Dash herself scowled at her supposed mentor, and certainly looked as if she was about to head-butt him, which, I might add, would have resulted in the bearer of the Element of Loyalty being summarily court-martialled and either merely flogged to within an inch of her life, hanged, or some combination thereof depending on by how much she would offend the provost sergeant presiding.

"But it's four in the morning!" she protested.

"Lesson two," said Blitzkrieg. "Training can happen at any time and at any place. The whistle-heads [Royal Guard slang for commissioned officers, who started to carry tin whistles as part of their uniform with which to signify the start of a charge and serve as a rallying point should the regimental standard or platoon guidon be obscured or otherwise not visible, or if the platoon drummer or bugler be incapacitated] can send you into battle with barely a moment's notice, and the Changelings will give you none at all. You'll either learn to wake up and be ready for anything instantly, whatever the time and place, or you'll die, alright?"

I thought Rainbow Dash would protest further, but she merely clenched her jaw and nodded her head, which made the messy strands of her offensively garish multi-coloured mane flutter awkwardly. "Sir, yes, sir!" she shouted exuberantly.

Captain Blitzkrieg grinned. "That's more like it," he said.

"But what's he doing here?" Rainbow Dash pointed accusingly at me, as if I had just done something horribly wrong.

"The Commissar will watch, and then decide what to do with you."

It was around this time when I noticed that ponies spoke about me as if I was an inanimate object or a vague, indistinct concept looming in the distance; it seemed that as this aura of unassailable heroism that shielded me from the harsher realities of my rapidly deteriorating life had led ponies to think of me as no longer one of them, but something abstracted and somehow outside of 'normal' equine life. It was as if Blueblood, nephew to Princess Celestia, Duke of Canterlot, and a prince of Equestria, had ceased to exist and, rather like the Changelings themselves, had been replaced by 'The Commissar'.

"I will take you and your Wonderbolts through basic Royal Guard political indoctrination and ideology classes later today," I said, giving a polite nod of my head which made my brain feel as though it was sloshing about in my skull.

Rainbow Dash made an exasperated groan and slapped her forehead with her hoof. "There's classes now? Like school?"

"It's all part of the standard Royal Guard induction process to make sure you're as mentally fit to fight as you are physically. There'll be tests later." I looked to Blitzkrieg and gave him a knowing smirk. "Assuming that you won't quit after the Captain's through with you."

"No chance of that, sir!" Rainbow Dash turned on her hooves to address her pegasi. "We're the Wonderbolts and we never, ever give up!"

Said Wonderbolts shouted wordlessly in response, and I wondered how much more of this could go on before we had an entire encampment of sleep-deprived soldiers coming to tell us to keep the bloody noise down. With every exuberant syllable uttered by the garishly coloured mare pounding into my skull like a croquet mallet, I found that I would sympathise entirely if that were to happen.

Going back to bed might have seemed like an attractive option to those with the distinct lack of anything important to do who read this nonsense, but while the rustic comfort of a mattress packed with straw and a blanket that might as well have been made out of sandpaper would have been preferable to standing out in the chill of the night with a hangover metaphorically beating at the insides of my skull, I knew that there was little to no chance of me getting any rest now, so I may as well take a seat and enjoy the show. I was rather curious to see what Blitzkrieg would make of my somewhat vague commands, and I feared that he may have not picked up on the subtext that lay beneath my words with all of the subtlety of a manatee trying to hide beneath silk sheets.

With a barked order and a stamp of his hoof, one of the pegasi, a platoon sergeant, tugged a sackcloth bag over, disturbing the dust. Blitzkrieg grabbed the end with a hoof, and then upended the sack to send its contents: Two dozen or so training swords apparently acquired, or most likely 'borrowed without permission' from Quartermaster Pencil Pusher's stores, falling into a disorganised pile on the ground with a loud clatter of dull iron that should have woken everypony in the surrounding tents. I did not relish the time I would have to explain their sudden and unexplained absence to the odious, pedantic, unimaginative little stallion later.

"These are standard training swords," said Blitzkrieg, taking one and turning it over in his hoof. "Every soldier in the Royal Guard has cut his teeth on these bloody uncomfortable things, from wine-swilling, namby-pamby generals to us common troopers. I wouldn't trust you lot with blunt butter knifes, but since I don't want to embarrass you further by making you use pretend weapons these will have to do."

He tossed the weapon to Rainbow Dash, who caught it rather clumsily with her hooves and then examined the weapon with its rounded, blunted edges. Despite their somewhat shoddy appearance I knew from personal experience, having trained with the wretched, unbalanced, glorified slabs of lead during my time at the Academy as Blitzkrieg had just said, they could still do some very real damage to an un-armoured pony if one was not sufficiently careful or trained. An uneasy sensation, this time unrelated to my body's attempts to deal with the effects of alcohol, nagged at the back of my head as I watched Rainbow Dash take a few experimental swings of the sword, as neophytes are wont to do when finally presented with a shiny new weapon. Somepony was bound to get seriously hurt, but I began to think that was what Captain Blitzkrieg fully intended.

"Alright then," said Blitzkrieg. I felt a sudden sensation of dread creep over me when I noticed that slight, sing-song tint to his normally gruff, atonal voice. "Let's get down to business!"

One can only imagine my surprise and horror when Captain Blitzkrieg started out with that most mysterious and ultimately embarrassing quirks of collective equine psychology - a Song Number. While I can't recall all of the lyrics because, frankly, I have done my utmost to try and purge it from memory, I vividly recall the refrain in which he promised Rainbow Dash that he would 'make a mare out of you'. Naturally I refused to take part, though the unconscious mental pull was still there, and instead tried to make myself as unnoticeable as possible in the gloom and wait it out. It disturbed me to learn that Blitzkrieg had a surprisingly good singing voice, for a pony whose normal speech sounded as though he had been gargling with sand and had a tone that was about as far away from melodic as one could get while still being able to speak Equestrian with a reasonable degree of clarity, that is. Perhaps the stallion's life would have been very different if his workhouse had some form of choir, thought I.

Cannon Fodder, I should note, seemed entirely unfazed and watched the bizarre display, complete with spontaneous choreography involving the training swords and various other military training paraphernalia that happened to be around at the time, with his usual expression of moderate disinterest. I wondered, perhaps, if this was yet another symptom of my aide's unique abilities, or disability, depending upon how one views Blanks.

[It is possible that the reason Blueblood didn't take part in the song number and, unusually for one with such extensive powers of recall as he, appears to have mostly forgotten the details about it, is that he happened to be standing within Cannon Fodder's magic null field at the time. Further experiments have been attempted by Twilight Sparkle; however, the spontaneous nature of equine communal songs makes performing them in a controlled environment extremely difficult, which led to my Faithful Student's least favourite thing in the world - inconclusive results.]

The rest of the 'training' carried on until the first rays of the sun flooded over the horizon, and mercifully the singing was limited only to the very beginning. By then I had given up on all attempts to disguise my hangover, which seemed to be only getting worse and worse as the morning wore on with all of the haste of a drunken elephant, and instead I merely laid down and relaxed languidly in the dust, uncaring of the further staining of my already-battered uniform, and watched. Cannon Fodder, dutiful as ever, supplied me with tea from the ever-present and seemingly bottomless flask that he kept secreted deep within the many folds of his uniform.

For much of the morning Blitzkrieg and his pegasi simply chased the trainee Wonderbolts around and around the fortress, in what to my untrained eye looked like a very protracted game of tag, except played by supposed adults armoured and armed to the teeth. Whatever reasoning behind the exercise remained a mystery to me, and frankly I was under the impression Blitzkrieg was simply trying to waste everypony's time, mine and his included, and then call it a day so he could go back to doing whatever it is he does that passes for soldiering.

It was some time, just as the morning reveille was sounded with the dawning of the sun, that the pegasi landed. Well, I write 'landed', but in the case of the Wonderbolts I feel that 'fell out of the sky' is a more apt description of what I saw. I should reassure the reader that for the most part they were unharmed, aside from a few superficial bruises and cuts, having at least been able to arrest enough of their momentum so as not to cause themselves any serious damage. Nevertheless, they were clearly exhausted after having spent however many hours flying around like that; a choir of panting, rasping breathes and hacking coughs greeted me as I reluctantly rose from the ground, ignoring the sudden sense of vertigo as I did so, and approached with a suitably sympathetic look of concern on my face.

Rainbow Dash was the last of the Wonderbolts to drop, landing in a messy tangle of spindly limbs and wings resembling a dropped pile of broken, brightly-coloured twigs that happened to be in the vague shape of a pony. She didn't bother getting up, and instead merely unknotted her various extremities to lay sprawled on her belly like a beached dolphin after the tide has long since receded. Her thin, aerodynamic chest rose and fell with every laboured breath and her fur and mane were slick and shiny with dripping sweat, which I might have found arousing if it weren't for my rather fragile physical and mental state at the time. Teeth bared and gritted, she shouted wordlessly in defiance at the sky, or rather at the circling Night Guard pegasi who drifted in to land with the sort of leisurely, relaxed manner that must have been calculated to have been as mocking as possible.

The Night Guards landed almost simultaneously and without sound around the fallen Wonderbolts, forming a ring around the prone pegasi. There, Captain Blitzkrieg approached Rainbow Dash, who was struggling to rise to her hooves. As I watched, I pre-emptively stepped forwards, fearing that perhaps Blitzkrieg had gone too far. Not that I was overly concerned about the Wonderbolts' personal safety, mind you, but after thinking it through in the stark relief of relative sobriety I thought it best that when they return to Canterlot in ignominious failure that they do so in one piece and preferably still alive.

Captain Blitzkrieg strutted, that was the only word to describe his confident swagger, to Rainbow Dash, who had by now succeeded in standing up and was gently swaying from side to side like Fancy Pants after one too many of his particularly vile Manehatten cocktails. He circled her, eyeing the exhausted mare carefully as though he was selecting a courtesan with which to spend the evening, and mockingly shook his head and tutted.

"You can't be tired already," he said, jabbing Rainbow Dash roughly in the shoulder with a hoof.

To her credit, despite wobbling a little she remained more or less upright, which was more than could be said for the ponies under her command, who lay sprawled in an undignified pile gasping desperately for air. Rainbow Dash spat on the ground and sucked in a deep breath, which merely led to a hacking, dry cough.

"What was the point of that?" she said between ragged breaths, her voice somewhat hoarse.

"It was a test."

A deep frown furrowed Rainbow Dash's brow as she stared unblinkingly at her 'trainer', before she shook her head in confusion. "How was that a test?" she blurted out. "All you did is chase us around and around the castle over and over while hitting us with those swords! You said you were going to train us!"

"We've only just started, you daft bint. I wanted to see what your stamina's like, and I must say none of us here are the slightest bit impressed. Are we, lads?"

The Night Guards said, or shouted rather, some colourful variation of the phrase 'no we are not' at the exhausted, bewildered pegasi, accompanied by loud jeering that was probably unsuitable for the ears of a lady, though Rainbow Dash was as far removed from being one as much as her sex would allow. I watched Rainbow carefully, pushing my way through the crowd that seemed to be gathering around her and her comrades with judicious use of Cannon Fodder's overpowering scent to clear the way to get closer to her. It was clear from her clenched jaw, snarl, and aggressive body posture with wings erect in that odd manner that pegasi seem to think makes them look threatening and not at all like a peacock that's let itself go that she was uncomfortable, and that the source of her discomfort was not entirely exhaustion.

"Shut up," snapped Rainbow Dash, stamping a hoof. "I'm the best athlete out of Ponyville, and I'm only just getting started."

Blitzkrieg laughed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Stubborn little bitch, aren't you?" he said, grinning inanely as he stared at Rainbow apparently to see if his comment would elicit any further indignation from her. He was rewarded only with a glare and more laboured breathing. "Dammit, I could have you bloody well flogged to death for being rude to an officer, but I'm in a good mood today. You're fast, I'll give you that, and nippy too, but you used all your energy in one go. After an hour you were exhausted, which made you easy pickings. Battles can last for ages, love, and there's no telling when you'll next get a chance to recover or whether a Changeling horde lies behind the nearest cloud ready to take you and your pretty, virgin Wonderbolts out for a gangbang."

"But how was I supposed to know you were going to drag this out for that long? You didn't tell us! If you'd explained everything first then we would have conserved our energy, sir."

"I don't teach by telling, I teach by showing." Blitzkrieg shook his head and offered Rainbow Dash his water canteen, which she took with some hesitation but downed with relish. "I ain't doing this for fun, you know. That's just an added bonus. I'm doing this because I want to keep you alive if the medal-seeking generals suddenly decide to throw you against the Changelings. You're going to hate my methods, and I can accept that. In fact, I expect it. But when you do go into battle and you see a swarm of those bugs so huge it blocks out the sun, you'll thank me and the commissar for all the misery I'm about to put you through. Understand?"

When Rainbow Dash had finished downing the contents of the canteen, apparently draining it entirely and thus reminding me to impress upon her the need to conserve water in this desolate, arid wasteland some time later by taking a leaf from Blitzkrieg's book and letting her experience the deleterious effects of dehydration herself, she nodded her head and said: "Yeah, I guess so."

"Alright then." Captain Blitzkrieg gave her what I took to be a friendly, if rather forceful, pat on the shoulder, which nearly sent her toppling over, and then nudged her at my general direction. "For the rest of the day you'll be the Commissar's problem, unless I get bored later."

The Night Guards pegasi left, leaving me standing awkwardly with my aide, who was busy scoffing down a cucumber sandwich that he had procured from somewhere with his usual lack of grace that meant much of it ended up splattered across his dirt-encrusted breastplate, and the collection of exhausted Wonderbolts. With my head still pounding like the inside of a drum and the sun still yet to make its appearance in the eastern sky I knew that this was going to be an excruciatingly long morning. More to the point, however, what the bloody hell was I supposed to do with this thoroughly miserable collection of unwanted, untrained, and unwashed trainee Wonderbolts?

***

With little else to do with Rainbow Dash and company I simply put them through lesson one of Royal Guard induction and indoctrination, as helpfully provided by the Commissariat. I had given them the opportunity to wash themselves, find breakfast, and recover somewhat, which gave Cannon Fodder and me the necessary time to plunder my office for the appropriate class materials. In truth I had yet to give one of these lessons, thinking that they were rather pointless and frankly if any soldier came into my regiment ignorant of the structure of the Royal Guard and their lowly position within its labyrinthine bureaucracy then I would have likely sent them home, for which they would have been infinitely thankful. Nevertheless, though I knew that I had no business providing this service to the Wonderbolts, being a separate organisation from the Royal Guard and therefore beyond the scope of my commissarial portfolio, I assumed that it would be fairly easy and would keep me away from performing more onerous duties.

[Blueblood here displays his ignorance of Royal Guard basic training, which only provides a cursory introduction to what the recruits like to call 'book-learning'. It is the duty of the regimental commissar, i.e. Prince Blueblood, to provide these classes. He is, however, correct in stating that as an organisation wholly separate from the Royal Guard and not under the control of the Ministry of War (at this stage of the war, as their heritage as the personal bodyguard of Commander Hurricane and then the Princesses meant that they were organised separate from the Royal Guard) he technically has no power over the trainee Wonderbolts. However, as this training squadron was seconded to a Royal Guard formation, it was argued that they would therefore be subject to Princesses' Regulations and the authority of the Commissariat.]

I had selected a small tent in the courtyard in which to conduct this pointless lecture, nestled in the shade of the outer wall and positioned close to the main drill square with which to demonstrate the famed discipline that lies at the cornerstone of Royal Guard training and, more importantly, to provide me with some respite from the heat that was steadily rising with the dawning sun. There, I had set up, or rather I had Cannon Fodder set up for me, a couple of chairs, desks, and a chalkboard that he had somehow procured. It was shortly after the sun had deigned to rise and the morning reveille had been sounded that the 'lesson', as it were, began. As the temperature rapidly increased in that short amount of time, Rainbow Dash and company had soon learned that any effort put into bathing oneself is an exercise in futility in this climate, for it is instantly erased by the veritable buckets of sweat one will produce almost immediately after stepping out of the showers and drying oneself. When they had all filed into the makeshift classroom-tent and taken their seats, I noted that with their skin-tight latex flight suits the sweat did not soak into the fabric as it did with a tunic but instead ran off and pooled at their extremities.

I won't bore you with the details of the lesson itself, as I fear I've already bored you, dear reader, enough already. If you're really curious I'm sure those with adequate connections in the military will be able to find the lesson plans themselves if there's really little else productive you can do with your limited time, but needless to say the entire process was utterly tedious in the extreme for all concerned. Suffice to say, the purpose of these classes was to 'induct', as it were, the recruits into the Royal Guard so that they form a close attachment to their regiments and their comrades by teaching them to believe that they are part of a unique, tightly-knit brotherhood and thus make them all the more amenable to blindly following orders. I'll give the desk-bound imbeciles who wrote this quality-deficient nonsense one thing; they knew how to exploit the base, herd instinct of the equine race perfectly. I might have found it impressive if it weren't so morally bankrupt (or if I wasn't so 'morally bankrupt' myself, but I digress).

Despite the inattentive audience I carried on with the lesson as though we were on some unwritten contract: I would get through this as quickly as possible and then we could all go and do something else more productive. However, it was when I was explaining the finer points of the history of the Royal Guard, focusing on its past glories more than its more recent indignities, and halfway through a sentence that I was interrupted by the unmistakeable sound of a pony snoring. It was a loud sort of snore, like how one would imagine a larger earth pony stallion such as Colonel Sunshine Smiles would. I was only mildly surprised to find that the source of what sounded like a steam engine on the verge of exploding was the slim, svelte, athletic little pegasus named Rainbow Dash sitting at the back of the tent, with her head resting on crossed forelegs on the desk.

Cannon Fodder, who had been sitting patiently in the corner with a feedbag of oats around his muzzle and one of his favourite magazines to pass the time with, started to move over to the sleeping mare, but I stopped him with a shake of my head and a wave of my hoof. This was something that I wanted to take care of myself. A stern glare, modelled after the sort that Auntie Luna gives to those who displease her, which happened to be nearly everypony but especially me, was enough to dissuade the uneasy Wonderbolts from attempting to wake her.

I took a hoof-long wooden ruler from the chalkboard and approached Rainbow Dash as quietly as possible, which, despite my steel horseshoes tapping loudly against the sun-hardened earth, was easy enough with the tinnitus-inducing volume of her thoroughly un-ladylike snoring. If she was actually awake and only making the noise as a sort of critique of my teaching style then I admired her dedication in keeping up the act, however, as I loomed over her like a judge about to pass judgement on a lowly criminal and saw the small puddle of drool that formed on the table she used as a pillow and the vague, half-formed mumblings between each deafening breath I saw that she was truly asleep.

Two swift motions brought the ruler high into the air and then rapidly down to strike the desk very close to the filly's head, as though using a whip. Rainbow Dash yelped like a startled dog and very nearly leapt out of her seat, but before she could do so I quickly grabbed her by the head with my hooves and forced my muzzle against hers.

"Am I boring you, Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash?" I said, doing my very best impression of Sergeant Major Square Basher. Alas, I don't think I could do old Marezilla justice.

She stared back with wide, alert eyes, and shook her head as much as my grip would allow. I let go, surreptitiously wiping my hooves on the ground in case I had caught anything from her, and stepped back a little to give her a little space. "Then why did you fall asleep?"

"Because I got no sleep at all last night, I've been flying around and around the castle being chased by Captain Blitzkrieg, I'm exhausted, and now you expect me to sit through a class without dozing off?" she said, throwing her hooves out as if to emphasise the point she was making. I cleared my throat and arched an eyebrow, which had the desired effect of making her sink in her seat and timidly add, "Uh, sir. I mean."

"A soldier is expected to be able to operate at peak efficiency, with maximum alertness and fighting spirit, in any circumstance, regardless of physical hardship and mental state," I said, reciting some sentence from some pamphlet that I had skim-read a while ago. "That includes classes."

"I know that, sir," she said, and I could tell by the halting pattern of her speech and the expression of moderate concentration on her face that she was, perhaps for the first time in her life, trying to pick her words very carefully. "But come on, we already went through this boring egghead stuff in the Wonderbolts Academy, and this book-learning isn't my style of learning things."

Before she dig her grave any deeper (already metaphorically approaching Equus' core already), I tapped the now-splintered ruler on her desk. In the quiet that descended on the tent like a shroud that had been dropped over it, I found that I could hear the rhythmic, pounding sound of soldiers marching up and down the drill square punctuated by the aggressive bark of Square Basher shouting orders, reminding me of the tribal drums of darkest Zebrica accompanying the arcane rituals of a shaman. It gave me a cruel idea; perhaps it was time that I took a leaf from Captain Blitzkrieg's book.

“Have you had the pleasure of meeting Company Sergeant Major Square Basher?” I asked.

Rainbow Dash shook her head no. "I only just got here. Like I had the time to meet all of the thousands of soldiers here."

I let her sarcastic comment slide for now, for she would soon be eating those words. “I think it's time we fixed that. In fact, I think she'll be able to teach you something herself. She's the big, loud, angry mare just outside on the parade ground. You can't miss her. I want you to tell her that I sent you to see her, and when she asks you why I want you to tell her in these exact words: 'mind your own fucking business you syphilitic whore'."

Those bright magenta eyes blinked at me vacantly once, twice, before Rainbow Dash burst into a loud, obnoxious giggle. "Oh, you almost had me there, sir," she said, between spasms of irritating laughter. She pounded her desk with a hoof and buried her face in her other foreleg. I waited until she recovered from her fit, as it would make the moment of realisation of exactly what predicament her inattentiveness and attitude had just put her in all the more entertaining when it inevitably came. "But you're gonna have to try a lot better than that to prank me."

"It is not a prank, Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash," I said, keeping my voice as level and monotone as that of Field Marshal Iron Hoof to try and impress upon her the seriousness of the situation. I suppose it could technically be considered a prank, from my perspective, at least. "You are ordered to go to the CSM and tell her exactly what I have just told you. Now."

She looked up, rubbed at her face, and blinked again in that peculiarly gormless expression that forms on the faces of ponies moments before they finally understand just how badly things have gone for them, and that it is entirely their own fault. "Heh," she laughed again, but this time it was a nervous titter. "That's some dedication to the prank, sir. You can't seriously mean that."

"I gave you a direct order," I said, and beckoned Cannon Fodder closer with a hoof. "The penalty for disobedience is a flogging, soldier. Are you going to comply or is my aide going to have to tell the Provost Sergeant to dust off the old cat o' nine tails?"

[The cat o' nine tails was primarily used by the Equestrian Navy. The whip used by the Royal Guard for corporal punishment was similar, but was simply a drumstick with attached strings. Unlike the naval cat o' nine tails, the Royal Guard equivalent was more likely to cut the skin and leave distinctive, heavy scarring, which was believed by adherents of this practice to be a permanent reminder of the soldier's transgressions.]

The awkward grin faded, and she gulped anxiously. "Y-you wouldn't. We don't flog ponies in the Wonderbolts. You can't do that. I don't want to go to a random mare and swear at her like that; it ain't like me to do that."

"Can't I?" I rested a hoof on her desk and leaned on it, almost casually, and peered down at her, giving the impudent young mare a few seconds to drink in what I hoped to be a suitably threatening and authoritarian demeanour looming above. Lowering my head to her level and positioning just close enough to hers so as to be slightly uncomfortable without actually touching, which I found to be an effective way to intimidate the vast majority of ponies who happen to be smaller than me, I said, quietly but firmly: "You are attached to a Royal Guard Army Group, living in a Royal Guard encampment, using Royal Guard equipment, eating Royal Guard rations, and enjoying Royal Guard training. Whether you realise it or not, you are under Royal Guard authority. Now, carry out your orders before I have to ask Private Cannon Fodder to bring the Provost Sergeant."

Rainbow Dash hesitated for only a moment, before she sighed in defeat and slipped away from her seat. She skulked out of the tent through the flap, through which I watched her approach the Company Sergeant Major, and granted me with an enjoyably callipygian view as she left. It was damned lucky that I managed to convince her to do this, as I was not entirely sure that if I had to follow through with having her flogged, which I would have only done with great reluctance as I hated the idea of ruining that pretty little body of hers with the lash, that I would escape without any serious repercussions from Canterlot. I already had enough of damned politicking with Scarlet Letter, and I had no desire to earn the ire of the Wonderbolts of all ponies, knowing that such an enmity with these bizarrely popular stunt ponies would cause my standing in the elite's social hierarchy to drop considerably.

[As a historical note, there are a number of instances where the use of Royal Guard corporal punishment inflicted upon units of other arms who do not practice it which invariably led to fierce controversy over the issue of flogging as a form of maintaining discipline. In particular, when a soldier of the Princesses' Gryphon Legion (PGL - Gryphon volunteers who serve alongside the Equestrian Royal Guard, but, as with the Wonderbolts, are not technically part of it) was ordered to be flogged by a Royal Guard officer for a seemingly minor transgression, protests from the Gryphon Empire led to the matter being discussed in Parliament and resulted in the eventual abolition of the practice.]

I couldn't hear what Rainbow Dash said to Square Basher, but the earth pony mare's response was enough to know that my orders had been carried out correctly. They were quite close, about ten to fifteen feet away from where I watched them from behind the tent flap like I was some pathetic voyeur watching a mare showering, not that I've ever done that, with their backs to me. Rainbow Dash had approached the tall, well-built CSM with a degree of confidence and swagger to her step that I would not have expected to see on any pony other than her. It was rather comical, actually, to see her beckon the taller mare down, whisper something in her ear, and then flinch from the inevitable angry response.

"WHAT?" Square Basher bellowed.

A stunned silence followed. The platoon of soldiers she had been observing marching up and down the parade square halted mid-step, with each rank stumbling awkwardly into the one before it until the guardsponies simply collapsed in a heap with the sound akin to a garden full of wind chimes in a hurricane. With a slight growl of frustration that could be heard even from where I stood, the CSM briefly looked away from the somewhat startled Rainbow Dash to address them. "For Faust's sake," she shouted. "Pull yourselves together or you'll be spending the rest of this war marching in circles."

I was surprised to see that Rainbow Dash did not take the opportunity to flee and hide when Square Basher was briefly distracted, as I would have done had I been in her position and had been granted the gift of flight, but instead she stood there with that same defiant firmness to her posture. I had to give her dubious credit for standing there and taking her punishment like a mare.

"And as for you," said Square Basher, her voice dropping to that distinctively sinister East Trottingham snarl. "I want you to repeat what you just said; louder this time, so everypony else can hear it."

There was only a brief moment's hesitation before Rainbow Dash began to answer, but just as the first impertinent syllable stumbled over her thin lips she was interrupted.

"Don't you tell me to mind my own business!" shrieked Square Basher with sudden ferocity, and she matched the violence of her voice by using her favourite tried-and-tested method of intimidation by ramming her face against Rainbow Dash's cheek so that she roared directly into a wilting, floppy ear. "Of all the ponies in this bloody camp it's you, you disgustingly coloured cloud-humping bitch, who thinks she has cast iron twenty-five pounder cannonballs for bollocks to tell me to mind my own business! Stand up straight and stop flinching, because this is the very last bit of dignity you're going to enjoy for a long time! I am going to make you suffer!"

Rainbow Dash snapped to attention, seemingly out of reflex, and despite having received the full onslaught of the CSM's infamous rants at point-blank range, appeared to have composed herself rather well. I expect that she was used to such behaviour from the Wonderbolts, perhaps, and that I had been a little too unfair on judging their prior training. The next few hours or so would either confirm or deny my initial assessment that she and her ilk were civilians masquerading as soldiers and in need of a short, sharp shock to the system.

Square Basher remained close to her prey, but turned her head slightly away to address the soldiers loitering by the side of the busy parade square, and she uttered the words that every soldier of the earth pony company dreaded to hear: "Bring me the sled!"

The troops scurried away to retrieve her favourite device of punishment. It consisted of a sturdy wooden pallet liberated from the Quartermaster's stores, primitively reinforced with more planks of wood nailed into the sides and across its top, and with a length of thick rope looped around the front beams to serve as a harness. As Marezilla directed Rainbow Dash to bite around the rope before she took her position on the pallet like some earth pony warlord of Ancient Equestria who has had to scale back on the extravagant war chariots out of a lack of funds, I decided that I had seen enough and slipped back into the tent.

The stunned, nervous faces that looked back at me was proof that what I had just forced Rainbow Dash to do had the desired effect. "Is anypony else finding this boring?" I asked. The sea of faces shook their heads, and to the sound of the Sergeant Major screaming and Rainbow Dash's pained exertions in dragging her around, I continued the class.

Author's Note

Phew, this was another tricky chapter to write.

Bit of useless trivia for today: ordering offenders to relay rude messages was a common punishment in the British Army, putting the poor sod in the unenviable position of having to choose between disobeying a direct order or earning the wrath of whomever receives the message.

Honour and Blood (Part 4)

The class wrapped up in half an hour, just in time for a mid-morning snack of dry, tasteless biscuits, which was just what one needed in the middle of an arid desert while nursing the matriarch of all hangovers, and some more of Cannon Fodder's tea. I considered retreating to my office to hide beneath the covers of my bed, with the curtains drawn and a lingerie catalogue to help soothe the pain and misery, but unfortunately I couldn't very well leave the Wonderbolts to their own devices in a busy fortress. Feeling somewhat vindictive, I instructed Cannon Fodder to look for Shining Armour, being the most senior officer in the camp without being so senior that I would get into much trouble for wasting his time, and ask him if he would take over their training for the rest of the day. Why should I be the only pony here inconvenienced by the presence of these irritating foals playing at soldiers? If anything, however, I should have known that they and our venerable Lord Captain would mix as well as gin and vermouth, considering that they all appeared to have the maturity of an excitable spaniel.

There was, however, one further thing to do before I could retire for the rest of the day. After I let the Wonderbolts out for a much-needed break and sent my aide on his little errand, I stepped out of the tent to check on how Rainbow Dash was coping with her punishment. It seemed that Sergeant Major Square Basher had grown bored of being dragged around on the 'sled' like an extremely single-minded foal determined to enjoy the snow despite the fact that it hasn't snowed here since the late Ice Age, for the pallet lay discarded in the shade of the outer fortress wall and etched into the dust of the parade square were the long marks left when it and its rather heavy occupant were dragged in what appeared to be a large oval shape. Judging by those skid marks and the hoofprints scattered drunkenly across the ground, I assumed that Rainbow Dash, despite being nigh-exhausted to the point of collapse, had given a rather good account of herself and must have managed a few laps before giving up.

Instead, Square Basher had settled for a less rigorous but no less humiliating and painful method of punishment: the age-old tradition of 'crucifixion'. Now, for those readers lunging towards the history books to prove me wrong, whom I presume have never served in the Royal Guard and will likely take that term literally, said punishment in the Royal Guard does not actually involve nailing the offender to two blocks of perpendicular wood and leaving them there to die in undeserved agony as the Roamans used to inflict upon the worst traitors, but rather, as Rainbow Dash was when I saw her, had the guilty party with their legs outstretched atop four empty water drums, such that their body was suspended a few feet above the ground. The idea was that after a certain length of time the strain in supporting one's body would become unbearable, rather like an actual crucifixion, except it would merely result in a bruised muzzle, a face-full of dirt, and a wounded ego, instead of a slow and lingering death.

A small group of ponies with apparently little better to do had crowded around Rainbow Dash. One, a corporal with a shock of white in his mane that concealed a scar torn across his scalp, stared intently at a battered old pocket watch that must have been passed down through his family since Princess Celestia was in diapers, while another, a private, appeared to be taking bets. The coins and betting ticket stubs changing hooves rapidly disappeared into the folds of armour and day tunics as I approached, and the soldiers did their best to look as nonchalant as possible but looked all the more guilty for it. I gave them a knowing look, but paid the matter no heed; there were far more important and more immediate things for me to concern myself with, and I felt that I had already indulged in the sin of hypocrisy enough to last me a lifetime already.

"She's doing well," said the corporal, but not before qualifying that statement with: "for a skinny little cloud-humper."

"She might even beat your record, sir!" exclaimed one of the watching soldiers.

Square Basher simply growled in response and stared intently at the struggling mare, whose limbs twitched and shook with the strain and whose latex flightsuit was veritably dripping with rank sweat. She lifted a hoof the diameter of a dinner plate, planted it in the approximate centre of Rainbow's tensed, taut back, with the skin-tight latex making it resemble a topographical model of undulating hills and valleys, and began to apply pressure.

The effect was instantaneous; Rainbow Dash snarled, apparently having since lost whatever fear of Square Basher that had been instilled by the initial violence of the punishment detail, and shouted, "H-hey! What's the big idea?"

Before Square Basher could complete this latest indignity on Rainbow Dash I noisily cleared my throat and stepped closer. "Come on, that's hardly sporting now, is it?" I said, injecting sufficient jest into my voice to try and diffuse the situation. Besides, I knew that to the competitive little pegasus that having an officer, and especially me of all ponies, come to her rescue like some ineffectual teacher attempting to politely ask some schoolyard bullies to return a certain egghead's favourite cuddly toy would be more humiliating to her than anything that conventional Royal Guard punishment could possibly inflict on her. "I need to have a word with her anyway, if you've finished."

There was a quiet snort of derision from Marezilla, and small, subtle shake of her head in apparent disappointment of not being allowed to inflict any further pain and indignities on Rainbow Dash. She removed her hoof from between (and on top of) the pegasus' protruding shoulder blades with great reluctance. With a single, barked order and a wave of her hoof the stallions moved to help Rainbow Dash from her precarious position, despite the obstinate mare's insistence that she could manage fine by herself. That her forelimbs wobbled awkwardly, before collapsing under her weight so that she fell nose-first into the ground as if prostrating herself before either of my two divine Aunts, had done little, however, to dampen her spirits. Almost immediately she struggled to her hooves, using one of the barrels for help.

"If you don't mind me asking, sir," said Square Basher, her voice mercifully back to a volume that didn’t make my ears ring. She drew herself up to me, eyes roughly level with mine which meant I did not have to crane my neck down to speak with her as I did with most mares. "What did she do?"

"She fell asleep in class," I said, "and was being insubordinate."

The CSM sucked air through her teeth and shook her head in an exaggerated display of mock disappointment. "Despicable, sir. If I'd known I'd have given her more of a beasting. Maybe a dip in the Regimental Bath if we could find some unicorns."

['Beasting' refers to informal punishments inflicted typically on new recruits in the Royal Guard, in particular regiments of the Trottinghamite military tradition. Such punishments typically involve arduous exercises, verbal abuse, and/or whatever harsh treatment is deemed appropriate for the transgression committed on an ad hoc basis. Not only are they intended to punish and correct inappropriate behaviour by the recruit, but also to build character. As for the 'Regimental Bath', this particular stock punishment involves immersing the guilty party into a tub of icy water (explaining Company Sergeant Major Square Basher's reference to finding unicorns, presumably to chill the water despite the heat of the Badlands), and then scrubbing them with abrasive materials until it is deemed by the supervising NCO that sufficient pain, discomfort, and embarrassment has been inflicted. Such practices have since fallen out of favour since the Twilight Sparkle Reforms, as reformists have argued that excessive beastings tend to brutalise soldiers to the point that more discipline problems were created than fixed.]

As much as I would have liked to see an attractive mare in a bath, the line was probably drawn with the application of kitchen scouring pads and an audience of young stallions who missed their filly-friends terribly. "I know," I said, "but she's new, so I think it's best I have a little chat with her. Just to make sure that she doesn't get up to any more mischief again."

That seemed to satisfy her, though really it was not as though she was in any position to disagree with me. Before she left to instil the fear of Faust into another hapless soldier over some minor infraction of the Princesses' Regulations, she turned and jabbed Rainbow Dash aggressively in the chest with a hoof. The slight, plucky pegasus stumbled over her hooves into one of the upright barrels, but otherwise remained standing and as defiant as her battered, exhausted frame would allow her. I had to give her credit—it was a rare sort of pony that could afford to stand up to Sergeant Major Square Basher without flinching, let alone maintain eye contact for any substantial length of time, but Rainbow Dash, despite being battered from her previous 'training' and her more recent punishment did not seem fazed in the slightest.

"You learnt your lesson now?" said Square Basher.

Rainbow Dash stared at the taller mare, still trying to catch her breath. "Sir, yes, sir," she said at length. Inwardly, I was relieved that she remembered that in the Royal Guard female officers and higher ranking NCOs were always referred to as 'sir' and not 'ma'am'; if she hadn't then she might not have survived another round of abuse, which would have been embarrassing for all concerned.

"Louder!" barked Square Basher suddenly. A few of the soldiers looking on jumped in shock at the abrupt outburst. "You're supposed to be a soldier, so bloody well shout like one! Your voice is going to strike terror into the hearts of the Changeling enemy."

I watched as Rainbow Dash muttered something under her breath, but was either not heard or ignored by the Sergeant Major. She then sucked in a deep breath, rearing her head back as if she was about to give Square Basher a thoroughly ill-advised Scoltish kiss [a colloquial term for a head-butt, I believe, given the context], and shouted as loud as her deceptively small frame would allow: "SIR, YES, SIR!"

The ends of Square Basher's lips tugged upwards slightly in what I took to be a rare earnest smile. "Alright, that's a start, then." She then turned to me, snapping her hooves together and giving a brisk, parade-ground quality salute with the angles of her forelegs at all the precise, correct angles, and said, "She's all yours now, sir."

With this latest task completed to the exceedingly high standard that the stern, violent mare sets herself in her work, Square Basher stomped off in search of a new group of soldiers to bully. The onlookers had likewise dispersed, apparently having lost interest in abusing Rainbow Dash or simply not wanting to be in the presence of the regimental commissar for longer than strictly necessary.

Now that I was alone with Rainbow Dash, or as alone as one could possibly be inside a military camp populated by thousands of ponies who all had the concept of individual privacy and the respect thereof beaten out of them by bullish drill instructors, she glowered at me with hate-filled eyes. She wobbled awkwardly on thin, tensed legs, but did not allow herself the indignity of collapsing in a wretched heap before me. "Sir?" she said, her tone of voice suitably defiant.

"Come with me," I said. I turned on my hooves and headed back to the castle to my office. Rainbow Dash followed, albeit slowly, necessitating that I stopped every two dozen paces or so to wait for her to catch up to me. Of course, it would have been a damn sight quicker for both of us if I simply carried her, but I knew that her foalish pride simply would not have allowed her to suffer that indignity. I was in no hurry, however, as I was ever unenthusiastic about performing my other, necessary duties of paperwork, lectures, punishment details, meetings, and other such useless bureaucratic drivel that, despite its eminent tedium and perceived uselessness, nevertheless keeps the Royal Guard running, or rather shambling along in a lifeless imitation of forward movement.

When we reached my office the mid-morning sun was streaming brightly through the window, casting the grey stones in a brilliant yellow-white while leaving the shadows as stark, gloomy pits of despair in the recesses of the room. Fortunately, the ragged piece of cloth nailed to the upper portion of the window frame that served as both curtain and window itself still covered the large gaping hole, and so I was not immediately blinded by sunlight as I emerged from the darkened corridors. The slightly diffused light, however, still gave the room a washed-out and faded look, despite the brilliant sunshine.

I made a bee-line straight for my drinks cabinet, or rather the drawer that I still liked to pretend was the much larger and better-stocked cabinet in the Sanguine Palace, looking for what Blitzkrieg liked to refer to as 'the hair of the dog'. As I rooted around the half-empty bottles of liquor and Rainbow Dash staggered in panting and gasping for air as though she had been drowning recently, I could not help but wonder when exactly I decided that it was acceptable for me to start drinking at around elevenses time. With a grunt of annoyance I slammed the drawer shut, making its contents clatter noisily within; life in the Royal Guard had the tendency to exacerbate the worst traits in ponies, namely the vices one is warned against by robed priests in church who then go and partake of said sins behind the closed doors of the vestry, and I, for one, was unwilling to allow a finely crafted appreciation for the distiller's art to become mere common alcoholism.

"Sir?" said Rainbow Dash. "What's this about?"

I pointed to the cushion just in front of my desk with one hoof, while with the other located a spare canteen of water amidst the scattered detritus on my desk and poured out its contents into two somewhat grimy tumblers. "Take a seat, and for Faust's sake relax, damn you. You're no longer in trouble."

Rainbow Dash hesitated for a few seconds, before she sat down on the cushion with what appeared to be great reluctance. As she planted her firm, taut rear on what was probably the luckiest seat in the entire encampment I removed my cap and stormcoat and tossed those hateful symbols of office, the leering, grinning alicorn's death's head staring grotesquely into one's soul as though Faust herself could see and judge through those empty eye sockets, onto the bed behind me as though this was the last time I would ever have to see them again. It was a simple gesture, partly because I wanted out of that uniform but mostly because I wanted to convey to her that we were speaking pony to pony, equal to (relative) equal, rather than as a commissar admonishing a lowly non-commissioned officer.

"You don't like me very much," I said, resting my forehooves on the desk and leaning forwards. "Do you?"

"That's a trick question," she replied. "Isn't it? I say 'yes' and I get punished for disrespecting an officer, I say 'no' and I get punished for lying."

I offered a grin that I hoped was sufficiently carefree to put her at ease. It had the opposite effect. "So you don't like me, then?"

"Just wait a minute, sir, I didn't say that," she said.

Well, it seemed that my attempt to form some sort of agreeable working relationship through my usual faux-good natured badinage simply didn't work with her, probably because she already hated my guts and, if her friend Twilight Sparkle had told her everything about what I was like some ten years ago, which was very likely as that's what friends do apparently, then no amount of forced friendly chatting was going to change that. Rainbow Dash seemed to be somewhat sharper than I had first assumed, and I knew that it was probably to my detriment if I was to keep underestimating her. It was time to cut the wishy-washy, gentle nonsense and just get straight to the heart of the issue; I knew that her uncluttered and straightforward way of thinking, her unrefined manner, and the fact that she would most likely prefer speaking to the contents of a cow's digestive system than to me for an extended period of time, meant that she would appreciate the more direct approach.

"Why do you think I ordered you to say those words to Company Sergeant Major Square Basher?" I asked. I took a sip of the water; it tasted faintly metallic.

Rainbow Dash shrugged, which was a gesture that I immediately found very irritating and I did my utmost to refrain from darting over the desk to give the silly mare a slap. "Because I fell asleep in class?"

"That's part of the reason, yes," I said, leaning over the makeshift table and tapping a hoof idly on the sheet of thin wood. The disturbed dust swirled in the draft. "But not all of it. The truth is that I needed to make an example of you."

"Oh, it's because I answered back, right?"

I nodded my head, and then struggled to contain the sudden wave of nausea that accompanied that movement; it felt as if my brain had sloshed forwards and bumped against the front of my skull. Now I had to stop drinking, thought I, probably for the seventh time that day. "Again, that's part of the reason. Tell me, why did you do what the Sergeant Major told you to do?"

The mare fidgeted in her seat, and gave me the sort of dark look that implied that she felt she was being manipulated somehow. Of course, if that was the case then she would be entirely correct in her assumptions; one could say that the entirety of my job, both as a prince of the realm and the somewhat less important role of commissar, was to manipulate, or 'motivate' to be more politically correct, ponies into doing what I, or rather the state, wants them to do. She hesitated as she carefully considered her answer, and, at length, said, "Because it was an order?"

I let out a sigh calculated to sound mildly disappointed but patient, like that of an exasperated teacher trying and failing to impart the basic concepts of the alphabet to a class of idiot foals. "But why? Faust granted you the gifts of free will with all that it entails, so why did you give that up and do all of the humiliating things?"

Rainbow Dash shrugged again, and then hesitantly reached for her water. "I don't know," she said, taking a sip and then screwing her face up at the taste; the unique flavours imparted by the water purification process tends to be an acquired taste. "I don't know what you want me to say, or what the point of all this is, sir. I mean, orders are supposed to be obeyed, right? That's the point of them."

"The Royal Guard," I said, folding my hooves on my desk as I launched into the speech that I had been mentally writing, ordering, and editing in my mind over the past couple of minutes, "is a vastly complicated organisation that can only work if every single pony works in harmony with everypony else within it, and that means having a strong hierarchical system to ensure that all orders are obeyed without question. You, Acting Squadron Leader Rainbow Dash, whether you appreciate it or not, are now a part of that hierarchy; your trainee Wonderbolts look to you for leadership and, when you must face the enemy in combat, to keep them alive. Understand?"

She nodded her head, but the rather sceptical look on her face said otherwise. "Yeah, I think I get it."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure you do," I continued. "I don't know why the Wonderbolts didn't teach you this in the Academy. This is military leadership at its most basic. The ponies you command will pick up on absolutely everything about you. If you are lazy, inattentive, ill-disciplined, and downright insubordinate to superior officers as you were with me then so too will they. Officers of the Royal Guard lead best by example, and thus far yours has been rather lacking."

Rainbow Dash stared at me harshly, before she slumped in her seat and looked into the glass of water in her hoof, turning it this way and that to make the clear liquid within slosh about against the somewhat grimy glass. Of course, much of what I had just said was complete and utter bollocks of the highest order; if a pony such as me could be considered an inspirational leader by virtue of 'example' without any sense of irony in the slightest, then there wasn't much credence at all to that utterly trite collection of useless management buzzwords. Nevertheless, I stand by the general message of those words; that the character of a Royal Guard unit will invariably reflect that of the officer or NCO that commands it. This theory neatly explains the general incompetence of much of the 3rd Regiment of the Solar Guard before Colonel Rising Star was ignominiously cashiered and why the overwhelming majority of disciplinary cases brought to my attention invariably involve the pegasi of Captain Blitzkrieg's company. Looking at the stroppy mare sitting before me, separated only by this makeshift desk, I could see only further problems down the line from her unit, which could only mean even more infernal paperwork.

"Yeah, you're right," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Of course I'm right," I said, forcing that same grin on my face that I had effected so many times that it was starting to become some sort of uncontrollable facial tic, "I'm the Commissar - it's my job to be right."

I had no idea if I was getting through to her, and to be honest, I knew that if I simply failed to impress upon her the necessity of just doing as she's damn well told then I would have suitable grounds to send her and her ilk back to Canterlot due to their attitude being incompatible with that expected by the Royal Guard. Yet that prideful part of me refused to let me do that, as if it thought that Captain Blitzkrieg and I truly had a chance of moulding these cocky showoffs into effective and disciplined soldiers before Parliament stops being distracted by the debacle beyond our northern borders and decides that it's time to wake Field Marshal Iron Hoof from his self-induced torpor to mount another foolhardy offensive.

Shaking my head, I downed the remainder of my water, quenching my thirst only slightly. "Rainbow Dash, I didn't give you that order just to be spiteful," I lied; spite was at least half of the reason why. "I understand that you come from a different organisation with its own history and traditions. I know that the Wonderbolts trace their lineage to the elite warrior culture of ancient Pegasopolis, and I know that it means they value the initiative of NCOs and junior officers in the field of battle, and historically your leaders have fiercely guarded their independence from the rest of the Royal Guard. However, we are fighting a modern war on modern terms. You will stand with thousands upon thousands of fellow soldiers against the Changeling enemy, for victory can only be achieved through the combined effort of these thousands of soldiers fighting together in harmony."

I paused briefly in my speech to levitate my cap from my bed back upon my head, and effected an expression that I hoped matched that of the grinning, leering brass death's head in terms of its severity. It was, I admit, a cheap, theatrical ploy, but then much of my role as commissar, and indeed as a prince, lies in the theatrical; done with sufficient poise, energy, and perceived honesty, even the most ridiculous of displays can inspire great loyalty in ponies. It helps, of course, if said audience is amenable to such manipulation (my ancestor, Coldblood, once said that it took two ponies to manipulate, one to do it and another to have it done to them, which I believe made him think he had carte blanche to do whatever it is he wanted to do), and the utterly exhausted mare drained from a morning of 'training' and humiliating punishment was in the perfect state of mind to have it poked, prodded and moulded as I saw fit. At least, that's what I was hoping at the time.

I continued, pointing a hoof at Rainbow Dash in the same manner as those ridiculous propaganda posters of Princess Celestia pointing accusingly at the viewer. "You are a tiny cog in the vast Equestrian war machine, so am I, and so is each and every single enlisted guardspony, officer, NCO, clerk, and general out there in the Royal Guard and the War Ministry. We all are. It takes just one cog in this intricate machine to stop working and the whole thing will grind to a halt. Victory can only be achieved through the combined efforts of everypony in the Royal Guard, but it takes the failure of just one pony to do her duty to bring defeat. Understand?"

Rainbow Dash nodded her head and mumbled a quiet 'yes, sir', but I suspected that her acquiescence was more due to a desire to be rid of me than any actual understanding of what I'd said. Nevertheless, the feeling was more than mutual, so I dismissed her from my office and resigned myself to the next few hours thinking about where I could take a short nap without anypony noticing.

***

The days that followed, as ever, settled into a sort of quiet routine. By no means comfortable, the presence of these blue-suited misfit civilians from Canterlot nevertheless just faded into the background of the general misery that was my life. Despite my misgivings, Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts appeared to take my words to heart and conflicts between them and the general command structure soon dropped to what is usually expected by enlisted guardsponies, with one notable exception which I'll come to later. That said, they were still not without their unique challenges: primarily just how in the blazes were they supposed to fit in with standard Royal Guard doctrine. The esteemed writer of that manual so beloved by commanders [Von Pferdwitz, I presume] had neglected to mention the role played by the Wonderbolts in his book, but I imagined that it was written long after they had been relegated from the task of waging war against Equestria's enemies to that of waging war against Equestria's boredom as stunt flyers. ['On War' was written shortly after the Nightmare Heresy and during the last aborted invasion of the Equestrian mainland by the Gryphon Empire, in which the Wonderbolts certainly participated in a military role. Von Pferdwitz described the Wonderbolts in terms close to what we would call today 'special forces', which a commander would use to seek out and identify weak points in the enemy frontline through rapid, lightning strikes or as opportunistic raiding parties to disrupt supply lines behind the front. It is therefore likely that Blueblood either misremembered the text or chose to ignore it just to make a point here.] Blitzkrieg had elected to train them simply as regular pegasi troops, which was a decision that I was probably least qualified to criticise.

Speaking of Captain Blitzkrieg, our lessons began in earnest shortly after the incident with Rainbow Dash. 'Lessons', however, may be a grandiose term for the both of us sitting in my office with me simply reading from an outdated etiquette manual. It was, of course, an exercise in futility, as even if he had somehow managed to absorb the sort of convoluted ritual that ponies of the aspiring nouveau riche seem to imagine that their social betters, myself counted amongst them of course, allow to dictate their lives and must therefore be emulated like the common poseurs they are, it was still unlikely that anypony would extend to him the same courtesy that he would to them.

Nevertheless, we persevered. Each lesson would often start with an argument, as most conversations with our esteemed Captain did, about why whatever it was that I was trying to teach him would be of any use to him at all. I recall vividly one occasion where I tried to explain the various different varieties of cutlery and their place and use on the dining table, on the off-chance that he might be asked to dine with royalty (which he already did, with me, in that same bloody trough filled with brown stew, but that didn't count). It was a balmy, humid evening as we sat on the floor in my office, separated by a sheet of canvas cloth upon which I had projected a magical illusion of the sort of lavish dinner set that Blitzkrieg was under the quaint, naive impression that he might be invited to one day.

I had just finished explaining to my thoroughly bored student the mechanics of the vichyssoise fork, and once he had got past the initial shock of the idea that one may eat soup with a fork, Blitzkrieg frowned and said, "A lot of this posh stuff is just bollocks, isn't it? I mean, it don't really matter."

I could not help myself but nod and smile, and made a mental note to work on improving his grammar in the near future. His general lack of eloquence aside, I could not help but agree with him. A year prior, before the crimson sash and the peaked cap were thrust upon me, I might have reacted with anger rather than mere bemusement. My experiences of war had helped put a few things into perspective for me, but alas I had reputation amongst the highest echelons of Canterlot's social elite to maintain. Though I wanted nothing more than to return to my old life complete with that blissfully myopic, ignorant, and self-centred view of the world, part of me dreaded the day that I would have to immerse myself once more into that entirely superficial and intellectually and emotionally vacant realm.

"Yes," I said, turning over the illusory vichyssoise fork this way and that in the air just between us, "but it's 'bollocks' that some ponies take very seriously. The things that 'don't really matter', as you put it, are those that help a pony become a true gentlecolt."

Blitzkrieg squinted at me. "If you say so, mate."

"Trust me on this," I said. "One day, you'll thank me for all of this." Placing the fork-illusion back down amongst its brethren on the cloth, I swept my hoof over the array of cutlery that filled the sheet. "Now, point to the salad fork."

Naturally, this period of relative quiet would not last, and though I did not know it for certain at the time the arrival of the Wonderbolts signalled the restart of yet more unpleasantness in my life. However, I was simply content to wait out this quiet time, all the while making mental preparations for trying to worm my way out when offensive operations inevitably started once again; a bit like falling from a great height with sufficient time before one hits the ground to ponder whether it was better to aim for a lake or try one's luck to steer towards something soft, like the space between Rainbow Dash's ears.

That is not to say that those weeks were not without stress, of course. I don't know for certain who started it, though I have my suspicions that Rainbow Dash was if not directly responsible then at the very least heavily involved, but over the course of those few days after the arrival of the Wonderbolts the entire damned fortress became embroiled in a prank war. Evidently, the fault of its escalation lies primarily with NCOs being under the naive misapprehension that what eventually escalated into a severe disciplinary headache for Yours Truly was 'harmless' and 'just a bit of fun'. Bored soldiers will often find a means of entertaining themselves, but being very much outsiders the Wonderbolts had decided that the usual methods of drinking, gambling, whoring, or just staring off into the middle distance and missing home and loved ones were not for them.

It started small and fairly inconsequential, as these sorts of things often do; spray cheese decanted into a helmet so that it melted and dripped down one's face as the wearer wore it in the hot sun, itching powder lined inside a flight suit, and a bucket of water balanced on a half-opened door. However, it was not long before one pony, Royal Guard or Wonderbolt I don't know but I certainly have my suspicions, took what should have been a good-spirited if foalish game born of the friendly sort of inter-force rivalry propagated by the regimental system and turned it into something far more bitter and, above all, disruptive. Soon reports started appearing on my desk, written by those ponies who took the decision that it was worth enduring the presence of Cannon Fodder and his unique bouquet of miscellaneous odours to drop it on his desk and dart out of the room before it became overpowering, that rations of 'brown stew' had been spiked with illicitly-obtained hallucinogens just before an inspection by some visiting local politician, personal items and keepsakes had been stolen and either defaced or simply hidden in various parts of the encampment, to suits of armour replaced with frilly Prench lingerie sourced from Faust knows where.

At the time I did not concern myself much with such matters, believing rightly that correcting these lapses in discipline and good sense on behalf of the common soldiery were the purview of their non-commissioned officers and hardly worth the time of the regimental commissar. After all, I had rather more important and more severe cases to deal with when it came to enforcing those sections of Princesses' Regulations that I deemed worthy enough and my hooves were full enough as they were in subtly trying to convince the General Staff that Army Group Centre was in no shape to mount any offensive operation in the near future. Therefore I half-heartedly assigned a few punishment details and the odd flogging and hoped that would be the end of it. What I hadn't counted on at the time was that as the prank war started to turn into a personal vendetta that the non-commissioned officers who should have been at the very least restraining those soldiers were not only encouraging such ridiculous behaviour but quite often masterminded some of these illicit adventures. It was fortunate that I had managed to sweep this under the rug and apportion blame to the appropriate stooges before it could rightly be levelled at my head, and therefore threaten my precariously nascent reputation as some untouchable exemplar of Equestrian gallantry.

I was only forced to act when Quartermaster Pencil Pusher confronted me on the issue one day, ruining what was otherwise a pleasant and relaxed Sunday morning spent reading an erotic book thinly masquerading as both a 'romance' novel and actual literature (one should recognise the sort if I describe its cover - a shapely mare in a silk dress held by a stallion with a more than slight resemblance to me against a backdrop depicting either a castle or a lavish country mansion, with the author's name, which tended to be Twilight Velvet or one of her many pseudonyms, printed in bold letters so as to attract the sort of bored, unfulfilled housewife or simple degenerate like me who read this sort of thing) in one of the abandoned parapets of the castle keep. This was one of the few places here that I could afford privacy, short of wandering into the desert by myself, as ponies had become accustomed to barging into my office without warning to demand my attention on some trivial matter. Up there I had shade and relative quiet, with the bustle and noise of the encampment down below muffled into the background like the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Those few moments of undisturbed solitude each day, if I could afford this luxury in my schedule, is probably what stopped me from falling into the sort of deep, bitter despair that I constantly felt nagging at the ragged edges of my consciousness. The war felt so far away.

My reading of a particularly enticing chapter, which was so lavishly written that I began to suspect that Twilight Sparkle's home life was not as stable as was generally assumed, was disturbed by the sound I dreaded the most in these self-imposed exiles - hoofsteps. I looked up from my book, tucking it away within my stormcoat and hoping that whomever had dared to disturb me did not see its cover, to see our Quartermaster picking his way delicately around the scattered piles of debris and dust strewed about on the wooden floor. He avoided them as if they carried some sort of contagious disease.

"Oh," he said as he approached, "there you are, sir."

"Pencil Pusher," I said, rising to my hooves. I was damned if I was going to spend this conversation sitting there like an idiot and looking up to him. He was one of the very few ponies with whom I made no effort to hide my innate dislike of, though I don't think he was the least bit upset about that and, if anything, he appeared to accept the fact that he just wasn't terribly popular with anypony at all with a sort of stoicism that could have been found admirable. It was more likely, however, that he simply didn't care what others thought of him, which I suspected is what allowed him to perform his job of maintaining the regiment's supplies to a level of competence remarkable for the Royal Guard. "You're looking for me?"

"I want to talk to you," he said, abrupt as ever. Pencil Pusher brushed irritably at the black ink stains that spread across his entirely superfluous breastplate like vomit on a drunkard's shirt. "This is getting entirely out of hoof."

"What's getting out of hoof?" I snapped.

"The vandalism of Their Highnesses' equipment," he said incredulously, as if it were something that I should have already been aware of.

From his otherwise immaculate breastplate our esteemed quartermaster retrieved a battered, used notepad and flicked through the well-hoofed pages, squinting down at the spidery hoofwriting that made Cannon Fodder's look like a perfect example of the calligrapher's art. It was some time before he found the correct page, and during that time I entertained thoughts about throwing the impudent, arrogant, personality-deficient earth pony from this parapet and onto the perfectly arranged stacks of breastplates, sabatons, helmets, spears, swords, haversacks, saddles, and so on that he spent the entirety of his waking life lovingly doting over as though they were his own foals.

A stiff but warm breeze fluttered through around the tower, buffeting at my stormcoat. It was around mid-afternoon, and the noise below suddenly grew louder. Time for tea, I presumed; it was a simple matter of fact for regiments raised from Trottingham that at precisely four o'clock absolutely everything stopped for a tea break. While others might have found this tradition bizarre, or even dangerous in times of war and certainly in a place where Equestria ended just beyond a distressingly fragile stone wall, I for one took comfort in the ability of these soldiers to enforce some semblance of normality, no matter how minor, on a very abnormal situation. I should have been down there, thought I, enjoying a nice cup of tea, further impressing my entirely false reputation for the 'common touch' upon the common guardsponies and the fawning junior officers alike. Instead, I was stuck with this odious little bureaucrat.

"To date," he said, at length, "twelve breastplates have been painted pink, four decorative helmet fins have been cut into rude shapes, six Wonderbolt 'Hurricane'-pattern flight suits have been shredded into confetti [From this we can infer that either the supply of equipment to the Wonderbolt squadron 'Flying Tank' came under the authority of the 1st Regiment of the Night Guards or that Quartermaster Pencil Pusher was unaware of the fact that Wonderbolt equipment was supplied independently of the War Ministry's supply commission. With the lack of written records on the matter and taking into account Pencil Pusher's personality it is safe to assume the former], eleven spears have been forcibly..."

"Yes, yes, yes," I said, waving a hoof irritably in an effort to shut him up. "I’ve already assigned punishment duty for the ponies responsible."

“Well,” he said, shaking his head. “It looks like it wasn’t enough. If anything, it’s escalated.”

“So I take it you want me to do something about it right now?”

Pencil Pusher opened his mouth, apparently to say something, but stopped himself just before the words could come out. I watched with faint amusement as his narrowed eyes glanced almost imperceptibly up at the grinning skull on my cap leering down on him, then to the well-used sabre strapped across my back with its worn handle just visible over my right shoulder. "Yes," he said, licking his dry lips and looking away at something on the ground instead. "Please. We can't let this abuse of Royal property continue unabated."

I was about to say that it was his responsibility to do that, being the quartermaster and therefore responsible for the maintenance of Royal Guard equipment any improper use or vandalism of said equipment was up to him to investigate. At the time, however, I remained ignorant of the true scale of the problem facing me and how it was all about to explode messily right in my face.

Author's Note

I'm not normally a fan of self-inserts, except when they're self-deprecating and don't steal the spotlight from the actual main characters, but I couldn't resist having an exaggerated version of myself as Pencil Pusher.

Honour and Blood (Part 5)

I have never been one to believe in such things as fate and destiny. The idea that one's life has been planned out to utterly minute detail by powers beyond even Celestia's comprehension is not only horrifying by its implication that the freedom to think and act of our own individual free will is merely a shallow illusion, but it is also ludicrous to imagine Faust had the spare time between creating the universe and making sure that it doesn't collapse in on itself in an orgy of mayhem and insanity to plan events as minor as the time that I lost my virginity. That I have survived where other ponies have not is not down to some divinely-penned cosmic scheme, but through my own under-hoofed cunning, Faust-given ability to lie convincingly, and my unique ability to do something obviously cowardly and somehow be seen as all the more heroic for it. There is no pre-ordained order of things; merely choices and their consequences. I mention this pseudo-intellectual nonsense masquerading clumsily as philosophy (which is largely pseudo-intellectual nonsense even at the best of times) not because I want to paint myself as some pretentious poseur but merely to demonstrate that the events that I am about to describe were merely the product of some inadvertent good timing on my part and not part of some cosmic scheme.

Pencil Pusher was not what one might call a sparkling conversationalist. Our journey towards the main quartermaster stores located deep within the dark bowels of the fortress was conducted almost entirely in silence, with the dour, uncommunicative earth pony apparently finding no discomfort in the awkward silence between us. I considered the idea that he might get on well with Cannon Fodder, if only due to the fact that on the rare occasion that either of them had made the decision to speak it was with sentences that had all of the emotional weight and interesting content of the financial pages of the Equestrian Times, which meant it was unlikely for them to fall out over anything.

"So," I said, finding the relative quiet rather interminable, "how did you know where to find me?"

"Huh?" Pencil Pusher turned his head over his shoulder, but otherwise did not slow his walk.

I bit my lower lip out of frustration, and said: "How did you know to find me on top of the tower?"

"Oh." He shrugged his shoulders, which caused the entirely superfluous armour plates that covered his body to clatter noisily as though somepony had upended a box of heavy cutlery. "You weren't in your office, so I went through each and every room of the fortress until I found you."

I couldn't say I was terribly surprised, and I was about to say something along the lines of 'you obviously have far too much time on your hooves' when, passing a closed door, I heard what must have been mess tins filled to the brim with brown stew dropped on the floor with a clatter of tin and a wet splatter followed by several raised voices arguing angrily. Though I had stopped by the door to listen to the escalating volume and violence of a shouting match which must inevitably be followed by a brawl, Pencil Pusher continued walking. When he realised that I was no longer following him, he likewise stopped, turned his head over his shoulder at me, pulled a face like he had just tasted rancid milk, and then pretended to find great interest in the irregular arrangement of stones that made up the walls.

Realising that he would be of no help at all, I ignored my companion and pushed the door open. Halfway in its opening, a large, heavy object, most likely a heavily-armoured stallion judging by the fleeting glimpse that I received, collided with the door and rammed it shut. The shouting beyond had grown louder, despite the sound being muffled by the thick wood, and was punctuated emphatically the distinctive thuds of hooves striking both mithril armour and bare skin, followed by yet more defenceless mess tins clattering to the floor. While I had no real desire to get involved in one of the many brawls that bored soldiers inevitably start to pass the time, usually over some minor perceived slight or a mare that more than one stallion had taken a liking to, simply trying to ignore it as most ponies might have done in my position would have severely dented the persona of actually caring about my job that I had inadvertently created. Besides, I would rather risk grievous bodily harm than endure another long and tedious meeting with Pencil Pusher again.

I pushed carefully at the door and found that the obstruction had been moved, or more likely had got up to take revenge on whomever had thrown him against the portal. It opened to reveal a scene of total chaos. The room was a relatively small hall, about the size of two tennis courts stacked against one another, and normally served as one of the many small common rooms inside the castle itself. The rows of primitively-crafted tables, stools, and feeding troughs once lovingly cared for by the gallant chefs of the Catering Corps [As any pony who has served with the Royal Guard Catering Corps will tell you, the 'chefs' have equal rank and status as private soldiers of any other frontline regiment. Although they are not generally expected to be involved directly in combat, there are numerous recorded instances of Changeling sneak attacks on supposedly safe rear echelon sections being driven back by troops of the Catering Corps and those of other logistical and administrative units] had been reduced to broken splinters fit only for fuel for campfires. The source was what appeared to be a grotesque, cloying monstrosity of limbs, bodies, heads, and weapons improvised from the broken furniture that churned and rippled like a tempest. The noise, too, once muffled by the ancient stone and solid wood, became a cacophony of jeers, insults, and bestial wordless screaming.

There must have been a dozen or so ponies, though it was hard to tell in the swirling melee, and I spotted the sombre steel-grey of the Night Guards clashing with the gaudy blue and yellow of the Wonderbolts. From what I could tell, the Wonderbolts, being outnumbered and generally less experienced in the brutality of hoof-to-hoof brawling, were suffering the worst of it. This 'storm' had a relatively calm and placid eye - my aide Cannon Fodder had restrained an extremely irate and vocal Rainbow Dash by simply sitting on her back, who made clear her displeasure by flailing those limbs not pinned down by the sweaty mass of the pony on top of her and by describing in graphic detail what she was going to do to him when she got free. Elsewhere, a large, burly pegasus with wings so absurdly small that they should not have been capable of getting him off the ground held a guardspony in a headlock whilst screaming the word 'YEAH' over and over, as said guardspony attempted in vain to free himself by repeatedly kicking his hind legs into the Wonderbolt's side. Globules of brown stew were smeared on the walls, amidst the impressively-sized dents and gouges caused by stray hooves and heads, in interesting shapes rather like a modern art exhibition.

As I stepped into the room, just on the edge of the brawl, a full mess tin arced gracefully through the air and crashed into the wall a few inches to the left of my head. Its lukewarm contents splattered messily on the wall, with some flecks of the horrid brown stew landing on my cheek and my cap. So far they hadn't noticed me, or if they did they didn't care. I turned my head and saw that Pencil Pusher was still standing there, gormlessly looking out of the window apparently doing his best not to get involved.

"Don't just stand there," I snapped, "go and fetch the provosts. Now!"

Pencil Pusher vacillated, before turning on his hooves and galloping down the corridor. By now the fight had shown no sign of dying down as the combatants grow more exhausted. If anything, it seemed to be getting worse, as punches and kicks were thrown with greater accuracy and vehemence, as though the tensions built up between the ponies of the Royal Guard and the Wonderbolts suddenly overwhelmed what little sense the common soldier possessed. I could not afford to simply stand back and wait for the provosts to arrive to break up the fight, and if anything their usual clumsy and violent approach to enforcing discipline was likely to result in somepony getting severely hurt or killed, which would ultimately reflect badly on me.

I spotted Captain Blitzkrieg amongst the rabble, and I would have bet an entire month's income (which, without meaning to brag, was quite substantial) that if he did not start this latest addition to a long line of annoyances then he at least pushed it over the edge. He was shouting, though I could not discern his words, at Cannon Fodder, who I deduced had sat on Rainbow Dash as a means of keeping them apart.

"STOP!" I shouted as loud as I could manage. It is to my continued surprise to this day that it actually worked. As though time itself had somehow ceased in its inexorable advance, the brawling ponies froze still, some with forehooves in mid-swing, but with one exception - I suddenly became aware of all eyes now fixed upon me, and while some had the good sense to look sheepish at having been caught the majority I could tell were still possessed of the rising, animalistic bloodlust that had temporarily taken over their minds. Though striking an officer carried with it the death penalty at the time, especially if said officer happened to be both a commissar and a crown prince of Equestria, good sense sadly becomes an exceedingly rare attribute when a relatively large number of ponies are grouped together and get rather emotional about something. If I didn't follow up quickly enough or used the wrong phrasings without the backup of a small army of armed provosts I could end up uniting the two groups against me.

[It was reported that Blueblood's exclamation was heard from outside of the castle keep itself, implying that he had involuntarily used the Royal Canterlot Voice. This may explain why the fight ended so abruptly.]

Authority is as much projecting an image of possessing it as it is actually having it, and for once the abuse that I had previously suffered at the hooves of Princess Luna paid off. Though I must have looked like but a pale imitation of my daemonic auntie, the effect of standing tall in that uniform so carefully designed to radiate the stern, iron-hard discipline expected by the Royal Guard, and effecting an expression that not only exuded disapproval but hinted at the severity of the consequences to come should that discipline be violated, appeared to have some effect, as the stallions and mares untangled themselves from one another to stand awkwardly amidst the wreckage of the room. From behind a huge upturned cooking pot two ponies wearing the stained white aprons emblazoned with the symbol of the Catering Corps [A large, steaming cauldron suspended over a stylised flame with the motto 'Nos Sustinere', which is translated as 'We Sustain'] peeked out tentatively from their hiding place and stared with open-mouthed horror at the carnage.

"Cannon Fodder," I said, spotting my aide still in the approximate middle of the gaggle of ponies.

"Yes, sir?" he said. His familiarly calm and vacant tone of voice was oddly reassuring to hear.

"Kindly get off Acting Flight Sergeant Rainbow Dash, will you? And while you're at it, go and fetch us some mops and washcloths."

"Yes, sir."

With Cannon Fodder's mass no longer pinning her down, Rainbow Dash staggered to her hooves with a disgusted expression on her face, which, after that ordeal, had a rather sickly green tinge. She quietly muttered something about wanting to take a week-long bath and would even tolerate using Rarity's impressive collection of lotions, shampoos, oils, perfumes, and other assorted alchemical substances to rid herself of the memory of my aide's distinct aroma. I ignored her protests, and those of the other ponies around her, Wonderbolt and Night Guard alike, and knelt down to start collecting the jagged splinters of what was probably a wooden stool into my hooves.

Every now and again I would glance up to see the group of ponies staring gormlessly at me with expressions of confusion in varying degrees of severity. Nevertheless I continued with my task, despite this being mere servant work and obviously beneath somepony of my social standing. It did, however, have the desired effect of distracting them from whatever it was that had caused the fight, which was something that I planned to find out later at the expense of attending yet another tedious meeting with Iron Hoof and the rest of the General Staff. While the usual methods of shouting, screaming, and the threat and use of violence have their places in enforcing some semblance of order and discipline on the common soldiery, quite often another, less direct method is more effective in the long term.

"Uh, sir?" said Rainbow Dash, having pushed herself to the fore.

I had by now collected a sizeable pile of debris, which was being threatened menacingly by a pair of dainty blue spandex-clad forehooves. Looking up at Rainbow Dash was a novel concept for me, though even crouched down as I was my head was roughly level with her chest.

"Yes?" I said, feigning surprise at being interrupted from my work.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm tidying up," I said. Getting to my hooves again and pushing the small pile of splinters neatly to the side against the wall, I looked over at the sea of somewhat bewildered faces staring gormlessly back at me. "Is anypony going to help me? I don't think it's fair to leave this mess to the Catering Corps to clear up, unless you'd all prefer to serve the Princesses by mucking out the latrines for the rest of your lives, which, I might add, may become distressingly short based on your actions over the next few minutes?"

There was a subdued murmur of quiet assent from the soldiers, and those who had managed to escape the worst of the injuries, which extended mainly to sprained hooves, black eyes, and the odd broken wing, slowly started to get to work clearing away broken tables and chairs. The task was greatly aided when Cannon Fodder returned bearing the necessary equipment, and before long the soldiers and Wonderbolts had overcome their initial awkwardness and started working together to clean the room, especially when the NCOs and Captain Blitzkrieg apparently remembered that with their rank came certain responsibilities and expectations that needed to be followed. There were a few minor debacles, of course, which were to be expected when one remembers that this solution was merely a temporary salve to what must have been a deep-rooted issue that had somehow escaped my notice (which is not all that surprising, if you had been paying attention and remembered that as commissar I tended to simply drift along and hope to get through the war with as minimal fuss as possible and preferably still alive). Nevertheless, the occasional re-conflagration of hostilities was easily doused with a sharp, stern reminder from me that I could just as easily have them all flogged instead.

In truth I felt quite proud of myself, for once, for having, if not resolved this issue, then at least ameliorated it in the short term without anypony getting seriously hurt. I would have to sort out something more serious later, and especially have a word with the officers, but for now, the forcing the two groups to work together under the threat of equal punishment from me had the desired effect of keeping their tempers under control. The Royal Guard command structure is reliant upon that theory of management which states that ponies are best motivated and will work better as a cohesive unit when united under a leader that they all mutually fear, and while I had always sought to encourage the soldiers to genuinely like me (which will make them more willing to risk their lives to save mine), sometimes the traditional methods have their place.

As the guilty parties worked together, with a small modicum of something approaching friendly co-operation, I had deduced from various off-hoof comments and from the minor arguments that continued to flare up occasionally that Captain Blitzkrieg had made a rather insulting comment about the span of one of the Wonderbolt's wings and how their diminutive size related to another part of his anatomy [There is, of course, no evidence to this myth]. Though the stallion had taken the insult about as well as can be expected for one insecure enough about his masculinity, it was Rainbow Dash who had stepped in, and it was only a matter of time before it came to blows. In truth, I was more disappointed than angry. I had hoped that my etiquette lessons with the Captain were sinking in.

I was busy scrubbing at some blood splatter on the floor close to the door when the provosts arrived. Two pairs of immaculately clean sabatons stepped into view before me, and I tilted my head up slowly, seeing a small but pudgy and pampered frame squeezed into the brilliant gold lacquered armour of the Solar Guard with the glittering star emblazoned on the chest sparkling even in the dim light, and then up at the face of the very last pony that I ever wanted to see.

"Cleaning the floors?" said Lieutenant Scarlet Letter, the smugness in his voice only worsening my blood pressure. "Isn't that a bit beneath you, Prince?" My favourite of my many titles that I had hitherto collected rolled from his fat, blubbery mouth like raw sewage flowing from an industrial waste outlet pipe straight into the Detrot River.

I rose to my hooves, feeling a bit more assured of myself now towering over the stallion. The shock of seeing him again had rattled me, and for a moment I was rendered utterly speechless. Despite this, I kept my expression suitably rigid so as not to betray that weakness, knowing that he'd certainly exploit it in one form or another. I bought some time by instructing the provosts, the four that had arrived and looked thoroughly disappointed they weren't going to be using their truncheons to crack skulls today, to take those too wounded to help clean up to the infirmary.

"That's Commissar-Prince Blueblood to you," I said, doing my damnedest to sound as though his sudden and thoroughly unwelcome appearance, or even the fact that I was still forced to share the same planet as him, was something quite ordinary. "These stallions and mares respect an officer who would never give them an order that he would be unwilling to perform himself."

Scarlet Letter smiled in that invariably insincere manner that for some reason only seasoned politicians are capable of. "Of course, sir," he said, casting a critical eye over the haggard, worn state of my uniform in contrast to his parade ground-quality armour. If I didn't know any better, I would have assumed that he had bought another suit simply to be annoying. "How silly of me. I return here from Canterlot to find His Royal Highness the Prince Blueblood doing the work of his servants. Oh, how the society pages will relish this news. It's a shame I neglected to bring my camera."

It's a matter of course that I adamantly refused to allow this impudent, traitorous imbecile the satisfaction of getting the desired reaction out of me, and though it went against every single fibre of my noble, aristocratic upbringing during which my father impressed on me most earnestly that any insult to myself or my bloodline must be repaid a thousandfold, I simply shook my head and said: "Better to do the work of servants than that of the enemy, Lieutenant. Don't imagine that I have forgotten about what you did."

That insufferable grin spread wider on Scarlet's face, and he tossed his head back in what he assumed was a defiant gesture. "The court of inquiry acquitted me on all charges, and through appeal my commission and rank were rightfully returned to me."

Looking back, I might have spared myself quite a lot of misery if I had insulted him, challenged him to a duel, and then ran him through on the field of honour. At that time, however, I was acutely aware of the way the wind was starting to blow, the shouts of reform that were inflamed by Twilight Sparkle's yet-to-be-published report, and I was determined to find myself remembered as being on the 'right' side of history. The reader might ask why I had not exercised my right of summary execution, to which I would say that this assumption is based on the thoroughly unrealistic expectations of how commissars work brought about by those horrendously awful stories written by ponies who wouldn't know a real commissar if one turned up drunk on their doorstep and slept with their wives. Summary execution, despite its nature, invariably generates a lot of paperwork after the fact, and executing Scarlet Letter more than a full month after the incident on frankly tenuous evidence after he had been 'acquitted' would reflect badly on me, for being damned unsporting for one.

If he came here simply to gloat over me, which I suspected that he must be doing to placate his fragile ego, then it was working. Faust Almighty, these damned reformists in Parliament speak of equitable justice for all based on reason, and yet when one of their own becomes embroiled in scandal out of their own idiocy they indulge in the same rank corruption that they accuse the ancien regime of. I consoled myself in the most unlikely of sources: Twilight Sparkle. I had faith, despite my misgivings about her, that her commission would inject some much-needed sense back into the Royal Guard, and therefore I would never see the likes of Scarlet Letter again.

I could have maintained this back-and-forth duel of witticisms all day and potentially all night if I sent Cannon Fodder out to locate an agreeable bottle of wine to sustain me, but it was getting me nowhere and Captain Fine Vintage, my regular supplier of such libations, was still several miles away at Maredun. It was lucky then that Captain Blitzkrieg had chosen this particular moment to slink silently by my side, carrying one of the dustpans and brushes that Cannon Fodder had so helpfully brought along in his mouth. I was only alerted to his presence, his movements, despite his steel boots that should have tapped noisily on the ancient stone, disturbingly noiseless as always, when he dropped his cleaning paraphernalia with a clatter to the floor.

"We've just about finished," he said. "Rainbow Dash tried to ram a saucepan on my head, but other than that..."

Blitzkrieg stopped mid-sentence, and then looked directly at Lieutenant Scarlet Letter, who had drawn himself up to look as imposing as his small, pudgy frame would allow, with an expression of utter horror as though he had just accidentally walked in on Princess Celestia indulging with a hapless member of her personal guard in her chambers with industrial amounts of whipped cream and the rather more interesting artefacts from the royal collection of whips and physical restraints [I would like to assure readers that such rumours about the initiation rites of the Princesses' Life Guards are entirely spurious and have no grounding in reality beyond the fevered imagination of deluded fantasists]. Nevertheless, I think he recovered admirably.

"You've got some bloody nerve coming back here!" he blurted out incredulously, jabbing a hoof against the pristine, shimmering breastplate of Scarlet Letter, leaving a smear of dust and grime.

Scarlet Letter cleared his throat and stepped back, brushing at the mark on his armour irritably with a white hoofkerchief. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I have merely returned to my rightful place on the frontline to lead my platoon to glory, in the name of the Princesses. I refuse to be insulted by the likes of you."

"Yeah, right," snarled Blitzkrieg. "Be lucky insulting you is the worst thing I'll do to you. I lost a lot of good stallions that day, and none of their spirits will be thanking me while I stand here with you still drawing breath, mate."

"How dare you? I'm not your 'mate'. Commissar, how can you allow your officers to be so damned uncouth?"

"Better, uh, 'uncouth' than a traitor."

I could have let this continue, ending with Blitzkrieg being arrested by the provosts and then court-martialled in a show trial and then hanged for having stabbed Scarlet Letter in what part of his neck was accessible for the rolls of decadent fat with a spoon, but as I had rather grown attached to the Captain despite his rough nature I decided to intervene. His desire to improve himself, though ultimately a wasted effort, was endearing enough to me to generate some modicum of concern for his well-being. As Scarlet Letter and Blitzkrieg continued to exchange verbal barbs at one another to increasingly lowered degrees of wit and taste, I noticed for the first time that behind the unwelcome unicorn was another pony clad in the distinctive black uniform of the commissar. My stomach made that peculiar sinking feeling again, as though it had had enough of this nonsense and simply vacated my abdomen.

"Excuse me," I said, finally putting an end to this intellectually stimulating conversation. I pushed my way past Blitzkrieg and Scarlet Letter and approached this new pony. She was a thin, tall, willowy unicorn mare who resembled a bundle of sticks carefully arranged into the shape of an equine and dressed in the uniform of a commissar. Small, pale eyes stared at me from under a fringe of a maroon-coloured mane, flattened by a peaked cap in far better condition than mine, and though her rigid poise was that of a pony doing her damnedest to appear dignified and calm when presented with somepony she greatly admired, those eyes twinkled with expectant awe.

"I don't believe we've met," I said, offering a hoof out to her. "I'm Commissar-Prince Blueblood."

"Commissar Gliding Moth, sir," she said curtly, and gave a small, stiff bow of her head. Her voice, like that small gesture with its underlying tones of military efficiency and authoritarianism hidden beneath what should have been the softness of a young mare, put me in mind of Princess Luna. I could not help but wonder how much of the darker of my two aunties had rubbed off on what I took to be a young, impressionable mare whose life must be wasted in the Commissariat. "Can I just say how much of an honour it is for me to finally meet you. We've all heard so much about you."

"Not everything, I hope," I said, grinning.

"Sir?"

"That was a joke, Gliding." Well, in truth I was only half-joking. I could tell already I was not going to enjoy my time with this humourless mare, and made a mental note to keep any contact with her to a minimum.

When I realised that she was not going to shake my hoof I placed it back on the ground and pretended to ignore that slight; it seemed that whatever training my fellow commissars had been put through (which I had skipped, mercifully perhaps) was not content enough to purge its neophytes of its sense of humour but also what little good manners this benighted generation had. At the very least, she was polite enough to fake a dignified titter of laughter, however poorly.

"Your report on the Battle of Black Venom Pass was required reading in my last year at the Academy," she said. "The first time our principles were applied in the field is no joke, sir."

"It's nice to know somepony reads those things. Nevertheless, it's good to see you here, I thought I might be left alone here by myself."

She gave a small nod of her head, which made her fringe flutter gracelessly over her eyes. "I have been attached to Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's platoon for the duration of my final year. The rest of my cohort have been attached to other regiments across Equestria, but I asked Princess Luna personally for a post on the frontlines."

It was then that I noticed her dainty, thin waist was devoid of the ceremonial crimson sash that was as much a symbol of the commissar as the peaked cap and the absence of a sense of humour or a sane perspective on life. She was a trainee commissar, then, as much as Rainbow Dash and her Wonderbolts were merely enthusiastic amateurs. The prospect of letting her go and get herself martyred pointlessly in the name of Equestria and the Princesses went flying out of the window and onto the metaphorical dung heap the second I realised, with the sudden and inexplicable horror of a pony standing upon a rope bridge and for the first time noticing the supports about to snap, that not only would I be expected to make sure that she survived, but also to act as some sort of mentor and guiding hoof for her. Literally anypony, even Cannon Fodder, could have served that role better than me, but alas, the convoluted circumstances which had thus far ruined what was a comfortable life for me have sought only to degrade it further.

That she was crazy, stupid, and zealous enough to request a frontline regiment when there were plentiful quiet postings in the civilised portions of Equestria available spoke volumes, and bore ill-tidings for my well-being. On the other hoof, having her watch over Lieutenant Scarlet Letter, and her likely being far less tolerating of his idiocy than me, should alleviate some of the burden on me. When Faust closes a door She opens a window, as the commoners might say.

"How admirable," was all that I could say.

Her shadowed eyes looked around the room, which by now was one of two halves: the half that had been restored to some semblance of cleanliness and the other that was still an utter mess. One could determine a visible frontline on the war on untidiness by following where the globules of congealing brown stew stopped where the bare stone walls began. Our gallant soldiers had launched a number of offensives with mops and brooms but a true breakthrough had yet to be made, much like the actual war we were supposed to have been fighting.

"What happened here?" she asked.

Scarlet Letter snorted contemptuously. "An outbreak of ill discipline typical of the First Regiment of the Night Guards. Brought about by its low-born and ill-mannered officers and a spineless political officer too obsessed with pursuing fantastical conspiracy theories to..."

An appropriate glare from yours truly (and, presumably, Captain Blitzkrieg, who was still standing next to me and was sizing up the new Commissar) was enough to stop that diatribe from developing to the point where I would finally have solid grounds to remove his head from the rest of his body. His tone of voice and the speed with which the words tumbled out one after another from his blubbery lips implied to me that he had spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time rehearsing this speech in his head and had been looking forward to delivering it to me for so long. Fortunately for him, and much to my irritation, he made an excuse about having to inspect his platoon and made bid a hasty retreat back into the darkness of the corridors where he and other filth like him belonged.

Blitzkrieg nudged me in the shoulder with a hoof, and then drew it across his throat, his head tilted back to expose it. "One word, Blueblood," he whispered, "and I can make it look like an accident."

"A minor brawl," I said, hoping to distract Gliding from Blitzkrieg's ill-considered words. "So we're cleaning up the mess, and I'll decide on punishment following my investigation." An investigation which, I should point out, I had very little intention of pursuing too hard; give everypony extra latrine duty and perhaps some community service with the Catering Corps to make up for the ruined mess and I could spend the rest of my afternoon enjoying the remainder of that lascivious novel.

Gliding Moth looked over at the mess impassively, and then raised an eyebrow imperiously when her gaze fell upon Captain Blitzkrieg and the bright red mark in the shape of a hoofprint just visible under his dusty grey fur. "Surely the pony who struck an officer must be hanged," she said, "or at least flogged to within an inch of his life?"

I noted that Rainbow Dash, who had been lingering nearby and was doing her damnedest to look as though she was most certainly not eavesdropping, started whistling conspicuously as she trotted away to scrub at the farthest possible wall away from Gliding Moth. Every now and again I would catch sight of her looking over at me.

"There are extenuating circumstances," I said, "which may mean that a less severe form of correction is more appropriate. Captain Blitzkrieg here is not entirely without blame."

The strange, quizzical expression on Gliding's face only grew more intense. "But the Regulations are very clear on this matter."

"They are," I said, nodding my head slowly to show that I understood her point of view, even if I did not agree with it. "But we are trying to integrate a new unit into the Royal Guard command structure, and it would benefit nopony if we were to start executing and flogging their members before they have even had a good look at the enemy."

The mare chewed on her lower lip. "Surely discipline must be rigidly enforced?"

[Though Princesses' Regulations and the Royal Guard penal code are unequivocal on the matter of assaulting a commissioned officer, commissars were, and still are, given considerable leeway in interpreting these rules as Blueblood described. However, they are not beyond reproach as the Commissariat itself may investigate the actions of its commissars and punish where necessary.]

I offered a small, reassuring smile. "I'll ensure these hooligans get punished appropriately. They are good stallions, and I have had the honour of fighting with them twice against the enemy. It would be a shame to waste their lives or their health when both could be better spent more productively."

It must have been a bit of a disappointment for Gliding Moth to have finally met me. I don't know what manner of propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies had been indoctrinated into her by whatever training program the Commissariat had put this perfectly innocent young filly through, but I imagined it had, for one reason or another, placed me as some sort of perfect example of what a commissar should be. While I was no stranger to being placed on a pedestal, I tended to prefer it in my capacity as the leading light of Canterlot's upper class society, not in a situation where I found myself in mortal danger. To find that this so-called paragon was in fact rather more lazy and pragmatic than the idealised version of me that had been projected by the official versions of the events at Black Venom Pass and the Siege must have been rather disheartening.

She stuck around, however, as we finished cleaning up the rest of the room, though she did not do much else but watch with that enigmatic expression of quiet and understated confusion. As I worked on tidying up the pile of splintered furniture into a neat little pile in the corner, Captain Blitzkrieg sidled up to me with a lecherous grin on his face. He elbowed me in the ribs in a manner that I found to be far too familiar for our respective stations on the social hierarchy, and leaned in a little too close to be comfortable for me.

"That uniform don't look half bad on a pretty mare," he said, his grin showing an array of yellowed teeth. "Am I right?"

"Give her a few weeks and then tell me what you think," I said.

"Better make the most of it, then." Blitzkrieg nudged me in the ribs again and snickered inanely, as if at some private joke that he thought we shared but in fact only ever seemed funny to him.

"Fraternising at work's only going to lead to trouble, anyway," I said, stepping back from the pile and admiring the... well, not excellent job that everypony had done, but at least the room was tidier than when I had first entered it.

"Well, if you ain't interested then I might have a go at her."

I chuckled, or forced one, at least. "It's your head, not mine."

Blitzkrieg glanced warily over his shoulder at the new trainee Commissar, who, I was relieved to see, either had not heard our conversation or had simply chosen to ignore it. Instead, she seemed rather more interested in watching Rainbow Dash chatting animatedly with her fellow Wonderbolts, likely boasting about something she had done that she believed must be suitably impressive to the easily impressed fellow 'jocks' that she commanded. Her speech, if I could even call it that, so mixed with nonsensical slang and variations of the word 'yeah!' that it bore as much resemblance to the Equestrian language as I did with common mule, was punctuated with rapid and vigorous movements of her forelimbs, from which I deduced that she was describing something that happened in the air with another pegasus. Looking back at her now that I had somewhat recovered from the initial twin shocks of first finding Scarlet Letter reappearing in my life like a malignant tumour and then meeting Gliding Moth, I could not help but agree to an extent with Blitzkrieg; in terms of physical appearance she was not unattractive, even though she was hardly my type, and if she smiled more she might have been considered pretty.

"I reckon it's still worth it," said Blitzkrieg, winking at me in a manner that made me feel quite ill. "Anyway, you'll be ever so pleased to know my plan worked."

I arched an eyebrow and dusted off my hooves. It didn't help, as my hooves were still caked in enough dust to suffocate an elephant, but it made me feel a little better at least. "And what plan would that be?"

There was a sly glint in his eye as he nodded his head in Rainbow Dash's direction. "You're probably wondering why I said those things to one of her stallions over there, even after all of the lessons you've been giving me."

"I had been wondering about that."

Blitzkrieg nodded his head eagerly, and lowered his voice to a more conspiratorial tone. "Well, I think I'm getting better at being more, uh, more 'polite' and less disrespectful, especially to inbred long-nosed toffs in the other regiments. But I wanted to see how well Rainbow Dash over there was at sticking up for her stallions, and she passed!"

"By insulting one of her soldiers and provoking her into punching you in the face," I said, my voice a flat monotone that would have made Iron Hoof's sound like that of Rainbow Dash. I confess it took me some time to work my head around the backwards logic of Blitzkrieg's argument, it being that of the sort of pony from the criminal under-classes whom more refined ponies such as I prefer to pretend simply don't exist and who have yet to learn that there are other means of solving problems other than the use of violence (those same qualities making them perfect common soldiers and NCOs, of course), but when I did I found it hardly made the situation any better. It's more likely he had once again said something before actually thinking about the consequences, and was now simply trying to justify his position.

"A good leader's got to stick up for his ponies, and Rainbow Dash might be" -he stopped, and momentarily pressed his hoof to the bridge of his nose as he tried to search for the right word- "a boastful, naive idiot, but she at least gives a damn about her ponies. She ain't like one of those officers who don't care."

I sucked in air through my teeth and sighed, all in a manner to appear as quietly disappointed as possible. "That's all well and good," I said, leading Blitzkrieg towards the corner furthest from the prying ears of Gliding Moth, "but you damn well know if I didn't get here before the provosts she would have been court-martialled and even executed for striking an officer."

Blitzkrieg had the good sense to look a little sheepish, and even disappointed. Glancing around, I saw that most ponies had either dispersed to whatever duties they were supposed to attend to or had elected to spend their down time elsewhere before I inevitably came down on them like the righteous angel of the commissariat's retribution. Nevertheless, I discreetly tugged Blitzkrieg away from the few who still lingered, including Rainbow Dash and Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth, and out into the empty corridor.

"Yeah, I know," he said, "but you'd have gotten us out of it. I mean, that's what you're here for."

"Actually, I'm here to make sure that you don't do stupid things like that to begin with, among other things." I rubbed at my temples; dear Faust these ponies were going to be the death of me if the Changelings didn't get me first. I shook my head in mock disappointment and turned away from him, knowing that the idea that he had done something wrong to offend me, somepony who, against all sense of reason, seemed to regard me as a pony whose approval mattered, would likely crush him. The disappointed, puppy-like expression proved that my actions had the desired effect.

"If you want to be seen and treated as a 'proper officer', as you call it, should, then you can't go deliberately picking fights with the lower orders," I said. Now that he was in a state more receptive to being manipulated, I turned to face him once more. Despite suspecting that the truth was rather less convoluted than what he stated, I had decided for his sake to pretend to take his word at face value. "You will not be judged by your good intentions, but by your actions and your words. You do realise I still have to assign you to a punishment detail?"

Blitzkrieg nodded his head, though his stance was rather defiant. In truth I didn't relish having to admonish him like some bloody foal, but sometimes a stern, but polite, word works a damn sight better than simply flogging everypony in sight and then wondering why a mutiny has suddenly broken out. A stallion such as the one standing before me, who had been brutalised for much of his life by an uncaring system, was more likely to respond better to words from somepony he considered, at best, a confidant, than bloody violence. "Yeah, yeah, I knew that was coming, alright. Whatever you're planning I've probably done it before."

"That's the spirit," I said. "See you in Shining Armour's mess tonight?"

"Alright, but you're buying."

I snorted air through my nose and shook my head. "I'm always buying. Noblesse oblige, remember?"

He grinned at our little running joke, and for once it was a relief to see the jagged shark-like fangs imbued by Princess Luna's nocturnal blessing. It showed that he wasn't too upset by my words, or that he was simply concealing a deeply held hatred of me and wanted to lull me into a false sense of security before sticking a cheese knife through my neck and telling everypony that I had a very unfortunate accident eating a slice of brie. I expect I would find out next morning if I woke up at all. He trotted away, and I was about to skulk off back to the relative isolation of the keep tower, though I knew I now had to find an alternative refuge from the general misery that was my waking life now that Pencil Pusher had found it, when I saw Gliding Moth gazing expectantly up at me from the door.

"Come on," I said, beckoning her over, "I'll show you where the amenities are."

And, thought I, try and keep you out of trouble.

Author's Note

In the words of Caligula, I live! Yes, I apologise for the lateness of this chapter (again). Unfortunately adult responsibilities are conspiring against me once more to stop me writing, but nevertheless I will prevail. I have moved out of my parents' house *finally* into a flat, and in order to keep living here and being able to keep myself alive I am gunning for a promotion at work, which, annoyingly, means longer hours.

Honour and Blood (Part 6)

For Captain Blitzkrieg's and Rainbow Dash's punishment, I had to get creative. While I could assign latrine duty after latrine duty for the ignorant thugs that wrecked the canteen until the communal lavatories in Fort E-5150 were so clean one could safely conduct open heart surgery inside a cubicle without fear of infection, I felt that a more unique and, most importantly, more severe and humiliating punishment was more appropriate for ponies who, according to Princesses' Regulations, should have known better. It was not easy, as I'm sure those of you who have been paying attention will know that I tend to put the least amount of effort possible in my work on account of the simple fact that it's all tedious and boring, and in the end I simply gave up and consulted with that expert in administering punishments - Company Sergeant Major Square Basher.

"If it were up to me, sir," she said, nursing a pint of room-temperature brown ale in a wooden tankard, "I'd have the both of them flogged, and I ain't saying that because Captain Blitzkrieg still owes me twenty bits for that game of pool back in Trottingham barracks."

We had met in the officers' mess late that evening, or what passed for the officers' mess in the Night Guards. Colonel Sunshine Smiles' egalitarian approach to off-duty recreation time extended even to the more permanent setting of the fortress, though in reality his well-intentioned approach to fostering bonds between officers and the soldiers they command was confounded by the fact that even here the two classes simply preferred to segregate themselves of their own accord. The distinctions of social class remained as immutable and divisive as ever, excepting the presence of my companion, of course.

"It's a bit unsporting to do that to pegasi," I said. [The flight muscles of pegasi are located primarily on their backs, meaning that a flogging can potentially ruin their capacity for flight for life depending on the severity of injuries suffered and the skill of the attending surgeon. As such, in the pegasus companies of Royal Guard regiments, flogging tended to be the exception and not the rule, as it was in the earth pony and unicorn companies.] "And it would be unbecoming of an officer to be flogged like a common soldier, don't you think?"

[Though officers were of course subject to military discipline, prior to the Twilight Sparkle Reforms what little regulations existed tended to be both vague and inconsistently applied across the Royal Guard. It was, however, considered to be 'bad form' to subject a commissioned officer to corporal punishment, as that was regarded as something reserved for enlisted ponies. Most of the time, however, officers were simply fined based on the judgement of the presiding officer of a court martial.]

The room itself was, it could be argued, one of the nicer communal chambers in the fortress. It was moderately spacious rectangular chamber large enough for a few dozen ponies to gather around the sparse furniture, and commanded a scenic view of the Macintosh Hills that was at least somewhat more interesting than the vast empty plains seen from just about every other room that was blessed with a gaping open aperture in place of a window. A rudimentary bar serving ale rations for enlisted ponies and wines and spirits for those who could afford to pay for them had been set up in the corner next to the window and furthest from the door, and was presided over by a bored Ensign who looked rather too old to be still at that lowly rank but nevertheless seemed content with his lot in life. Tonight, the mess was quiet, with only a small group of junior officers from the Night Guards and NCOs from the attached artillery battery commanded by Bramley Apple enjoying a quiet game of cards in the corner. I suspected that the majority of the off-duty personnel had found rather more interesting, debauched, and most likely illegal entertainment for the night.

I was a little disappointed that Gliding Moth had rejected my invitation to join me in the mess once again, having instead decided to consistently spend her downtime probably reading or going for a walk or some other solitary activity that she found to be more edifying than socialising with me. Her presence troubled me; I did not know exactly what sort of indoctrination took place during her training, but knowing the dark mare who started this whole damned scheme in the first place as I did I felt I had a fairly accurate picture of the exact sort of pony that they were trying to mould her into - Princess Luna. It was my wish to undo some of her programming, that rigidly undue deference to an unbending authority and to a nihilistic worldview alien to the natural hierarchy of modern Equestrian society but was so endemic to the Commissariat, so that she might have a reasonable chance of making it to retirement without getting herself killed, either by the Changelings or by a disgruntled guardspony. That, and I wanted to spend some time with an attractive mare without having to pay for the pleasure of doing so, which I haven't had the chance to since rejoining the Royal Guard. Instead that night I had to make do with a Company Sergeant Major of the Night Guards, who despite her sex didn't count for reasons that should be obvious by now.

Square Basher snorted and shook her head a little too excessively, and then attempted to right herself in that peculiar manner that drunk ponies do when they try to fake sobriety. She remained awkward around commissioned officers, as enlisted ponies tend to be especially when socialising with their superiors, as the very real divide in class and the fact that one invariably holds a great deal of power over the other makes finding common ground with which to progress the conversation past stilted pleasantries, but a few tankards of ale had gone some way in helping her relax a bit more around me enough for us to have something resembling a two-way conversation on relatively equitable terms. Her words, however, still remained limited by the narrow and carefully selected vocabulary that all non-commissioned officers use in the company of ‘the Top Brass’, despite her habitual bluntness and element of casual familiarity brought on by the strong ale.

"I forgot the bloody cloud-humpers don't know how to take a good flogging," she said. "But you're right, sir; can't do that to an officer."

I nodded my head, and swirled the blood-red claret that I had barely touched all evening inside its somewhat grimy receptacle. "I need something that will force them to work together. I don't know what's gotten into them, but I damn well want it out of them before the balloon goes up again." [A Royal Guard euphemism for when something exciting or dangerous is about to happen. The phrase is believed to come from the practice of using observation balloons to pre-sight targets for artillery bombardment prior to an attack during the Nightmare Heresy.]

"It's 'cause the balloon hasn't gone up, sir," she said. She settled the half-empty mug down on the battered wooden table, and idly traced its steel rim with her hoof while propping her head up with the other. "It's like we've got a faulty boiler that's about to blow up. We can give them stuff to do to use up their time, but it's like releasing a tiny bit of pressure. The boiler's still going to blow unless we get a plumber to look at it."

Square Basher must have seen the vacant, glazed expression on my face. Despite her size, appearance, and reputation amongst the common soldiers for being tougher than Royal Guard doughnut rations and just as likeable, the mare sitting in front of me had a rather low tolerance for alcohol. She was not even halfway through her second drink and she was already making badly-formed metaphors that made sense only to her. Of course, before somepony accuses me of taking advantage of the mare by deliberately getting her drunk to have my way with her (as many have accused me of in the past, which is an accusation I must refute as, once again, this 'technique' is the reserve of the cowardly sort of stallion incapable of getting his way through other, less unsavoury means. I am many things, but I insist that any successful sexual escapades on my part are the result of my own Faust-given charm and ability, and not due to mere drunkenness on the part of my conquest), one must remember that she would inevitably sober up and that any misdeeds on my part would likely be repaid in extreme violence. Besides, for once I wasn't terribly interested in that sort of thing; and while the stresses of being on the frontline tended to exacerbate one's urges, I like to think that I had higher standards in appearance, personality, and, increasingly so after having spent what felt like an eternity on the frontline, personal hygiene.

"The plumber is, uh..." she paused and stared at the ceiling as though the words she was trying to say were somehow written immediately above her head.

"An actual battle?" I posited, otherwise we might have been there all night.

"Yes, sir, that." Square Basher gave one of her rare smiles, and then shrugged her shoulders. "You know I ain't all that good at thinking. The Royal Guard's been my whole life, sir, ever since I was a filly, and it's the same everywhere, whether it's being stationed in Canterlot on guard duty or sent to some ugly little native village in Zebrica. Being trained up to be violent and aggressive and constantly being kept trapped together like that does things to a stallion, and while we train them to harness that aggression when ponies like you and me, begging your pardon sir, tell them to against the enemy, keeping it bottled up and making them feel like they're not actually doing anything's only going to make them more nervous. We've been stuck here, not moving, not fighting, no end in sight, and we're all bloody fed up. Sooner or later something's bound to happen that'll make it all kick off."

For a pony who just described herself as not being 'good at thinking', she'd apparently put a lot more thought into it than I had, at least, though as usual her general lack of eloquence for sentences that didn't contain an abundance of expletives artfully arranged into inventive metaphors that stretched the boundaries of both taste and one's ability to follow through with them meant that it did come across as mere inane ramblings. Then again, I suppose one does not spend as much time in the Royal Guard as Square Basher, whose life had been given in its meagre entirety to serving Equestria's great and ponderous war machine, without learning how soldiers work, or don't work as the case may be. Nevertheless, she shook her head and waved a hoof dismissively. "Sorry, I don't mean to lecture you of all ponies, sir," she said, apparently remembering her place in respect to mine. "It's just what I think, whatever that's worth to you, sir."

I told her that I appreciated her input, and for what it was worth what I said was true for the most part. One cannot over-estimate just how much out of my depth I was at that time, and still am if I must be completely honest for once, and any advice on the collective psyche of that creed of the common ponies who had often seemed to me to be as separate from the likes of Yours Truly and the rest of my noble ilk as tomato ketchup is to a fine Bordeaux was finally useful in my life. Despite being surrounded by the common sort of ponies for the past few years, and after this moment for much of the remainder of my life thus far, when I see them I feel as though that I simply cannot understand their lives and that they likewise cannot understand mine, despite being made of the very same flesh, blood, and bone. Anyway, digression aside, Square Basher beamed happily at the remark; NCOs, at least the dedicated ones, tend to respond well to positive feedback from commissioned officers. It was all rather endearing, in a rather pathetic sort of way, but it held testament to the effectiveness of the Royal Guard's indoctrination process.

Square Basher pressed me for more details about what had happened, and I furnished her the best I could. Nevertheless, she listened intently, or perhaps that was merely the effect of the alcohol she had consumed, and stopped me only to ask a few polite questions that were preceded by equally profuse apologies for having dared to interrupt my clumsily pieced-together recap of those events. When, however, I came to the subject of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's exceedingly ill-timed and thoroughly unwelcomed-by-all return to his commission and command of a platoon of unicorns that I held a rare amount of sympathy for, her disposition changed from relatively upbeat, if somewhat awkward and stilted, to a rather more severe countenance. Indeed, one could see her expression change the instant that I mentioned the pompous imbecile’s name, as though she had somehow slipped on a mask as I blinked.

"How is Captain Red Coat?" I asked, having finished telling my story.

"He's..." Square Basher paused again, and took a momentary glance out of the window to our side. It was at that curious time after Princess Celestia had laid the sun to rest for the night but was still too light to safely consider it to be night - a time between twilight and night that, as of yet, had no name. She sighed and shook her head, looking for all the world like a mother discussing her troubled child. I supposed, in a sense, being just old enough to have been Red Coat's mother (and mine, if one was of a particularly depraved and diseased mind) [If I must be honest, this diversion has very little bearing on Blueblood's description of events, but for the sake of completeness according to Royal Guard records, Company Sergeant Square Basher was thirty-eight years old at the time of the events described, and Blueblood twenty-three] it was to be expected that she might see him as some sort of surrogate for the foal that her life-long career and metaphorical marriage to the Royal Guard would deny her.

"He didn't take it very well," she said, at length. The tendency for understatement, it seemed, was as true for lower-class Trottingham ponies as much as it was a stereotype for their aristocracy.

"I know," I said, finally taking a sip from my wine glass. I pulled a face; the wine had been corked. "I was the one who had to tell him."

If anything, I thought Red Coat took the news surprisingly well, which was precisely what was worrying me. I had fully expected to have to physically restrain the young lad from committing an act of grievous violence upon Scarlet Letter, whom he justly blamed for the deaths of so many ponies under his command in the near disaster that was the siege and by extension his own maiming and disfigurement, but instead when I tried to explain the quite staggeringly poor judgement exhibited by that herd of overpaid desk-bound paper-fondlers in the Ministry of War who discussed, authorised, and signed their petty little sycophant's restoration of rank and command, his response was calm. Rather too calm for my liking. He stared at me blankly, as though he hadn't heard my words, but his half-burned face with one eye rendered opaque and milky, still not yet replaced with a prosthetic by Doctor Surgical Steel of the Medical Corps due to some physiological technicality that I couldn't possibly understand, was thoroughly nauseating to look on. It took a considerable amount of willpower for me to look him in the eye, for the grotesquely puckered and mutilated exposed skin would make even ponies of a callous disposition blanch at the mere sight of such a desecration of youthful innocence.

I almost wanted him to get angry with me; to have some sort of emotional response to show that despite everything that had been inflicted upon him that he was still the same bright-eyed young colt who I had walked into at Dodge Junction station and who would boast endlessly of his ambitions with boundless enthusiasm. Instead he shook his head sadly in a gesture that seemed far in advance of his eighteen years of age, and muttered that there simply wasn't any justice any more. He left me, and hid himself away in his quarters for a few hours, as he was wont to do now since he suffered those horrific injuries, and emerged only when it was time to conduct the evening roll call of his company. There was very little I could have done, for as one would expect emotional openness can hardly be counted amongst the very sparsely populated list of my virtues, and so I left him to his own devices. He still continued to execute his duties with a level of newfound efficiency I found to be almost frightening compared to the somewhat laid-back approach he used to follow, apparently leaving fewer and fewer tasks in commanding his company to his Sergeant Major to perform them himself, so at the time I saw very little reason for me to interfere. As callous as it may seem, and one can certainly call me that after having read these inane scribbles and thus seen me for the craven and effete narcissist that I am, I was not exactly going to exert myself in playing therapist to this stallion when I had a regiment of nearly a thousand other ponies whose mental well-being I was supposed to be responsible for.

As for Scarlet Letter, I must admit a great sense of satisfaction when I learned that trainee Commissar Gliding Moth had issued him with a rather substantial fine of several hundred bits to be paid to Captain Blitzkrieg as compensation for the great disrespect shown by him to a superior officer. It had been paid grudgingly, and though I had thought that Blitzkrieg would simply spend it all on cheap beer and cheaper mares as was his wont, it appears that I had misjudged him. Instead, he had rather proudly spent the money on a brand new dress uniform, which he intended to wear for the sort of social events that the upper class officers such as myself tended to host instead of actually performing their jobs. [Prior to the aforementioned reforms which standardised Royal Guard materiel, all soldiers, officers and enlisted ponies alike, were expected to pay for their own uniforms and equipment.] However, I also felt a certain degree of shame that this young filly, at least five years my junior, had done something that I had hitherto been far too cowardly to do - punish Scarlet Letter. Though in hindsight it was likely due to a certain sense of ignorance of the stallion's personal influence over the ponderous bureaucracy upon which every soldier was dependent upon, as much as it was simply her doing exactly what the Academy had instructed her to do.

"He'll get over it," said Square Basher, interrupting my quiet musing on the matter. "Faust knows he's going to have to. I'll look out for him, sir. That's what a sergeant major does for her officer."

By now the group of officers in the corner of the room had departed, one sans his armour, having apparently lost it in the card game. I did not envy him having to explain this loss of Their Highnesses' property to Pencil Pusher in the morning. The Ensign at the bar had finished mopping up whatever stains and spillages remained on the large, oblong-shaped wooden box that once served as a means with which to ship armour but had been repurposed as a counter, and stared at the two of us with a sour look that implied that as soon as we left he could close up and go back to doing whatever sordid activity he had planned for the evening.

"Of course," I said, tipping my glass of utterly ruined wine to my companion. "I'm sure he's in good hooves."

Square Basher beamed at me from across the rotting wooden table as though she was puppy being rewarded for having successfully performed a trick for her master, which I suppose quite appropriately explains the relationship between an officer and an enlisted pony. She quickly downed the last dregs of her ale, slovenly wiped the residual foam from her lips with the bare fur on the back of her hoof, and then suppressed the urge to compliment to the brewer in the traditional manner with what looked like considerable effort.

"Thank you sir," she said sheepishly. "But as to your predicament regarding Captain Blitzkrieg and the stunt flyer, sir, I think I might have just the thing for you."

***

I have to commend Company Sergeant Major Square Basher on her idea, though the Royal Guard frowns on anypony showing the slightest bit of creativity from anypony with a rank below that of a Lieutenant General, and even then having an original thought is considered to be the sign of an encroaching madness. It was a relatively simple plan, but it was one that provided both adequate punishment for both Rainbow Dash and Blitzkrieg for having instigated the brawl and impetus for them to learn the value of teamwork (the Royal Guard definition of teamwork being 'do as you're bloody well told or you will be flogged', of course).

It was early morning when we executed this particular punishment, and unexpectedly chilly for both this time of year and for this portion of Equestria that received a little too much in the way of Celestia's blessing. Under my command, the two offending ponies were roused from their cots, blindfolded and, after the very loud and crude protestations from a certain blue mare threatened to wake up everypony in the entire fortress, gagged, before they were taken by an armed guard under my direction to a location that I had prepared earlier. For those readers wondering why I had gone to so much effort when my usual modus operandi in the Royal Guard was to perform the least amount of work that I thought I could get away with, though my recollection is somewhat foggy on the details I believe I was due to attend a rather tedious inspection of the regiment's supply of paperclips, so I was perfectly willing to do almost anything short of manual labour to avoid having to endure something so monumentally boring that I was all but certain that my brain would suffer a sudden and fatal haemorrhage just to spare itself the misery.

The place of punishment was an area that I had personally selected; deep within the Macintosh Hills and close to the secret route that the battalion had taken to capture the fortress over a year ago. By that time the route itself had been expanded into an additional supply line by the Royal Guard, albeit one that was used infrequently as a diversion on the odd occasion that the traffic through Black Venom Pass became too heavy for the rapid transport of the all-important supply of paperwork that sustained the frontline. It was, however, both sufficiently isolated from the outermost edges of Equestrian civilisation that both the fortress and the quaintly rustic little town of Dodge Junction represented and was mapped well enough to suit my needs.

It had taken us a few hours to reach this small plateau nestled in the shadows of a great hill that rose like a sheer cliff above it. By that time the two blindfolded ponies had ceased whatever protestations they were allowed by their bindings and sullenly followed my aide, who led them through the precariously rocky terrain with the use of ropes fastened to harnesses tied about their barrels. The going was slow and tedious, with every few steps bringing a stumble or fall and a subsequent litany of muffled curses for our two captives. Nevertheless, sufficient motivation to continue was imparted by the judicious application of the pointy end of a guardspony's spear to their rear ends. The guardsponies who accompanied us and thus corralled our two prisoners to the area where their punishment was to be executed seemed rather too eager to do this to Rainbow Dash's firm, latex-clad flanks, but a threat from Yours Truly to have their other 'spears' forcibly removed from them unless they stopped mistreating a 'lady' and a fellow comrade-in-arms was enough to encourage them to take a more professional approach to their duties.

Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth had elected to join me, having been woken up by Rainbow Dash's outburst and had arrived on the scene with enough provosts to put down a small peasant uprising. After I had explained my intentions to her, and calmed down the assembled provosts to the point that I was reasonably certain they wouldn't put their truncheons to enthusiastic use on the prisoners, she duly invited herself to observe this punishment detail. She kept to herself throughout the journey, and with the hour being far too early in the morning for it to be considered sane enough for casual conversation I left her to her silence.

At my order, Cannon Fodder untied and discarded the cloth that covered their eyes and then removed the bundle of socks that served to stem the tide of invectives flowing freely from Rainbow Dash's mouth. The two blinked and squinted at the sudden, bright light, albeit dimmed by the early dawn and the shadow of the hills that rose around us.

"Finally!" exclaimed Rainbow Dash. She spat repeatedly, grimaced, and rubbed at her tongue with her hoof in an apparent effort to get the taste out. "I'm going to be tasting that for weeks. Now can you tell just what in the hay is going on here?"

Blitzkrieg rubbed at his eyes and looked around at his surroundings, and then squinted at me with an oddly plaintive expression. "Ain't it obvious? We're about to get whacked."

[Captain Blitzkrieg's use of a term primarily associated with organised crime in Manehatten implies that during his criminal career he must have had dealings with the notorious gangs there, though the extent of which has never been proven in a court of law and despite his candour about his past he remained silent about any affairs that extended beyond the East End of Trottingham. Evidence given at his trial implied that a vicious rivalry had developed, which had made him the target of numerous failed assassination attempts.]

"If I wanted either of you 'whacked'," I said, unsure of the exact meaning of the term but in the context I could hazard a guess, "then I would have already done so, and quite legally too. As it happens, I think Their Royal Highnesses might still have a use for you, which is why I've brought you to this miserable spot."

Rainbow Dash snorted in irritation, and I ignored her rudeness for I knew she would soon be paying for it, and looked around at the craggy hills surrounding us. "Yeah, I can see that. Lots of Changelings to kill out here."

"You can kill Changelings when you're ready to kill Changelings," I said quickly, to pre-empt both Gliding Moth from darting over to run Rainbow Dash through with her rapier for disrespecting a commissar and Rainbow from launching into her 'when are we actually going to kick some Changeling butt?' rant that I had heard and dismissed a dozen times before. Nevertheless, she muttered something about being in Canterlot that I chose to pretend to ignore, if only because every wasted second spent here would delay their inevitable misery. With everypony silent and paying attention I carried on with the speech that I had prepared earlier, or plundered and stitched together like some country-pony patchwork quilt from the asinine pamphlets and texts that lay in great piles on and around my desk to be more accurate.

"The Royal Guard operates on the principle of Harmony. Ultimate victory over the enemy is only achievable through harmonious co-operation between every single facet of the Royal Guard, including the Wonderbolts. Every conflict within our ranks, no matter how minor, weakens us. Your petty squabbling threatens our harmony, which is why you have been brought out here."

"Out here?" Blitzkrieg blurted out, flopping unceremoniously on his backside and tucking his hooves defiantly into his armpits. He still wore his faded white sleeping gown, apparently a key part of a guardspony's stock of equipment along with the ridiculous little cap that seemed to have been kept only because Princess Celestia found them cute [Those caps are actually part of uniform for hygiene reasons], which made him look all the more like some petulant schoolfoal who had been caught launching a midnight raid on the kitchens. As for Rainbow Dash I was disturbed to discover the implication that she slept in her precious Wonderbolt uniform. "At six bloody a.m.?"

"It's character building," I said dismissively, waving a hoof. I found that I could justify nearly anything with those three little magic words, or at least quieten any dissent. "You'll have noticed that I didn't let you bring your water canteens or field ration packs with you on this, ah, 'forced reconnaissance' shall we call it?

"There is a freshwater stream just a few miles from here," I continued, pointing in the vague direction of the stream. "It's used by the native ponies here, and it is the only source of clean, fresh water. All you have to do is get there before heatstroke and dehydration sets in."

"So," said Blitzkrieg, followed by a brief pause as he tried to parse what I had just said, "we are getting whacked after all?"

I shrugged my shoulders, and checked my wristwatch in a manner affected to be deliberately casual enough to be irritating to others. "That's entirely up to you. Find the stream together and you'll live. It's as simple as that."

Rainbow Dash blew a raspberry dismissively. "Oh, that's easy, sir! I'll just fly up to alicorns one-five [In this context, an 'alicorn' is military slang for one thousand feet, so Rainbow Dash meant fifteen thousand feet. Being able to gauge one's height above sea level is always a useful skill for a pegasus, especially so in the Royal Guard, though accurate measurement is impossible without specialised equipment which had yet to be made standard issue amongst the pegasus companies at this early stage of the Changeling Wars] and scout it out that way!"

The second after she spread her wings and bent her legs in preparation to launch herself into the air, my aide pounced on her with all the skill and grace of an overweight, inebriated cheetah belly-flopping onto a helpless and unsuspecting antelope. Rainbow Dash, to my surprise, did not react with the expected outburst of indignant rage, but as she wiggled under the armoured mass of the chronically unwashed earth pony to get as comfortable as one possibly could in that situation, she rolled her eyes and pressed one hoof against her temple and the other tapped the ground irritably. Her stubby little puff of a tail, which had been cropped short in the military style after an incident where Sergeant Major Square Basher had helpfully demonstrated the necessity of this style in her own inimitable manner by grabbing her long, flowing, un-cut rainbow tail and swinging her around the parade square like some garishly-coloured yo-yo, wagged energetically in annoyance, could be seen on the opposite side of Cannon Fodder's strangely-relaxed form swishing from side to side as if in a strong breeze.

"Seriously?" she spat. "Again? You got a real thing for jumping on me, you weirdo."

Cannon Fodder shrugged his broad shoulders and rose to his hooves, though kept Rainbow Dash restrained with a foreleg clamped tightly around her midsection so as to restrict the movement of her wings.

"Just doing my job, ma'am," he said phlegmatically. He was not certain about where exactly the Wonderbolts fitted into the peculiarly complex structure of the Royal Guard, but as with most things in life it seemed that he placed them, along with Rainbow Dash, as being somepony he should show deference to.

The mare squirmed, though seemingly out of discomfort rather than as a concerted effort to escape, as my erstwhile companion deftly retrieved from one of the myriad pouches whose contents were known only by the top biological and chemical scientists of Equestria a length of sturdy rope, which he wrapped and tied about her waist in order to clamp her wings tightly. I noted that she was holding her breath, and when Cannon Fodder stepped back she gasped for air with all of the enthusiasm of a formerly drowning pony. As for Blitzkrieg, he accepted his bindings with a sort of blank stoicism.

"Did you really think he'd let us off that easily?" said Blitzkrieg. He suppressed a yawn and shook his mane out.

Rainbow Dash shot him a narrow-eyed glare, and then sheepishly looked away and awkwardly pawed at the ground with a hoof. "I was hoping that he didn't think of that."

"Then why the bloody hell did you have to announce it like that? You daft bint, if you've got a secret plan to get us out of something you're supposed to damn well keep it as far away from the chaps with skulls on their hats as possible."

I don't think Rainbow Dash understood the meaning of the word 'bint', or she for once realised that it just wasn't worth confronting him over it. Instead, she shot that same venomous glare at him, before simply choosing to ignore the stallion for now.

"So, how are we supposed to find this stream?"

"You didn’t think I’d make you do this without a map, did you?" I said. From one of my saddlebags I retrieved said neatly folded map and a battered old antique compass that had belonged to my father and, for a reason that I couldn't quite articulate, felt the need to carry it around with me at times. I laid out the map on the ground below me, revealing it to be that of Black Venom Pass, the two fortresses that formed the main crux of the frontline in this sector, and a good deal of the surrounding area. The stream I had described was clearly marked, but for obvious reasons our current location was not. Of course, deciphering the mass of squiggles, lines, and arcane symbols that made one shudder to consider their dark purposes should not have been too difficult for two ponies who were supposed to have gone through basic orienteering during their training. If they were anything like me, however, and had used the time that should have been spent training on more edifying things like gambling, chasing mares, and drinking more than an average peasant's annual income in champagne, then it was likely I'd have something difficult to explain to both Colonel Sunshine Smiles and Captain Spitfire the following morning.

“And we won't have any cheating under my watch,” I said. “That would defeat the purpose of this punishment detail.”

“And that purpose is?” said Rainbow Dash.

"To teach the both of you the importance of working in Harmony with one another. Preferably before the Changelings force you to."

Getting the two to actually start the fun process of orienteering proved more troublesome than I hoped, as Rainbow Dash, apparently having not matured emotionally much since early puberty (though I suspected that pegasi might be late bloomers, which, if that was the case, makes much of what I have just written here unpleasant in the extreme) sulked and whined until Blitzkrieg helpfully pointed out that the sooner she shut up and started work the sooner they'd get some water. Satisfied, I left the two to pour over the map and argue over their respective viewpoints of exactly where they were and how they were going to get to the stream. My entourage consisted of Cannon Fodder, my bodyguard of two soldiers who were on an unrelated punishment detail for being drunk and disorderly, and, of course, the trainee commissar who had seen fit to follow me around like a lost cat. We were unlikely to find any Changelings around here, with the majority still 'contained', to use Field Marshal Iron Hoof's somewhat dodgy terminology, within the Badlands proper, but as ever I felt safer with several ponies I could place between me and whatever might be lurking unseen amidst the hills. If anything, I would have been happier with more, but alas I didn't think I could justify taking yet more guardsponies from their duties just for my own protection.

Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth had observed the whole thing with an expression of quiet bemusement, and in that stern look I saw a disturbing mirror of my Aunt Luna, which made me shudder despite the rising heat of the morning.

"Sir," she said, as I approached, "I don't think I follow the rationale of your punishment."

I shrugged my shoulders, and glanced over one of them to see the two guilty ponies arguing over who gets to be in charge of the compass, with Captain Blitzkrieg apparently winning because, despite being on the same punishment detail, he still outranked Rainbow Dash. "I think I explained it well enough."

"Forgive me sir, it's not my place to question your judgement."

"It most certainly isn't, but humour me anyway." I was hardly in the best sort of mood to explain myself once more, especially to a teenager whose main concern should have been trying to decide how to get the captain of the hoofball team to attend the prom with her, and who made up for her lack of a sense of self-preservation with a propensity for sticking her nose in precariously close to the truth. In my experience, ponies who said something along the lines of that statement, it itself being a variation of that hated phrase 'with all due respect', meant the precise opposite, but in this case I was willing to humour her. Having gone through a lengthy indoctrination from Princess Luna that imparted whatever warped and twisted ideology that my aunt viewed the world through like a dark lens, I expected that it would take a considerable amount of effort on my part to help her re-learn how the real world worked, assuming that she had any grounding in the same reality you and I inhabit to begin with.

She did not react to the terseness of my reply, at least not in the manner that I expected her to. If anything, rather than being offended as even the most hardened of soldiers might (though they would do well not to act upon it), she seemed to let it roll over her as though it was simply normal. "I don't remember seeing this form of punishment in the Regulations. I think it said that the punishment for brawling is fifteen to thirty lashes, depending on the severity of injuries inflicted and property damaged."

"You are right in that respect," I said, entirely unaware that I was just about to coin a brand new legal phrase, "but in this case I feel it's best to exercise my commissarial discretion. There's more to being a commissar than dishing out floggings for every single little infraction." [The concept of 'Commissarial Discretion' existed from the outset of the foundation of the Commissariat just after Princess Luna's return, though Blueblood is indeed correct when he says he gave it its name. Broadly speaking, it refers to legal right of a commissar to briefly suspend all legal restrictions including Princesses' Regulations, Acts of Parliament, and Common Law as the situation demands. The use of Commissarial Discretion may be subjected to later review by the Commissariat, if such scrutiny is deemed necessary.]

She snorted and shook her head, which made the bangs hanging from under her cap flutter in a manner I found rather attractive, in an endearing sort of way. Her expression, however, still remained as perfectly unreadable as ever, deliberately set into a mask that betrayed nothing of what thoughts and feelings floated about inside her head, if any still remained after her training. "The Regulations are very clear about it."

Dear Faust, it was worse than trying to maintain a meaningful conversation with Cannon Fodder. "Read and memorised the whole thing, did you?" I snapped, rubbing the bridge of my nose with a hoof in mild frustration. Nevertheless, I could see that despite my rudeness, or perhaps because of it, she was hanging on my very word like I was some sort of fakir who had just crawled out of his miserable little hovel to dispense some utter nonsense that sounds profound enough for the easily-manipulated. [A fakir is the name given to a religious ascetic in Saddle Arabia and Coltcutta who has taken vows of poverty and worship. Blueblood spent much of his foalhood with his father in the Raj in Coltcutta, and likely picked up the term there.]

"A commissar's sole, defining purpose is to ensure victory over the enemy," I said. Judging by the way that Blitzkrieg stared hopelessly at the compass, doing his utmost to pretend that he knew how to use it in conjunction with the gridlines on a map, and how Rainbow Dash was attempting to read said map upside down I suspected that I had plenty of time with which to explain this point, whatever it was. "The punishments that a commissar assigns should reflect that, don't you think? Why merely have these two flogged when I can remind them of their commitments to the Royal Guard and to each other as comrades?"

Gliding Moth pursed her lips and frowned, and her narrowed eyes smouldered behind her fringe in the deep shadows cast by the visor of her cap. When she spoke again, her voice was halting and more hesitant than the aloof, imperious tone, distressingly similar to the frightfully measured tones of Princess Luna on the rare occasion that she deigned to speak at a safe volume, as though she was unsure of what she was trying to say to me.

"You... You didn't go through the same training with the Commissariat that me and my fellow trainees went through, did you?"

I shook my head no. In truth I was uncharacteristically caught off guard by that comment. My hooves itched just as badly as when I was caught in more overt, obvious danger; though I had always feared that sooner or later somepony less enamoured with the mystique of my reputation would seek to undermine it by pointing out that all of my training as a commissar consisted entirely of Auntie Luna forcing me to wear a uniform and then pointing me in the direction of the nearest train to the front line. The problem was that she was thoroughly taken in by the impressive edifice of my false reputation; but when she saw that behind the image of the gallant hero was a soft, pampered, terrified little colt who just wanted to go home, would she then seek her revenge by bringing the truth crashing down upon me like an executioner's axe?

"No, I did not," I said at length, having struggled to formulate an adequate response in time. Instead, I elected to seize the initiative and throw the question back at the mare. "Just what are you insinuating?" I tried to keep my tone relatively light, for voicing that statement as a threat or leading her to interpret it as a threat would only encourage her to dig a little too deeply into my sordid, depraved, cowardly past.

The young mare smacked her lips, and then shook her head. "Nothing, sir. I was merely curious about your background."

"I warn you, it's not terribly interesting," I continued, taking my cap off and sitting down beside her. A little openness, or perceived openness, I thought would help diffuse the situation. "Princess Luna appointed me to be her commissar. To be honest with you, I don't know what she saw in me when she awarded me with the crimson sash. I'd already served with the Royal Guard as an officer in Canterlot, Zebrica, and Coltcutta, but it was an unremarkable career that I ended early to focus on matters of state. When I uncovered the Changelings in the catacombs beneath Canterlot, I did what I thought any other pony would have done in that situation." -Against all reason and logic, I remind whomever reads this- "Nevertheless, the Princess of the Moon had seen fit to grant me this honour, and I certainly don't intend on letting her down. You might be trained,] but I have two years of experience leading ponies and killing Changelings, both of which I've done quite well if I might be so bold, and that experience has taught me that as thorough as Princesses' Regulations may be, there are some situations that simply aren't covered. I would appreciate it if you bore that in mind the next time you seek to criticise my decisions."

Well, it worked, I thought, for the time being. Gliding Moth quietly nodded her head and wisely kept any further thoughts about my suitability to do my job to herself, regardless of how damnably close she had come to unmasking me. It was with some relief that I saw that Rainbow Dash and Captain Blitzkrieg had come to some form of agreement as to their next course of action, which after much deliberation between the two consisted of walking in a vaguely easterly direction, which Blitzkrieg had simply identified by pointing in the direction of the rising sun and saying 'it's probably over there-ish', until they come across the stream or 'find some water or something' along the way. To their credit, at least they came to this solution without brawling again.

As we made preparations to get underway once more, I eyed the young black-clad mare warily. If my written reports had been required reading during her training and if she had so determined to succeed as a commissar that she requested posting as close to me as possible, then surely she must have been familiar with my 'background', and hopefully the official version which had all of my past infractions, improprieties, scandals, and drunken orgies that my younger self indulged in expunged from it. She expressed a particular interest in me, which was not something that I was unused to being a prince of the realm and the former leading light of Canterlot's aristocratic social scene, but this time the attention was of a more professional nature that left me feeling strangely uncomfortable. Once again, I was merely Blueblood the Commissar and not Blueblood the pony, but now I feared that if she continued to prod and probe with the sort of questions that no military pony should have the independence of mind to even consider, then she would see that Blueblood the pony was little more than a frightened little colt way out of his depth who just so happened to convince everypony of a certain level of competence.

The sun crested over the hills, and the little valley we were in was bathed in light. With my thoughts troubled, exacerbated by the lack of sleep as usual, we followed Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash onwards.

Honour and Blood (Part 7)

Part Seven

In plotting the route to the stream, any sensible pony would have consulted the map carefully, interpreted and understood the mass of lines that denoted the network of valleys between the hills and rough terrain, and then used that information in conjunction with whatever training they had received in orienteering to select the easiest and most efficient path to their destination. Sensible ponies, however, are in a minority in the Royal Guard, as ponies with even the slightest modicum of sense would never have joined or allowed themselves to be forced into a situation where joining was the only option to avoid the wrath of a magistrate (or a certain distant relative in my case) in the first place. Captain Blitzkrieg and Acting Flight Sergeant Rainbow Dash, both pegasi, had elected to take the most direct route over the craggy terrain with its many cliffs, slopes, valleys, pits, and inclines. The main flaw with this idea should be obvious to those paying attention; their wings were bound and they were therefore rendered incapable of flight, thus their only method of getting to their destination was on hoof. I allowed them to carry on with this frankly insane plan, knowing that dragging themselves there as the crow flies would only wear out the two pegasi faster and to a greater extent than the earth pony soldiers I had brought, the trainee commissar that followed me, and, I hoped, myself.

If getting to the starting position was arduous and difficult in the first place, moving on from it was even more so, at least for Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash. The first obstacle we encountered was the hill immediately in front of our starting position, with a slope at some offensively steep angle and with a surface that, like every other damned geological formation of interest here, looked as though Faust had gotten bored of shaping mountains out of primordial clay and instead just smashed the ground repeatedly with a massive hammer and took the rest of the afternoon off. With that infamous prideful unwillingness on their part to admit that they had just made a stupid mistake that seemed characteristic of pegasi, they bravely dragged and crawled themselves hoof by hoof over boulders and through ditches and crevasses. Such unwillingness to deviate from their pre-arranged plan would do them well in the Royal Guard, particularly if either of them had aspirations to becoming a general at some point in their military careers.

Though watching the two prisoners struggle to climb up that hill was amusing for all but a few moments, I rapidly grew bored of watching them fumble awkwardly and alternately berate one another for tripping or slowing down with all of the grace and wit of two drunkards trying to navigate their way to the nearest mode of public transport to take them home. Nevertheless, for me it was something of a day out; a rather morbid excursion that still carried the risk of ambush from Changelings bold enough to try and break Field Marshal Iron Hoof's so-called 'ring of steel' [Though this term became common shorthand for journalists and military historians describing Iron Hoof's shift in strategy from conquest to containment, the only recorded mention of Iron Hoof actually using it was in a complaint to an aide was that it was both inaccurate and evidence that news media should remain as far away from military affairs as possible], but reminded me of more pleasant memories of my foalhood in the sultry heat and humidity of Coltcutta, walking with one of my various nannies, governesses, or one of the native maids around the grounds of the various palaces we lived in at the time. A small army of Coltcuttan servants carrying fans, exotic snacks, and otherwise willing to attend upon my every need would certainly not have been remiss in the Badlands, but I feared that even in an age when officers were perfectly happy to carry swords studded with enough gems to put a Sapphire Shores concert to shame into battle, such an extravagance might be considered a little too extreme even by the standards of the day.

The slow progress, however, provided me with sufficient time to speak further with Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth, who had taken up position as our small column's rearguard. Her angular features bore a more contemplative look, as opposed to the more usual caricature of Princess Luna trying and failing to understand how the modern system of taxation works that they normally held. In truth, I was not in the mood for conversation, and least of all with a brainwashed pony whose mind had been scooped out with a spoon and replaced with propaganda, but I knew that soon the silence would become interminable and, worst of all, would allow her time to consider how much of a disappointment I have been to her unfeasibly high expectations.

I hung back from the punishment detail to come to Gliding's side. "What of yours?" I said.

"Sir?" she said, looking up at me and blinking gormlessly.

"Your background, I mean."

"Oh." She looked away, ahead of us as we came to negotiating our way around a particularly large outcropping of rock that resembled a cluster of pimples on the unharmed portion of Red Coat's face. "It's hardly worth mentioning, sir. You wouldn't be interested."

I arched an eyebrow and shook my head. Her tone indicated that she seriously believed that, rather than using that cliché to try and shut me up and leave her alone, or perhaps it was a mixture of both. The response, however, had only served to pique my interest. Perhaps finding out the sort of pony she was before the black uniform and winged skull emblem had masked whatever personality she might have otherwise possessed, as indeed they had done with me albeit for very different reasons, would go some way in keeping her and any guardsponies she might soon be responsible for soon alive. "Humour me. As you said, I didn't attend the same military academy as you and the other trainee commissars. I think it's only fair that you let me know what I missed."

"Like you, I didn't exactly choose to be a commissar."

"Let me guess, Princess Luna?" I remarked dryly, and chuckled to myself at the private joke at my own expense. I wondered if the one thousand years of isolation on the moon had meant that my auntie simply didn't understand the concept that ponies had free will, or perhaps one thousand years ago such things didn't really matter.

"Yes," she said flatly. "Either I take Luna's offer to make something of my life, or return to the orphanage until I reach eighteen. And then what? Out on the streets or into the poorhouse. It was hardly a real choice.”

We had stopped briefly to allow our two prisoners time to negotiate their way onto a ledge roughly twice the height of the average pony. Rainbow Dash and Captain Blitzkrieg, however, being pegasi were both a little shorter than average, and thus had more than a little bit of difficulty in attempting to climb over it. There might have been a way to get around it, however, I will never know now, as the two of them seemed utterly intent to the point of single-minded obstinacy to surmount this devious obstacle in their path, as though to walk left or right to find smoother ground or simply circumvent this hill entirely was to admit an embarrassing failure. And so it was that Rainbow Dash clambered awkwardly onto Blitzkrieg's back, who was suffering under the weight of even the thin mare, and jumped multiple times in an attempt to grip her hooves around the top of the ledge. Faust almighty, these pegasi make Neighponese samurai with their ridiculous code of honour that tends to get the overwhelming majority of them killed for pointless reasons appear reasoned and humble.

"You are an orphan?" I said, taking advantage of this natural break in our thus far pleasant morning trek. My words were blunt, but like Luna, I suppose, Gliding Moth seemed to be a mare who appreciated such directness over weak and clumsy attempts to spare her feelings.

"Yes, as was everypony else who accepted the Princess's offer." She nodded her head quietly, and looked up at me with a thoughtful expression. "Like you, so I've heard."

"After a fashion," I said. "Father disappeared on an expedition to darkest Zebrica, and Mother found it rather... rather difficult to cope without him. So, I was taken into the care of Princess Celestia instead."

I had never considered myself an orphan when I was a foal. The fact that Mama was still alive, if one could consider life inside Bitlem Royal Hospital [An infamous mental asylum in Canterlot. Blueblood's wealth, however, afforded his mother a life that was more comfortable than the majority of patients there] a life at all, and that Papa's death had yet to be confirmed by the discovery and identification of his body tends to invalidate that particular appellation. Besides, that I spent far more personal time and developed closer familial bonds with potted plants and pieces of wooden furniture than I did with either of my two parents combined meant that for all intents and purposes I might as well have been a damned orphan. Some common ground between us, however contrived it might have been, would help resolve the tensions between me and this self-appointed protégée of mine and, more importantly, hopefully stop her digging further into my sordid past and equally morally-bankrupt present.

Gliding Moth snorted, which sounded more like a suppressed half-chuckle, and the ends of her lips tugged up in one of her rare but not unwelcome smiles. "After a fashion," she repeated. "When I was little I used to dream that Princess Celestia would come and adopt me from the orphanage. Instead, her sister talks me into signing my life away for the Commissariat."

"Do I detect a hint of regret?" I asked, lowering my voice slightly. Fortunately, our prisoners were still distracted by the thus-far insurmountable ledge and the two guards were having an inordinate amount of fun watching them. Cannon Fodder, on the other hoof, had deduced that this would take some time and had settled against a rock with one of his gentlecolt's special interest magazines, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply stashed about the pockets and recesses of his armour which no pony would dare touch without wearing a hazmat suit.

She shook her head, though that slight smile did not leave her lips. It was a shame; for a brief moment I thought I had a kindred spirit, somepony who too felt the crushing weight of responsibility and expectations that came with a title that, for once, I did not want. "Just irony," she said. "Like you said about yourself, I'm not going to disappoint Princess Luna."

There was something about the lowest dregs of Equestrian society that seemed to attract Princess Luna. The ponies that she had selected for her Night Guards, myself excepted, were in varying measures shamed, ignored, downtrodden, poor, disgraced, and so on. They were ponies that ponies such as me and my ilk, the rarefied upper strata of our country who move in the highest echelons of power, wealth, and glory, who are supposed to exemplify the highest standards of the Harmony that shapes our proud nation, simply liked to pretend did not exist. On occasions where we are forced to see this benighted underclass crushed under the weighty foundations of the very authority that made me the pony I am, it was with either condescending pity in the case of the more charitably acceptable and fashionable cases, like our loveable orphan the sombre Commissar Gliding Moth, or in the case of the vicious criminal and father to his stallions Captain Blitzkrieg, outright scorn that we treated them, if we deigned to treat with them at all. Perhaps, in her return from her exile upon the moon she saw herself in the ignored and the oppressed, and had wanted to provide for them the second chance that she so craved. Granted, this was a second chance that entailed a certain level of risk of a brutal and very messy death, but it seems for that particular subset of ponies it was a risk worth taking. The Princess of the Night seemed to engender a peculiar and toxic mentality in these ponies; they had been blessed with an opportunity to make something of themselves, they were naive enough to believe that the Princess truly wished for them to succeed, and they would therefore do anything to please her, even if it meant death.

I, on the other hoof, have never needed to prove myself; my birthright as a prince of the realm had already done that for me. Yet, in becoming a commissar I have done nothing but try and live up to the impossibly high standards set for me. Though perhaps our motivations were different, they to win Princess Luna's rarely-granted approval and mine to maintain the image of bravery that ponies had through no fault of mine built up just to survive long enough for me to enjoy a peaceful retirement with a sizeable harem of willing and nubile courtesans, I was not so different from them either.

The desperately slow rate of our advance over and through these mountains gave me much time to ruminate on this, just like those endless sleepless nights spent staring at a barren stone ceiling and contemplating what grievous sin I must have committed in a previous life to deserve all of this. Gliding Moth and I filled what would have been an awkward silence between us with idle small talk, the subject of which was so banal that I cannot accurately remember what we discussed, but it felt as though that we indulged merely out of social expectation. It was pleasant, however, and I realised that it was far too long since I had a conversation with another pony about topics entirely unrelated to the Royal Guard and the war, however mundane they might have been.

After a while, when the sun was just starting to reach the optimal position in the sky to ravage this land with its full fury, the conversation had wandered into the subject of Gliding Moth's cutie mark. The commissar's uniform at the time did not conceal the cutie mark, affording us the luxury of displaying the most fundamental expression of a pony's personality that was denied to the rank and file of the Royal Guard. [[i]During the reform period to come, it was decided by the Commissariat that commissars should wear trousers as part of their uniform. Prince Blueblood stubbornly refused to adopt this, and it was only his reputation that kept him from being reprimanded.] Adorning the mare's flanks was the image of a grey-brown moth, with a pair of wings intricately decorated with grim, austere, yet beautiful patterns and colours. A stylised eye adorned each wing, likely some quirk of evolution to fool gullible predators into thinking it was a bigger and more fierce creature than its desperately fragile form actually is. Despite its size and prominence, unlike most cutie marks which stand out proudly from a pony's rear, it seemed to blend in with the mottled grey and white fur it adorned, as though camouflaged. A sordid joke about her backside staring at me came to mind, but I resisted the urge to give voice to it.

"I like moths," she said flatly, as though that statement should have been obvious. In a way, I suppose it was, but cutie marks were supposed to be more symbolic than anything else. I don't like orienteering as a hobby, I just happen to be preternaturally good at it. Vast reams of discourse have been written speculating on the meanings behind the curious designs that appear on ponies' flanks, but I suppose in some cases it's ultimately very straightforward.

"I didn't think you'd be the type to be an aurelian," I said. She gave me an odd look, forcing me to clarify the somewhat archaic yet romantic term that I had used: "A lepidopterist, I mean."

"Oh, I don't collect them," she said. "It's a bit cruel to pin them up against cork boards like that for display. But they are very pretty in a way. Everypony likes butterflies, but moths have a beauty that goes beyond the bright colours and patterns. They only come out at night, yet they have a fascination with flame, even if it ultimately burns them."

"Yes, I've always wondered why they do that," I said. "If they crave the light so much, why do they not fly during the day?"

She shook her head. "Something to do with their navigating by the light of the moon, but candlelight confuses them. Still, I like the poetic symbolism behind seeking something that will ultimately burn you to ash were you to actually find it."

I wasn't quite certain how to respond to that statement, wondering if that was a reflection of her personality and her inevitable fate. She certainly seemed driven enough to pursue her goals, whatever they may be, at the expense of her own safety, which meant she would fit right in with the rest of Princess Luna's own cadre of imbeciles. I'd rather a pony with the sense to know when something just isn't worth the effort than somepony willing to defy all of the logic and reason in the universe just to get it. "You just like moths," I said, hoping to leave the sudden unpleasant shift in our discussion at that.

The silence lasted for a few moments. I say 'silence', I meant relative silence, for Blitzkrieg loudly complained that he felt like he had a hangover, which was likely dehydration starting to set in, and Rainbow Dash berated him to get a move on. The arrival of a squadron of vultures circling almost directly above us had gone some way in restoring their motivation, though I suspected that the carrion birds had simply learned over the past few years to associate any movement of a number of ponies with a battle and therefore abundant food, and were thus simply hopeful that we'd butcher some hapless Changelings to serve as their lunch. I felt we were getting close to the stream, due to my special talent for always being able to navigate my way to whatever my destination, or whatever it thought I wanted to go.

"Sir?" said Gliding Moth.

"Yes?"

"I have heard rumours about Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's recent conduct," she said, though her halting speech implied she was doing her best to pick her words carefully. I, however, was not so considerate.

"You mean you've found out he's a utterly incompetent blackguard, and is to commanding ponies-at-arms what Germane food is to fine dining?"

Gliding Moth's eyes widened, her mouth dropped open slightly, and a slight flush came to her pale, mottled cheeks. She composed herself rapidly, stifling what sounded suspiciously like a giggle, though I feared I might have overstepped my bounds in offending the sensibilities of a lady. "That's one way of putting it."

"Forgive me," I said. "When one spends as much time with soldiers as I have, the lines between what is and is not acceptable for conversation becomes somewhat blurred." Granted, what I had said was unlikely to have been said by any of the rank-and-file, aside perhaps for that rare sort of educated pony who for one reason or another found it necessary to join the Royal Guard, but as I would find in later life, that justification certainly does well in ameliorating any offense caused on the rare occasion that tact fails me. Which, I might add, became increasingly prevalent as I grew older and more jaded with the high society scene of Canterlot to which I had once devoted my life to.

"A soldier should be blunt in speech, but his spear sharp," she said thoughtfully, probably just to spare my feelings if I happened to be feeling anything other than quiet disappointment with the direction my life was taking. "But you're saying those rumours are true?"

"That depends," I said, "on what rumours you've heard. It pays to listen to what the troops say in the mess or gathered around campfire, but you shouldn't always believe everything you hear; they have a universal tendency towards exaggeration, particularly in large groups."

She nodded again. The morning air had grown unbearably hot and stifling as is customary, and out here atop this small plateau surrounded on all sides by deep gullies, in which one lay the very stream we were looking for, there was no shade from the onslaught of Celestia's sizzling golden orb. Yet this was merely a pale reflection of the veritable inferno to come when the sun would reach its zenith in a few hours. We had been marching under that blazing sun for a few hours now with but a few short breaks for the two prisoners to find their bearings, and I must say that Gliding Moth was coping with both the heat and the physical challenge of our excursion remarkably well for an untrained mare with a physique that suggested that she might be blown away by a stiff breeze. Either that or she was simply blessed with an upper lip so stiff it would have made Major Starlit Skies envious, and if she had been trained by Princess Luna then it was almost certainly the latter.

"I know. But there's a few things in the official accounts that don't add up. Your AAR [After-Action Report. The military's propensity for initialisms baffles me at times] was heavily redacted, for example. Lord Captain Shining Armour's too, and Colonel Sunshine Smiles'."

"I can imagine," I said, shaking my head. I hadn't realised that the War Ministry's cosy relationship with the Ministry of Information had gotten to the point where the latter was editing military reports for the benefit of certain officials within the former and their clients and friends in the Royal Guard officer class they protect. If they were any more intertwined I'd expect to find the Secretary of State for War in bed with the Secretary of State for Information with a number of bastard foals on the way, however biologically impossible that might be. "I advise you to be careful with Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter. He may look like a blundering imbecile, but that's only because he wants you to see him that way. The second he steps a hoof out of line, you report to me."

"Is that why I was assigned to his platoon specifically? To keep an eye on him?"

I hadn't thought of that, but I suppose it made sense. Our friend and comrade, the insufferable blackguard Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter, would naturally be cautious around me, but he would be unsuspecting of a trainee commissar. Gliding Moth, however, seemed to be no pushover, as evidenced by the fact that she demonstrated perfect willingness to punish even the slightest of Scarlet's transgressions. The Commissariat was at its core a political organisation, founded by a pony who detested modern politics for moving away from the autocratic system she was familiar with, and now showed itself to be as shrewd at playing this cloak-and-dagger game as the officers whose conduct we were supposed to oversee.

"You requested assignment to a frontline regiment, did you not?" I said. The conversation was drifting onto an area I was not exactly comfortable explaining to a mare who, for all intents and purposes, I had only just met.

"Yes, I did, but it's strange that of all the platoons in all the regiments on the frontline I am assigned to one led by a pony whose reputation is under question."

"He was acquitted of all charges."

Gliding Moth shot me a queer look, and shook her head in what I took to be in moderate disbelief. "You don't actually believe that’s truly the case?”

“No more than I’d believe that a gryphon can be taught to sing a hymn,” I said, involuntarily shuddering at the memory of one of less happy events of my early life. [I believe Blueblood is referring to gryphon operas that he attended as part of a cultural exchange initiative. Such performances are certainly an acquired taste for those unused to the unique, screeching quality of gryphon singing and who lack the stamina for shows that can last entire days, but the majesty and spectacle of the epic stories told make up for it.] “The Royal Guard doesn't operate in the way most ponies think it should. It is the shield and sword of Equestria, but a thousand years of peace has made it rusty and blunt. The system has made it easy for ponies like Scarlet Letter to exploit, but that is where we come in. If you want to be a commissar, you will learn that it is not ponies like Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash that you should be most wary of, but the cultured, refined officer who thinks only of his own advancement, and thinks nothing of letting others die for his vanity. And sometimes he will get away with it.”

The sun reached its zenith by the time we found the stream, glittering in the light as though it was a path of diamonds. It was a damned miracle that Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash could find it in the first place, and I suspected that there was some sort of innate navigational system built into the brain structure of pegasi that gave them some sort of natural advantage over us earth-bound ponies. [Like some birds, pegasi are subconsciously able to detect magnetic fields, allowing them to instinctively know magnetic north] The stream itself was not overly impressive, being about five feet wide and sheltered from the sun within two steep cliffs seemingly carved out of the rocky landscape with an axe, descending from the less arid lands to the north, probably from some greater river, wending its way between these hills to be buried in some crevasse somewhere. What little vegetation grows in the Badlands seemed to been localised almost entirely here, with anaemic-looking grasses and shrubs clinging desperately to the trickle of water that sustained them. Nevertheless, the sight of fresh, flowing water was a welcome one, more so for our prisoners who simply abandoned all restraint and flung themselves down the side of the cliff, their hooves scrambling frantically to maintain purchase on the almost sheer surface, and then headlong into the water.

Neither of them seemed to take much notice of the mare collecting water in terracotta urns at the stream's bank, so consumed by their thirst they were. She was startled by the sudden appearance of two strange ponies, letting a high-pitched yelp of surprise and scrambling back away from them in a flurry of hooves and fluttering robes. It was then Captain Blitzkrieg finally took notice, snapping his head up from the water to address her.

"Calm down, filly," he said, apparently ignorant or uncaring of the fact it was unlikely she spoke Equestrian, "I'm only taking a drink."

The arrival of Yours Truly cresting over the edge of the cliff, flanked by four heavily armed and armoured ponies, one of whom both appeared and smelt like he had just crawled out of a sewage pipe, did very little to help the situation, and the strange mare exclaimed something violent in her native tongue and fell to the ground in a whimpering mess. One of the urns had been knocked over by an errant hoof, and the precious water that it contained spilled out to be soaked up by the arid dust. Blitzkrieg watched the cowering mare with a practiced sense of detachment, before shrugging his narrow shoulders and returning to the business of drinking from the stream.

Our two guards raised their spears warily, but seeing that she was completely alone I instructed them to lower their weapons, which they did only reluctantly. We had long known of the ponies native to this wretched little portion of the world, living curiously unmolested by the vast horde of Changelings lingering mere miles to the south, but actual contact with the reclusive tribes was exceedingly rare. They were the descendents of those groups of ponies unwilling to accept the rightful rule of the Princesses or recognise the divinity of Faust, and thus fled to the one region on this continent that no sane pony, not even the blood-hungry Warmistress Princess Luna, had thought it worthwhile to invade and occupy. The inhabitants of Dodge Junction had over the centuries traded trinkets and cherries with a few of the more enterprising groups and a several of our patrols had encountered wandering parties of natives whose disposition varied from friendly through cautious to downright hostile, though fortunately none thus far had the severe lack of foresight necessary to physically attack our forces. For one to venture out alone by herself implied that her home was relatively closeby, or that there were others of her kind hidden from sight. Their ability to appear from seemingly out of nowhere was well-documented by those who have encountered them, and I found myself scanning the rocks and hills around me for potential hiding places.

Gliding Moth stared at the strange pony, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set in a peculiar manner as though she was about to say something but had thought better of it. Nevertheless, she stared intently at the quivering heap of rags and pony on the ground before her. It was only after the silence, broken only by the ambient sounds of the hot breeze flowing through this cleft and of Rainbow Dash and Blitzkrieg drinking noisily, had endured for a few uncomfortably long moments that I realised, as ever, that everypony was looking to me to decide what to do.

I suppressed the urge to sigh in irritation, which was something that I have had to do more frequently these days. I cautiously made my way down the side of the cliff, and though there were a few moments where I was certain that I would slip, fall, and quite likely break my neck, I reached the bottom and approached the mare. She was about middle-aged, I thought, though I couldn't be sure whether the greying mane and wrinkles were brought about by age or prematurely by the depressing conditions in which they must live. Long, loose-fitting robes draped around her thin frame and onto the dusty ground around them, which I noticed were both more or less the same colour, giving the odd impression that she was melting. In this heat it certainly felt like it. Around her neck hung a crude necklace of string, from which dangled a pendant of three interlocking triangles. Casting the Changeling-reveal spell that had by now become second-nature reassured me that I was not about to have my throat torn out by fangs.

Aware that just about everypony in the vicinity, including ones that I probably couldn't see hidden away in the myriad different possible hiding spots surrounding us, was watching me, I gingerly picked up the jug of spilt water, with its former contents forming a darker patch in the parched earth. It was a clumsy, ill-formed sort of thing, unlikely to win any awards, though the odd, elegant geometric patterns with intersecting lines and shapes carved upon its service with greater care than its initial shaping was quite pleasing in a rough, folk-art sort of way. 'Charmingly rustic', as that oaf Fancy Pants might have put it. I filled it with water from the stream and placed it upright along with its brethren.

"Do you speak Equestrian?" I said, trying to keep my voice as unthreatening as possible. A lifetime of elocution lessons often made it difficult for me to sound warm and friendly, but I think in this case I had at least partially succeeded.

The mare looked up at me with wide, quivering eyes, and slowly and awkwardly rose to her unsteady hooves. She bowed her head, apparently identifying me through my practiced regal bearing and stately grace undimmed by two years' worth of dust and filth and bloodshed that I was a pony of worth, and babbled a sort of greeting in the sibilant tones of her native tongue. She stared back, her frame quivering slightly and ready to bolt in the opposite direction at the slightest sign of trouble. My sword was firmly in its sheath, though the four other armed ponies who had followed me held their weapons in wary readiness, which was not likely to help calm her.

The languages of the natives was something unknown to me, and despite my affinity with foreign tongues, their relative reclusiveness meant that I had only picked up a few words and phrases over the course of my time since arriving at the front. Nevertheless, it seemed to share the same mother as the language you and I speak in Ancient Equestrian, though thousands of years of relative isolation had done much to distort and corrupt the once regal and awe-inspiring tones of our ancestors into the bastardised version these ponies spoke. Some, at least, had a little understanding of this shared ancestral language to varying degrees, even if their grasp of it would have sent my old schoolmaster, who was very keen on the Classics, into fits of blind rage.

"Benevolus?" I said, pointing to myself. [Benevolent, kind, friend, or a well-wisher.]

She nodded, and mumbled something else in her own tongue. Keeping a careful eye on me and my entourage, she took a few steps back, gathered up her jugs, and resumed filling the remainder a little further up the stream away from where Blitzkrieg and Rainbow Dash sated their thirst. Every so often she would turn her gaze to look at us, and then quickly snap her head back down if she were to accidentally make eye contact with either me or a guardspony. I considered the issue resolved; it was unlikely that she wanted anything further to do with us, and I could hardly blame her for that, for even I would want to have nothing to do with me under these circumstances.

I turned and trotted back to the group, and busied myself with refilling my own water canteen in the stream. The water was quite cool and refreshing, having avoided the worst of the glare of the midday sun in this crevasse, and I was thankful for the relative shade afforded by those steep cliffs above us. Though for all intents and purposes the punishment detail had ended, I decided that at the very least a short break was in order; I was in no rush to return, especially in the heat of midday and with my limbs aching terribly, and saw no reason why this little expedition could not be extended by a few hours. After all, after a year or so of precisely sod and all happening vis-à-vis the actual prosecution of this war it was very unlikely that either Field Marshal Iron Hoof or Queen Chrysalis would choose today out of any other day to mount their long-awaited and long-feared offensive. Knowing my luck, however, I'd probably return to find Chrysalis herself in my office, sitting on my chair, eating my biscuits, and drinking my secret stash of brandy.

"What was that?" said Gliding Moth, a little too abruptly for my taste.

"That's a mare," said Cannon Fodder. One could almost take that statement for sarcasm, if my aide was in any way capable of understanding the concept. "Ma'am."

Gliding Moth, however, seemed a little perturbed by the comment, and snapped at my aide, "I wasn't asking you."

"Private Cannon Fodder is right," I said flatly, inwardly hoping that nothing further would come of this, or that my aide would be too offended by her sharp remark. As ever, it went over his head like an airship and he simply crept off by himself to stand guard. "She's a civilian. We've orders to leave them alone."

Gliding Moth snorted contemptuously, "She's a heretic, sir."

Oh dear, I should have known that those elements of the Church who are most divorced from what most sensible ponies would recognise as objective reality have sunk their tendrils into the Commissariat. I had suspected as much, owing to the vast amounts of spuriously religious pamphlets that I had received, collected, and then disseminated amongst the soldiers only to be recycled as toilet paper, and that the reams and reams of manuals and scripture that had been sent to me and then repurposed as compost for Major Starlit Skies' vegetable garden demanded that I act as much as a spiritual mentor to the stallions as the authoritarian hoof of the Ministry of War. I had quietly ignored that aspect of my job, as I did with many other things that I found distasteful, knowing that a soldier's faith tends to be a relatively simple one born out of a desire to have some divine guarantor of survival that needed no input from me and I myself not having much trust in the incense and sycophantic platitudes of religion, but it seemed the new breed of commissars would not, indoctrinated as they were by a system that mistook blind fanaticism for loyalty and bravery.

"Technically," I said, incapable of letting a minor semantic error go uncorrected, "she's a heathen."

The statement was met with a slight look of confusion and that odd pursing of lips that I noticed Gliding Moth did whenever I said or did anything that did not quite mesh with whatever lies the Commissariat had told her about me. "Same difference."

"Not really," I said, crossing the line straight into simply being facetious. "A heretic believes in Faust but not in the official doctrine, and a heathen believes in something else entirely. I think these ponies worship nature spirits." [The native ponies refer to their religion as the ‘Old Faith’, and worship not a single creator being but a multitude of different spirits that inhabit animals, plants, and the land itself. This explanation is unfortunately very crude and does a great disservice to a vibrant faith with a great variety of customs and rituals for each clan, but for the purposes of presenting this narrative and brevity it will have to suffice.]

"But..."

"She's a civilian," I repeated, a little more forcefully this time. I swung a hoof in the mare's direction; she was still doing her damnedest not to look like she knew we were talking about her, even though she likely had no idea what exactly we were talking about, and though she pretended to be busy with her water urns her ears were firmly pointed in our direction. "We've enough trouble with the Changelings without angry natives causing havoc behind our frontlines. Focus on the bigger picture, Gliding; we're here to fight Changelings, not ponies. Leave the proselytising for the missionaries."

And let us get dragged into yet another bloody quagmire, thought I. Nevertheless, I quickly put the thought out of my mind; the Church might have had some role in the setting up of the Commissariat, but it was highly unlikely that even politicians and generals would take complete and utter leave of whatever senses they had left would risk doing something so utterly stupid. One, however, should never discount the idiocy of ponies deluded thinking they are doing the right thing, for they are a far greater danger to the peace and prosperity of the Equestrian nation than even the most corrupt and self-serving of the empowered classes.

She saw sense, however, or at least appeared to. Dear Faust, I hoped I was getting through to her; the ability to think critically is one of the most precious of Her gifts, and to have it stamped out so thoroughly of this young, bright mare by the Academy was a damned shame.

The heathen mare had left hurriedly, as though she did not want to be in even the same continent as us. My hooves began to itch terribly, and the horrid sensation that we were being watched, which I had not felt since I had first accompanied Captain Red Coat's battalion through these very same hills, sent a shiver down my spine. The cliffs and hills above us now loomed as though they were about to close in on us, and I felt suddenly claustrophobic. There, in the clefts and holes I could feel but not see hundreds of eyes watching our every move, judging us for how we dealt with one of their own. Although I had been looking forward to having a pleasant little picnic by the side of this quaint little stream, with our task now complete I thought it best that we made a hasty retreat back to the fortress; no matter what colour the Macintosh Hills were coloured in on the map, this was not our land, we were trespassers in it, and if we weren't careful we were going to get a sharp reminder of that fact.

Author's Note

Woohoo, here we go again. The stars are aligned and I've produced another chapter for your enjoyment, or not, that's for you to decide.

Honour and Blood (Part 9)

Rainbow Dash greeted the news of our gallant mission to blow up this bridge of dubious military importance with her characteristic restraint and good grace, by which I mean she enthusiastically declared that it was about time she got to do something productive, punched empty space, and did an obnoxious little dance some ten feet in the air in front of the Night Guards' senior officers, General McBridle, and his staff. This initial exuberance of hers, however, began to evaporate after a few days like a good mood when a tax collector knocks on one's front door as the drudgery of planning and preparation began to set in, and before long her incessant complaining about the constant inventory checks, meetings, briefings, debriefings, equipment requisition, additional training, form-filling, and other such tedious but ultimately necessary things that inevitably preclude even the most basic of all military operations, in this case, going into enemy territory to blow up a bridge, would be enough to drive the most patient of nuns into a murderous rage.

"Why do we even need to demolish a bridge?" she asked one morning, while we waited in the queue in the quartermaster's storage tent. Pencil Pusher was busy admonishing a soldier more than twice his height and girth for the improper usage of the Royal Guard standard issue spork and would likely be doing so for some time, which meant that I would have to endure Rainbow Dash's company for much longer than I had initially hoped to. I had only come to have the regiment's armourer have a finer edge put on my sword before our little excursion, and while that was a simple enough task for me to have let Cannon Fodder do instead, I simply wanted an excuse to get out of my office and stretch my legs for a short bit. As for her, I had gathered that she required a replacement flightsuit, having ruined hers in a mid-air collision with a Night Guard who, I wish to point out, suffered injuries greater than a damaged uniform and wounded pride by cushioning her fall. It was pure bad luck on my part to have run into her here in this empty limbo of bureaucracy, where time has no meaning and the souls of the damned are doomed forever to catalogue, clean, and organise the myriad goods that keep Equestria's war machine running at peak efficiency, or something resembling that.

"To cover the flank of the coming offensive," I said. "We've been over this, or were you really sleeping through all of those meetings? Hm?"

"Oh, no! I was definitely awake for those, sir!" she said, a little too quickly to assuage my suspicions. "I mean, Changelings can fly, so they can just fly over the smoking wreckage of the bridge we just blew up!" She demonstrated this concept by waving a hoof above her head in a wide arc.

The thought had occurred to me, and like all good commissars I put that little thought back into the far reaches of my mind where it wouldn't bother me unless I was sufficiently bored and morose for it to make another appearance as I contemplate the nightmare that my life has become. I knew the truth, of course, that it was an entirely political gesture to spur the government of the day into taking this war for the continued survival of the Equestrian state and its Harmony a little more seriously. I could not, however, very well say that to Rainbow Dash, whose rather naively short-sighted and self-centred view of the world could not account for the machinations that took place behind the scenes of the war, and indeed she seemed to be entirely unaware of the vast endeavours, planning, manoeuvring, meetings, and discussions that inevitably accompany such a vast undertaking as a military operation beyond that which immediately affects her. She simply would not understand, and besides, it was just not her place to know. The problem, however, was that I struggled to think of an alternative explanation that would sate her curiosity, and telling her that such questioning of orders was simply something not done by the lower ranks would only exacerbate the situation in the long run.

"Food," said Cannon Fodder suddenly. I turned my head to see him standing behind me; I had forgotten he was there, in truth, which wasn't surprising when one considers his tendency to remain silent unless spoken to. It did, however, seem to imply that my continued exposure to his unique aroma had dulled my sense of smell to the point where the lingering stench of body odour and unwashed tunic no longer registered to me.

"Lunch will be soon," I said, grateful for the diversion, though somewhat confused as to why he chose that exact moment to say something. I had long ago given up any hope of trying to understand the inner workings that motivated my aide to do anything, believing that to be something beyond the scope of both the intellect and the sanity of most ponies to fully comprehend.

"I mean, they still got to feed themselves, right?" he said. I was astounded; it was the most amount of words in a single sentence that I had heard him say, though it was related, if somewhat tangentially, to one of the very few hobbies he pursued with anything resembling enthusiasm.

I saw Rainbow Dash's confused expression, and, having deciphered the concepts behind what Cannon Fodder had been trying to explain in spite of his limited vocabulary before she could, decided to save everypony present the misery of seeing the both of them employing their limited faculties in trying to discuss this issue. "They can't just live off the land like ponies," I said. "If they cross the gorge, they need to maintain a supply line to bring whatever it is they eat from their hive; otherwise, any counter-attack across the gorge runs the risk of being isolated and starved."

"Huh." Rainbow Dash cocked her head to one side and squinted at Cannon Fodder, while chewing on her lower lip as though doing so would make discerning the meaning behind my aide's words and marrying it up with her curiously self-obsessed worldview any easier. "I guess that makes sense," she said, at length.

It didn't, really, but it kept her from asking any more awkward questions that might jeopardise the masquerade that the Royal Guard knew what in Hades it was doing, which was the most important thing at the time. If everything went well, and despite the apparent simplicity of this operation it was a very big 'if' that cast a deep shadow over my mind, it was not something we would have to worry about again. Experience had taught me that despite what most ponies think, when supposedly simple things go wrong they still have as much capacity to be as spectacularly, horrendously, awfully catastrophic as more complex operations. Perhaps even moreso, when one takes into account the false sense of security that tends to cloud one's judgement when doing something described as supposedly simple.

[Prince Blueblood here has touched upon one of the more popular and more plausible theories that seek to explain why Changeling strategy appeared to be more reactive to Equestrian advances and why they seemingly never sought to gain the initiative despite repeated opportunities to do so. Though most of the war was fought in Changeling-held territory, their unique method of feeding and their inability to formulate a means to store and transport their food, that is, the stolen love that one pony feels for another extracted, distilled, and stored, in sufficient quantities forced Queen Chrysalis to keep her forces on the defensive and use such under-hoofed methods such as infiltration and sabotage. The destruction of the bridge would indeed have prevented the enemy from maintaining a supply line with enough capacity to maintain a large enough force for a counter-attack. Another theory is that destroying bridges is just what the military does, just in case it might be useful to the enemy, and Royal Engineers are more than capable of constructing new bridges in their place.]

By now, Pencil Pusher had finished being tediously pedantic with the burly soldier and had turned his bureaucratic obtrusiveness onto his next victim, who was a platoon sergeant with a requisition form for four candles, and thus the queue advanced one space. It was then that Cannon Fodder broke the few moments of awkward silence that had fallen, as it tends to do when I am forced to socialise with ponies so far beneath my class that we have about in much in common as a Saddle Row tailored suit has with a pair of dungarees.

"What do you reckon is for lunch, sir?" he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, inwardly grateful for the diversion. "The same as breakfast, last night's dinner, and yesterday's lunch, and forever: brown stew."

***

Like all military operations that I have participated in, and most likely the ones I haven't graced with my presence either, this one started as it meant to carry on. Our intrepid little task force had mustered on the outskirts of the encampment, where the mass of tents that surrounded the ancient fortress like a halo around a saint on the stained glass windows in Canterlot Cathedral stopped and what was marked as enemy territory on the maps began, and after a flurry of activity to get ourselves ready, we were stuck waiting. It had been decided that a smaller force consisting of a platoon each of earth ponies and unicorns, supported by the trainee Wonderbolts, and a section of engineers would be sufficient to the task at hoof. Personally, I would have preferred a much larger detachment of ponies to place between me and the ravenous hordes of Changelings, but understandably General McBridle would have been quite unwilling to empty the entirety of Fort E-5150 purely for my own benefit. However, as the sun crested the horizon and was large, fat, orange satsuma hovering a few inches above the almost perfectly featureless plains to the east, the unicorn platoon from the 1st Solar Guard and Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth were an hour late.

It is often said that the moments of fearful trepidation before battle are worse than the actual battle, though I firmly contend that the two are downright terrible in the first place and that ranking them in order of awfulness is an exercise in futility, but sitting around in the early morning with only a mug of that ubiquitous strong tea and a ration bar of dubious contents to sustain me, being forced to divide my attention between watching the mass of tents for any sign of a very apologetic mass of gold armour and white fur to emerge and making sure that the Horsetralians didn't let their boredom get the better of them and start setting off their explosives prematurely, almost made me wish for a locust-like swarm of Changelings to descend upon us. Almost. There was, of course, the vain hope that they simply would not turn up at all, but the inexorable advance of the Equestrian war machine, powered by sheer bureaucratic inertia, would find other just as willing volunteers for martyrdom eventually. In the absence of further orders, all we could do was sit as Celestia's life-giving sun started to raise the temperature to just beyond that which is considered safe for ponies to spend any significant length of time within.

All of these sources of annoyance and anxiety paled in comparison to Rainbow Dash, who, after a commendable few minutes of waiting quite patiently, had taken to pacing back and forth and around in meandering circles with no apparent direction or purpose than to express her barely concealed irritation at having to wait for her chance at glory. Every so often she would stop, and then complain that in no uncertain terms that she was very bored and posited the option that we simply embark on our mission without the unicorns. Occasionally, a few of the other soldiers would simply jeer and make crude remarks at her in response, but thanks to their curious misapprehension that I might be somehow capable of stopping thirty or so heavily armed and armoured stallions and mares from doing what they wanted things never progressed further than that. A certain allusion to broken records came to mind, and while I had been willing to allow her to indulge in her own frustrations for a short time as I felt that it would have been hypocritical of me to prevent her from voicing just what I was feeling at the same time, to an extent, but as ever allowing a pony as ill-disciplined as her to speak freely would only embolden her to the point of saying something that somepony would make her regret. After about half an hour or so of grinding down everypony's patience, the inevitable happened.

"It's not like we even need the unicorns," she said. "I mean, you've got the Wonderbolts right here! I'm pretty sure we can handle all of this on our own anyway."

I was about to tell her that she was more than welcome to fly straight into enemy territory without the support of unicorn magic and earth pony muscle and demolish a bridge without explosives and the expertise to use them, when one of the earth pony soldiers had apparently had the same idea. Almost immediately behind her was a full section of earth pony stallions, who had been observing her uncouth ranting for quite some time, having apparently exhausted all other forms of passing the time. This aforementioned soldier who, unlike his comrades, had failed to see the funny side of the trainee Wonderbolt's ignorant remarks. He, a short but heavily-built pony with a squat nose that had been broken and hadn't set quite in the right place, rose from where he had been playing an engrossing game of snap with his comrades and marched with an expression of righteous determination on his face towards an oblivious Rainbow Dash.

"Now listen here, you dumb little..." he began, but, mercifully for him, stopped when he saw me lingering close by and watching with affected mild interest.

"Private," I said, and he snapped to attention. "Inform your platoon commander that I want him to send your section over to that small hill over there and report back in five minutes. I want to know what's behind it."

His bluster deflated by the presence of Yours Truly, resplendent in a commissar's uniform that had clearly seen better days, the soldier muttered something quietly in the affirmative and then went on his merry way to relay my orders to his commanding officer. He glanced over his shoulder a few times, but seemed to focus more on Rainbow Dash than me, and was then subsumed into the mass of ponies that was his platoon. With him out of the picture and a potential repeat of the last time a trainee Wonderbolt and a Night Guard found themselves incapable of resolving their differences without the excessive use of hooves and head-butting mercifully averted for now, I turned my attention back to this irritating little filly with an unerring tendency to make my life much more difficult than it already was.

"What's his problem?" said Rainbow Dash, oblivious as ever.

"As for you," I said, removing my cap and running a hoof through the mop of greasy blond mane that flopped unceremoniously over my eyes. I sighed dramatically for effect and shook my head, before levelling my gaze once at the confused mare. "Sit down, don't say anything at all, and don't move until I say you can. That's an order."

There was the briefest moment of hesitation, before she sat her pert, latex-clad rear down on the dusty ground with a look that could have caused a bushel of apples to shrivel up and rot within seconds. A glance back at the tents, with the nameless, almost identical stallions milling between them confirmed that our missing platoon was still desperately late, so I had time for one more lecture. One, I thought, that would avert whatever disaster her impetuous and disobedient nature was going to bring. Having been subjected to such proselytizing speeches from Twilight Sparkle for much of my life and Princess Luna more recently, I like to think I had grown rather adept at delivering condescending sermons to ponies who lack the necessary wit, intelligence, or authority to respond. Whether or not they have quite the same effect, I can't be certain, though the average pony tends to be suitably over-awed by the web of falsehoods that is my career and reputation that I could probably tell them that I'm related to Discord and they might believe me.

"What in Tartarus am I to do with you?" I said, shaking my head. Rainbow Dash looked as though she was about to say something, but then wisely decided that it was better to keep whatever little retort that what she possessed in place of wit had devised to herself. I sat down next to her, and fiddled with my cap idly with my hooves; I found that she tended to respond better when I approached her not as some kind of authority figure descending down from on high to dispense sanctions like an avenging alicorn of old, but as close to an equal as I could possibly manage with her. Besides, I don't think I could have mustered the same sheer bloody-minded, hell-forged ferocity that Sergeant Major Square Basher and her ilk so effortless drew upon as a mage draws upon magic to cast her spells.

"I don't expect you to understand immediately," I continued, trying to keep my tone relatively friendly and as free of condescension as one cursed with an accent as refined as mine can possibly muster. "You've been here for a few weeks, but these ponies have been here for two years with no end in sight. I appreciate that you've done a lot for Equestria, but while you've been doing that thousands of ponies here have been fighting, forgotten and un-acknowledged. So, for you to come here, with minimal military experience, without having to wade through the sweat and the blood and the filth that these soldiers have had just to survive here long enough for you to arrive and strut about, and to act as though you think that you and your collection of county air show entertainers -sorry, trainee country air show entertainers- can single-hoofedly win a war that an army of four thousand soldiers so far hasn't might not sit too well with them."

Rainbow Dash had the good sense to look sheepish as I harangued her. I like to think I am a somewhat decent judge of character, as being able to deceive ponies as often as I am forced to demands that I either learn this skill or else have the scaffolding of falsehoods that hold up the fragile edifice of my life come crashing down, and from what I could tell she seemed appropriately embarrassed by her own behaviour. She gave a slight nod of her head, pursed her lips, then looked back up at me.

"Yeah, you're right," she said quietly, half to herself. "None of this is how I expected it to be. I just... want to prove myself."

"Believe me, Acting Flight Leader, war is never how anypony expects it to be. You can prove yourself by doing your job and following orders, like a good soldier. Everypony here has to earn respect the same way."

That seemed to shut her up; either she couldn't think of an appropriate retort or had wisely decided that arguing with me was entirely futile when I had the authority of the Commissariat and, by proxy, Princess Luna standing behind me. A mere talking-to would not permanently fix the issue, of course; talking about war and all that it entails is insufficient as a means of conveying what it is truly like, much like how solely reading about higher magic won't automatically make one adept at teleportation or manipulating the raw fabric of reality unless one actually attempts it. No, only a baptism of blood and fire in the font of battle would be enough to strip the unwarranted arrogance from her like filth from a mithril breastplate. Should any of us survive, that is.

Eventually, Rainbow Dash simply fell asleep, which meant that I had to contend only with her snoring, which sounded more like an express train colliding with the Manehatten Philharmonic Orchestra attempting to perform 'Ride of the Alicorns' after consuming a crate of beer. It was, however, still preferable to hearing her speak, and I was grateful for it. I was about to see if I could rejoin her in the realm of slumber, on the off-chance that I could slip back into a very pleasant and, I assure you, completely innocent dream involving Countess Coloratura and a bed made of cotton candy, when Cannon Fodder roused me from that blissful transitory state between the escape of unconsciousness and cold hard reality, and pointed at the encampment.

"I think they're here now," he said, nudging me in the shoulder and leaving a streak of grime and dust on my tunic. “The Solar Guards.”

"What makes you think that?" I said groggily.

I rose unsteadily to my hooves, and saw peeking just above the pointed tops of the tents and wooden shacks two flags drifting towards us like the sails of a galley partially obscured by rocks. They were instantly recognisable to any guardspony worth his meagre pay; the Royal Standard, sewn by Princess Platinum and carried into battle by Commander Hurricane, and its younger but no less resplendent brother the regimental standard of the 1st Solar Guard. The flags twitched and swayed in the gentle breeze, but the young ensigns who carried these sacred military relics held them steady enough despite marching for them to appear as though they were gliding along with the grace and poise of Auntie 'Tia on ice skates. The presence of these two glorious banners, steeped as they were in the history of our land and its unconquerable harmony, never failed to stir even my cynical heart to, at the very least, feel slightly less miserable about the concept of my impending death. Of course, these colourful sheets of ancient fabric were designed explicitly for that purpose, for a soldier may not always be motivated by love of country, family, his friends, money, or even a commissar peering judgmentally over his shoulder, but the sight of a standard flying in the wind (helpfully provided by use of weather magic, of course) would remind even the most cowardly of guardsponies for whom and for what they fight.

This flicker of uncharacteristic jingoism, however, was snuffed out the very second I saw the platoon emerge from behind the tent closest to us, and at its head was quite possibly the very last pony that I wanted to see. Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter led the column of marching unicorns, flanked by Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth. Immediately behind him was the colour guard; six veteran soldiers, two of each pony race and forming two units of three guarding the ensign and the battle standards they proudly held. Together they were the malformed head of a fat, noisy snake that slithered its way free off the confines of the tent and onto the field before us.

The platoon halted, and Scarlet Letter and Gliding Moth marched up to me and saluted, the former with just barely enough discipline to be considered only just acceptable and the latter with an enviable sense of precision that bordered on clockwork. At the abrupt, barked command of the platoon's sergeant, whose previously cheerful and chipper mood that I had seen in the twelve months of his commanding officer's absence had been replaced with a fracturing semblance of civility and professionalism, the platoon stood at ease and busied themselves checking their equipment and exchanging crude banter with their Night Guard earth pony comrades, though they curiously ignored the Wonderbolts. I could not help but notice the stark difference between the two platoons, and I don't mean in terms of the white and gold versus the two slightly varied shades of grey that form the most obvious of variation. No, and it's a reason not always appreciated by civilians, but a soldier on campaign will invariably appear different to that of a soldier standing guard at some national monument or guarding the Princesses. Though the mithril armour remains more or less the same, the former would have supplemented his uniform with saddle bags and pouches, made emergency repairs, made rudimentary and not strictly legal modifications to make the infamously uncomfortable armour easier to wear, and fashioned crude additional plates of armour to cover areas left conspicuously vulnerable by standard armour such as the neck and the limbs. These Solar Guard unicorns looked as though they had just stepped out of a tourist guide book for Canterlot Castle with their gleaming, dust-free armour. It was a point not missed by the Night Guards, whose enquiries were met almost unanimously with casual hoof-pointing towards Scarlet Letter.

"You're late," I said abruptly, not wanting to allow Scarlet Letter to get the first word in. "And you're not Lieutenant Everlasting Oak." He certainly wasn't; the pony who was supposed to lead the unicorn contingent of this little expedition was a mare who, despite her pretensions of being a warrior-poet while possessing none of the skill of weaving images with deft use of the Equestrian language, was a competent, if unremarkable, officer who had yet to try and have me killed in the name of her own vanity.

[Everlasting Oak's notoriety as an extremely bad, yet popular, poet has more or less superseded her military career in the public eye. Nevertheless her service to the Royal Guard should be commended, even if her poetry is to be justifiably maligned.]

"My good friend Lieutenant Everlasting Oak suffered a terrible injury this morning when a box filled with helmets fell on her as her platoon prepared to muster for this glorious battle," he said, with that strange meter of voice that all politicians adopt when reciting a statement that they had obviously rehearsed several times yet wanted to sound as though they were speaking off the cuff, as it were. "I graciously stepped in and volunteered my services and my platoon for the operation. Commissar Gliding Moth supports this."

I was about to mention that it was all rather convenient and that it wasn't up to him to decide whether or not his actions were 'gracious', but I decided it was best to keep that thought to myself for now. There would be ample time for suitable admonishments later, preferably with the aid of a provost's whip. "What about Lord Captain Shining Armour and General McBridle? Do they support this?"

"We are already behind schedule," said Gliding Moth, and there was an undercurrent of nervous impatience in her normally restrained, calm voice. "Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's platoon was already prepared and we did not have time to seek written approval from the Lord Captain. I took the decision, so we can proceed with the operation without further delay."

"The bridge isn't going anywhere," I said. "I'd rather we have written orders from Shining Armour before setting off."

"With respect, sir," said Scarlet Letter, taking a step closer to me, "if our crusade against the Changeling enemy is to continue as planned, then surely we must proceed with all possible haste. Or would you rather delay the offensive over a simple administrative discrepancy? I daresay, sir, my colleagues in the Ministry of War will not look favourably upon the political officer who abuses his power to pursue a meaningless vendetta."

It was all I could do to keep myself from slapping the impudent stallion across the face like one would with a hysterical filly; to stand there, after all that he had done in the name of his own puerile vanity and accuse me of holding a vendetta. If he wanted a vendetta, however, I was more than willing to give him one; my family's long and bloodied (no pun intended) past is, for the most part, a long series of feuds and quests for vengeance against slights both grave and trivial, but always ending in one or both parties involved reduced to physical, financial, psychological, and/or metaphorical ruin. Indeed, various ancestors of mine had turned revenge into a veritable art form. For the most part I simply hadn't the energy to pursue this little family hobby, but looking at him there I wondered if there was time yet to dust off the old Exsanguinator after a thousand years of storage.

[The 'Exsanguinator' is an urban myth, and Blueblood's mention of it here is likely a little joke to himself. Though his ancestor Prince Coldblood's ruthlessness and paranoia is hard to exaggerate, having known him for all of his mortal life I know that he would have found a device that kills a pony by very slowly draining all of their blood into a large vat so that they might watch their life literally slip out of them and then to allow his wife to bathe in it to preserve her youth to be too inefficient a method of removing troublesome ponies for his tastes. I would like to assure everypony that such a device has never been built and never will be so long as I am still Princess, though I doubt this explicit denial would stop the conspiracy theorists, who will take it as further proof of their ideas and continue to irritate Blueblood's surviving relatives by trying to break into the Sanguine Palace and find it.]

Nevertheless, he was right, as much as I truly hate to admit it even now. The look of smug self-satisfaction on his porcine features was infuriating, and there was not a damned thing that I could do without earning myself a court-martial. [Discipline of commissars was handled through the Commissariat through ad hoc internal inquiries boards, therefore Blueblood could never be officially court-martialled. It is likely he simply didn't know or didn't care.] Though I would love nothing more than to postpone the offensive over this 'simple administrative discrepancy' as he put it, I could think of nothing more that would ruin the reputation I now bore as a protective shield than to defy the spirit of our orders and return. In truth, I despised having such responsibility over me; the continued life and well-being of the ponies around me were dependent on my decisions being correct, and the fact Scarlet Letter's withered, fat-encased lungs still drew breath was proof that I still lacked the spine to make them. That one's own desperate situation is the fault of others is marginally less dreadful than the horror granted by knowing that this misery is self-inflicted.

"Would that all of our officers showed such eagerness," I said, not willing to give his remark the slightest bit of dignity by acknowledging it. Besides, I could simply push him off the bridge and claim that he tripped on a loose paving slab. The structure was said to be very old and likely in a state of disrepair. "But what about the Colours? Seems a bit of an unnecessary extravagance."

The Colour Sergeant, an older stallion who defied Princesses' Regulations by maintaining a large bushy beard that one could lose a cat in by virtue of his seniority and a sense of fear over what might be behind it, stepped forwards and beckoned the young, wide-eyed little ensign bearing the greater of the Princesses' Colours forwards. "Whenever the 1st Solar Guard march to war, the Colours will always lead them."

I pursed my lips and frowned, and I was about to protest that we were only going to go and blow up one measly little bridge out in the middle of nowhere and ask if it was truly necessary to bring out these ancient relics for what amounted to the military equivalent of asking one's staff to go to the shops and pick up some milk, but instead held my tongue. I decided that we had wasted enough time as it was waiting around for the 1st Solar Guard to sort itself out, and the sooner I could get this over with the better, preferably before the Changelings had woken up and had their morning cereal. It was futile, of course, to argue with tradition, especially with the oldest and most prestigious of regiments in the whole Royal Guard, and thus I reluctantly acquiesced. In a few moments our merry band was ready and prepared to march across the seemingly endless wastes, where any small hillock and rocky outcrop could conceal half the entire Changeling horde, albeit with two very large and brightly coloured flags just to make sure that it would be absolutely impossible for anypony and anything out there to miss us.

The march was easy enough, as marches go, at least for the first hour or so over flat and level and frankly boring terrain. The Colours took the lead, with the Night Guards immediately behind them, the Solar Guard contingent forming the rearguard, and the Horsetralian Engineers in the middle. Two sappers were yoked to a wagon that carried a number of squat wooden barrels, each marked with a rather uninviting warning symbol that made its highly volatile contents perfectly clear to everypony. A few hundred feet or so above us the Wonderbolts circled lazily in a standard escort formation, acting both as navigation and as a lookout. I took position with the Colours at the head of the column, which were ironically leading the Night Guard platoon as a result of an incongruence between centuries of tradition and modern practicality that resulted in another awkward compromise that suited nopony, and while I felt uneasy about being at the front and therefore most likely to be the first casualty of an ambush, being as far away as Scarlet Letter without being accused of desertion was a compromise I was willing to accept.

Being in close proximity to the two standards invoked a wave of warming nostalgia that brought me back to my time as a junior officer in the 1st Solar Guard. As ensigns, Shining Armour and I both had the honour of carrying those standards at official functions, which largely consisted of various parades and guard duty back then as going to a real war was considered utterly unthinkable until the Changelings attacked Canterlot. That I was granted the greater and more noble task of holding the same royal standard that Commander Hurricane bore into battle on behalf of Princesses Celestia and Luna and Shining Armour had to make do with merely the regimental standard was not lost at me at the time, though I recall that the colour sergeants selected to keep us line soon tired of our incessant bickering (most of which, I must confess, was started by me) and arranged for our simultaneous promotion to the rank of lieutenant just to be rid of us. I could hardly blame them.

The royal standard itself depicted Celestia and Luna chasing one another in a circle around the sun and moon, surrounded by neatly arranged stars against a cerulean background. A slight, warm breeze had picked up from the south, stirring the ancient silk into some semblance of life. It was not fluttering gloriously in the wind as artists seem to imagine it does when borne into battle or displayed for parade, but such gauche and clichéd imagery seemed rather too vulgar for so splendid a flag. Instead, it and its sister the regimental standard accepted the zephyrs with a stately, refined grace, as a mare and stallion dancing masterfully across the marble floor of a Prench ballroom. Both were beautifully preserved, with the slight fading of the once-vibrant colours only adding a sense of elder refinement. The battle honours stitched into both flags spoke of the wars that shaped and moulded the Equestrian state, that brought it both glorious victory and mere survival; I imagined the ponies who had fought and died beneath their patrician countenance over the millennia, of all the heroes whose names are immortalised as much in the collective psyche of ponies as they are in marble statues in Canterlot and names carved in stone on austere memorials, and the acres upon acres of headstones like trees in a morbid orchard where their mortal remains are interred, and I felt the impossible weight of their judgement upon me. I would be found lacking. But not matching up to this unattainable ideal was to be the least of my concerns, as I soon found out.

Honour and Blood (Part 10)

When I saw it I thought it was a damned shame to demolish the bridge. It was hardly a feat of engineering brilliance on par with the one that connected Equestria to Griffonstone, being a simple and rather inelegant stone structure that looked as though the rock and dirt either side of the gorge had somehow grown across to meet in the middle of that great chasm, but it had served its purpose admirably as a means of crossing from one side to the other for longer than the Equestrian flag has flown from the tallest spires of Canterlot without much fuss or acknowledgement from the wider world. And now we were going to blow it up. I wondered about the long-dead civilisation that inhabited this once-fertile region of the continent, and of the unremembered masons and slaves who actually built this thing, if they had any inkling that this simple little structure would endure for far longer than the dynasties that ruled them and the false idols that they worshipped.

It was about wide enough for two stout ponies to walk side-by-side without much difficulty, and arched over a gorge that must have been about forty or fifty feet across and hundreds more deep. There was a single pillar that rose from the cold, dark depths of the chasm to support the bridge under the very apex of its arch. Peering over the very edge of the sheer cliff revealed only a great cleft that was unlikely to have been formed through purely natural means; the walls were far smoother than what I had seen in the other such interesting geological features that I had fought and bled over in this seemingly eternal conflict, as though they had been deliberately carved and shaped by those same long-dead artisans who had built the bridge which spanned the gap. The surfaces were by no means as smooth as Canterlot marble, but one got the sense that millennia ago they had been and that the inexorable tendency of the universe towards entropy had roughened the once-sleek rock like the lines in the face of a once-beautiful mare. The path of this chasm too seemed as though it had been planned, for to my eye it seemed rather too straight with too consistent a span for it to have been otherwise. All of these features added up to invoke a subtle sense of quiet anxiety that, once again, nothing in this benighted, desolate portion of the world was what it seemed. Despite Celestia's sun ever shining brightly above us, at that moment I felt that we couldn't be farther from her light.

We had approached from the north-east, and as we drew closer to our objective the terrain had become rougher until we were forced to navigate our way between and around strange large, monolithic stone structures and outcroppings of rock that seemed to emerge from the barren earth like an archipelago in the South Luna Ocean. Navigation had become rather difficult, though my special talent guided us in vaguely the right direction. That the Wonderbolts seemed to consider the vital role of pegasi soldiers of spotting for the benefit of the rest of us earth-bound ponies to be somehow beneath them hampered our progress more than it would have otherwise been. Either that or neither their Wonderbolt training nor Captain Blitzkrieg's lessons had imparted the importance of that most vital task upon Rainbow Dash. Indeed it was rather difficult to tell whether or not her arrogant bluster was simply an unwarranted sense of self-importance or some sort of psychological defence against the very concept that she might not be as utterly amazing and astounding at being a pegasus as her boisterous, daredevil image presented. The truth was likely some combination of the two, but already I had mentally concluded that her attitude thus far had earned her a one-way train ticket back to Equestria. I almost envied her for that.

It was around mid-day, with the sun almost directly above us so as to cast our shadows as puddles of darkness beneath our hooves, when we reached the north-eastern part of the bridge. The march had been long, tedious, and exhausting, and my thankfulness to Faust that we elected to stop for a much-needed rest and lunch was beyond the capacity for any language of mortals to describe. The soldiers had erected a number of makeshift gazebos by planting their spears into the ground like stakes, and stretching out rolls of canvas with which to provide some modicum of shelter from the fury of the sun. The time I had spent here had, at the very least, encouraged me to take pleasure in the simpler things in life, for the chance to sit down on the hard ground under the shade cast by what might as well have been tissue paper for all its effectiveness in blocking the sun, stuff my face with bland, tasteless oats, and wash that down with water that still tasted faintly of metal and chlorine after what amounted to a very long walk in clothes not the least bit suited for the climate had brought me such happiness that former pleasures as fine food, fine wine, and fine mares seemed to pale in comparison.

Rainbow Dash, however, was apparently unimpressed with this humble but very useful little structure. "Is that it?" she said, landing next to me with an almost disdainful flutter of her wings.

"What in blazes were you expecting?" I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and snorted. "I don't know," she said, sounding profoundly disappointed, "something a bit bigger, I guess."

"That's what she said," said Cannon Fodder, probably repeating something he'd heard the other soldiers say. We chose to ignore him.

The smell of burnt gunpowder, cheap beer, and singed fur alerted me to the arrival of Lieutenant Southern Cross next to me. He made a quiet, thoughtful humming noise in his throat as he surveyed the bridge in question, and tapped his hoof against his chin. Behind him, the sappers of the Royal Horsetralian Engineers platoon had parked their wagons and started unloading their equipment, which I eyed warily, knowing that an errant spark or flame would result in my mortal remains having to be collected with a dustpan and brush and placed inside a shoebox for internment in my home's basement along with the rest of my ancestors. Despite its inevitability, I very much wished to avoid spending the remainder of eternity with that collection of incompetents, decadents, sadists, and rogues that infested my family tree like a blight. [Blueblood is describing the Crypt of the Blood, which is actually a mausoleum built adjacent to the Sanguine Palace. It is connected to the extensive network of catacombs that lie beneath Canterlot, which, despite prior history, unsubstantiated claims of haunting, and occasional illegal use by live-action role players looking for an 'authentic dungeoneering experience' are now open to the general public for viewing. All entrance fees go to the maintenance of the Crypt and charities which Blueblood himself might not have agreed with, but I suspect he would have wished to have been seen in favour of.]

"Oh, don't you worry," he said, grinning wider as he pointed to barrels marked with so many bright and colourful warning signs that it looked as though it had been wrapped with one of those quaint and rustic patchwork quilts that rural peasants are so peculiarly fond of. "We're still going to make a really big 'ka-boom'. The ponies in Dodge Junction will hear it."

The promise of something exploding in a spectacular fashion seemed to placate Rainbow Dash for the time being, though I hadn't the heart to tell her that the explosives used by Royal Engineers, and indeed most competent demolitionists, were of the variety that did not detonate with a large and impressive fireball as one might expect; it was best to spread out her disappointment as much as possible, thought I. With our hasty lunch concluded, the officers of our little expedition met beneath one of these improvised tents to finalise the plans before bringing our mission to a very final conclusion: it was agreed through a number of meetings and briefings prior that the sections of the unicorn and earth pony platoons were to split to form two mixed platoons of equal composition, each commanded by one of the two lieutenants, to guard each end of the bridge while the Engineers laid their explosives and maintain at least one avenue of retreat should the enemy take notice and object to our unadvertised demolition. Rainbow Dash's Wonderbolts were to be our sole aerial support, and those of you who have been paying the amount of attention required to keep up with this clumsily written narrative that I have scribbled here will have discovered a certain discrepancy in the ratio of the earth-bound ponies to pegasi. To those readers I ask why in the blazes could you not have been around to point that out to the general staff planning this operation? One might say that I, or another, more competent, pony should have been able to do that, but at the time I and the relatively saner of my colleagues had made the grievous error of assuming that the planners of this operation had the sufficient collective mental capacity to, as the long-dead and much-revered von Pferdwitz had put it, 'maintain harmony' in our force make-up. At any rate, it was too late to complain and there was very little else I could do but accept the situation and mentally compose a letter of complaint to write should I survive.

[Minutes and documents from the planning of this operation demonstrate that a great deal of discussion on the subject of the order of battle did take place. Blueblood was either unaware or had simply forgotten that it had been agreed that a smaller force would better avoid notice, and that due to both the Changelings' weaknesses in aerial combat and the disproportionately higher attrition rates suffered by the pegasi in their frequent aerial patrols into enemy territory a much smaller contingent of airborne soldiers was needed. There was a degree of political lobbying from Captain Spitfire and other notable citizens of Cloudsdale to allow the trainee Wonderbolts to contribute in a more direct manner to the war, and it has been rumoured, but not adequately verified, that General McBridle had ordered them to be sent without support from regular pegasi troops out of a fit of pique.]

Our meeting took only half an hour, and much of it was simply Lieutenant Southern Cross explaining to us in very pedantic but disturbingly enthusiastic detail the manner in which he planned to lay the explosives and blast this millennia-old relic into ignominious dust. I found myself inadvertently exchanging glances with Gliding Moth, who sat next to me and, aside from the occasional coy smile, maintained a rather more professional demeanour throughout the proceedings than I had.

As of late I had been seeing rather more of her, as my initial drunken attempt to turn her into a more competent fencer had somehow impressed her to the point where she demanded regular training sessions from me. I started to look forward to my time tutoring her, and while it was very probable that she was cynically exploiting my slowly-blossoming attraction to her to maximise her chances of both succeeding as a commissar and surviving combat, she seemed to genuinely enjoy my company; I noticed a faint blush to her cheeks and a faint upwards twitch of her lips each time I moved close to her, our sweat-soaked bodies in tantalisingly intimate contact as I adjusted her stance and guided her through the various hoofwork exercises as mandated in her fencing manuals. And after we had sparred we would rest, exhausted and bruised, and while away the remainder of the evening together in the relative solitude of her chambers, simply chatting with one another about matters both trivial and grave over a few glasses of a moderately agreeable white wine. We talked about the war, about swords, history, and the rich, mouldering tapestries that were our lives. I confess that my interest in her was not limited to strict platonic friendship, despite her very much not being 'my type', as it were, in terms of both looks, personality, and social class for either a relationship or just a brief fling. The implication of her connection with Princess Luna, regardless of how distant or close, gave enough reason for me to hold back; indulging my libido, however long it had been since I had seduced and bedded a mare (the whores in Dodge Junction don't count), wasn't worth the potential violence that would be visited upon me should she find out, and she would. Gliding Moth had placed a great deal of trust in me, despite having failed to live up to her unrealistic expectations, and in defiance of my previous modus operandi of seduction, sex, then simply leaving, for some peculiar reason I found the very idea of using her in such a manner to be rather distasteful.

Her skill with her rapier had improved faster than I had anticipated, and her desire to master the weapon, if one could truly 'master' one, accelerated faster than both her capacity to learn and my ability to teach. I was hardly a good instructor, and I could only impart the techniques that I had honed over a near lifetime of stabbing things with swords for fun, but hopefully I had taught her enough to keep herself alive. For a joke, I told her that to unscrew the pommel of one's sword and hurl it with force at one's opponent was both a valid and effective combat manoeuvre. I was surprised and rather disturbed to find that when I had organised a sparring match with Captain Red Coat that she believed me and that it worked, though I think only because her opponent was confused by a sword's pommel bouncing off his protective mask, which was then exploited admirably. [This 'technique' made it into the fencing manual published as 'Commissar Prince Blueblood's Sword Secrets', later re-published as 'The Sword Secrets of the Commissars', and then 'Secrets of the Sword' after numerous legal battles between the Commissariat and its anonymous author and one challenge to a duel. There is a theory that Blueblood himself was the author, but his statement that he had 'far more important things to do than write this insipid little waste of paper that will get ponies killed if they attempt anything written inside it' is to be trusted. The mysterious author can be narrowed down to one of the ponies who witnessed the sparring match.]

Mercifully, Lieutenant Grim Cathedra, the moody commander of the Night Guards' earth pony platoon here, whose face was disfigured in some sort of alchemical accident with odd black and white patches of fur that made him look like a depressed panda, had grown as bored of listening to Southern Cross explain the intricate differences between nitro-glycerine and mana-enhanced TNT as the rest of us and told the Engineer to just get on with it. The meeting then broke up with the sappers embarking on their task with a foal-like enthusiasm normally seen in juvenile dragons just starting to collect the first gold coins and shiny gems that would one day become a vast hoard. The other officers peeled off to carry out their orders, leaving Gliding Moth and I together with that peculiar sense of privacy that comes with being completely surrounded by scores of ponies all far too busy doing things to pay attention to us.

"You know, you can undo your top button if it's too warm," I said to Gliding Moth, indicating the offending article. Her neck was starting to turn an alarming shade of red where the stiff high collar that had been starched to be as rigid as the proverbial stick up Princess Luna's rear end rubbed against her skin.

She moved a hoof to touch the polished brass button, but then stopped and shook her head. "That's not what the regulations say," she said churlishly.

"I'm sure some allowances can be made here of all places, "I said. "We are a long way from Canterlot, and if we are to fight on its behalf then we might as well be comfortable."

She pursed her lips again, as she always did when I pointed out the absurdity inherent in attempting to follow Princess' Regulations to the letter, then apparently saw the wisdom in both avoiding heatstroke and in not cutting off the flow of blood to one's brain, and unbuttoned her collar. The heat had become intolerable hours ago and was rising rapidly to the downright lethal regions of the thermometer, and despite having lived here for what felt like most of my life thus far I still had yet to get used to it. I wondered if the native ponies here ever did, and if we could ever establish a working relationship with them would they tell us their secrets of coping with this damnable climate, though I assumed it might have something to do with not wearing elaborately decorated wool tunics or heavy plate armour in the desert.

Gliding Moth rubbed her hoof over the inside of what was very likely a sweaty collar and rolled her head from side to side as she enjoyed her newfound open-necked freedom. Still, her face bore the expression of slighted pride, as though encouraging her to allow herself to be more comfortable had caused her offense. "Would it not have made more sense to do this at night?" she said.

"The risk of ambush is too great," I said, shrugging my shoulders a bit. "Besides, I prefer to see what's trying to kill me."

She snorted, removed her cap to fan herself with it, and said in a tone that was only half-joking, "I'm beginning to think those risks might be worth it. At least it won't be the heat that gets me."

The topic of conversation had gotten rather too morbid for my liking, and I was already struggling to suppress my anxiety to the point where I could at least pretend to execute my duties with something resembling competence. Fortunately, by that point the sappers had gotten themselves organised, and a damn sight quicker than their usual relaxed attitude both on and off duty would otherwise imply, with the barrels of explosives unpacked from the cart and arranged to Lieutenant Southern Cross's specifications just next to the bridge and precariously close, I thought, to the edge of the chasm. The additional equipment they had brought, among them picks, hammers, bolts, ropes of varying lengths, a rats' nest of colourful electrical cables, and an assortment of strange and peculiar tools that looked as though they could be nightmarish marital aides from the Middle Ages as much as engineering equipment, was arranged neatly atop a stretched sheet of canvas close by.

The infantry, however, took a little while longer to get themselves sorted despite the split into two equal formations; the Night Guards under Grim Cathedra knew what they were doing, having rehearsed the procedure with the original Solar Guard platoon, but Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's platoon, though well-drilled, professional, and overall competent despite the very best efforts of their commanding officer and his obsession with his own self-aggrandisement, were not privy to weeks and weeks of arduous preparation endured by the unit whose deployment here they had usurped. The delays were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively short, and looking back on these events I do not think they contributed to the disaster that followed, but more on that later.

Nevertheless, the presence of not one but two commissars (one-and-a-half to be more accurate) watching the proceedings carefully each with one hoof resting on the pommels of our swords [from this we can infer that Blueblood had swapped the impractical back-mounted scabbard for a more conventional one attached to a belt around his waist, otherwise striking that pose would likely have the opposite effect to the one intended] certainly helped to speed things along, as it often did, and within the hour the two mixed platoons had taken up their positions guarding one side of the bridge each, and after a brief argument that to my regret was resolved by acquiescence on my part it was decided that Scarlet Letter's unit with the Royal Colours would guard the far end and Grim Cathedra's would form the rearguard. The armchair generals amongst my readers, who, I might add, are merely the military equivalent of the sort of sports enthusiasts who berate their favourite team when they lose and insist that they could have somehow done better than the group of trained professional athletes, will likely point out that regimental colours are, by tradition and basic common sense, to remain to the rear of the formation while lined up for battle to provide an easily identifiable rallying point. They would be correct, under normal circumstances, as much as any combat operation can be considered 'normal', however, the colours were also required to stand with the highest ranking officer of the 1st Solar Guard. I had also hoped that the presence of the flags would inspire something approaching competence in Scarlet Letter.

I had elected to accompany the one guarding the side closest to Equestria for reasons so obvious that I shall not insult the intelligence of whomever reads this by explaining it. Gliding Moth could be trusted to keep Scarlet Letter in check on the far side, and if the worse came to the worse then he could either flee into the desert alone and be of no harm to anypony or find some moral fibre with a little assistance from the pointy end of a rapier.

I still felt horribly exposed; the terrain close to the bridge was a little more open, though we were still flanked by shallow ridges and clusters of rocks. A broad length of flattened land weaved its way around these obstacles, indicating the faded remnants of what might have been a busy road a few thousand years ago. Lieutenant Grim Cathedra had arranged his mixed platoon into a semicircle around the end of the bridge in the vague direction of friendly territory with the earth ponies at the front and the unicorns just behind; the idea being that should a Changeling horde crest over the horizon to swarm us our formation would tighten up with the earth ponies forming a close-order phalanx and the unicorns providing a continuous barrage of fire over their heads, thus providing at least a few moments of resistance before everypony is mercilessly slaughtered. In case of an aerial attack, the platoon could be brought into a square formation in a matter of seconds, which should, in theory, at least let me survive long enough to regret ever being born in the first place.

I am sure that the Horsetralian Engineers worked as fast as the strictures of minimum safety requirements would allow, but here in this tiny isolated pocket in the middle of nowhere it felt as though they were dawdling just to spite me. My main focus was on the great expanse of bugger all, as the lower orders had so eloquently put it, that stretched out seemingly into infinity beyond the more geologically interesting landscape that immediately surrounded the gorge like two slices of bread around a particularly depressing cheese filling, but every so often, just to alleviate the toxic mix of crushing boredom and cloying anxiety that seemed to make time drag to a veritable standstill, I would look back to check on the sappers' progress. Only four of the ten, excluding Lieutenant Southern Cross who had elected to join me, were actually working on the bridge itself: two of them worked together to secure the barrels of explosives around the central supporting pillar, the other two seemed to act in some sort of supervisory role, two worked on the detonator on our side of the bridge, while the remaining four busied themselves transporting barrels, tools, and equipment as needed from the home side of the bridge to where it was needed.

As for the Wonderbolts, don't you worry, I haven't forgotten about them. Indeed the sordid mess that was to follow was in part, and it was a rather major part, due to the gung-ho attitude that I and Captain Blitzkrieg had together been trying and failing to stamp out of them. In accordance with the plans the pegasi continuously circled a couple of hundred feet or so above the bridge in a vague figure-of-eight pattern, thus providing the all-important aerial support and long-range spotting. More importantly, it kept Rainbow Dash's ego and her complaints about the lack of anything interesting happening out of earshot. Indeed, it was this lack of anything interesting happening that was keeping all of us alive. Of course, it was not to last.

I don't know how long it took for everything to start taking on the profile of pear fruits, but by my guess it was probably about an hour after the Horsetralian Engineers had started their work. An argument had broken out on the bridge about a technical issue with the wiring, or something, I'm not sure, but it looked very heated and required the intervention of Lieutenant Southern Cross. The delay was frustrating, for I wanted nothing more than to return to the safety of the four stone walls of my office with a nice drink and a good book. But as I observed the sappers trying to demonstrate the efficacy of their respective ideas on the finer details of bridge demolition by way of waving their hooves around and aggressively pointing, Cannon Fodder alerted me to something much more interesting occurring elsewhere by tapping me a little too roughly on the shoulder to leave a rather heavy dust and grease stain on my already filthy tunic.

My aide pointed at something in the sky to south. At first it looked like nothing more than a cluster of flies buzzing around, but the somewhat rigid formation they held as they wafted lazily through the sky and their positions relative to the few lonely clouds up there betrayed their true nature - Changelings. It was not the sun-blotting swarm that assaulted Canterlot, nor the chitinous tide that had almost swept away the tiny fortress that had been home for over a year, but instead seemed to be merely a patrol, albeit a rather large one. This sight had, at least, brought a quick and decisive end to the engineers' squabbling; a small flight was unlikely to cause much concern to us, as the Wonderbolts should be able to take care of them and they had not the sheer mass of numbers required to overwhelm a tightly-packed and well-drilled infantry square, but now that their pernicious hive mind was aware of our incursion it would not be overlong before the inexhaustible supply of expendable drones would converge upon us.

The soldiers remained professional and disciplined despite seeing the enemy, knowing that they were much too far away for us to do anything about it. As I was just about to call Lieutenant Southern Cross back and demand an update from him, which, much like the various plumbers, electricians, and other such technicians I must employ to keep my crumbling homes somewhat liveable, would most likely consist of a vague estimation that must be multiplied by a factor of three or four in order to arrive at the correct amount of time to fix the issue, Rainbow Dash called out suddenly and loudly enough for me to hear.

"Hostiles at three o'clock high!" Rainbow Dash's barked command, clearly attempting to imitate Captain Spitfire's sharp bark. "Attack pattern alpha-seven! Engaging!"

The Wonderbolts shot off in the direction of the enemy patrol like rats fleeing from an opened trap. I hesitated for a few seconds, believing that they would see sense and realise that the 'hostiles' were much too far away to intercept, before I realised that they weren't coming back and shouted, "GET BACK HERE!" as loudly as I possibly could. Either they did not hear or, as I suspected, chose to ignore what I thought was an entirely unambiguous order, and we, the poor, ground-bound infantry, were left isolated and alone with no protection from the skies or means of long-range spotting. The last echoes of the Royal Canterlot Voice resonating around the chasm died away as both Changelings and Wonderbolts dwindled into minute specks against the clear blue expanse, and were then lost in the sky's emptiness.

I imagine there's a technical word for the sort of awkward silence that follows when a group of ponies collectively come to understand just how badly things have turned, and it's probably in Germane and consists of just about every letter of the alphabet [one could create a compound word out of piecing Germane words together, but it would not be one actually used by native speakers], but if such a word did exist then it would be a most apt title for this unofficial autobiography. Everypony looked to me for leadership, once again proving that most ponies are very poor judges of character, and I reluctantly gave the order to continue with the mission at hoof, but at the first sign of trouble we would start an organised retreat home. If the Wonderbolts did not return by the time the bridge was a smoking ruin then I would make what Rainbow Dash endured under Sergeant Major Square Basher seem like a pleasant summer evening strolling down a seaside promenade by comparison, if I was feeling charitable and didn't gut her with my sword immediately upon landing for disobeying an unequivocally direct order. It would have been an unpopular decision with the sort of reverse-baseball-cap-wearing, beer-drinking, hoe-down-attending peasantry that make up the core of the Wonderbolts' following, but I expect they would have found something else with which to distract from the tedium of their lives.

As much as I knew it chafed Lieutenant Southern Cross, the Engineers were now forced to rush their efforts. An errant spark or a crossed wire would have blasted them into oblivion and scattered their mortal remains all through the chasm below, but, despite my misgivings, I trusted in their professionalism. My watch had stopped, either due to me forgetting to wind the damned thing this morning (such were the perils of trying to live without one's valet, and I was not about to let Cannon Fodder handle an instrument of such delicacy as a watch) or the mechanisms within had been clogged up with the ever-present dust, so I could not tell how much time had passed. The sun barely seemed to move in the sky, though the heat and cloying humidity only grew worse as time dragged inexorably along.

The Engineers were still hastily connecting miles upon miles of brightly coloured wires to barrels and to strange bits of machinery and, most ominously, to the detonator on our side of the bridge when the pegasi were spotted. At first we all assumed that the Wonderbolts were metaphorically crawling back, and indeed I was very much looking forward to using the speech I had spent the intervening time composing and editing in my head, but these pegasi came from a south-easterly direction more or less following the path forged by canyon as opposed to the near-direct south that our erstwhile comrades had just deserted us. As they flew closer I could make them out more clearly; the flyers were clearly pegasi, though they each wore gowns of rough, sandy-brown cloth and primitive iron helmets instead of the sleek, skin-tight blue and yellow jumpsuits I had expected to see, and they were armed with a motley selection of various spears and swords forged out of what little iron could be gleaned from the barren rock.

Grim Cathedra gave the order to form square, which the well-drilled platoon did in a matter of seconds. It was merely a precaution, but I hoped that this clearly defensive measure would not be interpreted as an act of aggression by these natives. I took my position with the officer in the centre of the square, and found the feeling of safety granted by being surrounded almost entirely by four walls of heavily armoured ponies with spears and horns raised defiantly like the spikes of some kind of steel hedgehog that could also shoot magic only slightly alleviated the bowel-loosening fear that started to grip me. The Engineers too had joined us, though their deadly spades would be of very little help against pegasi if fighting was to break out.

I noted that the detonator, a small black box with a large red plunger, had been set up next to us in the centre of the square, and was being guarded by Lieutenant Southern Cross.

The pegasi maintained a respectable distance, though they were still close enough for me to pick out the physical details of specific individuals. They flew without a coherent military formation, instead soaring at their own respective paces, occasionally darting closer to one another with sudden bursts of speed to engage in whispered conversations I could not hear. A few dared to move in for a closer look, for indeed that's what I assumed they were merely doing, but none of them seemed to have the manners to land and introduce themselves. The sky had become thick with them, or at least it seemed to; their constant and erratic movement made it difficult to keep track of individual ponies and was thus intended to be a cheap, albeit effective, psychological trick to give the impression that there were far more of them. Knowing this did very little to help combat its effect, and indeed the soldiers around me snorted and fidgeted anxiously as though straining at a leash to fight them. I employed the universally-accepted gesture of friendly greeting by waving my hoof and smiling at the strange ponies, but none of them reciprocated. However, when performed from behind a ring of grey and silver steel tipped with raised spear-points and horns charged with magic and while wearing a black and red uniform adorned with the equally ubiquitous symbols of death the meaning behind that gesture might have been somewhat lost.

"I wish they'd sod off," said Grim Cathedra. The use of a Gritish curse sounded odd in his Nhorse accent, but suited his morose personality.

"They're only taking a look," I said. "So long as everypony stays calm and doesn't do anything stupid they'll either talk or go away."

Grim Cathedra snorted, shook his head, and waved a hoof at the other end of the bridge where thing were certainly not as calm and controlled as they were here. "Somepony should tell them."

I had been so worried about my own immediate safety that I had neglected to pay attention to our comrades on the other side. To say that they were somewhat less organised than we were would be a gross understatement; 'farce' might have been a better word, as the platoon seemed to be struggling to form the protective square formation around the Colours. It was difficult to make out exactly what was going on, as much of what was visible there in the crevice between the two outcroppings of rock that sheltered the path was obscured by the dust brought up by so many hooves, but the two flags were visible above the sandy haze, slowly shifting around to whatever confused orders Scarlet Letter was issuing.

The pegasi natives seemed to take a far greater interest in our comrades across the bridge; the presence of the Royal Colours implied that whomever was in charge of our expedition would be with the brightly coloured pieces of cloth on sticks that were intended to serve as a means of identifying the commanding officer. The sky seemed full of these sandy-robed pegasi, all constantly moving, gliding, and flitting between one another in a chaotic aerial ballet, and greater in number than those above my head. My hooves itched terribly; it was most unlike the native ponies here to behave in such a bold and, to my eyes, deliberately provocative manner. Our lack of aerial support and the scattered, disorganised disposition of our forces far from the safety of the Equestrian front line made it absolutely clear to them that we were isolated and vulnerable. Nevertheless, I held fast to the belief that they were merely curious about the sudden military presence on their metaphorical doorstep and not suicidal enough to provoke outright war with Equestria.

Perhaps I should have sent somepony over the bridge to relay an order to form square, perhaps I should have done it myself and kicked the incompetent officer into the chasm. Whether or not that would have made a difference to what followed one can never be certain; sometimes the fate of the rest of one's whole life can rest upon one decision, or it makes not the slightest bit of difference and everything goes terribly wrong regardless of one's choice. I watched, peering over the heads of soldiers that surrounded us, and silently implored them to form square.

What followed was something that still confuses me to this day. I have had nearly an entire lifetime, longer than most ponies whose bloodlines are untouched by divinity as mine, to work out what reasoning could have possibly motivated the pony or ponies responsible to perform what I could only describe as an act of pure insanity. A tiny flash of light, almost imperceptible in the bright sunlight, flew from the cloud of dust, clipped the wing of a pegasus who had flown too close, and sent him spiralling to the ground. I didn't see him land with all that dust in the way, but even with my poor understanding of pegasus flight it seemed unlikely that he survived the impact with the ground. The response from his comrades was entirely understandable given the circumstances. The swarm 'flinched' as though it was possessed of one singular mind, before it split into a number of smaller groups with disconcertingly military precision, and then descended upon the disorganised platoon with sudden and brutal ferocity.

The suddenness of the incident and our distant perspective from across the bridge, coupled with the intellectual and emotional disconnect brought about by the very concept that our enemy was not unthinking and unfeeling Changelings but now ponies like us, gave what we saw a horrid surreality that was only enhanced by the diffused sound of clashing steel and battle cries echoing about the gulf the chasm. The spell, however, was swiftly broken, for we too came under attack. The assault on our position was nowhere near as aggressive as that on our comrades, owing to our greater organisation; our earth ponies' spears and unicorn magic were effective in keeping the enemy at a healthy, if still uncomfortable, distance away from us. One, a colt barely into adulthood, seemed to grow impatient at trying and failing to manoeuvre around bristled spear points and magic missiles and made a bold dive straight towards me, having undoubtedly identified me by the many shiny things attached to my uniform as a pony of some minor importance. A spear shifted, and there was just barely enough time for his defiant snarl of victory to transform into an expression of surprise and dawning horror before he impaled himself upon it through the chest with such force that the point erupted with a spray of blood from his back. His forward motion ceased, his outstretched wings twitched and he writhed in pain on the spear, before the soldier wielding it slammed the dying pony to the ground and wrenched his bloodied weapon free.

A few more would meet the same fate skewered upon earth pony spears or shot from the sky by fusillades of magic missiles until our square was framed by a halo of dead, dying, and wounded pegasi. There were no casualties on our part, as the enemy could not get past our defensive screens of spears and unicorn fire to meet us in hoof-to-hoof combat. Unless they brought overwhelming numbers or a full platoon of unicorns to pick us off leisurely from a relatively safe distance, it was entirely unlikely that we would be forced from our position. Despite being all but completely surrounded even I felt remarkably safe in the centre of the square.

The same, however, could not be said for the platoon across the bridge. Their failure to form square in time meant that small groups of soldiers had become isolated from one another, and could thus be individually surrounded and picked off at leisure by the marauding pegasi. Nevertheless, despite being clearly outnumbered, their forces dispersed, and being commanded by a stallion who was even less qualified to command ponies-under-arms than me, our soldiers fought admirably. Amidst the clouds of dust brought up by hooves I could see that superior Equestrian discipline, training, weapons, and, most importantly, sturdy mithril armour was more than a match for these primitive savages. One mismatched group of unicorns and earth ponies had forced their way through the enemy, carving a bloody path through the mob, to reach the bridge. There, they held their position guarding the one way home for their comrades, and as a testament to the famed obedience so expertly instilled in the common Equestrian soldier, not one of their number broke rank and fled to the obvious safety of our side of the bridge.

To watch and do nothing was agonising, but I was in no particular hurry to cross the bridge and hurl myself into the madness. Yet as the minutes crawled by it became horribly clear to all that the enemy was not seeking to drive us from what I presumed must have been their bridge [Due to a lack of written record keeping, it is almost impossible to ascertain which of the many pony tribes that inhabit the buffer regions between Equestria and Changeling Country actually 'owned' the bridge. Indeed, these cultures lacked the concept of ponies or organisations possessing land or structures as property] but were instead turning their full attention upon the Colours, which were still isolated from the main bulk of the platoon. As far as I could make out the colour guard had taken refuge in the small gap between two of the larger boulders, which was a sensible course of action to take as it provided a small measure of protection from both attack from the air and from being completely surrounded on all sides. Yet they were still isolated, and it looked as though every damned native of this benighted land had been summoned to this very spot with the express purpose of wresting our Colours from our hooves.

"They can't hold out much longer," said Grim Cathedra, pointing at the two flags visible above the melee.

"If the platoon can regroup properly they should drive them off," I said optimistically.

The taciturn pony snorted and shook his head. "Not with him in charge," he said. "It's funny; soldiers complain politicians fight in the wars they start, and here's one of them making a total mess of it."

I knew what had to be done, I just did not want to do it. He was right, of course; the beleaguered platoon only needed somepony to get over there, kick Scarlet Letter off the cliff, and get them to organise themselves. That our superior discipline and craft with weapons and armour would hold out against the savage horde was becoming increasingly unlikely under the constant onslaught; these were not the mindless Changelings we were used to fighting, but employed tactics of rapid, sharp attacks and retreats that our heavier infantry struggled to match. The bloody fool who had fired on them in the first place had grossly underestimated them, and if he survived this encounter with the natives I would make absolutely certain he would not survive his next with me. Besides, Gliding Moth was still over there, and I felt strangely concerned about her safety. Reluctantly, I did what was expected of me and gathered a section of unicorns and earth ponies, and leaving the remaining twenty soldiers plus the Horsetralian Engineers to guard the rear.

The narrowness of the bridge and the fact that whomever designed and built this thing apparently hadn't heard of railings (the concept of health and safety standards not having been invented until after their civilisation fell) made our progress across it slow. The old cliché of not looking down to avoid feeling the terror of such dizzying heights was made downright dangerous by the lack of anything at all to stop me going over the edge and plummeting to my messy death; at least, I thought, it looked as though the bottom of the crevasse was far enough for me to have time to consider that perhaps such requirements were, on the whole, a good thing. An errant slip, an accidental nudge from any one of the ponies around me, or a stiff breeze could have sent me tumbling down into the abyssal depths below, where it would be exceedingly unlikely that my rotted corpse would be found and interred with my ancestors. Naturally, Cannon Fodder and I covered the rear, in case the enemy pegasi had noticed our little rescue party. Despite this, I heard hooves behind me, and stopped to look over my shoulder and see that despite my explicit instructions otherwise, Lieutenant Southern Cross and about five of his sappers were trotting right behind me wielding axes and spades as weapons.

"I thought I told you to stay behind," I said, not slowing my step.

"Bugger that," said Southern Cross. "Can't."

Fine, thought I, more bodies to place between me and the enemy then. It struck me that for an industrious lot with a famed 'can-do' attitude these Horsetralians seemed to use the word 'can't' an awful lot, both when asked to do something and told not to do it. [On a personal note, I have yet to make up my mind as to whether Blueblood has consistently misheard that particular expletive, or is uncharacteristically censoring his own private memoires, or perhaps it's simply a private joke.]

Up ahead and further down the bridge I heard the sound of some sort of commotion breaking out. The soldiers ahead slowed, and they were clearly none too happy about whatever it was that caused the obstructions. I could hazard a reasonable guess as to what exactly was causing the problems, and lo and behold I was proved completely right when Lieutenant Scarlet Letter forced his way between the two Night Guard stallions trotting side-by-side in front of me. The soldier on the right tripped over his own hooves in a misguided attempt to avoid trampling the shorter unicorn, sending his rear legs slipping over the edge of the bridge. Fortunately, his companion seized the poor soldier by the straps that held his breastplate on, and with a snarl of exertion that bared his fanged teeth he dragged his comrade back from the precipice.

"Watch where you're going!" he shouted. "You coward!"

Scarlet Letter found himself face-to-tunic with me. Faust almighty he looked terrified, as well he should; the commissar just caught him nearly killing a pony. He tried to compose himself, but the trembling movements of his hooves as he tried to straighten his posture and the wild, panicked look in his eyes betrayed his fear. "That pony just insulted me!" he shrieked, his voice wavering. "What are you going to do about it?"

I stared back at him in sheer incredulity for a brief second, before a nudge from Cannon Fodder, apparently impatient to get back to the relative safety of Terra Firma, brought me to my senses. The sheer and utter gall of this thoroughly unpleasant stallion always found new lows to sink to.

"I'm going to give him a bloody medal!" I snapped, then I grabbed him by the neck with my telekinesis and shoved him none-too-softly in the direction of the safer side of the bridge, where I was certain the soldiers there guarding our retreat had just witnessed what he nearly did. "Now get out of my sight."

I didn't hear his retort, nor did I care to. The moment's distraction was forgotten as quickly as it had started, and we marched onwards towards the inchoate roar of battle to perform the grim task of war that fate had once more thrust onto me. All the while, directly ahead of us and visible above the heads and spears of ponies locked in the brutal scrum of hoof-to-hoof combat the two flags, the standard of the First Solar Guard and the Royal Standard of the Royal Pony Sisters, fluttered resplendently in the dust-filled breeze, under the omnipresent glare of a merciless sun. My blood was up, and I eased my sword out of its scabbard with a shriek of grinding steel, which had the added effect of motivating our small force to march with greater urgency.

We had nearly reached the end, the first stallions of my rescue party had already joined their comrades to bolster the line, when an ear-splitting bang pierced through the ungodly noise of combat. I had barely enough time to register what had happened, when something slammed me in the flanks with the force of a locomotive. Whatever it was tossed me and the stallions around me briefly airborne, describing a small arc before crashing into the bridge again. I landed snout first, and my nose exploded in agony. A few stallions had slipped over the edge, but the luckier of their fellows had managed to grab into armour and straps to save them. Choking on dust, I dared to lift my head, and slowly, as though I wanted to put off realising the horrifying truth for as long as physically possible, I looked behind me to see a gap ten feet wide had been blasted out of the bridge.

Author's Note

Bloody hell, that was a long delay between chapters. Hopefully it won't happen again if I can get real life under control now and allocate enough time to concentrate on writing. Anyway, I hope the wait was worth it.

Honour and Blood (Part 11)

I suppose some might say that enduring continual attempts on my life is simply the price one pays for the status and luxury that comes with being a prince of the realm, but this particular incident only marked the second failed assassination I had experienced thus far, the first being when Scarlet Letter opened up the crypts of the fortress and allowed the Changelings inside. Of course, those hypothetical ponies might be correct, as a cursory glance at my sprawling family tree indicates a great number of branches that were pruned rather too early by certain overzealous other branches wanting their time in the precious sunlight. Being under Princess Celestia's protection for much of my early life and my refusal to take any interest at all in the more contentious issues of the day had helped to mitigate this particular family curse, at least until my fame had reached such levels that even as yet undiscovered tribes in darkest Zebrica could draw a reasonably accurate portrait of me if given a pencil and a sheet of paper.

I mention this because I want to convey just how jarring it felt when the fog in my mind faded with the cloud of dust brought about by this surprise demolition, and I realised that what had just happened was no accident but a deliberate, callous, and cowardly attempt on my life. Changelings have tried to kill me in battle more times than I dared to count, and as of this day so had ponies, but there is a stark difference between killing in war and cold-blooded murder; both were unpleasant and I made it a special interest of mine to prevent both things from happening to me, but the former was to be expected and I at least had a small chance of killing the other bastard first in a mostly fair fight, while the latter demonstrated such cowardice that even I was appalled. I have standards. Certainly, I was not above contriving situations that allowed other, less deserving ponies than I to die in my stead, but ultimately survival was still possible, but to perform the deed myself, as whoever had detonated the charges with deliberate aim to scatter my bodily remains into the stratosphere had just attempted to do, crossed the one boundary that should never be violated.

It was a relief to find myself uninjured, though I was quite lucky in that regard. A few soldiers had been caught in the blast, tossed into the air as I had, and landed back onto the bridge with bones broken and joints sprained from the impact. Cannon Fodder himself was unharmed, as though his coating of filth had shielding properties as yet unknown to science, and appeared entirely unperturbed, as usual, by yet another close call with death. Stumbling onto hooves that seemed rather too shaky to support me, I stared at the yawning gulf where the centre span of the bridge stood, and across where the troops on the other side seemed to be in as much a state of shock as I was from what little I could make out of their distant faces. There seemed to be some kind of commotion in the centre of the formation where, if I remembered correctly, the detonator had been set up. When I found the pony who depressed that plunger, and with Faust as my witness I swore that I would, then I would subject him to such torments that eternal damnation in the pits of Tartarus would seem like a pleasant relief.

"Sir," said Cannon Fodder, "shouldn't we help Lieutenant Southern Cross?"

I don't know how I failed to notice a pair of hooves clinging desperately to the edge of the ruined bridge, but in my defence the settling grey dust had made us all look like ghosts. Cannon Fodder and I rushed on over to see Southern Cross dangling by his forelegs. His mechanical one spluttered and made all manner of unpleasant, disconcerting noises that demonstrated that the blast had well and truly turned it into a broken piece of scrap metal attached to his shoulder. Despite its damage, it still managed to support his weight well enough, as it seemed that whatever mechanisms powered the artificial limb had seized up solid. Below, the view of the chasm behind his wildly kicking hindlegs was thoroughly nauseating.

"Help me!" he shouted up at us, and his hooves slipped a few inches downwards. I grabbed his organic foreleg while Cannon Fodder grabbed the useless mechanical one and we both hauled him off the edge of the broken bridge. He was a damn sight heavier than I thought he would be, but with so much of his body replaced with moving lumps of metal I should have expected it. Nevertheless, even with the two of us it still took a great effort and much cursing to drag him to the relative safety of solid ground where what remained of our little rescue party had formed up with the surviving members of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter's platoon.

The soldiers formed up in a defensive semi-circle around the damaged bridge, but with our backs to a large chasm and the only method of retreat now a pile of historic rubble a few hundred feet below our position was probably the absolute worst in all of military history since the Prench marched their heavily armoured knights straight into a muddy swamp, where they got stuck and were picked off from a comfortable distance by Trottingham archers. [This seems to be a reference to the Battle of Agincrop, where Prench chevaliers were indeed trapped by their heavy armour in muddy terrain, though Blueblood is incorrect when he says they were dispatched from a distance by archers, instead the lightly armoured Trottingham forces moved into close range with their trapped enemy and finished them with swords and spears.] The enemy, however, was utterly fixated on the Colours and with only a few stragglers who were unable to force their way through the mobs to reach the few brave defenders left standing to turn their frustrations upon us in small disorganised groups. They were dealt with in short order, shot and/or stabbed before they could move close enough to inflict any damage. I noticed that some of the enemy were earth ponies, and I could only guess that they had been hiding around the rocky terrain or crept up on us while our attention was focused on the marauding pegasi.

Southern Cross attempted to stand, but with his foreleg now a solid rigid lump of metal stuck out in front of him in a manner reminiscent of what artists mistakenly believed was an ancient pegasus salute [a reference to the neo-classical movement in art that was popular in Canterlot at the time, which aimed to replicate the grandiose artwork of pre-Equestrian pegasus society with little regard for historical accuracy. Often with a martial theme, it was no coincidence that interest in this style waxed and waned with the intensity of the ongoing Changeling Wars] his stance had become awkward and ungainly. It became clear to all except him that there was no way that he could be in any fit state to fight effectively. Until he started striking this piece of delicate and complex machinery with his hoof and swearing at it, and then whatever it was that had become damaged within had somehow fixed itself through the magic of violence and obscene language. After a few experimental stretches and movements, each accompanied by distinctly unpleasant grinding noises and bursts of hot steam from the vents, he seemed satisfied with his work and looked around with a rather dazed expression on his face.

"Where's the rest of my section?" he blurted out. Southern Cross's mouth was as wide open in shock as his eyes, and he frantically turned his head this way and that to try and find them. "Where the bloody hell are they? They were all right..." - he stopped when he saw the ruined bridge, and then bowed his head and removed his helmet - "They were all right behind me."

"I'm sorry," I said; it was all that I really could say in these circumstances.

"Bastard!" Southern Cross stomped a hoof into the ground and turned to face me, his features twisted grotesquely into a tight knot of anger and grief of such raw intensity that I almost forgot about the battle raging around me. "I'll kill him. I'll bloody well kill him."

"Easy, Lieutenant..."

"They were my colts!" he snapped, turning his anger upon me and ramming his muzzle against mine, snarling and blasting hot breath through his nostrils as he apparently tried to push me down. "They were soldiers! They knew the risks! They all knew what they were getting into when we signed up and got shipped halfway across the bloody world to fight! But not this, they didn't deserve this."

"Lieutenant," I said again, softly but as firmly as I could manage. "Fall in with the platoon."

Somehow, the sound of my voice seemed to snap Southern Cross out of his spiral of self-indulgent angst; there would be plenty of time for him to do that later, but he was going to be of very little use to me if he allowed his emotional response to this tragedy to interfere with his duties. He stepped away from me, mercifully granting me some much needed personal space, his eyes wide with their pinprick-sized pupils darting around with a high nervous energy. Muttering something that sounded like an affirmative, he eased his wickedly sharp axe from its harness and then moved with slowly growing confidence and determination in his gait to the half-ring of soldiers around us. Some might think me cold, but if there is anything that I have learned in the past two years of doing my damnedest to keep myself alive then it is that sentimentality has no place on the battlefield. The enemy was not going to suspend their efforts to kill us just so we could have an emotional and dramatic moment.

With that distraction out of the way we could finally turn our attention back to the monumental task at hoof. The twin flags rose defiantly above the dust and the bodies ahead of us, but between us and the brightly coloured sheets of cloth that ponies seemed to value more than their own lives was what seemed to be every single dust-dwelling autochthon in the entire Badlands. I wondered if they were even the slightest bit cognisant of the almost religious value of the royal standards, not bearing any kind of banner or other distinctive means of advertising to which denote the political entity they fought for. That they knew that it was important to us was evident, as they as a military unit, disorganised though they were, had focused nearly all of their efforts upon taking the standards, such that they appeared not to have noticed the rather large group of now very angry and upset Equestrian soldiers forming up behind them.

We numbered now little more than a score, minus those wounded in the blast, and while I would have liked more stallions with me on this thoroughly suicidal venture this small number would have to do. Under my orders, we arranged the unicorns to the front and the earth ponies with spears readied behind. The enemy was still distracted, and had either forgotten about us or believed that we would simply stand by and watch as our comrades were cut down. They were a moderately short distance away from us, about fifty feet or so as they pushed and shoved past each other in a mad and frantic attempt to be the one who claimed our standard; it was this selfish disorganisation that probably allowed the colour guard to hold out for so long.

"Unicorn section!" I shouted above the din. "Fire!"

A dozen sparks of light flew from the unicorns' horns, mine included, and ripped into those unfortunate enough to be at the rear of the enemy mob, cutting down a few. The effect of a magic missile is hardly the quick, clinical, almost refined death that certain unicorns, who were unlikely to have fired a shot at a living target, seem to believe. A scintillating orb of raw magical energy, focused and shaped into a rough ball shape the size of a pomegranate and then projected at the speed of sound from a unicorn's horn rips into an organic body, disintegrating soft tissue and leaving a horrid crater of cauterised flesh that conceals pulverised bone and liquefied organs. That there is very little blood spilt does not in any way lessen the brutality of the deliberate effect of firing upon another pony, nor the violation of the most basic, fundamental law of equine society.

"Earth ponies to the front!" I ordered, and they complied instantly. There was not a moment to lose while we held the slight advantage of surprise. "Spears at the ready! Platoon, charge!"

The Equestrian soldiers shouted a unanimous, wordless cry that is often expressed in written language as 'huzzah'. This word, however, is far too inadequate a term to describe the sound of two dozen stallions roaring in expression of the release of so much pent-up aggression, and the appropriation of this signal to prelude to a massed infantry charge by the upstart bourgeoisie as an effete exclamation of delight does not exactly conjure up the necessary image of thundering hooves, lowered spears, and the sickening sound of sharp steel ripping through flesh that it should. It was a cry that was felt rather than heard, deep within a primitive part of the equine brain best left repressed, that awoke a lust for blood.

I had the sense to position myself with the unicorns, who followed snout-to-tail with the earth ponies in front with their sabres drawn. Pressed in on all sides by warm, sweat-soaked bodies, whose sun-baked armour singed my skin, however, did not make me feel as safe as it should. The distance between us the enemy closed within a matter of seconds, leaving the survivors of that initial fusillade of shots virtually no time to brace for the charge. The earth ponies tore through the enemy ranks, spears ripping into flesh, shafts splintered, and bodies trampled under-hoof, like a sharp blade. The mob parted, forced out of the way by the stampede, and then moved to surround us. Robbed of the momentary advantage of surprise, and lacking the sheer weight of numbers and momentum required to carry off a proper Equestrian Charge and push deep within the enemy formation and inflict the desired panic, our gallant assault slowed and became bogged down like a cart in wet mud.

A gruelling slog of attrition ensued. With our momentum lost and in the confusion of the fight our formation had become intermingled with that of the enemy, if their incoherent mob can be charitably described as a 'formation'. Despite my best efforts, as the fight descended into a brawl I was robbed of the protective screen of earth ponies and forced to engage with the enemy directly. Once more, my view of the battle became reduced to this myopic, self-absorbed scene, one of many played out on a grand scale. My senses became localised entirely to the space immediately around me, as it always did in the all-too-common occasions that I found myself dragged into the sickening mire of war at its worst; the feel of the dirt beneath my hooves, the hot wind that plucked at my coat and fur, the stench and taste of blood, the cacophonous roar of clashing steel and screams, our goal the two Colours flying above, and the pony directly in front trying his damnedest to kill me.

An earth pony clad in tattered yellow-grey robes lunged at me with a sword, his foreleg extending like a piston with aim to impale me upon his blade through my chest. He was a thin, wiry fellow, unshaven and unwashed too, and looked as though he was scarcely capable of lifting his weapon. Despite his slender physique, he seemed to use it competently. I darted quickly to the side, and the bronze blade whistled past my aching shoulder. He tried to adjust the thrust of his blade to catch me in the flank, but I was faster. My sabre came down and sank a good few inches into the pony's foreleg to the bone.

The pony screamed in agony as blood seeped around the grievous wound. A sharp tug freed my sword with a spray of arterial crimson that splattered onto my already stained tunic. Another swing of the sabre hacked into the back of his neck, not quite severing through, but the overall effect was all the same as he slumped to the ground in a grotesque mass of twitching limbs and blood.

I stepped over him, the thoughts of the dying pony leaving my mind as his life left his body. A civilian might imagine a battle as being filled with hundreds of instances of noble one-on-one combat, each deciding the fate of nations in their own way. That was not the case; for when I stepped forwards I did so with a dozen or so other soldiers beside me. Even in the swirling chaos of this disorganised battle, like the phalanxes of antiquity a well-drilled Equestrian infantry unit advanced and fought together, with each individual soldier supporting the next to him.

It was the enemy's turn to be surrounded, as slowly but surely we had pushed the survivors into the cleft between the two sheer rock structures. This, however, had the unfortunate side effect of forcing the remaining Colour Guard back into more open territory, where, in what short, fractured glimpses I could grasp between the shifting heads of the ponies jostling with one another to try and get to them, they elected to clamber atop one of the smaller rocky outcroppings to gain some advantage in having the higher ground. I could see, however briefly, two ensigns clutching the flags for dear life with one hoof and clumsily wielding swords with the other, their youthful eyes stricken with horror as they watched the carnage. The Colour Guard, identifiable by the greater amount of ornamentation on their armour and the ceremonial halberds they swung to brutal effect, were down to four soldiers, supported by a further five unicorns and earth ponies who formed a cordon around the two ensigns. All around, the enemy swarmed like carrion birds around a dying beast, picking around at the extremities until it must surely fall.

"To me!" I cried. "Push them back!"

The platoon, on the danger of becoming dispersed on account of casualties creating gaps in the line, rallied around me. The grinding slog of a Royal Guard advance was slow and inexorable; a steamroller that relentlessly and ponderously ground down all resistance before it. With many of the spears broken in the initial charge, the earth ponies had to rely upon their swords, and likewise with the close press of bodies the unicorns too were forced into the brutal mess that is hoof-to-hoof combat. I had found myself in the unfortunate position at the front of our formation, hacking almost blindly with my sword and somehow managing to deflect and avoid oncoming blades that would have torn great rents into my flesh. My memory of the fight became a blur of steel and blood, of the stench of gore and death, interspersed with flashes of utmost clarity: a pony clutching at his bloodied face shredded into ribbons, another writhing on the ground holding a broken leg bent at an obscene angle, one motionless on his back with his chest torn open and its eviscerated contents revealed to the sky...

We were close to the Colours, damnably so. Only a mob about five ponies deep, the rest having moved to surround our isolated comrades or presumably deciding that claiming our standards wasn't worth the effort after all and had wisely fled. The ensign carrying the Royal Standard had fallen, and in his place Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth held the glorious banner aloft with one hoof and with the other wielded her rapier to deadly effect. I confess to feeling a small degree of pride when I saw her expertly slice a pony's face straight across the eyes and then finish him off with another across his throat, though that emotion was rapidly and rudely shouted down by the sensation of utter terror that comes with being in mortal danger. A number of the soldiers guarding the Colours had fallen, leaving only three of the veteran Colour Guard, their once-immaculate silver armour that had only seen use as mere ornamentation for state events was now splattered with blood and gore. This, coupled with the ever-present dust that stuck to their fur gave them the appearance of savage ghouls risen from the dead of some long-forgotten war.

The ensign clutching the regimental standard of the 1st Solar Guard, with the symbol of the blazing sun embraced by the crescent moon fixed upon a white shield on a crimson field, in an act of utmost desperation reared back on his hindlegs and hurled the flagpole like a javelin towards us. Mercifully, he avoided impaling anypony on our side with it and it landed harmlessly, point-first, in the midst of our formation and stood proudly embedded in the dirt. The banner was quickly snatched up by Cannon Fodder, who, having lost his spear, seized the pole with both hooves and clutched it to his grimy breastplate. The flag itself still flew proudly in the breeze, eagerly waiting to be reunited with its more esteemed sibling. This, however, had forced the ensign to drop his guard, and he was rewarded for his quick thinking and bravery with a spear between his ribs. The posthumous medal I would recommend him for would be of scant comfort to the family he left behind.

Our rescue party pushed onwards, fighting our way through the thinning formation of native ponies. Gliding Moth had seen us, and for a moment our eyes locked across the battlefield. She thrust the ancient standard skyward and shouted something that I could not hear clearly over the primal cacophony of battle. Whatever it was, it certainly had an effect on our troops, as the remnants of the platoon surged forwards, cutting down the enemy until I, at the head of this formation, could almost climb up the rock formation unimpeded. Standing there, standard in one hoof and sword in the other, chest heaving with exertion, uniform splattered with blood, and screaming furious exhortations to her troops to fight harder, she looked the very model of a Commissar.

This rocky outcropping was about twice the height of a reasonably-sized pony such as myself from where I stood at the base, though the opposite side was more of a gentle slope that allowed easier access. There, however, our push had forced the enemy to congregate around the slope, hemming the surviving Colour Guard at this sheer drop. Rearing up on my hindlegs, I reached up, just about able to touch the reasonably flat top of this structure with my hoof, though I could not find enough purchase to pull myself up. Gliding Moth inched her way towards me, and so focused was I on trying to extend my hoof to reach hers so I could be dragged up to support our gallant soldiers (and be situated safely behind them too), that I completely failed to notice that one enemy warrior had managed to cleave his way through our formation until he swung his club down on my head.

It was by instinct alone that my head, protected only by a cloth cap, was saved from being crushed like a tin can. Without conscious thought, I had raised my sword to my right side just in time to catch this great misshapen lump of unpolished, blood-spattered iron that this ungainly brute had rudely swung down on my head just before it could connect. I could not arrest the blow entirely, but it was enough to divert its path into the ground by my hooves, where its impact left a small crater in the cracked earth.

I imagined this warrior to be a champion of some description, likely hoof-picked by whatever warlord, chieftain, or other such petty ruler that liked to believe he owned this place. He was a massive brute of an earth pony, about as big and stocky as Colonel Sunshine Smiles but with none of the refinement to his physique. His was a frame built out of hard use rather than exact and careful exercise. The same sort of tattered robes his comrades wore also covered him, but a large metal helmet crudely fashioned out of what seemed to be low quality iron was balanced precariously upon his head. It resembled little more than a bucket upended on his crown, and with the 'bottom' rounded out with the application of a number of hammers. From below the brim, or lid, I should say, two grotesque, pig-like eyes glowered at me.

My opponent raised his metal club, muscles bulging with the effort to raise that uncouth, unrefined weapon. I, however, was faster, and lunged forward to run him through with my sabre. That he was not skewered like a cube of cheddar cheese and a pineapple chunk at a dinner party thrown on a budget was an unpleasant surprise, but not as upsetting as coming to the realisation that attempting to parry his makeshift mace had shattered my blade. I had precious little time to feel upset at the loss of this weapon, this sabre that over the past year or so had served me very well, as the great lump of iron swung down once again.

I stumbled backwards in a clumsy flurry of hooves, and the club swept just before my nose so close I could almost feel it brush against my fur. Before he could correct himself and bring that lump of iron to bear once more I plunged the jagged six inch long remnant of my blade straight into his wrist. Jiggling the handle a bit elicited a sickening squelching sound and had the desired effect of both making him drop his weapon and cry out in pain. I seized the club with my magic, and in a burst of exertion that left a dull ache in my forehead I tossed it as far as I possibly could. That twinge of pain, however, was merely a prelude of what was to come; while I struggled in vain to free what was left of my sword, presumably the jagged end was caught upon bone, I caught a short glimpse of a hoof the size of a dinner plate swinging my way before it connected with my glowing horn.

Red exploded across my vision, and all I could feel was agony. My legs buckled and I fell to the ground, rendered helpless by the pain, and writhed in the dust like a wounded animal. I had enough sense to reach up to my forehead, and it was some relief to find that despite being bludgeoned my horn was still completely intact; it simply would not do for the great Prince Blueblood to spend the few minutes that remained of his soon-to-be-shortened life a useless cripple. [The loss of a unicorn's horn is irreversible except by very potent restorative magic. If it is completely destroyed will render one incapable of performing even the most basic of magic. It is fortunate, therefore, that horns have evolved to be extremely resilient.]

A strong hoof shoved me roughly onto my back. My blurry sight could make out the indistinct form of this stallion standing over me, as his grubby hooves then descended and closed around my exposed neck. Behind him I could make out the unclear silhouette of Gliding Moth holding the banner aloft. From above a pegasus, unseen by her or any of the stallions standing beside her, descended like an owl upon a field mouse and stabbed his spear through her ribs. The standard was seized from her failing hooves, and carried away by the enemy. A fusillade of magic missiles was fired in the thief's direction, but they were aimed too hastily and too few in number to provide an adequate chance of hitting him, and he disappeared into the distance. We had failed.

Strangling a pony to death takes rather more time than those trashy adventure novels would otherwise indicate, with the gallant hero subduing an unsuspecting guard by giving his neck a light squeeze for a short while with minimal fuss. It certainly felt like a damnably long time, my limbs flailing in utter, futile desperation beating against my would-be murderer. The pressure around my exposed throat was such that the burning in my lungs and the horrid sensation of my oesophagus constricted was sufficient to override the agony in my head. Dear Faust, even now half a century later I shudder to recall the memory of this; the sight of this monster of a stallion standing over me, hooves clasped tightly around my neck and squeezing my windpipe closed, but starker in mind than even that is the feeling of sheer, unbridled panic that filled every vein and fibre of my body with ice, and gave motive force to my attempts to free myself. [Unconsciousness from asphyxiation tends to occur in about ten seconds, but in this case it is likely that this pony was not at all skilled in strangulation and had not applied enough pressure to Blueblood's arteries.]

Nopony was coming to my aid, for our rescue force had been worn down to the point of both physical and numerical near-destruction. Like me, each individual soldier was engaged in their own individual fight for survival. I am not one to believe in the concept of divine intervention, but as my window into the mortal world around me began to dim around the edges and the colours faded, and the sickening sensation of asphyxiation itself began to dull into numbness, I had flung my right hoof out to the side and found cool steel, I came the closest to the feeling that perhaps somepony up there was taking a momentary interest in my wellbeing. I rapidly seized whatever this object was, ignoring the pain as it sliced into the delicate palm under my hoof, and plunged it straight into the side of this earth pony.

Never before has the simple act of breathing felt so rewarding. When the great hooves moved from my throat I sucked in great, deep lung-fulls of the dusty, blood-scented air as though it was from the clean and unspoiled Crystal Mountains. The fogginess in my head had not faded, but still I dragged myself to my hooves, pushing the shrieking pony off me. Somehow, my hoof had found a shard of my sabre, and it was this twelve-inch long sliver of steel that was now embedded in my opponent's side.

I looked around for a useable weapon, but found none within easy reach. Around me the battle still raged even though the Colours had been lost. If anything, our stallions fought with far greater savagery than they had earlier; all semblance of discipline had collapsed utterly, not least because I had become somewhat occupied at the time, and what ensued was no longer an organised battle, insofar as battles can be adequately organised, but a brawl. The pegasi had simply flown away, but the earth pony and unicorn contingent of this native war-band found it rather more difficult to escape from the vengeful Equestrian soldiers driven so insensibly violent in their need to wipe away the shame of losing the Royal Standard with blood.

I noticed that the metal bucket on this stallion's head was resting askew, and for a lack of anything else to hoof decided that it would have to do. While he was still staring gormlessly at the shard of metal stuck in his side, blood oozing from the wound, I rushed forwards and wrenched the helmet free with my hoof. My horn was still throbbing with agonising pain, so I was forced to do things the mud-pony way and brought what was effectively a shaped lump of metal straight into the side of my opponent's skull. The blow made a sickening crack, and he fell to the ground with blood pouring from a horrendous gash in his temple. I stood over him, and brought the metal helm down again, and again, and again.

The pain in my forehead faded, but I still felt utterly sick inside. The Colours were gone, lost to an enemy that we were not even at war with, and all that I could see was red; it filled my vision utterly, the blood calling my name and exhorting me to further violence until all the world as I could perceive it had been reduced to the pony I was killing, the lump of iron in my hoof, and my own bloodlust. Each strike of the iron helmet against that pony's skull, the horrid crunch of shattered bone and the squelch of pulverised flesh that sent shudders through my right hoof and along my foreleg to awaken some long-repressed lust for blood from the caliginous regions of the equine psyche. I was a heathen striking an ominous tattoo on a drum as a prelude to a sacrifice to a forgotten god.

"Sir!" A strong hoof seized mine, and the familiar voice of my aide Cannon Fodder, only slightly higher in volume than his usual dull monotone, snapped me out of my rage-induced fugue state. I slowly turned my head, and felt the disconcerting sensation of what must have been a mask of splattered, congealing blood in my fur shift and crack with every twitch of facial muscle. He stood beside me, and slowly let go of my hoof when he saw that I had abruptly come back to my senses.

Only then did I see what I had done, and became aghast when looked down to see a horrid pink and red mess that was once this pony's head protruding from a body that seemed more or less intact. I recall mentally asking myself if I had really done that. A pool of blood had soaked into the dry, thirsty earth, but had also splashed messily along the entire length of my right foreleg and onto my chest to utterly ruin my uniform, such that my once white fur was now almost entirely splotchy red and black. I dreaded to think what my face looked like, but I was hardly going to waste precious water just to wash my face when the inside of my mouth felt like it was full of cotton wool.

As I dropped the helmet, battered with a number of dents that I was certain were not there to start with, and tried to put the sight of the awful ruin that was once a living, breathing pony out of my mind, I became aware of how unnervingly quiet everything had become. The surviving Equestrians stared back at me with haunted, vacant expressions. Each, like me, was covered in a layer of grey-brown dust, with streaks of blood, rivulets of pouring sweat, and in some cases tears, carving lines across their bodies and their armour. A few stumbled across the cramped battlefield, moving between the boulders and rocks and bodies seemingly without aim or purpose, but most had seen fit to passively stand more or less still with wide-open eyes fixed upon me. Of the enemy they had taken no prisoners, but I could scarcely blame them after what they had just been through. An unspoken acknowledgement of our collective failure seemed to spread amongst the ranks as if by telepathy, for none had the courage or wherewithal to give it voice and thereby confirm the gravest disgrace that could fall upon us - we had lost the Colours and had the bad luck to survive, to crawl back to base, and proffer explanations and excuses for the dishonour we had inflicted upon the whole Royal Guard.

Speaking of survival, I have often pontificated that the lead-up to a battle is the worst part of war, as one usually does not have the time to ruminate on its horrors when one is utterly immersed in them, save for the occasional quiet moments. Sometimes, however, it is the aftermath that feels the worst, and not least because of the sight of eerily still corpses mutilated and twisted into unnatural forms. The relief of survival is drowned out, like a cry in a hurricane, when the adrenaline that sustains one in a fight to the death evaporates to leave one feeling physically and mentally drained to the point of near collapse. I felt dreadfully sick, as though every breath of the dust-choked air threatened to send up the oats I had for lunch.

A cry of pain broke the silence like a rock through the glass pane of a greenhouse It was feminine, and could only have come from Gliding Moth. Hopeful that she had somehow survived her injury and was not beyond help, I trotted around the rocky outcropping until I found a place that was low enough for me to comfortably climb on top of it. There, the bodies of two ensigns and their guards lay close together, as if embraced in death. They had all given their lives to defend the Colours, which, as I saw their bloodied and torn corpses, I could not make my mind up whether or not I should have joined them rather than suffer the dishonour or if it was all just a horrible waste of life.

Gliding Moth lay on her front with her forelegs dangling over the edge of the boulder and her lower half smothered by a dead soldier. Blood poured from a grievous wound in her back at an unsettlingly fast rate, almost like a running faucet, and mixed with that of her fallen comrades in the dry, thirsty earth. I pushed the limp bodies away to get to her, ignoring the strain in my limbs as I hauled the heavy, lifeless corpses to the side; there would be time for the proper respect due to the dead later, after the needs of the living had been seen to.

Her hoof reached up and seized mine as I approached, and she stared up into my eyes. Her face was pale, more so than usual, and her eyes wide and red. Where her hoof touched my sleeve it left a streak of bright crimson against the darker red of drying blood. Her breathing was shallow and quick, and with each sharp breath her chest inflated and deflated rapidly like set of bellows.

"Sir," she gasped, tears rimming her eyes as the life ebbed from them. "I lost the Colours."

I held her hoof, while with my other I did my best to stem the bleeding, but it simply wasn't enough. Whatever pressure my hoof could apply on the wound could do nothing to halt the flow, so I removed my red sash, the most potent symbol of the commissar, and tied it tightly around her chest. A grim faced medic approached, took one look at Gliding Moth, shook his head sadly, and then trotted away to find somepony else with a better chance of survival to save. I was about to call him back, threaten him with a flogging or even an execution unless he somehow defied all of the accumulated medical knowledge of ponykind and stopped the bleeding. The other ponies watched, or otherwise found something else to be getting on with, and in spite of my grief I felt their eyes judging me.

"I'm sorry," said Gliding Moth. Blood pooled around her open mouth, which made her cough violently. "I tried."

I struggled to think of what to say, so I held her cold body to mine as close as I could. "You didn't lose them," I said, lying through my teeth like the craven bastard I am, and yet somehow it felt like the right thing to do. In truth, I had no idea if it was. "You saved them, Commissar Gliding Moth."

A weak smile came to her lips, and she stared back into my eyes. Only when I saw that she was not blinking did I realise that she was truly gone. I don't know how long I spent staring with horror into the wide open, hollow eyes, trying to somehow will the life that had left them back, yet all I had gotten in return was a terrifying silence. In spite of their lifelessness, or perhaps because of it, they seemed to gaze accusingly into me, for in death she had seen the truth behind my public facade; I was responsible, for if I had fought harder and better than I had done, if I hadn't tried to hold myself back to save my own life, if I hadn't allowed Scarlet Letter to live long enough to set this grotesque spiral of events into motion, then she would still be alive.

On the ground by her body was her sword, its blade stained with drying blood but still serviceable. Carefully I lifted it up, and then made the decision that I would take it back with me, believing in some sentimental way that it would contain some part of her essence, and thus I could placate her restless spirit by plunging her finely crafted rapier into the withered, hollow chest of Lieutenant Scarlet Letter. I took her scabbard too, and after removing and discarding mine, now rendered useless after the loss of my weapon, fastened it around my waist.

I left Gliding Moth's body with the others, one more statistic for the General's reports and for the historians of the future to argue over, and I scrambled back out of sight of everypony else. I was surrounded by more of these statistics - twisted, torn, burnt, stabbed, and mutilated in heaps around me. I could scarcely see for the tears that stung my eyes, but behind the boulder upon which she had died nopony could see me. For the first time that I could remember I broke down utterly, more so than when I came to the realisation my father was unlikely to return home; it was not dignified or noble, it was indulgent and shameful for a pony of my social stature to be reduced to this level, not to mention a dreadful waste of precious fluid. Yet there are some things that all of the aristocratic detachment and refinement in the world cannot restrain, and so I sat with my face buried in my hooves, gasping frantically for air between choked sobs as tears streaked down my face and washed the blood and gore from it, where I hoped and prayed that nopony could see me, and sobbed in a toxic mixture of grief and anger at the absurdity of the war that had taken her from me.

[No other eyewitness testimony that Twilight Sparkle has been able to uncover mentions Prince Blueblood's expression of grief. However, it is unlikely that the survivors of the rescue party were unaware. We can conclude that it has been omitted out of a sense of respect for their Commissar and of the shared sense of shock they must have felt at losing the Colours.]

Damnation, I felt more ashamed of myself than I ever had done in my whole worthless, wasteful life; why did the death of Gliding Moth hurt me so much more than those of the ponies whose lifeless bodies littered the battlefield around me? How could I be so bloody selfish to indulge in this misplaced grief, when back home in Trottingham and Canterlot scores of mothers, fathers, wives, and husbands would soon learn that their loved one who went to war would never return home? It was some time, I don't know how long, when I regained sufficient control over myself to at least stand up. Once more I would have to take charge and do something, though I had not the slightest indication of what we should do in this unprecedented situation. The ponies out there needed somepony to lead them, and unfortunately for all concerned that somepony had to be me.

I walked among the living in a daze, as if my legs had been propelled by inertia than any conscious desire on my part and heedless of the expectant stares that I received. Out of everypony present, however, it was Lieutenant Southern Cross who had the courage to say something to bring me out of my grief-induced stupor, by summing up our situation in the most succinct and effective way possible.

“Well, now what?”

Author's Note

I think this was probably the most challenging chapter to write thus far, but I hope it was worth it.

Also, as this series has developed over however many years I've been writing this, I wonder if I've all but lost the 'comedy' tag, as it seems to have turned into a more straightforward war story.

Honour and Blood (Part 12)

I did not address Lieutenant Southern Cross immediately, for my mind was a whirlwind of jumbled emotions in spite of the outwardly calm demeanour that I was struggling to maintain, much like trying to stop a leak in a sinking ship with a hoof. Standing before him, I caught faint glimpses of my distorted reflection in the dusty and scratched surface of his stained breastplate, and almost didn't recognise myself for all of the blood and filth covering most of my body and face. In places my white fur, which had turned an unsightly shade of beige over the course of my military career here owing to an inadequate supply of both soap and water, was stained by such a dark shade of reddish-brown so as to appear almost black. From what I could tell from this spectral reflection, my appearance matched certainly matched my dark mood, which had simmered down from a chaotic jumble of anger, hate, and sorrow warring against one another like a storm within my own psyche to a deep, leaden grey overcast. I simply felt numb.

We had lost the Colours, dozens of ponies were dead, Gliding Moth included, and we were stranded from the rest of Equestrian soil by a gorge with the only bridge within marching distance destroyed. I was not used to the concept of failure, but there was some tiny iota of comfort that could be found in the knowledge that there was nothing that I could have done to avert this grotesque series of events. Nothing, that is, except to have killed Lieutenant Scarlet Letter when I had the chance to. I had no concrete proof at the time, but who else amongst us would have been so utterly bereft of common sense to have fired on a merely curious group of innocent ponies, and then to have deliberately detonated the explosive charges on the bridge while a number of ponies, including me, were still crossing it?

Nothing, however, could be done here. With the Colours gone and our main objective of destroying the bridge completed there was little we could do out here, and so I resolved that we should return to the fort. I did not relish having to explain what had happened to General McBridle and Shining Armour in what would probably be the worst and most imbalanced case of 'good news and bad news' in all of Equestrian history, but I was reasonably confident that I should be able to escape most of the blame for this debacle. The problem as far as I could see it, however, was the one now facing the Changeling enemy if they sought to outflank the oncoming advance to the south; the bridge, the only means of crossing this gorge from the enemy front for miles around, was gone.

"You look awful," said Lieutenant Southern Cross, his voice flat and drained of its usual energy and warmth.

I realised then that I had been staring uncomfortably at my own reflection for quite some time, and that everypony was simply waiting for me to take charge. I shook my head and attempted to regain my sense of aristocratic detachment and sprezzatura [a term referring to doing something extremely well without appearing to show any effort, as a sort of affected nonchalance. It is considered a necessary trait for a courtier to possess] to probably very minimal effect. Now, more than ever, was not the time to show any degree of weakness.

"How long will it take to erect a crossing?" I said, pretending to ignore the question.

Southern Cross sucked air through his teeth and regarded the large gap in the precise centre of the bridge. The central pillar remained, or part of it rising defiantly from out of the depths of the chasm at least, but the remaining stubs of the walkway itself extended about five feet or so from the anchorages either side of the crevasse, thus leaving a thirty foot wide expanse that we needed to cross.

"Depends on what kind of crossing you want," he said as he considered the ruined bridge. As he explained our options, some semblance of his former cheerfulness began to return, as though being presented with some sort of engineering conundrum to solve was sufficient to distract him from the misery that the both of us had just been through. "We can toss a rope across, and that'll only take a few minutes. But if you're looking for something that'll take your weight, no offence, mate, then we can build a simple suspension bridge. We'll have to disassemble the wagon for the wooden planks, but it's doable in a few hours."

"Good," I said, nodding my head. "Get to it, Lieutenant."

Southern Cross moved to approach the bridge anchorage, but stopped after one step and inclined his head in my direction. "So that's it, then?" he said quietly. "We're just going back."

I bit down on my lower lip and sighed. Southern Cross certainly was not making this whole affair any easier for me, and in truth I did not expect the outspoken Horsetralian would do otherwise, but I could not blame him for giving a voice to the collective feelings of everypony here. Around me the surviving soldiers had gathered, and stared with what I could only describe as 'expectant hostility' at me. As the only clear authority figure left as perceived by the common soldiery, left directionless and despondent by the day's events, I had to tread a very fine line lest I become the target for the simmering anger that lay within each present pony like a magma bubbling up beneath a smouldering volcano.

"There is nothing left for us here," I said flatly, having uncharacteristically drawn a complete blank on what empty platitude to say.

Nopony had the energy to say or do anything at all to contradict me, which was something of a relief given the circumstances. While Lieutenant Southern Cross busied himself drawing diagrams in the dust using the shaft of his bloodied axe as a writing implement, I had ordered the soldiers to start digging graves for the fallen. It was grim, unpleasant work, and though commissioned officers were supposed to be spared the indignities of manual labour I thought it best to be seen contributing in a more direct manner.

During a rest break I asked for Scarlet Letter's sergeant so that I might interrogate him and find out what in Tartarus actually happened, only to find that he had been killed in the fight. It was a damned shame; that stallion, whose name unfortunately continues to elude me [Sergeant Firecracker of Canterlot], did a damned fine job of keeping the platoon an effective fighting force in spite of their leader's utter failure as an officer. Therefore, I had little course but to consult his corporal, who I found sitting with the other wounded soldiers in the shade of a large boulder. He looked somewhat dazed, with his great, blue eyes staring unfocused at the horizon. His midsection had been bandaged up with white cloth, which had a rather large and ugly red stain growing just under his ribs.

I picked my way around the other wounded ponies, who groaned in pain or simply watched me impassively, and sat next to the Corporal. Everything ached, from my muscles and joints to the bones and organs within, and I was grateful for the chance to rest again. It was also a blessing to remove my cap and momentarily become just a pony again, if only for a short while.

"How are you?" I said clumsily to the Corporal.

The stallion looked at his bandage and then back at me. "I've been better," he said. "And I'll feel better once the painkillers kick in."

"Oh come now, if you want a chance at going home early you'll need to ham it up a bit more than that."

"Speaking frankly, sir, after today I don't think we can go home."

I found that I could not respond instantly. Though I had known it deep down, my mind had been in such a fractured mess of emotions and thoughts that each craved individual attention like a basket of very spoilt puppies that it had not surfaced as an articulate thought; how could I, or any other survivor of this battle, dare to show our faces in Equestrian society again? Though I could pin the blame justly on Scarlet Letter, even without any proof as was my remit as a commissar, the stain of dishonour requires a far stronger detergent than the mere truth. His blood might suffice.

"So what happened?" I said, after a pause. "Who fired at those natives? Who gave the order?"

The corporal stared at me with an intense expression, with his brow furrowed and mouth set in a thin, horizontal line across his snout. He then cocked his head to one side, twisted his lips as he appeared to consider my order-framed-as-a-request, while I waited to hear with growing anxiety to hear the name that would confirm what I already suspected to be true. Though I knew that Scarlet Letter was by no means loved by the ponies under his command, some soldiers invariably hold a little too much loyalty to even the most incompetent of officers out of a misguided sense of loyalty; being a necessary side effect of the Royal Guard's insistence on discipline, the chain of command, and the dogmatic rejection of the very concept of independent thought, that was all designed to inculcate a sense of obedience and devotion.

"The Lieutenant did," he said eventually, deciding that all that had happened over the past few hours was not worth whatever loyalty he felt he owed his commanding officer. "Those pegasi were getting too close and they were armed, so he lost his nerve and shot one of them. You saw the rest."

I nodded my head and thanked him, it was as good a proof as any. We continued our work in respectful silence, carving out individual pony-sized holes in neat rows in the ground into which we laid to rest their mortal remains. It was hard work, for we lacked the sufficient number of shovels and were thus forced to dig into the dry, cracked earth with our hooves. This place would later become a minor war cemetery, one of many that would dot the Badlands after the conclusion of this miserable conflict like spots of mould over stale old bread. [The Royal Equestrian War Graves Commission does indeed maintain what is now known as Gliding Moth's Crossing Cemetery, which is one of twenty-seven within the Badlands converted from ad hoc burials into organised memorial sites] For headstones we had to make do with broken spear shafts and pieces of armour that Pencil Pusher was likely to deem to be irreparable, though I suspected rightly that this unpleasant bureaucrat would complain uselessly about such a frivolous waste of valuable war materiel.

While we continued with our work, Lieutenant Southern Cross had completed his plans and proceeded to inform his comrades across the gorge of his intentions by shouting as loudly as possible and waving his arms in what appeared at first to be a random manner but somehow managed to convey sufficient information to get them started. They started by stringing a few lengths of rope across the gap, which took only a few aborted attempts at simply throwing it until one had the bright idea of tying one end onto a spear and then employing an earth pony to throw it like a javelin to the other side. It worked, surprisingly, and soon enough there were half a dozen ropes stretching across the void between our bifurcated platoon. With this in place, the engineers reduced their cart and an assortment of leftover barrels and boxes to their constituent planks of wood and set about the difficult task of assembling the recovered material into something one could charitably call a bridge.

Under normal circumstances I would not have dared to cross the ungainly mess of ropes and wood planks even if Fleur-de-lis herself was on the opposite side, resting atop a soft princess-sized bed with a set of signed divorce papers from Fancy Pants, a tub of whipped cream, and a dog-eared copy of the Pony Sutra. These were clearly far from normal circumstances, however, and I would have skipped merrily over that slapdash, rickety thing to the other side if doing so would not diminish the air of gravitas and, let's face, a base level of competence that I was trying to maintain.

I let Southern Cross be the first to use the bridge, but to my combined relief and horror he stepped from plank to mismatched plank with deceptive ease using a spider's web of intricately knotted ropes to support himself, and reached the other side safe and sound. Relief, for the structure that looked like a ball of yarn of record-breaking proportions had collided with a coopers' workshop had managed to bear his weight without any real loss of structural integrity, and horror, for while the spritely earth pony had made it across with ease, a life of over-indulgence on rich Prench food and fine wine meant that I was likely to be rather heavier than he.

All attempts at maintaining dignity were abandoned as I crossed this bridge, hanging desperately onto the ropes with my forelegs as I hesitantly guided my hind legs onto the planks. That the planks were by no means equally spaced, owing to the haste with which they were tied into place, meant that I was forced to look down. In the spaces I could see the seemingly vast gulf between my precarious position, held aloft by rope and wood and wishful thinking, stretch almost into infinity. The bottom of the chasm was shrouded in near impenetrable darkness, into which I could almost discern strange, still shapes that my overactive imagination had decided to interpret as all manner of horrifying monsters waiting for me to slip and fall into their hungry maws.

The promise of safety, and most importantly, revenge, was enough to motivate me to place one hoof carefully in front of the other. Concentrating solely on this deceptively simple task to the exclusion of all else, as much as I could manage, as merely a means to get to the other side and hopefully find and expunge the root cause of all of this misery - the pony stupid enough to either fire on the native party or order another to do so - meant that my hooves were safely back on terra firma a damn sight faster than I had anticipated. Indeed, the moment I touched solid earth, as opposed to bits of wood suspended over what appeared to be an endless void, I was so surprised by the sensation of the ground not swaying beneath my hooves that I almost fell on my face.

"Lieutenant?" I said, addressing the crowd of soldiers standing in a disorganised mob in front of me. As I approached, they parted before me to reveal Lieutenant Scarlet Letter and Lieutenant Grim Cathedra at the centre, the former sitting on his haunches with a spear held at his neck and a very unhappy expression on his round face.

Scarlet Letter snapped his head up to look at me, and said, "It's about time, sir! These ruffians have-"

"Not you," I snapped. "Grim Cathedra, I'd like a word with you, please."

The scarred pony dipped his head in solemn affirmation, spoke a few quiet words to his sergeant while indicating at Scarlet Letter with a nod, and then followed me to a spot just outside the disorganised mob of the remnants of the platoon. There was, of course, still absolutely no guarantee of privacy, but I merely wanted some relief from the peculiar sense of claustrophobia that comes with being surrounded by other ponies. I already had one answer to two of the questions burning away in my mind and now I just needed the second to seal his fate, though I suspected that I already knew the answer to this one.

"Who blew up the bridge while I, while we, I mean, were still on the damned thing?" I asked in a hushed tone, though I did not care overmuch if we were heard. A quick glance over my shoulder and I saw that those soldiers closest to us were trying a little too hard to look as though they weren't listening to our conversation, by conspicuously avoiding eye contact and suddenly finding their own hooves very interesting even though their ears were swivelling noticeably in our direction.

Grim Cathedra answered without any delay. "Scarlet Letter," he said flatly.

"Are you certain?"

He frowned, which made the comically ghoulish appearance imparted by his disfiguring facial discolouration look rather too corpse-like for my comfort. From within the irregular coal-black circles around his eye sockets, his yellow eyes with the draconic slit pupils seemed to smoulder with the intensity of raw hatred even though his outward appearance remained deceptively calm and composed.

"We all saw him," he said. "He watched as you crossed over the bridge, then he pushed his way to the detonator and pressed down on the plunger."

I had suspected as much, but to hear it spoken aloud made it sound utterly absurd; these were far from the actions of a rational pony, and although I well knew that in the chaotic mess of battle ponies in general are far from rational (which is why the Royal Guard insists on enforcing strict discipline and drill practice), even accounting for that strange state of mind where one knows one's life is in great danger it felt very far fetched. Nevertheless, that left two possible explanations in my mind - either Scarlet Letter had truly panicked and activated the detonator because he believed our cause was lost and it was the only way to defend his position, or he merely wanted me dead. Either option still carried grave consequences, for the former was rank cowardice and the latter was attempted murder. The truth, as I saw it, fell somewhere in the middle, and I assumed that he expected that I would not survive and that he could use his connections within the Ministry of War to suppress any version of events that conflicted with his own. Unfortunately for him I survived.

This was not a premeditated conspiracy, planned in detail and complete with a self-aggrandising story that both exonerated and glorified its perpetrator like the incident in the siege not too long ago. Instead, these were merely the actions of a panicked and frightened stallion who had not the training nor the soundness of mind to act appropriately during a time of great stress; Scarlet Letter was merely one symptom of the disease that infested the officer class of the Royal Guard. That was not to say I felt the even the slightest bit of sympathy for him, for it was his actions that ultimately lost us the Colours and killed Gliding Moth and all of those other ponies who would still be alive were it not for him. No, it was time to set an example.

I thanked Grim Cathedra, and he silently slinked away to help co-ordinate the evacuation of our comrades still stranded on the other side. Scarlet Letter remained in the centre of the platoon's messy formation, under the watchful and hate-filled supervision of the dozen or so soldiers whose lives he apparently held in very little regard. As I approached and the ponies moved quietly and graciously out of my way, Gliding Moth's sword in its sheath started to feel rather heavier and more ungainly than before, as though it was somehow trying to make its presence known so that I might plunge its blade into the throat of the one who took its mistress's life and sate our shared thirst for vengeance in blood.

"My friends at the Ministry will hear of this!" shouted Scarlet Letter, though the tremor in his voice betrayed his obvious fear in spite of his arrogant bluster. By now he was being held down by the rough hooves of one stallion, while another held his spear about as close to the disgraced officer's neck as if he was giving him a shave. As I stepped closer, he lifted his head up to look at me, his eyes wide and desperate, and I wondered if he was at all cognisant of just how much trouble he was in now.

"Lieutenant," I said flatly. "This is a new low."

Scarlet Letter blinked gormlessly at me in the manner of a dog trying to understand its master's words, and then said, "I quite agree, sir! These stallions should be flogged for mistreating an officer in this way. This has all been a horrible misunderstanding, and I can explain everything if they let go of me."

Yet for all of my anger when I approached the pathetic stallion I found I had not the will to even unsheathe my sword. It is one thing to speak of taking another pony's life in cold blood, but quite another to actually perform the deed even if he truly deserved it. Though my magic had gripped around the handle of the rapier tightly, I found that I simply could not bring myself to free the blade from the scabbard. I hoped that he could not see the internal struggle raging in my mind, for though it seemed that the unquiet spirits of the dead raged incessantly to implore me to perform the grim deed. In the end I gave up, and thus released my hold on my sword with a defeated sigh.

"No," I said, the strain was evident in my voice.

"No?" Scarlet Letter echoed my words incredulously.

"No. You are under arrest and will be court-martialed immediately upon our return for treason. I have nothing further to say to you." I then looked to the stallion holding the sword to the Lieutenant's throat. "Nopony is to harm him. Is that understood? Nopony, that is, except me."

“If anything happens to me, you’re finished, Blueblood. Not even your Aunt will be able to save your career once my friends in Parliament are through with you.”

I ignored that hollow threat, for it was merely the desperate and vain pleadings of a pony doomed to die, and I stormed off in a manner I hoped would be appropriately dramatic. I had determined that Shining Armour would have to decide his fate; after all, the guilty pony was an officer of the 1st Regiment of the Solar Guard and therefore technically out of my jurisdiction, and out of sense of professional courtesy and to avoid even more bureaucratic unpleasantness on my part it was only proper that the infamously lenient and understanding Captain of the Royal Guard should be the final arbiter [Blueblood is incorrect on this account and is likely looking for an excuse to justify his deferment of Scarlet Letter's sentence, as an individual commissar's authority may extend beyond regimental boundaries as circumstances dictate, such as operations that employ units from different regiments working closely together]. Nevertheless, he was right - I was finished, completely and utterly, but I may at least be able to survive long enough to take the tattered scraps of my life and clumsily sew them back together.

I ruminated on this while the rest of the platoon crossed the temporary rope bridge with varying degrees of speed and elegance. Only one pony could, or was willing to I should say, cross at a time, which meant that our return back to the fort would be delayed somewhat. The remaining soldiers on our side took this as an opportunity for a tea break, as those not watching the horizon and the gradually darkening skies had set up a couple of small campfires with which to brew their favourite beverage. Though I wished to be alone, an enamel mug filled with that familiar hot brown liquid did much to settle my mind to the point where I felt I could think relatively coherently for the first time in a while.

This brief upswing in my mood, however slight it was, could only last so long, and it popped like a balloon drifting too close to a lit candle when one of the soldiers on picquet duty declared that he could see pegasi approaching very low and very fast. There was a brief outbreak of the sort of restrained panic that sets in when a unit of guardsponies is required to shift from a state approaching relaxation to combat almost instantly, which they did so with great alacrity. The campfires were quickly stomped out, the canteens and enamel mugs put back into saddlebags, and spears seized and horns lit with magic.

I could see the pegasi approaching rapidly, but it soon became apparent that they were not the same ones who attacked us earlier. Only one particularly irritating group of that one third of the pony race were so damned prideful that it completely eclipsed their common sense to the point that they would announce their presence, and therefore ours, to everypony with an unobstructed view of the sky by trailing smoke and rainbows behind them. The trainee Wonderbolts were in a standard V-formation, with Rainbow Dash, identifiable by her multi-coloured smoke trail being the most flamboyant and gaudy of them all, at the lead. Accelerating quickly in a deep dive to the ground, they pulled up at the last second to avoid smearing themselves across the ground like overripe berries fall from a tree, which would have spared their leader from the even worse fate that I was concocting for her as I watched them.

The Wonderbolts swept directly overhead in a blur of skin-tight blue latex, smoke, and rainbows, close enough that a particularly tall earth pony soldier might have been able to poke one with his spear if he stood on his hind legs and stretched. The air shrieked as it was displaced violently by the speeding pegasi, almost knocking my cap off my head and into a crevasse nearby. I watched with a fire burning brighter and hotter in my chest, until it felt like the only thing preventing me from erupting in pure bloody-minded rage was the flimsy barrier formed by a lifetime of being taught that such displays were for the uneducated peasantry. The formation then pulled up into a steep climb and then split to form a palm tree shape with the smoke forming the multi-coloured 'leaves'. The sheer, bloody arrogance of it all was astounding even by my standards, and it betrayed a complete lack of self-awareness that seemed to be utterly endemic in these entertainers.

If they were expecting the usual applause and whoops of adulation from their 'audience', they were going to be sorely disappointed. As the Wonderbolts swiftly returned to formation and glided down for an elegant and dignified landing, one could almost detect the simmering, seething resentment radiating from just about every pony who was bothering to watch this unwarranted display. To pre-empt any sort of unpleasantness (that is to say, the illegal sort that the mob might commit in their haste as compared to the completely legal type that I was allowed to inflict on ponies), I quickly pushed my way to the front. There, Rainbow Dash trotted merrily towards me, panting heavily from exertion and with sweat slicking her mane and what little fur could be seen in the strategically placed gaps in her skin-tight flightsuit. The latex had split in places, some around the joints of her limbs from stressing the fabric in combat further than its designers had initially anticipated and others where she had received a few superficial cuts and scratches that certainly were not there before.

Rainbow Dash gave no indication that anything to her seemed amiss, though I can hardly blame her when the rest of the Royal Guard and I had treated her and her ilk with barely-concealed disdain the majority of the time anyway, so as far as she was could probably tell the angry scowls and angry mutterings were simply normal behaviour for us. She approached with a lively spring in her step, in spite of the admittedly light injuries she had suffered in whatever fight she had just come from. I struggled to conceive of the idea that she was somehow oblivious of just how much trouble she was in, she simply had to acknowledge the fact that she had willingly disobeyed orders and left us entirely without any aerial support whatsoever, but the big, cheerful, ever-so-self-satisfied grin stretching her face so wide that I feared it might split her face right down the middle in two certainly implied that she was just as oblivious of her transgressions as Pinkie Pie was of the concept of personal restraint.

The tension rising as she approached was like the discordant hum of a machine of some description powering up. The soldiers around me eyed her warily, clutching at their weapons and seeming to strain on invisible leashes to pounce and rip her apart. A few snorted and stamped their hooves, but they remained silent and would make furtive glances in my direction. I drew myself up and took a few steps forward, where Rainbow Dash stopped, snapped to attention with a well-practiced stomp of her hoof that, in the expectant hush that had descended like a curtain to muffle all sound, sounded like the slamming of a great cathedral door.

"Sir!" she greeted me proudly, swinging her hoof in a crisp salute. "We routed the enemy, inflicting heavy casualties and forcing them to retreat with zero losses on our side. In total we have seven confirmed kills and thirteen probable. Not bad for our first operation!"

Rainbow Dash looked up at me with an eager and expectant expression on her face, no doubt bracing herself for the flurry of praise and adulation that she believed that I was about to heap upon her like a Labrador that had successfully performed a trick for its master. Perhaps she also expected a medal of some description, or even a promotion or a commission for her heroic victory over a small patrol of Changeling drones whose loss would barely register amongst the seemingly endless reserves that Queen Chrysalis had at her disposal. Nevertheless, I still could not quite believe that she remained so utterly oblivious, so completely wrapped up in her own personal heroic fantasy, that she failed to notice that everypony else, most notably the pony she was talking to standing right in front of her, bore expressions of such unmitigated disdain and anger directed entirely upon her. How could she so fail to grasp the horrendous consequences of her actions, made obvious to all in the blood and dust around her? Did she not see the dried blood splattered across my face like a baptism gone horribly wrong?

"Sir?" she said again, nudging me out of my stupor. I realised that I had been staring at her as I struggled to find a way to put what I needed to say in coherent words. In the end I simply gave up and addressed Cannon Fodder, who had evidently made it across the rope bridge and discreetly taken up his usual position just behind and slightly to the left of me.

"Put Rainbow Dash under arrest," I said, and then I turned abruptly on my hooves to find something better to do than waste further time on her. Naturally, the mare in question did not take too kindly to that, and as when Cannon Fodder moved past me and asked her to surrender any weapons and come quietly I heard a loud, sharp, and violent exclamation from her.

"What?"

I owed her an explanation at the very least, though on a selfish level I thought that nothing would do more to improve my fractious mood than for her to finally comprehend the grim consequences of her ridiculous, self-centred actions. Thus, I turned to face her once more, and saw the confused and indignant expression on her face. The other soldiers had moved closer with weapons in hoof to assist my aide should the Wonderbolts be so utterly bereft of sense as to resist, but most simply stood, tense and alert with tails swishing and snorting in frustration, and waited silently.

"Your orders were to provide close air support to the infantry," I said, consciously keeping my voice as flat and level as I could. A calm, measured tone would do more to impress the severity of the situation than the anger and fire within me that demanded to be made known. "Your orders were to stick close to us at all times. You chose to wilfully ignore that order, and that is insubordination."

"We saw the enemy and we engaged!" she protested. "We're soldiers, that's what we're supposed to do! Fight the enemy!"

"Soldiers obey orders!" I snapped. I then fixed her with a glare and sucked in a deep breath, and then released it slowly as a frustrated sigh, before I continued again in the calm yet stern tone as before. "You are not soldiers. You have proven yourself unworthy to call yourself soldiers. Yet, you are operating under the authority of the Royal Guard and are therefore subject to military law. You are under arrest and will be court-martialed upon our return to the fort. That is all."

"But..." Rainbow Dash's rebuttal died in her throat along with any hint of self-righteous defiance. For her, it seemed that the penny had finally lost its battle with gravity and had fallen to the ground with a dreadful clatter. I could only imagine that she now saw the dirty, filthy, wounded, and profoundly hostile group of soldiers forming around her, weapons readied and the mental restraints holding back their bloodlust weakening with every passing moment, and at last saw the consequences of her actions. She turned her face away from me and looked to her fellow Wonderbolts, who likewise gazed back with silent, dejected expressions - so rapidly had their pride been punctured.

"I ordered them to engage," said Rainbow Dash, looking back at me. "Whatever happens, it was my responsibility. The other Wonderbolts shouldn't be punished for my mistake."

Though it pained me to admit it, I was quite genuinely impressed by her integrity. Then again, for all of her many, many faults - her brashness, rudeness, defiance of authority, and pride - Rainbow Dash was the bearer of the Element of Loyalty, after all. As I looked at the thoroughly dejected mare, I felt some small stirrings of what might be considered sympathy coalesce within me; none of this would have been such an issue were it not for Scarlet Letter's actions, and her apparent remorse for what was ultimately a foalish mistake forced upon a mare too young and inexperienced to be serving on the frontline and her obvious dedication to the ponies under her command encouraged me to be more lenient to her than Scarlet Letter.

"So noted," I said.

With everypony across the bridge we started to make our way back to the fort, but not before collapsing the bridge that we had just built. Lieutenant Southern Cross was a trifle miffed that his latest engineering marvel was to be torn down, but nevertheless reluctantly acquiesced by hacking through the ropes that suspended the dangerous wooden walkway until the entire structure began to twist beneath the mess of its own haphazard construction. With whatever component key to its structural integrity now gone, the entire bridge collapsed and folded in on itself in a spectacular and rather noisy implosion of wood and rope. Within a few seconds it was no more than a pile of splinters at the bottom of the chasm.

***

The journey back was blessedly uneventful, with no Changelings or native ponies sighted and with little to no protest from either of our two captives. Perhaps Rainbow Dash and Scarlet Letter had accepted their respective guilt and failure and were engaged in quiet and reflective contemplation of their sins or, as was most likely, attempting to get their stories straight so that they might escape the imminent tribunal with as much of their careers and lives intact. As far as Scarlet Letter was concerned, however, he would be lucky to suffer only a quick and instant death.

It was late afternoon when we returned to the place I could only charitably call 'home', with the sun already beginning to sink from its ascendant position in the sky and commence its descent into the west. Immediately upon crossing through the portcullis gates I delivered our two prisoners into the care of the bewildered provosts, giving only curt instructions that they were to be held pending their court martial and to fetch Shining Armour immediately. I had first thought to wait for the Captain of the Royal Guard, who was indisposed elsewhere at the time doing Faust knows what [records suggest that Shining Armour was engaged in routine inspections at the time], but I then considered that I had done all that I could and, with what I hoped would be taken as sangfroid and not mere selfishness on my part, retired to the officers' mess and ate a champagne dinner.

I had just finished the delectable wild mushroom and truffle risotto and was halfway through polishing off a thoroughly exquisite bottle of Dom Ponygnon '07 when Shining Armour found me. During my meal the other officers there had given me a rather wide berth, and I realised only after the fact that it was because in between returning to the fortress and having dinner I had neglected to wash off the filth of the battle. I could hardly blame them, for I must have made an interesting and horrific sight, dining upon the fine cuisine and drink that the prestigious mess hall of the 1st Regiment of the Solar Guard offered with my uniform and fur caked in a mixture of dust, blood, and gore. Nevertheless, it suited me just fine, as this darkened mood that clouded my mind meant that I would hardly be the sort of pleasant company these officers were after. Besides, I was only really going through the motions of enjoying a nice meal, as the anger and grief of what had happened had coalesced into some kind of fog that seemed to shroud the rational, thinking parts of my mind. Though I knew on a conscious level that the risotto was expertly cooked with the right balance of richness and flavour and that the champagne was as the nectar of the gods, none of the pleasures associated seemed to register at all. [It is likely that Blueblood was still experiencing some level of shock, which would explain his 'dazed' state of mind.]

Shining Armour sneered when he saw me, and only reluctantly sat down at my table as though it was the last remaining seat in a busy train carriage next to a very friendly and talkative looking pony with an abundance of pamphlets about the good word of Faust. The empty plate, the half-drunk bottle of champagne, and a lit candle separated us, and he glowered at me from across them. As he was staring at me with the same expression that he pulled moments before swinging his hoof at my jaw when we were colts and he'd had enough of my teasing of his sister, I quietly took my cigarillo case from my coat pocket, selected a slender cigarillo, and went through the ritual of lighting it.

"Well?" said Shining Armour, with an edge of invidious directness in his voice. "What happened?"

I told him. Over the course of smoking that cigarillo and drinking the remaining half a bottle of champagne I explained in as terse and clinical language as I could manage exactly what had taken place; that Scarlet Letter usurped command of the operation; that Rainbow Dash had deserted us and left us without air support; that Scarlet Letter provoked a native patrol by firing on them; that he fled and then destroyed the bridge with half a dozen ponies and me still on it, thus cutting off further support; and finally how the Colours were lost. Shining Armour did not speak or react as I delivered my explanation of the events, but instead merely stared intently and quietly at me with only the occasional nod of his head indicating that he was, in fact, paying attention.

"I see," said Shining Armour flatly when I had finished. His whole body was tense, and though his face was still that masque of conscious and deliberate non-expression he still looked as though at any moment his hold on his patience and famed good nature must inevitably break and explode in a torrent of violence. Having experienced it before, albeit when we were both much younger, I aimed to be as far away as possible when that happened.

I had finished my cigarillo and left it to die a dignified death by resting it on the ashtray, and though I desired another, chain-smoking them was a tad vulgar and so I refrained. Having finished telling my story, I reclined back in my seat and idly fiddled with my slowly-diminishing final glass of champagne and watched Shining Armour carefully. It was some time - a few more sips of the glass and a glance at my watch - before he spoke again.

"So that's it?" he said, again his voice curiously and forcefully level and devoid of emotion. "And you just come here after all that and have a meal and a drink and a cigar like nothing happened."

I placed the now empty glass between us, and watched as the shaped glass distorted Shining Armour's scowling face. "If you can think of a better use of my time, I'd like to hear it."

"Like dealing with this mess, Commissar."

I snorted and shook my head, contemplating ordering another bottle but I wisely decided against it. The drink had clouded and dulled my mind, leaving me in a pleasant haze where the full pain of the situation no longer hurt me so much. "How am I supposed to do that?" I said, my voice being a little too loud for the seriousness of this conversation. "I can't just bring the Colours back."

"Scarlet Letter is still alive," hissed Shining Armour through set teeth. "He escaped justice once before, and he'll do it again if you continue to sit here doing nothing."

"Oh." I leaned forward and rested my hooves on the small table between us, fixing the Captain of the Royal Guard with a glare that he returned. He was right, perhaps; I should have exercised the right of summary execution then and there and at least some of the stain of dishonour would have been washed clean with the detergent of this pony's blood. Yet I could not admit to him that I was so sickened by the idea of committing murder, so devoid of the necessary will to commit the act that I knew to be both justified and inevitable.

Nevertheless, Shining Armour's sudden dark mood had disturbed me, though it did not surprise me. Behind his cheerful, caring, brotherly exterior still beat the heart of a determined career soldier who had to sacrifice so much to earn his place, and whose career had been balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff for some time and now just been given its hardest shove. I had, of course, experienced his darker, angrier moods before, though we were both colts at the time, and despite my apparent drunkenness, the underlying threat of a sudden violent outburst from the tense stallion opposite was rather chilling. That he of all ponies, so devoted to the ponies under his command, and indeed to all who served under the aegis of the Royal Guard, could so callously demand the death of another was a shock. However, as I reflect back now it was that same devotion that inspired this seething anger, for Scarlet Letter had committed the most grievous of all sins in his eyes - the avoidable deaths of ponies.

"I had assumed," I said, proffering an apologetic smile, "that you wanted some input in this matter or that a more public example should be made of him."

Shining Armour glowered at me for a few moments more, and then nodded his head quietly. "Meet me in my office in one hour," he said authoritatively as he rose from his seat to leave. There was nothing further to be discussed, and as I watched him storm out of the officers' mess, ignoring the polite expressions of concern from his fellow officers, I could not help but feel a certain level of sympathy for him. Whatever was going to happen, I knew that there was no way that he was going to leave with his career intact - the first Captain of the Royal Guard to lose the Colours under his command.

Author's Note

Finally, a new chapter!

Honour and Blood (Part 13)

It is often said by some ponies, who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than to say or write things that seem profound but are actually rather pedestrian, that a pony's office is a reflection of their innermost soul. This is especially true of officers, who invariably try to bring something of home with them while on campaign and have the means to do so. Mine was a tiny oasis of comfort and relative elegance amidst a desert of hardship and common vulgarity, with a few tasteful furnishings such as my desk and my drinks cabinet with the comforts its contents offered lending a certain air of civility in an otherwise barbarous locale. Colonel Sunshine Smiles' quarters were exceptionally austere even by the standards of the 1st Night Guards, and though I never lingered there for very long, having found the wide empty space and the distinct lack of anything that might be considered a 'personal touch' to be rather uncomfortable, it certainly reflected his apparent rejection of the very notion of officer privilege and his unpretentious style of command and leadership. Conversely, when I've had to suffer through Major Starlit Skies' exceedingly dull and minutiae-driven meetings on the state of the unicorn company I noted that the sheer mass of filing cabinets and bookshelves that filled his office so as to render the journey betwixt desk and door a veritable maze, each filled to bursting with enough paperwork to make Pencil Pusher explode with excitement, reflected his detail-obsessed approach to how he pursued both his work and his hobbies.

In this respect, Shining Armour's office was no different; indeed, it rather more resembled the bedroom of a teenaged colt than an officer of the Royal Guard, reminding me of Captain Red Coat's office without the collection of strange Neighponese toys. His lack of refinement and pretension was reflected in the desk that was clearly built from a mass-produced flat-pack kit, the standard issue Royal Guard cot, and the rustic chest of drawers likely made by some peasant at Dodge Junction. His optimism and his open and pleasant nature was likewise demonstrated by the colourful posters of hoofball players and some garishly-costumed comic book hero plastered on the walls. If such foalish decorations detracted from the seriousness of what was to take place there, then the severe expression on Shining Armour's face certainly restored the atmosphere to a more appropriately grim tone.

I was the last to arrive to this court martial [Although Blueblood refers to this as a 'court martial', this is more of an unofficial tribunal executed under commissarial privilege, or to Blueblood's initial detractors a mere show trial. Official courts martial have definitive rules and procedures like civil courts, whereas the proceedings described here are arbitrary in nature and guilt has already been determined], having enjoyed a digestif of Armagnac alone in my office to relax my nerves. Drinking alone, though considered a vice, a warning sign, and something to be pitied, is an activity that I find to have a quiet, soothing effect upon one's psyche; for it allows one to truly grapple with the darkness that lies within each of us, acting as it does in social situations as a friendly mediator between two parties, without the protective psychological walls created by sobriety. Whether or not what you find on your journey with the drink as your guide is of any comfort is another matter entirely.

In this matter, however, the darkness proved rather stronger than the liquor, and I soon gave up on that venture before I became too inebriated to walk in a straight line or construct a coherent sentence. When I arrived, I feared that they might have started the proceedings without me, but the awkward silence that was not dispelled as I slipped through the doorway and into the room soon dissuaded me of that notion. The two guilty ponies stood before Shining Armour's desk, behind which the Captain of the Royal Guard himself sat silently. The only sound apart from the latent background noise of the military camp that was present every damned minute of every damned day here was the scratching of his quill. In the corner General McBridle sat on a cushion, puffing away thoughtfully on his pipe and staring off into the middle distance with a deeply contemplative expression on his face.

Shining Armour did not look up from whatever it was he was working on as I entered the room and shut the heavy wooden door behind me with a hefty, hollow 'thud'. The only acknowledgement that I received as I crossed the short distance betwixt door and desk were some furtive glances from Rainbow Dash and Scarlet Letter, both of whom were doing their utmost to appear not at all perturbed by the proceedings, and reassuring nod from McBridle. The sound of my iron shoes striking the cobbled stone joined the irregular and persistent scratching of the pen, and then halted as I stood in the vague space next to the desk.

It was a cheap, albeit effective, psychological trick; one favoured by schoolteachers, parents, and military officers alike. The two ponies standing before the desk knew that they were in deep trouble and that the consequences would be severe, but the true nature and harshness of their punishment would remain a mystery that festered away in their minds as their respective imaginations would torment them with conjured images that would make the Solar Inquisition of old blush. It was, however, a delicate balancing act, as often the end result is instead a sense of relief when the punishment delivered fails to match the brutality of their expectations.

Lieutenant Scarlet Letter was the first to lose his nerve. He cleared his throat noisily, making a dramatic show of covering his mouth with a hoof, and saying, "Now that Blueblood has deigned to show up, reeking of drink as usual, perhaps we can continue?"

I flushed a little with embarrassment, having previously believed that this particular vice of mine was sufficiently hidden or at least considered to be part of the rakish cad image that I had cultivated in the early years of my adult life. In truth it caught me a little off guard, and I wondered briefly if I had what some might consider a problem.

"That's Commissar Prince Blueblood to you," said Shining Armour, placing his quill down neatly on his desk next to the letter he was writing. "We've just had a very interesting discussion about the operation, and what he's told me conflicts somewhat with your report, Lieutenant."

"The Commissar, sir, is just that," said Scarlet Letter, a small smile tugging at his lips. "He is a political officer, whose duties cover the morale and indoctrination of his regiment and not the conduct of battle. He lacks both the training and experience to appropriately criticise command decisions taken by officers in the field."

Shining Armour struck the desk loudly and suddenly with his hoof, the force of which sent a few papers flying and some assorted ornaments and knick-knacks rolling off to the floor. Snarling like an angered wolf, he leaned forward over his desk and addressed Scarlet Letter, who had taken an involuntary step backwards to the door, in such a stern tone that I almost felt compelled to imitate that gesture.

"The Commissar," he said, his voice level but strained, "saved the 3rd Solar Guard from annihilation, saved this fortress and its garrison from destruction, and saved Princess Luna, my sister, and my wife from Queen Chrysalis." Shining Armour then looked in my direction, his stern, though calm, expression softening only slightly. "Equestria owes him a lot, and more than you will probably ever understand."

"Thank you," I said, half wondering if he could be in any way cognisant of the truth behind each of the events that he had just described. "The praise should rightfully belong to the soldiers of the Royal Guard."

My telling of the truth for once, albeit in a somewhat roundabout manner, would be taken for false modesty by those ponies so wrapped up in their own image of what I should be like that they would not think to look beyond it. Ponies all have the very convenient tendency to either ignore things that did not mesh with their own view of the world or mentally distort their perception until their internal philosophies are no longer threatened by reality. Shining Armour lapped it up like a cat drinking cream, as expected.

"Now," said Shining Armour, "Lieutenant, tell Commissar Prince Blueblood what you just told me."

Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter hesitated, licked his lips, and cleared his throat. In a tone of voice dripping with undeserved pride he said, "We destroyed the bridge, sir, carrying out General McBridle's particular order as written. The 1st Solar Guard performed this task with the utmost alacrity and precision, sir."

Shining Armour tilted his head to one side and arched an eyebrow at Scarlet Letter's words. In spite of his outburst just moments before, he masked his anger quite well with a tense but calm quietness once more.

"Commissar Blueblood's testimony goes into more detail than yours," he said. "Sir, if you'd like to proceed."

I briefly examined Scarlet Letter's face for any hints of unease or discomfort, but either he was so confident in his own presumed innocence that he feared nothing, of which he would be sorely disappointed very soon, or as a politician he had become so very adept at presenting a confident self-image for his electorate (all one of her, if I recall correctly) and the media as consumed by the general peasantry at large that I could detect neither. Instead he stood very casually, in stark contrast to the rigid, statue-like posture of Rainbow Dash standing at attention. If anything he simply looked bored; it was as though somehow all of this, the culmination of greatest dishonour ever inflicted upon the Royal Guard, worse than any of the defeats suffered at the hooves of greater enemies that still nevertheless left the standard and therefore our honour in our possession, was an imposition on his time. The casual smirk as he returned my stare had only boosted my resolve, however, and with the sword of the fallen Gliding Moth resting heavily in its scabbard about my waist, I began the laying out of his sins.

"To start with," I said, "instead of Lieutenant Everlasting Oak, you had taken command without seeking approval from your superior officer."

"As I said in a previous statement before you turned up late, sir," said Scarlet Letter, and in much too casual a manner for my liking, "my comrade Lieutenant Everlasting Oak was injured in an unfortunate accident. Mine was the only other platoon in a state of sufficient readiness to carry out the mission, sir! I needn't remind everypony here of the importance of this operation in light of the coming offensive."

"Fine," I said, knowing that I wasn't going to trip him up on these minor points. The hammer blow would come later, and I looked forward to swinging it upon his misguided belief in his own innocence. "But was it necessary to bring the Colours for a platoon-level operation?"

"Of course, sir!" he said boastfully, puffing his chest out as though those same Colours were not currently being paraded around some native warlord's hovel before an unwashed mob of jeering heathens. "That's my style, sir, where the 1st Regiment of the Solar Guard marches to war the Colours will lead the way!"

I ignored the drivel, and carried on. "On our march to the bridge we encountered a small Changeling patrol, at which point Rainbow Dash here saw fit to disregard her orders and chased after them."

The mare in question did not say anything, but still remained standing almost perfectly still at attention and staring directly at one brick in particular in the opposite wall as though she was trying to remove it with only the power of her mind. As I paced in front of her, deliberately interrupting that fixed stare of her eyes by lowering my head down to her level, I noticed the small, subtle twitches here and there across her lithe, thin body, emphasised by the skin-tight flightsuit that she still insisted on wearing, that implied a slight sense of unease. I decided that her discomfort was nowhere near severe enough, so I stopped pacing and stood directly in front of her so that her muzzle was almost touching my stained coat.

"Do you have nothing to say for yourself?" I said, glaring down at her and hoping my not-inconsiderable advantage in height would help intimidate her into saying something that might be sufficiently incriminating. That she had faced down such fearsome creatures as dragons, Changelings, Discord, the Nightmare Moon reborn, and Twilight Sparkle suffering from a study-mania and lived to tell about it hadn't occurred to me at the time, but nevertheless the desired effect had been achieved.

"The enemy was sighted and we engaged, sir!" she barked.

"Without authorisation. Your orders were to accompany the earth ponies and unicorns to the bridge, which you failed to execute. You pursued a small Changeling patrol of very little consequence, thus leaving the platoon below strength and vulnerable to attack from the air. Tell me, those Changelings you so valiantly slew in battle, were they worth the losses we suffered at the bridge?"

Rainbow Dash's mouth flapped uselessly, before she settled on the manner in which she would articulate her justification. It was a few seconds until she finally spoke, but it felt like a damn sight longer trying to maintain that glare.

"Sir, no sir! It was the wrong decision and I take full responsibility for it. I wanted to prove the Wonderbolts deserved to be here and fight, sir. I... I wanted to win!"

"And there it is again, that one word - I." I shook my head in mock disappointment and stepped away from her. To her credit there was almost no change in her demeanour, and though I fully doubted the efficacy of the Wonderbolts' training in actual military terms, at the very least I could commend Rainbow Dash's drill sergeant [For the sake of pedantry, the Wonderbolt equivalent is called a drill instructor] in at least inculcating the statue-like requirements for standing at attention for extended periods of time. "The Royal Guard doesn't care about what you want; it doesn't care about your selfish need for glory, or your need to 'prove' yourself, and it certainly doesn't care about your wanting to 'win' over the operational requirements of this war. All that is required of you is to follow orders. Soon you will learn the consequences of failing in your duty."

Rainbow Dash remained silent, apparently having picked up on the other key thing an enlisted pony learns very quickly in their career that the very best thing to do when in trouble, particularly if it's a serious enough issue to involve the senior officers of a regiment including the Commissar, is to keep one's mouth shut. More often than not, excuses and attempts at explanations would only worsen the situation. Scarlet Letter had yet to learn that lesson, owing to his particular sense of arrogance and absurd belief that, somehow, everything will turn out fine for him so long as he could adequately twist the truth. Unfortunately for him, I had been doing that exact thing since I first learned to speak in coherent sentences, and this time, for once, I had the truth on my side.

"Nevertheless we pressed on to our objective," I continued. "The platoon reached the bridge, and as the engineers laid their charges we were visited by a small patrol of native ponies. Lieutenant Scarlet Letter had seen fit to open fire, wounding or killing one of their number and thus encouraging the remainder to attack us."

"It was merely a warning shot," said Scarlet Letter, shaking his head. "The damned fool was flying erratically, not like our graceful be-winged comrades of the Pegasus companies. It was sheer bad luck on his part that he flew straight into the magic missile."

I snorted and shook my head. "Then, realising your mistake, you ran away while your platoon was surrounded by the enemy."

Thus came the next excuse; "Realising that we were outnumbered, I made an orderly retreat to request reinforcements. Lieutenant Grim Cathedra dithered, sir, and delayed the relief force that surely would have saved the platoon had it not been for his inaction."

"The same relief force that was still crossing the bridge when you detonated the charges. Don't dare try to deny it; I was on that bloody bridge when it blew up, and I have Grim Cathedra's sworn testimony as an officer and a gentlecolt."

This time Scarlet Letter hesitated before he answered, apparently not having prepared for such a question in the few hours he had to reflect on his failures. The mock, easy-going smile remained, however, and if anything intensified, insomuch as the deliberately placid and overly friendly expression a politician wears like the skinned face of a normal pony almost by impulse when trying to ameliorate a journalist or a member of the public who is asking too many awkward questions can be described as 'intense'. Whatever it was that he was going to say, be it another useless platitude or something so utterly astounding that it would bring the whole of reality into question by such a degree as to absolve him of his crimes and allow him to leave with the tattered remnants of his reputation intact, it would remain forever a mystery for I did not allow him the time to voice it.

"You lost the Colours," I said flatly. A hush seemed to fall in the room, as though everyone in the entire encampment had heard those words and were thusly stricken mute by them.

"The, ah..." Scarlet Letter stammered, and almost seemed to retreat in upon himself like a turtle seeking safety within its own shell. "It wasn't my fault, sir."

"You lost the Colours," I repeated. "You were the officer commanding here, so the fault is yours and yours alone. You lost the Colours of the Princesses of Equestria!"

If nopony else outside of this room and the platoon had heard the grim news, then after that rather loud outburst from Yours Truly they certainly would. The walls and doors of this fortress were rather thinner than most ponies would believe, both in a metaphorical and an all too literal sense. It is the nature of secrets that they must inevitably be uncovered (an axiom that I live in constant fear of), and it is doubly so when said secret happens to be particularly bad news. The damage control would have to be done later, though I knew that no amount of inspiring speeches and group discussions over hot tea and biscuits would ameliorate the intense sense of dishonour that would inevitably follow. The best that I could hope for, it seemed, was to ensure that I was absolved of all possible blame.

"Trainee Commissar Gliding Moth was in charge of the Colour Guard," said Scarlet Letter. "It was her fault that they fell to the enemy."

"Commissar Gliding Moth died defending the Colours," I said. Damnation, I could have slapped him for that remark, though I stayed my hoof for now - it would be beneath my station to strike him in such a manner. "As did most of the Colour Guard and twelve ponies under your command. Had you likewise given your life then the matter of your dishonourable conduct would have been resolved. Since you have clearly failed in your duty to die in battle, you must now face the consequences of your actions."

Scarlet Letter fixed me with a glare, or at least he attempted to, tilting his head forward and staring up beneath furrowed brows in what I assumed he believed to be a stern, authoritative glare. The effect, however, was rather lessened by his short stature and somewhat pudgy frame. His voice, when he finally spoke, was likewise lowered and deepened in some sort of vain effort to project a level of authority that he must have craved but never truly possessed. "My brother is the Secretary of State for War," he said, "and I have friends in the highest echelons of government."

"Not even the magic of friendship will aid the pony who lost the Princesses' Colours," I said. "For two thousand years since the birth of Equestria, designed by Princess Platinum, sewn by Chancellor Puddinghead, and carried into battle by Commander Hurricane, the Colours have witnessed the unification of Equestria, wars with Gryphons, the Nightmare Heresy, and the Pax Celestia [Literally, 'Celestia's Peace', being the rather poetic term for the thousand years of relative peace between the start of Nightmare Moon's banishment and the start of the Changeling Wars]. And now you've lost it. It's gone. Furthermore, you have failed in almost every criterion it is possible to judge an officer by; your orders have resulted in the needless loss of soldiers and equipment, you have been cowardly and fled from battle twice, you lack even the most basic of skills in leadership, and worst of all you view the lives of ponies around you as merely tools to realise your own selfish ambitions. It is only your connections within the Ministry of War that prevented the imposition of the Princesses' justice. Now, the Commissariat will say 'no more'."

"Lord Captain!" Scarlet Letter's voice was suddenly loud and with a hint of desperation adding a noticeable quiver to it. He moved past me to approach the desk, apparently trying to push me out of the way with his shoulder, but instead merely bounced off my leg and stumbled forward. "I must protest! I refuse to be harangued by this mere political officer. You are the Captain of the Royal Guard and Colonel of this regiment, sir, you can't stand for this treatment of one of your officers."

Shining Armour had spent much of the conversation writing on sheets of paper. The completed letters, for that was what I assumed them to be, were piled with such neatness that it left absolutely no ambiguity to my mind that he was truly Twilight Sparkle's brother. He then placed his quill down on the desk with a small, quiet sigh and then tilted his head up to look Scarlet Letter in the eye.

"Don't tell me for what I can and cannot stand," said Shining Armour, his voice quiet but filled with an underlying menace. "I must now write these letters of condolence to the families of the soldiers killed by your incompetence, and for that I will not stand. Commissar Blueblood here will decide your fate."

"In Equestria's distant, barbaric past, it was traditional for officers who have disgraced themselves like this to kill themselves," I said, gently easing my sword, Gliding Moth's sabre, out from its sheath. It slid from the scabbard with a bloodthirsty sense of eagerness, as though it longed to be plunged into the throat of the one whose actions resulted in the death of its mistress. "The practice is still common with the samurai warrior class of Neighpon. [The ritual suicide method known as Seppuku is largely a historical artefact and since the Restoration is rarely practiced except by the most conservative of the samurai] I fear, however, you will need some assistance."

I raised my sword, and Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter shrank back from me, but I couldn't do it. Once more I found my will seized by the most basic of all the natural laws of Equestrian herd society - you will not kill another pony. I had no doubt in my mind that he deserved it, and at any other point in our nation's history his actions would have earned him the death penalty even before he lost the Colours. Yet when I stood before him with my sword raised to strike the killing blow, with what felt like the spirits of Gliding Moth and every other pony whose life was lost as a result of this wretch's petty ambitions exhorting me to perform the grisly deed in a rising chorus of the unquiet dead, I simply could not summon up the necessary willpower to thrust the blade into his throat. Through my weakness I had failed utterly in my duty, and by extension the souls of the deceased, but yet I am not ashamed of this. It is one thing to speak of cold-blooded murder, for let us be frank and acknowledge what summary execution truly is, but another to actually perform the deed, and I ask those who would call me a coward for this if they would have done any different in my stead.

"No," I said, trying to stifle the bile rising up my throat. "A more public example must be made instead. Cannon Fodder, take him to the provosts. We will hang him in the morning."

My aide nodded his head, then took Scarlet Letter roughly by the shoulder and led him wordlessly out of the tent to his eventual fate. I, however, felt none of the relief that I expected to come with my weaselling out of having to do something very unpleasant. If anything I felt worse, for I knew that a stronger pony than I would have had the courage to perform this grisly but necessary deed, and even one as cruel and heartless as my ancestor Coldblood had enough integrity to take lives with his own hooves and not assign the acts of murder to some hapless underling.

"Sir?" said Rainbow Dash. I had forgotten that she was still standing there at attention, or at an awkward stance that approximated attention at least. "What about me?"

Precisely the wrong words to say to a commissar under normal circumstances, I thought, but these circumstances were about as far from normal as one could possibly get. Hers was a more difficult problem to solve, for while I could safely dispose of Scarlet Letter and keep the backing of the Commissariat and the Princess whose dark patronage I hid behind like a scared foal and her mother's apron, Rainbow Dash was a heroine of the realm and a bearer of an Element of Harmony. I was therefore trapped between the requirement to punish her according to Princesses' Regulations and the desire not to have to deal with the potential backlash from executing a beloved public figure. Once more, I simply chose to dodge the issue by giving it to someone else to deal with.

"Your fate I will leave in the hooves of Commander Spitfire, though I think it will be safe to say that your future in the Wonderbolts is no more. You are dismissed."

Rainbow Dash hesitated for approximately two seconds before she apparently realised that she had been let off reasonably lightly compared to what I could have inflicted upon her. She saluted with a stomp of her hoof, and then turned and left the room almost as quickly as if it had been on fire. The abrupt slamming of the door shut behind her was a full stop to everything that had happened before; a moment of catharsis that allowed at least some of the tension in the room dissipate. I breathed a deep sigh of relief, feeling as though I had held it throughout the entirety of that difficult court martial, and then sucked in a lungful of that stale, humid air.

The three of us left remained in silence for a few moments, as if neither of us felt that we had the courage to break it. For in this nether period of time, however brief, we seemed to occupy some sort of strange region outside of the conventional reality that we would have to face at some point. I would have stayed in this blessed limbo had I the choice, but as ever I had no such freedom to choose, and there would have to be a time where this most fragile of all respites would be shattered like an antique vase toppled from its shelf. As it happened, it was General McBridle who made the first move, rising from his seat with an arthritic grunt of exertion.

"Well, lads, so much for finishing my career on a high note," he said as he hobbled over. "We're all in it now."

"It was hardly our fault," I said, rather at a loss to find anything meaningful to say.

"Aye, laddie, you're right there," he said, stopping to look at me and fix me with a stern glare. "But that's not going to stop the three of us here from being remembered as the ones who lost the Colours. The commissar on duty, the colonel who commanded the regiment, and the general who ordered the battle - we're a glorious triumvirate of failure. Now, I'm off to bed, and I hope to Faust that She takes me in my sleep so I don't have to deal with this in the morning. Goodnight, gentlecolts."

With that stunning ray of typically Scoltish optimism, General McBridle left us. I suppose I should have made an excuse and followed him, but when I saw Shining Armour pull open a drawer and extract from it a dirty bottle containing a suspiciously cloudy brown liquid I thought it best not to leave him. He placed the bottle on his desk and grabbed an enamel mug from amongst the carefully ordered furnishings on his desk.

"Come on," I said, "you don't want to do that now."

Shining Armour ceased unscrewing the top from the bottle and looked up at me with an expression that could be most charitably described as 'hostile'. Despite not saying a single word, his face seemed to scream 'don't tell me what to do'. Ordinarily, I would have obliged and allowed him to indulge in his self-destructive behaviour, and yet something kept me from leaving.

"You heard him," he said, staring up at me. "We lost the Colours. We're finished."

"Nonsense, it was Lieutenant Scarlet Letter who..."

The Captain of the Royal Guard poured himself a shot of whatever it was that was in the bottle and downed it with such sudden and worrying zeal that I found myself incapable of finishing that sentence. I hadn't seen him drink before, and it was inconceivable that the straight-laced, squeaky-clean Shining Armour, ceremonial head of the Princesses' elite palace guards, would have any vices more severe than a mug of hot cocoa just before bedtime. He slammed the now-empty glass on the table and glowered at me from beneath his furrowed brow.

"It's alright for you," he said, waving a hoof dismissively in my direction. "This is just another scandal for you. You won't get invited to the next big posh thing in Canterlot, but you'll bounce back. You always do. But me? There's nothing left for me in the Royal Guard anymore."

"But you're not to blame for this," I said.

I was well aware of the fact that I was simply repeating myself, but reassuring statements were hardly my forte; I might have been capable of convincing stallions to ignore the most basic and primal instinct shared by all living things of self-preservation and risk death in the name of two royal sisters hundreds of miles away, but here I was hardly the most capable pony to play counsellor to a senior officer apparently on the verge of a total breakdown. Though it causes me now great physical distress to write this statement, I needed Captain Shining Armour, if only as a buffer between me and the avalanche of bile and invectives that was to follow from the press once the news reached them, like raw sewage leaking from a broken pipe.

"Just like I wasn't to blame for what happened at the wedding? That didn't stop ponies demanding my resignation. This war was my final chance to set things right, and I blew it by not getting rid of Scarlet Letter."

"You are Captain of the Royal Guard, appointed by..."

Shining Armour held up his hoof and shook his head. "Stop," he said, looking away from me as if in shame. "Stop talking to me like a commissar and just talk to me like a pony."

"Like a pony?"

He nodded. "Like a regular pony."

"I am far from a 'regular' pony."

"You'll just have to do for now."

I chewed my lower lip, then pulled my cap off my head. It was only when I removed that symbol of office did I realise just how heavily it rested, like the crown of a ruler. I then tossed it in the corner of the room, taking care to have it face the wall so that the leering, grinning alicorn skull was not staring accusingly at me. Perhaps there was some truth to the rumour that the skull symbol was based on the stern, aquiline features of Princess Luna, I thought, as it almost felt as though she was looking through its hollow eye sockets. [A popular but unfounded rumour among the more superstitious soldiers was that both my sister and I could see through the skull emblems on commissars' caps. It is likely that some commissars perpetuated this myth to instil fear in their regiments.]

"In that case, we'll need to start drinking the good stuff," I said, retrieving my trusty hipflask from my jacket's inside pocket. Though I was loathe to share its precious contents with the pony I considered to be my mortal enemy for what was the majority of my life thus far, before more serious nemeses, the sort who actually want to kill me, started to demand more of my attention, the unfortunate circumstances in which we found ourselves encouraged me to be somewhat more generous than usual. I poured a dram of the whisky I had liberated from General McBridle's cabinet into his glass.

Shining Armour looked at me sceptically and then downed his drink. Almost immediately he screwed up his face, bent over his desk, and grasped it with his hooves as though a hole had suddenly opened up underneath his chair and threatened to swallow him. "It tastes like paint thinner!" he gasped between great, hacking coughs.

Feeling more than a little affronted, I took a sip from my flask and detected nothing wrong with this twenty year old single malt - it was smooth, dark, sweet, and had a lingering aftertaste of Prench roasted coffee. Of course, a pony such as Shining Armour would lack the experience and refinement to tease out the flavours amidst the harsher alcohol. It then occurred to me that I had never seen him drink anything stronger than lemonade, and that getting Twilight Sparkle's brother drunk would likely undo the progress we had made in the strange sort of détente we had reached in her too-brief attachment to our army. Then again, if there was any time that the Captain of the Royal Guard was allowed to get royally drunk, it was now.

"I know," I said, pouring a second dram into his tumbler. "It's the good stuff."

"I don't know how you can stomach it." Shining Armour shrugged his shoulders and downed this second drink, albeit a bit slower this time and with a much less severe reaction to the burning sensation that one must learn to overcome in order to fully appreciate the distiller's art. Progress at civilising this lower middle class commoner had been made at last, thought I, and perhaps we would make a prince out of him yet, and then pigs would fly, the war would end, and I might be able to return to my normal life of luxury, indolence, and debauchery.

"It's an acquired taste," I said, being the usual sort of polite excuse one trots out when one's drinking companion is having trouble enjoying his drink.

"That's what they all say, and it still tastes like solvents," he said.

I shrugged and summoned over a cushion to sit on with my magic. "Considering the circumstances now, perhaps it's time for you to start developing your palate."

Shining Armour looked at me over his fastidiously tidy desk and shook his head with a sigh. "I never really fit in with all of that upper class stuff; 'fine' spirits taste like they should be used to clean airship engines, wine is grape juice past its sell-by-date, cigars make me sick, and I'm the worst croquet player you've ever seen. After today I'll have plenty of free time to develop my 'palate', whatever that means."

"You can't possibly mean that," I said, shaking my head. "You're the Captain of the Royal Guard, appointed by..."

"Yes, yes, I know," Shining Armour interrupted me, waving his hoof and bobbing his head drunkenly from side to side. He continued in a rather clumsy impression of what sounded like a clipped, refined Canterlot accent, which I assumed was intended to be an imitation of me, "Appointed by Princess Celestia and only she has the authority to strip the Captain of the Royal Guard of his esteemed rank."

"Well, it's true, after all. Celestia's patronage makes you untouchable."

"Even the patronage of a princess won't be enough to save me this time," he said quietly, looking more at his desk than at me. He looked as though he might start crying at any moment, and that it was only an increasingly fragile sense of duty that held up the facade of his stallion-hood. I say this not as any slight against the pony, after all he had rather more glaring character flaws than the tendency to start crying at the drop of a hat, and indeed if there was any situation where it is acceptable for a grown stallion in service to the Twin Crowns of Equestria might weep then this was certainly it. Besides, I recalled Princess Luna stating that in her day [With a lifetime measured in thousands of years in a physical form, 'her day' could mean any point of equine history, but I must infer that Blueblood is referring to first unification of Equestria], stallions openly weeping was considered exceptionally masculine, but back then ponies also believed that disease was caused by an excess of blood in the body so I still would not put much stock in her nostalgic rants.

"I'm going to resign, Blueblood," he continued. "But not right now. I'll see the regiment through the new offensive, but my career in the Royal Guard will be over. There's nothing I can do to recover from this."

I wanted to tell him that was all utter nonsense, but damn me if he wasn't right. Regardless of whether or not he was truly responsible for the loss of the Colours, as the commanding officer of the regiment the stain of dishonour would tarnish his armour the most. The pressure from both Parliament and the Ministry of War, reacting to the anger and horror of the Equestrian public, would only worsen to the point where Shining Armour here would be incapable of executing his duties. The conduct of the war here could ill afford such distractions, in spite of the best efforts of the politicians and bureaucrats to waste the time and, by extension, lives of soldiers.

"Then what will you do?" I said.

"I'll go with Cadence to the Crystal Empire," he said, offering a sad smile. "They're trying to set up their own army to send to the front."

Faust knows why, I thought. Why would anypony want to take part willingly in this blasted war? The Crystal Ponies were in a perfectly safe position to the far north and this was not their fight. As a vassal state of Equestria they might have been legally forced to raise levies to send to the south, though I could not imagine for an instant that Princess Celestia would even consider such a thing, but to desire to needlessly waste the lives of their youth in this conflict that was increasingly losing all meaning and sense seemed like the very definition of insanity. Having been kept in some kind of magical stasis at least meant that they had some memory of how war is supposed to be conducted, if under the chains of a brutal tyrant. At very least they would provide a few more warm bodies between my own and those of the Changeling hordes.

"I'll go quietly," he continued. "The last thing the troops need is more sentimentality when there's still a job to do. To think that all of this could have been avoided if I stopped him buying his commission."

"Don't be too hard on yourself," I said, leaning back on the cushion to rest my back against the wall. I thought I might as well be as comfortable as I could possibly be if I was going to sit through this awkward conversation, increasingly inebriated, and playing suicide watch with Shining Armour. "I should have executed Scarlet Letter when I had the chance after the siege."

Shining Armour fixed me with an intense, piercing glare that, in my intoxicated state and with the walls of etiquette and aristocratic detachment therefore weakened as though the alcohol had soaked the soil into which their foundations had been laid, all but made me wither in my seat. I wondered perhaps if I had gone a little too far, and that in my attempts to, well, 'cheer up' might be too grandiose a term for simply making sure he didn't do anything regrettable on his own, I might have turned his anger away from himself and back onto its more justifiable target of me. I was right, though, I should have done the deed then and there; the political fallout would have been harsh and unpleasant, but ultimately easier for me to weather than the storm that was rapidly looming darkly on the horizon.

"Then why didn't you?" he snapped.

I thought about making an apology and a hasty exit, but after a moment's consideration I took another sip from my flask and asked, "Could you? Could you have carried out a summary execution?"

The stiffness left Shining Armour as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and he slumped once more in his seat. "No, I don't think I could."

"But it would have been the right thing to do." I sent my flask over to refill Shining Armour's glass, and then raised it in the manner of some kind of grim toast, which he reciprocated after a degree of hesitation. "Damn this war for making murder the 'ethical' choice."

"I never thought I'd miss the days of standing guard out in the hot sun in heavy armour for five hours while Princess Celestia has a tea party, or holding back royal autograph hunters, or the endless ceremonial parades."

I smiled and drank my toast, only to find that my flask, much like how my life was feeling at the time, was empty. Nevertheless, I stayed for a little while longer, listening to Shining Armour ramble on about life in the Royal Guard before this infernal war; I had lived much of it with him, but indulged him nonetheless, for I too felt painfully nostalgic for those halcyon years when military service carried about as much risk to one's health and wellbeing as celery. I recalled how ponies of the not-too-distant past thought of nostalgia as being something of a mental illness and ought to be treated as such, and as we reminisced and became more and more morose with each anecdote I came to the conclusion that perhaps they were right. We could never go back to the past, no matter how much we wanted to and certainly not after what we had witnessed, but ever would it remain in our minds as a shade taunting us with vivid images of a happier time of which we lacked the foresight to truly appreciate, and always slipping just beyond our reach. Memory was not a comfort, but a cruel and malignant thing that took pleasure in the misery of the present and our inability to return to its own idealised vision of the past.

It was getting late, and I made the excuse that I had paperwork to be getting on with (an obvious lie, as Cannon Fodder tended to handle the more tedious of my duties and I just wanted to go to bed where for a few blissful hours nothing was going wrong). Shining Armour seemed to understand, however, and as I left he once more threw himself into the unpleasant task of writing those letters of condolence. This was technically not his duty, but I suppose that adding the personal touch to the letter that every military family in Equestria dreads to receive was his way of assuaging his guilt [The duty to write casualty letters to next of kin generally falls to the soldier's commanding officer, sergeant, or, depending on the religious denomination of the deceased, the regiment's chaplain]. My method was found in the bottom of the bottle.

I shut the door behind me as I left, and almost walked straight into Rainbow Dash, who I could only conclude had been standing in the corridor next to the door and eavesdropping on our conversation. She regained her composure quickly, such as it was, snapping to attention and saluting with her usual parade ground efficiency.

The corridor was dark and deserted, and when I checked my watch I saw that it was far later than I had initially assumed. The night shift had started, with the majority of the camp asleep and only a small number of ponies on watch on the fortress walls. The background noise, however, had only lessened, for while ponies may sleep the war will not. In the gloom of this corridor, lit dimly only by a few spluttering torches hanging from brackets that had been fitted there when Auntie 'Tia still played with dolls, her bright blue fur, rainbow mane, and garishly bright flightsuit stood out starkly.

"Listening in, were we?" I said. It was a struggle to get the energy to be truly angry with her, so I settled for a sort of teacher-like disappointment instead.

"Sir, no, sir!" barked Rainbow Dash, likely waking up any soldiers who happened to be sleeping in the adjacent rooms. "I wanted to talk to you, sir!"

"Have you been standing out here all this time?"

I could have told her to get lost, and with the benefit of decades of hindsight I now realise that I probably should have and then gone to bed as I had initially planned. Instead, I asked her what could possibly be so important that it could not wait until tomorrow morning, and I have regretted it ever since then. The walls in this fortress were thick, designed to withstand the most brutal of sieges, but words have a way of seeping through the cracks between stones that even the heaviest artillery cannot pierce. Once again, the trajectory of one's life can be altered so rapidly, so effortlessly, in the space of but a single sentence.

"Why don't we just go and get the flag back?" she said, beaming proudly as though she had single-hoofedly come up with the way to win finally win this war herself.

"'Go and get the flag back?'" I repeated incredulously, and she nodded enthusiastically. "And just how do you propose we do that? Do you know where it is? Who's got it? Do you have the resources to do this? You'll need food, water, weapons, shelter, and, most importantly of all, enough volunteers daft enough to sign up for this, well, it'll be generous to call your half-baked idea to redeem what little shred of your reputation and dignity still remains a plan."

Rainbow Dash's expression could not have been any more hurt and broken if I had slapped her, but, and I must credit her this, her cocky self-confidence recovered with remarkable alacrity. Almost instantly she lost all pretence of following the usual deference expected of an enlisted pony to an officer. She jumped into the air, her wings beating rapidly to keep her aloft and hovering just high enough for her to look down on me.

"At least I'm trying to fix this!" she snapped, gesticulating emphatically with her hooves in such a way that I thought she might upset the delicate balance of wing power and weight distribution that kept her more or less stationary and send herself crashing straight into me [For the benefit of readers without wings, hovering in one spot is quite a difficult skill for pegasi and requires considerable skill with wing control, maintaining balance, and stamina in excess of that required for forward flight]. Even though the corridor was rather narrow, Rainbow Dash had somehow avoided striking these ancient stone walls with her wings and potentially breaking the fragile hollow bones within them.

"How dare you!" was all that I could splutter out in response. I took a step back, but Rainbow Dash drifted forwards to keep the uncomfortably close distance between us - she could probably smell the alcohol on my breath.

"I'm just saying we should stop sitting here feeling sorry for ourselves and actually do something! Someponies stole our flag, so we need to go over there, kick some bad-guy butt, and get it back for pony's sake."

"Enough," I said, returning her hate-filled glare with one of my own. She slowly sank back down to the ground with a sense of great reluctance, though her stance remained as defiant and un-cowed as ever. "We have an offensive to plan for, and the Royal Guard is not going to drop everything and put the conduct of this war and the lives of its soldiers in jeopardy just to satisfy your glory-seeking desires. Rainbow Dash, I understand you might be upset, but this is not how a soldier deals with a grievance with an officer."

Technically, a soldier deals with a grievance with an officer, especially a commissar, by taking whatever it is that troubles him and burying it very deep within them so that it has no chance of providing said authorities with reason to punish him. Occasionally, however, this tension might be relieved with the age-old tradition of 'griping' to one's comrades.

"Like you said, I'm not a soldier," hissed Rainbow Dash with enough venom in her voice to kill an elephant. "And now I'm going to be kicked out of the Wonderbolts, so it doesn't look like I have much else to lose. Which also means you can't tell me what to do anymore."

With that odd little contretemps over with, Rainbow Dash jumped into the air once again and darted down the corridor a damn sight faster than any consideration for her own safety or that of any other pony who might be embarking on a midnight perambulation would allow. In a short moment she was swallowed up by the darkness and I was left alone once more, with only the flickering torchlight for company.

The younger me would have gotten angry - I'd have shouted, ranted, and likely called for the nearest guard to have her arrested and punished to the fullest extent of the law, or at least until Auntie 'Tia would step in and quietly explain that I can't have a Bearer of an Element of Harmony put in stocks and pelted with rancid tomatoes for simply being rude to me. I, a prince of the realm, deserved respect for having been born to a noble family, and my duties to the Twin Crowns of Equestria demanded appropriate deference from the lower orders. Yet now, I was simply too tired and too drained to summon even one iota of that former aristocratic indignation. My anger had already been spent, leaving nothing more than a cruel void into which could only be glimpsed the grim truth that all we have struggled and fought for had been undone. The Colours were gone, and with it thousands of years of Equestrian history and whatever pride in itself the 1st Solar Guard had left after the debacle at Canterlot.

There was nothing more to be done and nothing more to be said until the morning, so I took one last glance at the door to Shining Armour's office and silently prayed that he wouldn't do anything stupid. Fat bloody chance.

Author's Note

Apologies for the radio silence - writing has become that much more difficult in recent months. I'm not going to stop writing, but I'm afraid other things must take priority so chapters will take longer for me to write.

Honour and Blood (Part 14)

[The following entry is disjointed even by the standards of this text, with the straightforward narrative timeline being interjected with various events that took place days before or after as Blueblood presumably remembered and wrote them down on assorted scraps of paper and even a receipt for some dry cleaning. I have done my best to make this section more readable while maintaining Blueblood's idiosyncratic writing style.]

"Sir, how long are you going to leave Scarlet Letter out there for?" asked Cannon Fodder one quiet and uneventful afternoon. It was quite unlike my dour aide to initiate a conversation or even speak in sentences with word counts in the double digits, especially in the middle of processing the endless amount of paperwork that the great bureaucracy of the Royal Guard generates seemingly out of thin air.

"Until I get tired of seeing him," I snapped back, and then returned to my much more important task of flicking through an old dog-eared copy of a libertine novel to bypass the boring philosophising of sin and get to the interesting parts where such sin actually takes place. I had confiscated it from a soldier, who had acquired it through the black market that always coalesces in times of conflict, but only after a deeply hypocritical lecture about the virtues of forbearance of carnal urges. He had, however, helpfully underlined the more scintillating passages with a pencil, and for that I considered awarding him a medal of some kind.

It had been three days since the execution of that damned traitor, and rather than do the appropriate and correct thing of sending the body back to Equestria for a proper burial I had instead ordered it to be left out on morbid display in the courtyard by the parade ground. I had justified this act of admitted barbarism, more suited to a grotesque medieval execution than the more clinical meting-out of modern Equestrian justice, by explaining to an obviously disturbed Shining Armour that the wretch would be of more use to the Royal Guard in death as a warning to others than he did in life, but really it was just a fit of pique.

"Yes, sir, only he's starting to smell a bit," said Cannon Fodder with no discernible irony in his voice.

I peered out of the large open window from the desk in my quarters to see what remained of Scarlet Letter swaying gently from the tall set of gallows nestled in the corner between the keep wall and a tower. The soldiers in the courtyard gave it a suitably wide berth, and I could not blame them as the past few days in the hot, humid climate had been less than kind to the corpse. I had yet to see it up close since the execution, and I had very little desire to do so despite hating Scarlet Letter to the very core, but I couldn't imagine it would be a particularly pretty sight now. Even from my distant vantage point I could see that the skin had taken a rather grim deathly pallor, and where the carrion birds had torn chunks of pudgy pale flesh from the body the once crimson blood had turned a sickly, ichorous black.

"You're probably right," I said with a sigh, not wanting to generate more needless work for myself unless I could get somepony else to do it. Cannon Fodder puffed his chest out and beamed proudly at the closest thing to a compliment that he's ever received.

"Have Surgical Steel" -I stopped myself; the forthright doctor would carry out the task but only with inordinate amounts of complaining about how this was an affront to equine dignity and a violation of whatever set of medical ethics he subscribed to- "No, have the provosts take him down tonight after the Last Post [The bugle call that signals the final inspection of sentry posts has been completed by the garrison duty officer, marking the end of the working day] and bury him in an unmarked grave outside of the fortress walls."

I had spoken with Scarlet Letter in the morning just before his execution, and in hindsight I might have avoided adding to my already considerable mental anguish if I had the provosts simply drag him out onto the gallows at the first light of dawn in silence. There was some intangible thing, I suppose it might be called 'honour' or 'decency' or some other such rot by other ponies who care overmuch about such vacuous concepts, that had compelled me to speak with the pony whose execution I had just ordered regardless of how much he deserved his punishment. It was a peculiarly cold morning, though I wonder now if that had been a combination of the hangover, lack of sleep, and my imagination deciding that it would be suitably dramatic to feel this way. Nevertheless, when I led the provosts, each wearing the ceremonial black mask over their faces and their cutie marks painted over in accordance with tradition [This practice is to ensure that nopony can recognise the executioners, thus protecting them from reprisals from other ponies] into the cells I could feel an icy chill crawl along my back that compelled me to wrap up tighter in my heavy woollen storm coat.

Scarlet Letter certainly had the look of a pony sentenced to death; haggard from a lack of sleep, and desperately fearful but consciously trying not to let it show. He sat in the corner of the room on a small bench, slouching pathetically and staring up at a tiny square hole about ten feet up in the wall that allowed only a tiny sliver of the dawn's warm light in, clearly designed by whichever pre-Equestrian despot built this place to taunt the imprisoned with the memory of freedom.

The provost unlocked the door for me and I strode in. The cell was small, of course, apparently calculated to be just uncomfortably cramped enough for a stallion of my taller frame. Ponies were apparently smaller back then, so I had read, but I imagined even then that being unable to so much as stretch would drive one insane before long. It stank too of damp and other unpleasant aromas, likely emanating from the bucket in the corner opposite the bench, and yet an extended period of time on the frontlines had rendered me, if not immune, then at least tolerant of it. Scarlet Letter did not look at me, but instead continued to stare at the 'window', as if he could will himself to dissolve into gas like Princess Luna could to slip through the tiny gap and escape.

"Have you come to gloat?" he said before I could get a word in, still looking at this sliver of sunlight. His voice was curiously flat and emotionless, lacking the overly dramatic and plumy tones of his affected upper class Trottingham accent. "You've 'won', Prince of Blood."

"I would hardly call this winning," I said, ignoring the clear sarcasm in the way he pronounced the least favourite of my many titles. "None of this needed to happen."

"No, it did," he said, finally tearing his eyes away from the admittedly beautiful sight of Celestia's majestic dawn to look at the rather less awe-inspiring sight that was me still covered in the filth and mess of the previous day - bathing was still a luxury here. "You had to get in my way, didn't you? But that's still the way things are in Equestria. You aristocrats could never tolerate a commoner like me rising above his station."

"For Faust's sake," I spat, turning away from him. I could barely stand to look at him now; if it wasn't for my own natural disgust at the idea of simply murdering an unarmed pony, even though I knew I could get away with it, at least in the short term, and that I knew he truly deserved far worse than being run through with a rapier blade or being beaten with the chamber pot in the corner, I'd have carried out the sentence then and there myself. "You can't expect me to believe this is all about your infernal class war."

Scarlet Letter snorted and shook his head. There was a strange, cruel smile that tugged on the ends of his lips, as though he somehow sensed my discomfort about what was to happen and, being the utter swine that he is, could do nothing else but his utmost to make it as difficult for me as possible. He knew he was doomed, but he also knew that it was that same doom that could very well lead to mine too at least in the eyes of the Equestrian political sphere.

"Would it be easier for you to believe I'm a Changeling spy?" he said, shrugging his shoulders in mock nonchalance. "But why are you really here? To make me admit to being wrong, or to assuage your guilt?"

My stomach was in knots, and I was not even the one due to be hanged that day. "I have nothing to feel guilty about, you traitor. Ponies died because of your hubris and that is what you must answer for."

"Then why can't you kill me yourself? You coward, always getting others to do your work for you like every stuck-up noblepony. You tell me that my actions killed ponies, but what of yours? How many have died when it should have been you?"

I did not respond, could not respond. He knew, though I had no idea how far he knew the truth behind my supposed heroism; it could not have taken him or anypony else much to dig a little deeper beneath my aversion to the practice of summary execution to find yet further evidence of my apparent lack of adherence to the twisted, brutal ideology of the Commissariat, even in its most nascent form at the beginning of this pointless war. It didn't matter, or at least it shouldn't have now that he was to die soon, but the concept that he of all ponies could have made the most progress in uncovering my true nature was disturbing, for it would not be too taxing for a more intelligent pony, especially a particular purple pony with something of a grudge against me, to investigate what happened in the catacombs beneath Canterlot just a little deeper.

No, that damnable upstart had gotten under my skin, as he meant to. He had just made some kind of lucky inference that happened to play upon some anxiety of mine that tugged and tore at my thoughts until I was all but incapable of reasoned and decisive action. It had bloody worked, too, which was why he still yet lived. I had vacillated over this long enough, and it was that same inaction more than anything else that had led to this mess we found ourselves in. My cowardice that kept me from doing what was distasteful but right at the end of that siege had damned us, but now finally, after all this time and needless bloodshed, it was time for retribution in the oldest, most barbaric, but most satisfying manner. It was time for him to die.

"You still fail to comprehend the scope of your own failures," I said with a sigh that I had affected to sound as sad and disappointed as possible. "Everything is the fault of somepony else to you. But it was you who opened the catacombs in this fortress, you who deserted, you who destroyed the bridge, and you who lost the Colours. You alone bear the guilt. I cannot put it in any simpler terms and there is nothing more I can say. Let's get this over with; I have a war to win."

With that, and feeling precisely none of the closure that my hopeful delusions had promised me, I left the room to allow the provosts to perform their unenviable task. I suppose I thought there might have been some kind of realisation followed by a confession and much begging of forgiveness, but such things never happen in the real world. His refusal to take responsibility for his failures made what was to come next a little easier than if he had shown genuine remorse.

I watched in silence as the provosts gripped the condemned stallion by his hooves, lifted him from his seat, and escorted him through the corridor. Scarlet Letter half-walked and was half-carried through the meandering, maze-like pathways in the fortress, and I followed a few steps behind. We soon reached the open gates into the courtyard, where the early morning sun was just cresting over the parapets of the outer walls of the fortress. There, nestled in the crook where the keep's wall bulged outwards to accommodate a tower, a tall gallows had been erected and was surrounded by a small crowd of ponies. The main platform had been built to about twice the height of an average unicorn, and was supported by an intricate array of scaffolding. Just before it, taking the prime spot up close like the ringside seats at some morbid sporting event, were the officers of the 1st Solar Guard who weren't preoccupied with other duties and whose presence I had personally ordered. Behind them were the rank and file, while not the entirety of the regiment there was still a good hundred or so - enough to witness the proceedings and then go off to tell their friends about that even I, who had taken great pains to build up a reputation for undue fairness and relative kindness, had a breaking point.

Scarlet Letter didn't get to see all of this, however, as just before he was brought out into Celestia's blessed daylight the infamous black hood was placed over his head. There was no protest, no heroic refusal of it, but instead a quiet acceptance that might have been considered noble if it came from a better sort of pony. From there he was led across the courtyard, unable to see the hundreds of pairs of eyes but probably feeling each one staring at him. The provosts guided him up the set of steps to the platform, and then onto the trapdoor. The noose dangled directly over the trapdoor, hanging from a crossbeam held up by more scaffolding on the sides of the structure. One provost placed this length of rope around the neck of the condemned and tightened it, while the other stood by the lever.

The mechanism had been tested earlier with a sack of potatoes and it worked perfectly, which was to be expected after Lieutenant Southern Cross and the survivors of his platoon had pulled an all-nighter to build it. Public executions are a thing of the past, though I felt that the peasant classes could sometimes benefit from a few hangings and beheadings to keep them in line as my forefathers had once done, but I had read enough about the embarrassment that ensues when it all goes wrong; a state-sanctioned execution should be quick, clean, and clinical, like the surgical removal of a tumour from the body of society, and I would have no macabre dance at the end of the rope while I was in charge of this. I have standards. [Capital punishment was still on the statute books in some Equestrian provinces and in the military at the time of the first of the Changeling Wars, though it had not been officially enforced for centuries. Grievous offences that would warrant a death sentence would often be commuted to permanent imprisonment in stone or banishment]

With everything ready, I gave the nod. The provost pulled the lever and the trapdoor opened. Scarlet Letter yelped as he fell through the hole, which was cut short when he ran out of rope. I looked away quickly, unable to watch the very thing I had ordered the assembled ponies to witness. I heard it, though; the sound of a neck breaking is a horrid, wet 'crunch' as the intricate array of bone and cartilage that supports one's head is suddenly ripped in ways Faust did not intend it to be. A provost scrambled underneath the structure, and after a few seconds of fumbling with the body confirmed that the deed was done.

Through the open trapdoor I saw Scarlet Letter's motionless body swung underneath the platform and was partially obscured by the scaffolding, his limp hooves trailing some kind of lazy circle in the dust below. It was done, finally and long overdue, but his death brought no meaningful sense of relief or satisfaction. Nevertheless, at the very least something had been done. I looked out to the audience and they stared back at me with expectant faces, apparently waiting for me to say something. I had imagined this moment often since that siege in this very fort and dreamt of the things I would say as the deed was finally committed, but all of the soliloquies and sermons that I had spent so much time assembling in my mind now felt far too grandiloquent and, in some cases, obscene and inappropriate now. If you will forgive me for this comparison, reader, but in some respects this first summary execution was rather like losing one's virginity; so much build-up and anticipation only for it to be strangely unsatisfying for all involved and with a great deal of mess to deal with in the aftermath.

I spotted Captain Redcoat standing almost immediately below me, staring at the body with an expression that I could best describe as 'aggressively neutral' on his disfigured face, or that could have just been the loss of movement in his facial muscles. Either way, he seemed to feel much the same sense of hollow victory as I did.

"This," I said at last, making everything up on the spot as usual, "is the only reward for treason. Dismissed."

***

Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts left a few hours later. I accompanied them outside the fortress to the supply depot that served it, and from there they would take the railway back to Dodge Junction via Maredun. The journey taken by hoof was awkward and quiet, which was preferable to the alternative that I had feared where Rainbow Dash would complain or one of the soldiers along the way would take exception to their continued existence on this mortal world and attempt to fix that problem. I had them take off their uniforms, which they would probably have to return anyway once they reported their utter failure to Captain Spitfire, to avoid such a thing happening because I was still too tired and too hung-over to want to deal with any further drama. What I was not counting on was Captain Blitzkrieg wanting to make his displeasure known to all within a two mile radius.

The supply depot was situated in Black Venom Pass roughly equidistant from both Fort E-5150 and Maredun. Supplies were brought in from wherever they came from in Equestria - apples from Ponyville, weapons and armour from the Manehatten factories, propaganda from Canterlot, reinforcements from regimental barracks, and so on - via the vast and sprawling network of railways of Equestria. Upon arrival at Dodge Junction all off this stuff was packed onto this narrow gauge railway to the depot, where it was sorted by the many loggies [military slang for soldiers in the Equestrian Logistics Corps] according to some arcane filing system that only they and perhaps Twilight Sparkle were capable of understanding, then finally loaded onto carts and hauled to the fortress. Upon entry into the fortress it was inspected by Pencil Pusher, who would usually find something wrong with it and an enormous argument would break out that required my special attention to sort out, because I can never have any damned peace and quiet anymore.

Rainbow Dash sulked for the entire time we walked, responding to my token attempts at small talk about the weather or the quality of the food with monosyllabic words or grunts, much like the perpetual teenager that she is. The other Wonderbolts likewise kept to themselves, though I heard a few smatterings of conversation and a minor attempt at lightening the mood by discussing how they were looking forward to seeing Ponyville again.

The journey through that pass always felt strange; to walk upon the same earth that I had done over a year ago, with the memories of my first experience in battle. With the same dirt beneath my hooves I could feel echoes of that same primal terror that I had experienced when subjected to that artillery barrage, or when we closed with the enemy and the brutality of hoof-to-hoof combat began. Despite the company around me and the traffic of ponies pulling wagons along this pass the outside world had felt muffled and distant, as though viewed from beyond a glass cage, but my mind had fogged it with images of the dead whose corpses littered the slopes of the hills that loomed above us.

We reached the supply depot at around midday, when the troops stationed there would start their break for lunch and try to get some respite from the burning heat in the shade of the hills. Boxes of assorted size, whose contents I could only imagine, were arranged into large oblong blocks, with paths between them like the grid system of roads in a modern city. There were a few tents, under which logistics troops, stripped of their unnecessary armour and wearing only hats and loose-fitted robes, rested and watched glumly as we walked past. Some served as makeshift offices, barracks, and storage areas for things that apparently couldn't be safely stored in convenient boxes, and at least one I had seen had been converted into some sort of primitive leisure facility with groups of off-duty soldiers playing card games, drinking, or listening to a radio they had somehow acquired. One enterprising individual appeared to be trying desperately to make a film projector work while her less-than-helpful colleagues shouted abuse at her.

The only permanent structure was the railway terminus station that was located at the other end of the depot closest to Dodge Junction. It consisted of a small goods shed and a platform for loading and unloading, a loco shed, a water tower, and a set of coal staithes for refuelling. One might be reasonable in one's assumption that I could not care less about this sort of thing, being a pony content to simply ride a train as a means to get to a destination in the relative comfort and luxury of first class, or my private carriage where applicable, with no interest in how they actually operate. I am only familiar with this after having been subjected to Major Starlit Skies' colt-like enthusiasm for trains, when I made the mistake of asking about the scale model of that station he had made in his office and was subjected to a lengthy demonstration of how it all worked.

"So that's it?" said Rainbow Dash in a defeated tone of voice. "So long and good luck?"

"I'm afraid so," I said, doing by best to present myself as somewhat conciliatory. "Let's not make it any more difficult than it has to be."

Whatever fate or destiny or other such vague metaphysical concept that had decided to make my life as difficult as possible must have overheard me say that out loud, for who should force his way through the nearby group of loggies arguing over a dropped box of potatoes but Captain Blitzkrieg himself.

"Right!" he said, slithering over with that disturbingly elegant gait of his. As ever, he moved like a panther slipping silent and unseen through the jungle on the hunt for some helpless prey. "Thought you could go without letting me say my piece?"

"Captain, what are you doing here?" I asked incredulously. "Were you following us?"

Blitzkrieg ignored my question and instead advanced on Rainbow Dash, staring intently at her with those chillingly predatory amber eyes. The other Wonderbolts parted swiftly to form a sort of path for him. I'm not sure why, perhaps there was some subtle element of his body language that my hindbrain had interpreted to mean that he intended to commit bodily harm on the unarmed mare, but I thought I should keep them apart. I stepped forward and held out a hoof to stop him, which he walked into as though he hadn't seen it. He looked at my hoof on his chest and then back up at me, but with an arrogant snarl that gave an unsettling glimpse of the razor-sharp fangs of the Night Guards he simply stepped around me.

"For pony's sake, I get enough lectures from Twilight at Ponyville!" snapped Rainbow Dash, loud enough for nearly everypony in the depot to hear if they so cared. "Alright, fine, let's hear it. I messed up, didn't I?"

There was a brief pause before Blitzkrieg answered, as though he didn't anticipate that kind of response. "Too bloody right you 'messed up', ponies got killed because of you!"

"You think I don't know that?" said Rainbow Dash, stepping forwards with her wings outstretched in that rather absurd pegasus gesture of aggression. "I'm the one who's going to have to live with that mistake on my conscience. I don't need you making it worse for me."

For Faust's sake, I just wanted to get this over with and then go back to the fortress, enjoying the quiet solitude of the long walk with maybe a little detour into the hills where I could enjoy a cigar and a drink from my hipflask without being bothered. I marched between them, holding the relatively diminutive pegasi back with my forehooves; Rainbow Dash stopped herself and moved just out of reach, while Captain Blitzkrieg saw fit to once more walk straight into my hoof and only this time try and fail to push me out of the way.

"Enough of this," I said, using the quiet but firm voice that Auntie 'Tia used to keep foreign diplomats from fighting when she mediated international disputes.

Once again Blitzkrieg ignored me and pushed against my hoof, though it seemed I was a bit too strong for him and he settled for continuing to harangue Rainbow Dash over me. "If you paid attention to our training then you wouldn't be in this mess."

"What training?" Rainbow Dash shrieked, and rather too close to my ear too as she darted around me. I tried to position myself between the two pegasi, but their natural agility and their ability to just fly over me seemed to trump my comparatively clumsy unicorn gait. "All you two did was shout at me, lecture me, punish me, force me to do pointless exercises until I could barely stand, abandon me out in the desert with no water, and for what? That wasn't training, you just set me up to fail because you wanted to get rid of me! And I was stupid enough to go along with it because I thought I could show you I could be a soldier, but I didn't count on everypony here having already made up their minds about it."

She had a point, I had to concede, but I was damned if I was going to accept any blame for her mistakes. After the morning I just had, however, I had gone far past the point of caring. Was it too much to ask for a nice, quiet war? On reflection, yes, because there is no such thing as one, but at the very least I'd like to be able to worry solely about keeping myself alive on the occasion some officer decides I need to renew my 'hero' licence and concocts a mad scheme that involves great mortal peril on my part without playing therapist to a dysfunctional group of emotionally stunted ponies.

"And you were too bloody stubborn to just give up and go home," Blitzkrieg snapped.

Reason wasn't going to work while Captain Blitzkrieg's blood was up. In the vicious snarl and hate in his eyes I saw all the work I had done to civilise this brute had proved fruitless; I could paint a veneer of sophistication and civility over him, but that could only cover the rotted core of the violent and boorish personality that had driven him to his life of crime in the first place. Oh, his heart was in the right place, standing up for his 'gang', as it were, against the perceived injustice of my simply letting Rainbow Dash get off lightly for her exceptionally poor decision, but I could scarcely allow him to assault, verbally or physically, the Bearer of the Element of Loyalty no matter how much she deserved it.

"Blitzkrieg," I said, raising my voice slightly. I saw that I would have to resort to sinking down to his level with base threats in order to get through to him. "I've already executed one officer today, let's not make it two or I might develop a taste for it."

That had the desired effect. Blitzkrieg glowered, giving his best impression of Princess Luna's trademark scowl. It was quite close, though it gave the implication of being gutted with one of the stiletto blades he still secreted over his armour rather than that of my Aunt's, which spoke more of eternal damnation and hellfire in the lowest depths of the pits of Tartarus. I wondered for a moment if he was going to turn his anger towards me, and that I might find a dagger between my ribs at any given moment, as the slits of his cold amber eyes flitted between me and the angry mare on the other side.

"Alright," he said flatly, before slinking away to be lost in the crowd. Common sense, it seemed, had prevailed over his misguided desire for his own version of justice, whatever form it took. Perhaps he had some measure of respect for me, though I had some doubt whether anypony except maybe Princess Celestia actually held any for me, and even then it was directed more at the idea of me rather than the real me [Blueblood, of course I do. I always have. I wish I could have told you this].

With the distraction over with I sent Rainbow Dash on her way with no fanfare, as this occasion deserved. I watched her embark the train, asked her to give my regards to Twilight Sparkle when she saw her [Twilight Sparkle was in Ponyville collating the findings of her investigation], and then she was off and out of my life. In theory, at least.

On the way back to the fort I found Captain Blitzkrieg on a small rocky ledge overlooking the path. Any hopes of a relatively quiet lunch had been dashed and I was forced to consume a hay sandwich I had bought from what passed for the officers' mess at the depot while I walked. He rested there on his belly like a cat, with his forelegs dangling over the edge and crossed over at the hooves, and watched as I walked past. I'd considered pretending not to see him and just carry on walking, but it must have been fairly obvious to him that I had.

"I screwed up, didn't I?" he said as I approached the ledge. At least he had the good sense to look sheepish.

"I have had a rather..." I paused to think of the right word, and bit another chunk out of the sandwich. "...trying morning today."

"You've had a 'rather trying' few days, mate," he said, wagging his forelegs a little as they dangled over the ledge. "Sorry about that just now. I didn't want to see her get off lightly for what she did. I guess I can say 'goodbye' to me ever being a gentlecolt."

I sat down in the shade beneath the ledge and chewed thoughtfully on the sandwich. My services were needed back at the fortress, probably to sign yet more paperwork and attend more meetings as, despite everything that had happened, the war must still proceed regardless. I was not looking forward to the drudgery of military administration, coupled with the general feeling of gloom that permeated the place since the previous day's events. Gliding Moth's absence felt particularly harsh, and as I rested there and watched the troops haul their wagons filled with goods to and from the fortress I felt an inexplicable desire for her to be with me now. That she could not, and will never be again, hurt me there and then more than any physical injury inflicted upon my body in battle before.

"You miss her, don't you?" said Blitzkrieg. Looking up I saw him peering over the edge down at me. "The filly commissar, I mean."

"Yes," I said, doing my utmost to maintain my composure. Were my feelings that obvious? Was the mask that I had done so much to hold up like a shield over the weak and cowardly pony that I truly was slipping so much?

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. I tried to detect any hint of sarcasm or mockery in his voice but I found none. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"I'd rather not, thank you."

Captain Blitzkrieg seemed to understand what I meant by that. I'm sure another pony would have pestered me, tried to get me to 'open up', but what good would that have done? This burden was mine alone to bear, as was my shame. The rest of Equus would proceed as normal, with or without Gliding Moth in it and regardless of whether I gave voice to the bitterness subsuming me from within like a cancer, but to engage in self-indulgent public mourning would have been pointless. Others had their own grief to work through, and many more since that skirmish at the bridge thanks to the now-deceased Scarlet Letter, so I found that I simply could not, should not, add to it in this time of hardship.

"I saw an older photo of you," said Blitzkrieg, attempting to shift the course of the conversation so rapidly and awkwardly that if it were a ship it would have rolled over and capsized. "From the Grand Galloping Gala, I mean. You were wearing a white suit. I was wondering if I ever get to go to fancy events like that I'll need something nice to wear that isn't just my dress uniform. Where'd you get it from?"

He was referring to my summer dinner jacket in ivory-white, which was almost completely ruined after the incident with the cake in the aforementioned party. I told him about my personal tailor on Saddle Row [Prince Blueblood was a frequent custom of Griffons & Hawks, one of the oldest gentlecolt's tailors on the famous street], and suggested that dropping my name there might afford him some kind of preferential treatment, assuming that he did not say or do anything to get himself (and me) banned. For a relatively short moment, however, about an hour or so I spent in the shade of that rocky ledge in Black Venom Pass, I could at least pretend to be a normal pony once more, or as 'normal' as a prince of the realm could be. Explaining to Blitzkrieg the importance of correct and proper presentation through a stallion's suit was a greater therapy than any that a psychiatrist or drug could offer (though a trip to a bespoke tailors' shop is by far the most effective cure for depression in any case), even though I had some small inkling that he was merely humouring me. While the pain could not be completely excised so easily, that it was relieved until it was time for me to return to work was greatly appreciated.

***

Things just sort of stumbled along from there, with no real drive or energy behind it like a broken-down train drifting along under its own momentum. The loss of the Colours had an effect on the entire encampment much like the death of relative to a whole family, whereby in spite of whatever grief one inevitably feels, life and work still must proceed, albeit with the pain of that loss suffusing all that one did. Almost instantly, however, there was a dramatic spike in disciplinary issues, particularly in the 1st Solar Guard, which was to be expected; disobedience, brawling, insubordination, drunkenness, and worst of all desertion. All of the things that were expected of a militia regiment guarding a tiny collection of hovels out in the Equestrian mid-west had suddenly swept through the most prestigious and the most disciplined regiment of the Royal Guard. Officers could dish out beastings, imprisonment, extra sentry and latrine duties, and floggings, but even their hearts were no longer truly in it. Like their stallions, with the Colours and therefore the honour and history that came with being a member of the regiment gone, it was difficult for them to find too much of a reason to care.

Yet the war could not stop for this. Planning for the offensive continued, with the added doubts about the reliability of the 1st Solar Guard complicating each and every decision from the high level operational planning to even day-to-day drill practice. On paper, the regiment was well-equipped and the latest batch of reinforcements had brought it up to full fighting strength, but in terms of that unquantifiable mental state that somehow drives a soldier to ignore both the instincts of self-preservation and reason to follow orders that could very well lead to his death, the inescapable conclusion that General McBridle and his staff had come to but seemed to wilfully ignore was that it simply could not be counted upon to perform in battle.

It was against this backdrop of 'going through the motions' of fighting this war, as it were, that I became aware of the backlash against my decision to execute Scarlet Letter. I should have known that it was a mistake to read the newspapers, for even at the best of times they have a debilitating effect on one's mood and, give it enough time, powers of critical thinking, but boredom and curiosity soon got the better of me. Though I was no stranger to the unfair vilification of the tabloid media, whose sole aim in life seemed to be to find anything remotely questionable in the lives of rich nobles such as Yours Truly and from there invent grotesque moral failings (though in my case they are often at least partially true), seeing 'BLUEBLOOD: ENEMY OF THE HERD' in big black letters accompanied by an old photograph of me striking a servant on the front page of The Canterlot Sun was more than just a trifle upsetting. Interestingly, though, the journalist, though I hesitate to describe the illiterate pony who scribbled those words in crayon on a fast food restaurant's menu and tried to pass it off as journalism as one, seemed to acknowledge my entirely fabricated image of being a decorated war hero, but such things were apparently not enough to justify what he and the editorial team had described as an attack on the very principles of the rule of law and democracy.

The rest proceeded in the same vein, though the quality of writing inevitably increased with more upmarket publications like The Times of Trottingham and The Daily Ponygraph. And so widespread and consistent was the message that the execution conducted under my orders was a grievous affront to civil society that I could scarcely believe that this sudden outpouring of opprobrium was spontaneous. Although the idea that Scarlet Letter had friends who really existed and were not just made up for what I had hoped were empty threats will remain doubtful in my mind, it was clear that his prophecy of his connections making life difficult for me had some element of truth to it. Many such editorials were published calling for the dismantling of the Commissariat and my cashiering, which I would have been all for had it not been for further calls to have me thrown in prison and my royal titles revoked.

This criticism was just that - words with no real action behind them, and I have been called far worse by far better ponies before. All of this would pass with the next scandal. It was only when I had learned that my name had been mentioned in the debates of the House of Commons, along with Shining Armour's and General McBridle's, that I felt genuine concern about my future. Ponies wanted somepony punished for the loss of the Colours, and though the pony truly responsible for this mess had been punished to the fullest extent of the Commissariat's authority, for some it was either not enough or the wrong choice to make entirely.

Hope, however, soon arrived from a most unlikely source - Princess Luna. Over the week following the execution I was inundated with both letters of support and condemnation from the various political factions within both the Ministry of War and the Commissariat; orders to report to Canterlot for some form of show trial would be countermanded by further orders to remain with the 1st Night Guards and carry out my duties, to the point that the officers and bureaucrats seemed to be arguing ideology more with each other through these letters. It was safe to ignore these contradictory missives, and that feeling was validated when I received a letter from the one pony I could not possibly afford to ignore. A midnight-blue envelope had arrived, with my name written on the front in silver ink in elegant hoof-writing. Inside was a sheet of the same dark paper, and in the cool dark of my office in the early morning I could discern pinpricks of white and silver like a cloudless midwinter night. In flowing, extravagant script the letter read:

Honourable Commissar-Prince Blueblood,

I wish to extend my continued gratitude to you for your exemplary service to Equestria and my condolences for your loss. Commissar Gliding Moth wrote fondly of you in her reports to me, and under your guidance she would have made an excellent commissar.

Equestria needs ponies such as you in this era of great peril, yet there are those in positions of power who are blind to the sacrifices required for final victory over the Changeling threat. You are to ignore all summons from the Ministry of War to abandon your post and return for their inquiries, for you will be of greater use to the war effort to remain at the front, and they wish merely to use you as a scapegoat for their own failings. Do not worry, for I shall answer their misguided inquisition in your stead.

You may consider yourself to be under my protection henceforth, for as long as is necessary and provided that the quality of your service is maintained.

Yours eternally into the night,

H.R.H. Princess Luna

P.S.: - Please extend my warmest regards to Captain Red Coat.

It was so like the Princess of the Night to frame a letter of support as a threat - 'provided that the quality of your service is maintained' was Luna-speak for 'don't ruin this and make me regret helping you'. Nevertheless, despite my misgivings I was touched by the gesture, signifying the warming of my relationship with my aunt that only took my saving of her life to start. Coming from her it was the closest thing I was going to a compliment. At the very least it meant that I could put this one thing out of mind, as Luna could generally be relied upon to intimidate, threaten, and otherwise bully the cowardly bureaucrats of the Ministry of War into submission. This cheerfully meant that I could direct my attentions to the more immediate problems of how I was going to survive this new offensive with a perilously unreliable regiment leading the attack.

***

[Prince Blueblood leaves the narrative of the political fallout here. In this case I feel it will be helpful to the reader to elucidate further on the events in Canterlot to better place his description of events in its historical context. The following extract is from an article from The Daily Ponygraph published on the 23rd March 1015 P.N., which, at the risk of displaying some bias here, is one of the better organs of the news media and has a consistently excellent crossword puzzle]

LUNA - 'BLUEBLOOD DID NOTHING WRONG'

Princess Luna appeared before a House of Commons inquiry yesterday evening to answer questions about the recent actions of Commissar-Prince Blueblood. Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter, MP for East Trottingham, was summarily executed by Blueblood, who accused the deceased of incompetence and cowardice in the field that led to the loss of the Royal Colours.

The Secretary of State for War, Treble Bass, is Scarlet Letter's brother and has in turn accused the decorated war hero of abusing his commissarial authority to settle a grudge and to mask his own failures. In an official statement, he declared Blueblood to be a wanted criminal who must be brought to justice, which is a charge the Royal Commissariat has rejected. This has caused a rift between the two organisations and cast doubt over whether the role of commissars in the Royal Guard to supervise officers and punish them is justified in military law.

Convention dating back to the Reconstruction forbids royalty from entering the House of Commons, symbolising the sovereignty of Parliament. Princess Luna removed her regalia and 'abdicated' her title as a Princess of Equestria outside the chamber. Historian and constitutional expert Juniper Tonic described this as a 'piece of theatre', as 'nothing really exists to stop either Royal Pony Sister from doing whatever they want'.

The House of Commons was almost completely full for this historic event, with some MPs having to sit or stand in the aisles. Princess Luna took her place before the Speaker of the House and answered the MPs questions. In response to the first question, asked by Chocolate Sun, the MP for the Hayseed Swamp, 'how are you today?' she said 'doing well, thank you'.

Serious questions followed. The Prime Minister asked the Princess on what basis a commissar has to execute a serving officer of the Royal Guard without trial. "On the basis that it is sometimes necessary," she answered. "The officer class today is sorely lacking in military competence and leadership. The result of centuries of neglect by the ponies of this very house."

This answer brought much jeering from some MPs, requiring the Speaker to bring the house to order. Princess Luna remained calm and impassive while this happened and awaited the next question.

"By what right can you say this of Royal Guard officers, particularly my brother, who has served you and your sister with distinction?" asked Treble Bass.

"When I have seen their incompetence with my own eyes," said Princess Luna. "I spent time at the front and saw officers entirely out of touch with the requirements of war. I saw officers who continued to throw extravagant parties while their soldiers suffered, who thought nothing of sacrificing the lives of those soldiers for no real military purpose. As for your brother, he committed an act of treason and should have been punished, yet the Ministry of War saw fit to have him acquitted and returned to the field where he would commit another act of treason. Scarlet Letter was a poor officer and a disgrace to the Royal Guard. He was merely the symptom of a greater rot within Equestria, and I see it before my eyes right now."

The jeers only got louder, and it took five minutes for the Speaker to restore order to the house. Many MPs shouted 'shame' at the Princess, who withstood the abuse with a sense of regal calm.

With order restored, Treble Bass addressed Princess Luna again - "A lot has changed in a thousand years. Equestria is now a democracy, but your actions demonstrate hostility to the idea of self-determination for ponies."

Princess Luna answered, "My ire is directed at this government's conduct of the war and nothing else. A thousand years ago there was war, then there was peace, and until recently there was none. You, Secretary of State for War, must have read von Pferdwitz, Sunny Tzu, Neighpoleon, and so on. I knew them. I even edited 'The Art of War' while your ancestors shovelled dirt in the rock farms."

The Speaker informed the Princess that that was un-Parliamentary language and that she should refrain from insulting the MPs. The Princess appeared to ignore the Speaker and continued to address the house.

"It is true that I still have much to learn of the modern world, like how the assembly I see before me can claim to represent the Equestrian ponies, but as once Warmistress of Equestria the one thing I do know is war. I can say with no fear of contradiction that this is the worst conduct of war that I have seen since Prince Maximilian of Gryphonstone attempted to invade Stalliongrad in the winter with no winter clothing for his troops. Mark me, when Twilight Sparkle completes her report, there will be a reckoning in this house."

The chamber exploded in uproar, with shouting and jeering from the seats. Some Opposition MPs, however, applauded Princess Luna's words. Strawberry Twist, MP for Rainbow Falls, threw a pencil in the Prime Minister's direction and was removed from the house by the sergeant-at-arms. The Speaker's attempts to bring order were drowned out by the commotion, as MPs engaged in loud, angry, unstructured debate with one another. Order was eventually restored when Princess Luna struck her hoof on the floor and employed the use of the Royal Canterlot Voice to stun the entire House of Commons into silence.

The Speaker informed the Princess that she should not intimidate the MPs. Luna responded by saying something in a different language, but thus far nopony has been able to translate it into Equestrian. [Princess Luna here used ancient alicorn profanity here, which, for those curious, roughly translates to 'don't tell me what to do or I will raise the moon up your backside']

Princess Luna continued, "The fatal mistake this government has made is assuming war can be clean and easy. After the attack on Canterlot you were all eager for revenge, as most ponies were, yet you all lacked the foresight to plan appropriately for such a war. It is you who neglected the Royal Guard in the thousand years of peace, but you were so blinded by this revanchist rhetoric that you could not see that the sword of Equestria had been blunted - its size too small for the task; its officers lacking the training, experience, and even base competence to lead; its generals too timid to truly take the fight to the enemy for fear of loss of prestige. Its strategy is outdated and ill-suited to an enemy that relies on stealth and subversion.

"And you all thought it would be over before Hearth's Warming with minimal casualties. My friend, Scorched Earth [The Nightmare Heresy-era loyalist general whose 'March to the Sea' campaign that left much of the south of Equestria in ruins and broke the back of Nightmare Moon's economic infrastructure remains controversial] once stated that war is hell. It is only when the horrible truth is accepted, when all the cruelty and horror of war is realised that you will know to do your utmost to achieve a swift and total victory by any means necessary. So far I have seen that you lack the will to wage this war. You are merely foals playing at it, for which the soldiers of this land must suffer. That is why I have taken matters into my own hooves and created the Commissariat, why my sister has tasked Twilight Sparkle with her report, because you will sit here and debate the just execution of a traitor by a war hero instead of undertaking what must be done to re-forge the sword. Equestria is at war, and it is high time you realised that no war can be won by mere half-measures."

There were no further questions. Princess Luna left the House of Commons, putting on her regalia and having the Archbishop of Canterlot conduct a quick coronation ceremony in the lobby before retiring to the Night Court.

In the press conference after, the Prime Minister told journalists: "Princess Luna is still adapting after her thousand-year absence, so while her delivery was unrefined it falls to the government to tease out the truth in her words."

When asked if he agreed with the Princess's damning assessment of his government's handling of the war, he said: "I don't think it's beneficial at this point to start pointing hooves and blaming ponies. These are very complex issues here, and I have full faith that our government will make the right choices in making Equestria safe."

Treble Bass, however, stated that: "The Equestrian soldier is the best equipped, best led, and best fed in the whole world. The Changelings have proven more difficult than anticipated, but I have every confidence in the Royal Guard. What is at stake here, is that an organisation that is only accountable to Princess Luna now has authority over a government department, and that's just not very democratic."

He was then asked if what Princess Luna and Commissar-Prince Blueblood had said about his brother were true. "Absolutely not. Sir Scarlet Letter served in the House of Commons for ten years. His only desire was to serve Equestria. These accusations of treason and incompetence are slander, and Prince Blueblood will answer for them."

Reporters pressed Treble Bass for further information, with Hot Scoop of Sun and Moon asking if he planned on implementing the findings of the Twilight Sparkle Commission in full. "That depends on the findings of the report," he said, "and whether or not they are politically viable."

Princess Luna was also approached by reporters with questions. She stayed to answer a few before leaving for her dream-guarding duties. When asked if Princess Celestia approved of how she addressed the House of Commons, the Princess of Night explained sharply that she did not need to ask her older sister for permission to do everything, and that they had discussed the state of the war together anyway and were in agreement about what had to be done.

"The truth is often unpleasant," she said. "I make no apologies for not dressing it up in nice words when my subjects’' lives at stake."

She was then asked if her defence of Commissar-Prince Blueblood amounted to nepotism, to which she responded: "No, I have judged Blueblood on merit alone. You need only look back on the past few years before I truly got to know him, when we all believed him to be a spoilt brat of as much use to equine society as a parasprite in a famine. I am glad to say that I have been proven wrong."

This reporter asked the question: "Should ponies put so much faith in the judgement of a stallion who wrote and published a book entitled 'The Grand Tour: A Gentlecolt's Guide to the Brothels and Bordellos of Prance'?" Princess Luna refused to comment and disappeared in a puff of smoke. [The book is mercifully out of print though I hear that what few copies remain fetch a considerable sum at auction]

Political commentator Swansong said of the debate in Parliament: "It's clear that Princess Luna dominated the discussion. She deftly turned the Secretary of State for War's accusations against him and exposed the failings of the Ministry of War. The government clearly misjudged in inviting the Princess to this debate and I wouldn't be surprised if Treble Bass will resign soon." [He did a week later, but took up another ministerial position in the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship]

Commissar-Prince Blueblood has been contacted by The Daily Ponygraph but has not responded. Princess Luna said that he has far more important things to do instead.

Author's Note

So I had it in me all this time, now I only need to try and maintain this momentum.

Honour and Blood (Part 15)

Rainbow Dash never made it to Ponyville, according to the letter that I received from Twilight Sparkle a few days after I had unceremoniously booted her and her Wonderbolt friends out of the Royal Guard. The others had returned, but over the course of the long train journey she apparently vanished. Perhaps she had fallen out of the carriage somehow and was left stranded somewhere between Dodge Junction and civilised Equestria, or maybe she could not bear to face the consequences of her failure before Captain Spitfire and had run away to live the rest of her life as a hermit of some sort in the big empty useless bit in the middle of our fair realm. Either way, she was no longer my problem, and I had rather more pressing things taking up my attention than the whereabouts of a national heroine, so I had Cannon Fodder write up a suitably non-committal reply that said I hoped she would turn up somewhere in her own time. She would probably slink back to civilisation when she grew bored of not receiving enough attention from ponies for her above-average ability to fly fast and eject rainbows from her rear end.

The 'more pressing things' all came to a head only a few days after the loss of the Colours. I had been invited to yet another staff meeting with General McBridle, one that at first seemed innocuous enough, promising only a few hours of utter boredom as staff officers with monotone voices and a severe lack of a sense of humour drone on endlessly about all the necessary preparations for the upcoming offensive. The senior officers of the frontline units, predominantly Shining Armour and Colonel Sunshine Smiles, would make some input on the readiness of their respective regiments in terms of training and equipment, while I would try to justify my continued existence here by making a few vague comments about morale and fighting spirit. It was a fine balancing act, really, as my ultimate aim of not having to engage in another life-threatening military operation, through subtle subversion of these meetings by casting the seeds of doubt about the readiness of the soldiers, was in opposition to my desire not to be exposed as a useless coward who didn't want to fight.

Upon entering I had caught the last snippets of the conversation - "...twelve absent without leave so far," said McBridle to a staff officer.

"Nearly half a platoon," said the officer. "Where could they have gone to?"

McBridle shrugged his shoulders. "Provosts would have caught them if they tried to go up the Pass to Dodge Junction, which means they've gone into the Badlands."

"They must be getting desperate, then. If the Changelings don't get them, the sun will. Don't share this information outside this room except with the Field Marshal, or it'll only lead to more desertions."

I could tell something was off, which is usually the case at these meetings anyway, almost as soon as I entered the meeting room; only General McBridle, Colonel Sunshine Smiles, and a staff officer in dress uniform whose name currently escapes me [records indicate this was Captain Hoops] were present, while Shining Armour's strange absence was both suspicious and conspicuous. As I entered, the assembled ponies standing around the table, which was festooned as ever with maps, charts, lists, and assorted writing implements, looked up and straight at me with suitably grave expressions on their faces (with the exception of Sunshine Smiles, of course, as his facial disfigurement meant that he almost always looked as though he had thought of a deeply inappropriate joke involving mares' anatomy and was doing his utmost not to laugh). It was very obvious something had gone wrong and nopony was trying to hide it, which in turn set an uneasy feeling in my gut as I crossed the stone floor to the table.

I took my position closest to the door, just in case something happened, whatever it might be, and I needed to be the first out of the room. The conversation ceased quickly, and I received a nod of recognition from each pony as I sat on the cushion and rested my forehooves on the table in front of me. It was one of the smaller rooms in the fortress, with a series of small slit windows that each provided a mercifully limited view of precisely sod all that made up the Badlands. Still, as this was one of the rooms that was rarely subjected to the unrelenting heat of the desert sun, it was quite possibly one of the coolest rooms available, meaning it was only just slightly bearably warm instead of life-threateningly hot. I made a mental note to write a letter to Auntie 'Tia, asking if she might turn the sun down a little bit, at least until this war is over, but I didn't know if such a thing was possible. [It is technically possible, but not without great ecological damage to the rest of the world]

"Good afternoon, everypony," I said.

"Thank you for coming at such short notice," said McBridle. The elderly stallion rested his hooves on the table and leaned forwards. His pipe was clenched between his teeth and emitting its usual cloud of sweetly-scented smoke. The events of the past few days certainly appeared to have taken its toll on him, and while he very much remained the sort of older stallion in steadfast denial of his advancing age, as the general officer commanding Army Group Centre it was clear that watching his planned offensive, the modest victory that he hoped would round off his lengthy career, crumble before his very eyes was having a most deleterious effect on his health. For the first time, his appearance seemed to match his age.

"I was only doing paperwork, but I'm grateful for the chance to take a break from that," I said, which was a complete lie as Cannon Fodder was doing said paperwork and I was taking a rather pleasant nap before I was interrupted by the summons to attend.

McBridle smiled at my weak attempt to lighten the mood. "Since we're all here, I think we can start," he said, shuffling the papers in front of him.

"Should we not wait for the Captain of the Royal Guard?" asked Sunshine Smiles.

"Nay," said McBridle, shaking his head softly. "He knows, son, he already knows. I think it's better the wee laddie isn't part of this discussion today."

I swallowed hard, as if it might stop the anxiety rising up from the pit of my stomach. There had been rumours, as there always are in the military and particularly during times of both inaction and hardship, and I had done my best to crush them despite believing they might hold some modicum of truth. A commissar might ridicule these whisperings, or attempt to stamp them out through force, but the trouble with appearing too heavy-hoofed in quashing such discourse is that the very act of doing so will only add credence to their ideas and appear as though one is 'suppressing the truth'. I had hoped they were false, however, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, but wishful thinking can only get one so far before reality as ever stomps all over one's happy little fantasy.

Sunshine Smiles arched an eyebrow and tilted his head at McBridle. "You can't possibly mean..." He let the statement remain unfinished, apparently having finally put two-and-two together, as it were, and came to the same conclusion that I had.

"I might as well just say it," said McBridle, his normally strong, defiant voice fracturing slightly under the strain. He picked up one of the papers, encasing the sheet in a soft red glow that matched the predominant colour of the tartan he wrapped himself up in, and continued: "I only received the orders from the Ministry of War this morning, and so has Shining Armour, I assume, judging by his absence. The 1st Regiment of the Solar Guard is to return to barracks in Canterlot and be disbanded."

So the rumours were true after all. It had been obvious to everypony present that the 1st Solar Guard could not be considered a reliable frontline regiment any longer, yet to hear it spoken aloud for the first time was still a most horrendous shock to all. By some unwritten and unspoken accord we had agreed not to voice it so plainly, most likely out of some kind of foalish desire not to acknowledge the reality that the oldest, most prestigious, and most disciplined regiment in the whole Royal Guard was now reduced to a motley rabble. Denial of the facts could only carry one so far, and the longer acknowledgement of reality was put off the harder it hurt when this self-made delusion was dispelled.

"Damn," was all that I could say. Though I was attached to the 1st Night Guards as the regimental commissar, my time with the 1st Solar Guard represented a far happier part of my life, where my main concern was trying to find my way back to bed from a night's carousing with my fellow officers in the mess or some high society function, perhaps with a lucky mare by my side too, as opposed to Changeling horrors and incompetent officers trying to kill me. I might wear the black coat and the peaked cap of the Commissariat, but my heart wore the shimmering gold of the regiment that gave my life some semblance of meaning and direction after my expulsion from Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, however shallow that lifestyle was.

"Aye," said McBridle, putting the paper down with a heavy sigh and a sad nod of his head. "It's a crying shame. Thousands of years of glory all gone in one almighty cock-up."

I could not have summed up this whole sordid affair more succinctly or aptly. Damn them all, I thought; it was so like the Ministry of War, as its ministers' thinking extended only as far as their next election, to take a sledgehammer to a problem that only required time and care to sort out, and all without any consideration as to the place this regiment held in the long and glorious history of the Royal Guard. They believed that if they could wipe the name of the 1st Regiment of the Solar Guard they could wipe the shame, thus absolving themselves from any complicity in allowing the milieu in which somepony like Scarlet Letter could not only buy his commission but keep it in light of his crimes.

"So that's it, then," I said flippantly, leaning back in my cushion and tapping the table with my hoof, trying desperately to keep my composure. "It's all gone with the signing of an order."

"I'm afraid so," said McBridle as he tamped his pipe and re-lit it with a spark from his horn. "Though they'll probably reconstitute the regiment at a later date and Princess Celestia will appoint a new Captain of the Royal Guard soon. They might even get a new Royal Standard."

"What about Shining Armour?" asked Sunshine Smiles. His expression was curiously unreadable; that is, until you learn the trick of not staring at the puckered scar tissue that twisted one end of his lips in an unnatural fashion and instead examine his body language as a whole. Normally full of quiet strength and aristocratic dignity, the big, imposing earth pony stallion looked utterly downcast. His posture, usually ramrod straight so as to emphasise his enviable physique, had become slumped. Sitting there, with his head bowed in quiet acceptance of this miserable fact, he seemed about half his size. "I know he planned on resigning his commission after the offensive, but where does this put him now?"

"He'll take the regiment to Canterlot," said McBridle. "Then he'll oversee the disbanding of the regiment; most will go to fill up the other regiments, the militias, and others will be demobilised. Once that's all done he's a free stallion again."

Lucky bastard, I thought. His reputation was in tatters, such as it was, and it might be some time before he could go out in public, but he still got to go home. I had not seen my home, the grim and imposing Sanguine Palace in Canterlot, for years now and I longed to be surrounded by its morbid and gothic architecture. Shining Armour would return to more welcoming hooves; the embrace of his wife who must have missed him terribly, the adoration of the Crystal Ponies who were likely ignorant of the great ongoing shambles that was the war here, and, most important of all, significantly fewer Changelings out to kill him. He would hate it, though, and that represented the ultimate cleavage between us; I could stomach to temporarily lose face in return for more permanent safety, but he could not possibly bring himself to fully put aside that immaterial thing called duty that inspires high-minded ponies such as he to do things firmly against the interests of his own well-being.

I made a note to visit him once this meeting was over, just to make sure that he did not do anything that I wouldn't do. Well, we all know how that turned out in the end.

"What about the upcoming offensive?" I asked, leaning forwards against the desk and resting my forelegs upon its surface, hoping to look eager to hear that it was still going ahead, as opposed to the foolhardy venture being cancelled or postponed in light of this news.

McBridle answered my prayers. "Army Group Centre is in no fit state to carry out this offensive," he said. "It'd be suicide if the Changelings move to oppose us, which they will. The operation will be postponed indefinitely."

The wave of relief that I felt upon hearing those words, once I deciphered the strong Scoltish brogue, was palpable. It was like coming inside from the cold to a warm, welcoming home with a fire blazing in the pit, a glass of brandy by a much-loved armchair, and an eager mare sprawled across said furniture for company. Oh, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before McBridle's sensible approach to war and his reasoned assessment that everything is well and truly doomed unless things changed quickly would be considered politically unviable. But until that moment when he gets replaced by the next insane general to pass through the great revolving door that is the post of commander of Army Group Centre, I could reasonably assume that, unless the Changelings got bored of waiting around for us to get on with the war or the Ministry of War had a sudden outbreak of sense and moved additional regiments up to the front, I was safe.

The staff officer, however, had other ideas. When McBridle had said those words, this staff officer, who had hitherto been staring out of the window and not paying much attention, snapped his head to face the elderly general with enough speed to send his peaked cap askew.

"Field Marshal Iron Hoof's orders are clear," he said. "The offensive must proceed no later than Nightmare Night if we are to regain the initiative."

With that, McBridle seemed to regain much of his earlier strength, sitting straighter as he slowly turned his head to face this impudent stallion. "I now only have two regiments of hoof [The 1st Night Guard and the 5th Solar Guard, which was stationed in Maredun at the time], one of artillery, a gaggle of militia-ponies, and no reserves," he said quietly and very matter-of-factly. "I cannot in all good conscience throw them against an entire Changeling war-swarm." [Changeling military formations tended not to have easy Royal Guard comparisons, being ad-hoc creations of the Hive Mind assembled for specific operations. The term 'war-swarm' was used by officers to describe any enemy formation larger than a regiment, but it had no set number. Famously, when Treble Bass was pressed on the exact number of Changelings in a war-swarm by journalists, he replied with the phrase, "It's a lot."]

The staff officer sucked air through his teeth and shook his head. "We need results, General, and we need them quickly. If we can bring our artillery in range to bombard the Hive, we can bring this war to a swift conclusion."

"Aye, I know that, laddie, and I want a quick end to this bloody war, too. But if we do this now, without more regiments, then the result will be a lot of dead soldiers." General McBridle jabbed emphatically at the staff officer's chest with the mouthpiece of his pipe. "I'll not launch a full-scale offensive knowing it's likely to fail."

McBridle would never budge on this, but for my own peace of mind and because I wanted to get out of this meeting and back into my afternoon siesta I decided I should intervene. "Nopony wants to get stuck into the Changelings more than I," I said, affecting the most casually-heroic tone of voice I could muster. "After all, this waiting around has become rather tiresome. But, I think it would be more prudent if we waited until the Ministry of War assigns us enough soldiers to get the job done properly."

That seemed to placate everypony, at least for now. McBridle grumbled his assent and puffed on his pipe thoughtfully, while the staff officer said he would pass this on to Iron Hoof but couldn't make any promises. I wasn't in any fear, however, as by the time the great inertia of the Ministry of War's bureaucracy finally sorted itself out and mobilised another regiment or two hopefully this war might have come to some sort of conclusion, in theory at least. While Princess Luna's very public admonishment of the Ministry was very well-deserved, I feared that it might have inspired them to begin taking this war more seriously, thereby putting my life in even greater peril if and when they came to their senses and gave McBridle the resources he desperately needed to take the fight to the enemy. That was a problem for another time, and until then I had plenty of it to plot and scheme my way back to home and freedom.

There was little else to discuss. Well, that's not strictly true, as the implications of an entire regiment being withdrawn were many and wide-ranging even just applied to the day-to-day running of this fortress. It's more accurate to say that nopony here truly had the energy or will to do so, except perhaps this staff officer whose name I still can't remember (which won't be an issue, as it is unlikely that either he or his family will ever read this). The loss of the Colours still held its draining effect upon all in the Royal Guard, and even the bravest, most foolhardy officers who appeared to be born without any sense of self-preservation were starting to wonder what the point of all of this was. Perhaps the withdrawal of the regiment would be the best option, then, if only for fewer disciplinary issues for me to deal with.

The meeting therefore wrapped up quickly, and owing to my position closest to the door and my eagerness to return to my nap I was the first out and into the corridor, whereupon I walked straight into Pencil Pusher. The slightly-built earth pony bounced off my chest and onto his rump with a clatter of armour plates and a flail of twig-like hooves.

"You need to watch where you're going," he said, as if I was the pony at fault and I didn't have the authority to punish him for any misdemeanour, real or invented, by any means my depraved imagination could concoct. He picked himself off the ground and dusted off his ink-stained armour. "Nose held so high you never see anypony beneath you."

"What is it this time?" I said, annoyed already of his presence. Behind me, the other ponies filtered out of the room. The staff officer and the general both ignored Pencil Pusher, but Colonel Sunshine Smiles greeted him with a warm smile (at least, I think it was. It could have just as easily been a grimace) and wished him a good afternoon. "And how long have you been waiting out here?"

Pencil Pusher shrugged his shoulders and took out that damned little notepad he always carried with him. "To answer your second question, about five minutes. Your smelly assistant told me you'd be here. As for your first question, some equipment and supplies have gone missing: a set of Night Guard pegasus armour, three weeks' worth of food and water rations, and two sets of large saddlebags. Presumably the bags were taken to put the food and water rations in."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose with a hoof and then glared at him. "Why are you telling me this?" I snapped, and Pencil Pusher shrank back from me. "Tell the provosts somepony's been stealing your supplies and let them deal with it."

"I did, sir," said Pencil Pusher, straightening his posture and standing as tall as his smaller frame would allow. If I hadn't been so annoyed with him I might have found it comical. "But I assume that you are aware that twelve soldiers are absent without leave."

"What?" I spluttered out. "How did you know that?"

"Oh please, I'm the quartermaster here," he said in a tone of voice that was just too cocky for his lowly birth and position for my tastes. "Everypony in the fortress comes to me for my services, so there's very little that happens in this fortress that I'm not aware of. Just before they deserted, like, the night before, some food and water rations also went missing. I thought I just ought to let you know as it might mean others are planning to do a runner very soon."

"I..." I had underestimated him. Oh, he was still irritating, and not just because he refused to give me a suit of armour when I respectfully asked for one, but it seemed those charts and figures he was so enamoured with had a practical purpose after all. I couldn't let that show, of course, otherwise he might get ideas above his station. "Fine, I'll speak with the sentries and order extra security in case."

"Unless they've gone already," he said with another one of his all-too-casual shrugs. "Anyway, I have important things to do now. Toodles."

Pencil Pusher trotted off merrily down the corridor, and I was thankful for his absence. Another word from him and I might have picked him up and thrown him out of the window the way Shining Armour had done with Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, except without wings he would have plummeted to the ground and made an awful mess all over the parade square.

Speaking of Shining Armour, I thought it best that I dropped in on him just to see how he was handling the news. 'Poorly', was my assumption, and I thought myself lucky that I had refilled my hipflask with something a bit cheaper but still relatively palatable, as opposed to the considerably more expensive rare spirits that would have otherwise been wasted on an unrefined stallion such as he. Truthfully, I had been avoiding him since that night we spent reminiscing in his office, though it was not completely my fault as he had become something of a recluse. He remained in his office almost all day and night, emerging only to conduct various mandatory inspection duties and to attend the usual sort of command meetings like the one he had just missed. The past few days had witnessed a transformation from the outgoing, extroverted stallion who always had time for the soldiers under his command, to the point of an overt sort of friendliness that I found a little overbearing but nevertheless was popular amongst the rank-and-file, to a moody, disturbed shadow of his former self. It would fade with time, I assured myself, though now I believe that what was to follow might have been avoided had I bothered to visit just once.

His office door was closed, which it almost never was as, unlike me, he was quite content to allow just anypony to wander in and have a chat. Though I did not think much of it at the time as it had been closed ever since that unpleasantness at the bridge.

I knocked on the big slab of oak and waited. There was no response, so I knocked again.

"Shining Armour?" I said. "It's Blueblood." I disliked the implication of familiarity by using my name sans the appropriate regal title preceding it, but in this extreme case I could probably make an exception.

Again, nothing. I was starting to get worried. Shining Armour would never do something stupid, I thought. Except that was a lie, Shining Armour has done some exceptionally brainless things over the time I've known him, from failing to notice that his then-fiancé had been replaced with the worst impersonation of Cadence ever to scarring his sister for life with a crippling phobia of [redacted], but even his occasional lapses in judgement had to have a limit. Or so I thought. Getting rather worried now, I simply pushed the door open to find he wasn't there. I had feared the worst, such as discovering that that terribly infectious disease called 'honour’ had infected him so gravely that he had hung himself from the ceiling, so it was a relief of sorts to find him absent. Perhaps he was away on some errand or answering the call of nature, and in either case he should be back soon.

I took a seat by Shining Armour's desk and waited, feeling as though I was stuck in the waiting room of a dentist. Fairly soon, however, I got bored of just sitting there and paced around the office a bit. Being a little nosey is probably the very least of my sins, but I still kept a wary eye on the door as I poked around the personal belongings of the Captain of the Royal Guard. I was amused by his collection of foals' comic books, flicking through a few and wondering how I might introduce this stallion to the more grown-up wonders of Prench decadent poetry written by syphilitic opium addicts. A book about a billionaire encased entirely in red and yellow metal armour who punches things for a living caught my eye, and for a few moments I thought about how I might acquire something like that. However, my interest in things intended for ponies whose age in years had yet to breach double figures had waned, and pretty drawings of implausibly proportioned ponies in garish outfits failed to elicit more than a quiet sense of bemusement at the intellectual tastes of the ceremonial head of the Royal Guard.

Shining Armour still had yet to return, and after pacing a bit more around his office and staring out of the window and watching some soldiers drill in the courtyard below I decided to take a look at his desk. I recalled the bottle that he kept in his drawer, which he had brought out and drunk from after Scarlet Letter's show trial, and remembered that I never got a good look at it. Knowing he would probably be more than a little upset if he caught me going through his desk I decided to do it anyway; I could make up some kind of official reason to justify my curiosity, like I was looking for contraband that somepony else had stashed in his office. I found it in the lower drawer, amidst some stationery and a half-eaten box of doughnuts. A quick, surreptitious sip revealed it to be little more than cherry cola, while a larger swig confirmed the complete absence of any alcohol content. I flushed a little in embarrassment when I realised I had encouraged him, a suspected teetotaller [Shining Armour has been known to drink at special occasions, such as his wedding, but measured against Blueblood's regular alcohol intake he may be considered abstinent], to get completely and utterly drunk when he actually had no intention to do so, and that if either Twilight or Cadence found out I might be due for an awkward conversation when I returned to Canterlot. If I ever did, that is.

That was when I noticed the letter on the desk, positioned prominently and deliberately in the very centre and in line with his chair. Resting upon the sheet of paper were two rank pips, each made of solid gold and depicting the heraldic symbol of the blazing sun; the insignia of the Captain of the Royal Guard and should really have been affixed firmly to Shining Armour's epaulettes. I moved them reverently to the side and skim-read the letter, revealing it to be from the Secretary of State for War detailing the arrangements of the disbanding of the 1st Solar Guard.

I noticed some hoofwriting scribbled in the lower right hoof corner of the letter. In a neat, crisp cursive that I recognised as Shining Armour's it read:

By the time anypony reads this, I should be long gone. Whether or not I return will depend on my success or failure in returning our Colours. Please don't attempt to follow me, for the dishonour I have brought upon the Royal Guard is mine alone. The Princesses protect.

I put the paper back down and made sure that the door to the office was still shut, then I started cursing and swearing in a every language I happened to be fluent in. Shining Armour was a complete and total idiot. I had always suspected as much, but this latest bout of utter insanity had just about confirmed it for me. He had this perfect, golden opportunity to go home and live a normal life, such as it was, with his loving wife in a crystal palace and he threw it all away for some ridiculous notion that he might somehow recover the lost Royal Standard. I thought about Cadence, and how she must feel, already under the strain that all military families must endure when a loved one is sent to war, living in fear of the day that black-bordered letter that starts with 'I regret to inform you...' arrives on their doorsteps. Shining Armour and I might not see eye-to-eye on most things, though recent shared hardships had brought the two of us together in some sort of cordial working relationship, but Cadence was family and the thought that he had just done something that, in the likely event that he made some kind of fatal error on this daft adventure, would result in hurting her made me feel an anger that I had not felt in a considerable amount of time. If he threw his life away over a two thousand year old piece of cloth and his feeling of guilt over losing it then so be it, but to plunge one of the very few ponies who cared about me enough for me to reciprocate those feelings into the sort of anguish that I knew would come as a result was another, more personal matter. I had to find him.

I left the letter where I found it and stormed out of Shining Armour's office. Ponies darted out of my way as I marched back to my quarters, though I barely noticed them as my mind was occupied with the problem of what in blazes I was supposed to do now. The letter had only been received today, and the post was normally distributed by Corporal Hooves late in the morning after it had first been collected from the supply depot and sorted. That meant that the earliest he could have left was a few hours ago, so he could not have gone particularly far, especially if he was travelling on his own. I briefly considered that the sentries might have stopped him from leaving the fortress, but that notion was quickly dispelled when I considered that no lowly soldier would ever dream of telling any officer, much less the Captain of the Royal Guard, that they could not leave when they might have important business to conduct elsewhere.

It was then, as I reached my quarters and threw myself on my cot with enough force that I thought it might break under my weight, that I remembered Rainbow Dash. Twilight Sparkle's letter remained on my desk, buried somewhere underneath the growing mountain of paperwork that threatened to collapse the antique desk's legs into very expensive splinters. There was no possible way that the timing between each disappearance had been a coincidence, and the theft of the equipment and supplies only confirmed the theory I had stitched together in my head; the disgraced former trainee Wonderbolt must have put Shining Armour up to this, by convincing him of the efficacy of her foal-like and impractical notion of 'just go and get the flag back' as she had put it when she confronted me in that corridor.

I lay there on the cot, one hoof applied dramatically to my forehead and the other swung over the edge of the mattress in a manner that was sure to make Rarity proud, and tried to think of a way out of the mess they had made for me. The first idea that came to my head was the most appealing, which was to do nothing and wait for Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash to run out of water and return empty-hoofed with their tails between their hindlegs and apologies ready for making us worry so much. I dismissed it after some further thought when I remembered that the two were more likely to get themselves killed in the process before they reached a point where they might consider giving up their quest. Cadence wouldn't like that, nor would she appreciate me having just sat around getting drunk and morose while her husband was off doing something stupid. Twilight Sparkle was another matter, and if I allowed her BBBFF and her close friend to get themselves heroically martyred over a fancy piece of thousand year old cloth then I truly would be in deep trouble; her new position as a heroine of the realm and her close relationship with my divine aunties would no doubt result in my expulsion from the Canterlot nobility. I would have to live as a common pony just like everypony else, and the thought filled me with greater terror than the threats of Changeling fangs and heathen-pony spears.

That left the second option, which was mounting an expedition to get them back. Not the most obvious of choices, wandering into territory infested with Changelings and tribes of hostile ponies, but the longer I lay there considering it the more appealing it became. Oh, it would be a waste of time at best and deadly at worse, but if I was to embark into the Badlands, look around for a bit, perhaps ask the native ponies who didn't attack us with pointed sticks if they'd seen a Royal Guard officer and rainbow-maned idiot wandering around recently, then come back and say that I did my level best then that might at least nudge me beyond the bounds of opprobrium here. If I did so happen to find them alive then so much the better, and if they had somehow recovered the Colours then I could indulge in some of their reflected glory. Besides, I may even delay this offensive even further.

My mind was made up, though I hated the decision I had come to. If 'Twilighting' had been a part of the common lexicon back then [Horseford Equestrian Dictionary defined the term eight years after these events as 'an extreme over-reaction to stress characterised by hyper-ventilation, over-thinking, and over-planning far in excess of severity of the situation as perceived by one's peers] I might have coined the term 'Blueblooding' to mean weighing up one's options, picking what is objectively the most dangerous and life-threatening but also the most morally correct one, but only after mentally exhausting all of the others, and then spending more time and effort justifying to one's self why it is actually the safest and best option. Except I would ensure that it was never used outside of my own self-indulgent moments of introspection of how undeserving I am of everypony's praise, which I did alone and away from witness anyway.

I reluctantly rolled off my cot and summoned my aide into my room. After explaining to him my intentions, which he accepted with his usual phlegmatic stoicism as though I was planning a pleasant little excursion to Rainbow Falls instead of out into Changeling country, we got to preparing, by which I mean I made him source and pack supplies into two sets of saddlebags while I paced around and tried to work out how to justify this to Colonel Sunshine Smiles and General McBridle. I then decided that I simply wouldn't, and though it was technically in breach of military law and would potentially lead to my court martial I had every confidence that I would receive little more than a slap on the wrists for being absent without leave for a day or two at the most. Besides, as the Commissar here I had considerable leeway in what I could and could not get away with in the name of enforcing said military law, and bringing in the most senior officer to desert in Equestrian history surely counted as that. Nevertheless, after a considerable amount of deliberation I left a note on my desk stating my intentions in as plain language as possible:

Off to retrieve Shining Armour, be back soon - Prince Blueblood

It would have to do.

It took Cannon Fodder only an hour to get what we needed - plenty of food and water rations, maps, tinder, rope, bedrolls, linen cloth robes to cover our uniforms and armour, and two pairs of hoofcuffs and a horn null-ring in case either Shining Armour or Rainbow Dash were reluctant to return to the fortress. I also raided my personal stash for bits and some gems in case we needed to bribe whatever natives we might come across out there, in case they weren’t going to aid us simply out of the goodness of their hearts. A last minute stop at the quartermaster’s office, timed so that the ineffable Pencil Pusher was off inspecting the latest shipment of staplers, allowed us to procure a dozen or so steel spearheads and daggers from one of his lackeys too over-awed by my dubious reputation and regal bearing to protest, likewise to offer to primitive ponies we might encounter in return for aid. [The Badlands are particularly poor in natural resources, so while gems are ubiquitous enough in Equestria to be used in mundane decoration, to the native pony tribes they are considered rare and very valuable (leading to an issue of imbalance of trade between our two nations that is too complex for us to discuss here). Furthermore, the dearth of iron ore in these lands means bronze is still the metal in use the most, so iron, in particular steel appropriate for use by the Royal Guard, is likewise much prized and would ensure the tribe an edge over its rivals]

We were all set, and so we headed off with no fanfare. Readers might assume that I should have sought more help in this endeavour, perhaps taking an infantry section or a platoon with me in case things took on the visual attributes of a pear. The fact is that I was not supposed to be doing this in the first place, and taking soldiers out on a wild goose chase would scarcely reflect well on me if I was to return empty-hoofed, which I fully expected to. Furthermore, two ponies were far less likely to be noticed by the enemy, who might even ignore us if we posed no threat. There is also the fact that I was in such a damned rush to catch up with the two, especially considering that one of them has 'speed' as her special talent, that the thought didn't occur to me until I was out of the fortress gates and walking through the bleak, dusty wastes of the Badlands.

It was getting into the late afternoon by the time Cannon Fodder and I passed through the portcullis and out into what is depicted on the map as enemy territory. I could think of two places that Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash might have gone to first - the fresh water stream frequented by some of the less-hostile native ponies or the site of the battle where we lost the Colours in the first place. If I had been in my cousin-in-law's sabatons, and I had taken a few recent blows to the head in order to make this idea of his seem like a good one, I'd have gone straight to the stream to ask for information about who took the Royal Standard. However, after a few more blows to the head to sink to the same intellectual level as Shining Armour I would have gone directly to the ruined bridge.

I, however, am not Shining Armour, and decided to go on to the stream first. From there, only Faust knew, but whatever it was I had the sinking feeling that none of this was going to be as easy as I had thought.

Honour and Blood (Part 16)

There is a strange beauty in desolation. Indeed, as Cannon Fodder and I walked through the rocky, rough terrain of the McIntosh Hills we were surrounded utterly by the striking, unforgettable vista, which married both loneliness and despair with a peculiar sense of majesty that was somewhat difficult to put properly into words. Forging our way through the tight, winding paths between the massive, rocky outcroppings and near-sheer cliffs, seemingly devoid of any life on an order higher than tumbleweed, it was easy to feel as though we were the last two ponies left alive in the world. The bleached sandstone structures, hewn by wind and rain and time itself into hard, jagged, and unforgiving effigies, tinted with the slight shade of orange as the sun began its descent to rest for the night, rippled across the terrain like the glazed surface of a crème brûlée that had been tapped impertinently with a spoon. That we were at the mercy of the elements, in this, one of the last untamed frontiers of mainland Equestria, where pegasi mastery over the weather had still yet to be established and earth ponies had not yet tamed the local wildlife, only seemed to add to the deadly allure of this place.

Solitude was a rarity in the military, as one spent every waking hour surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of ponies at all times, each having lost the concept of individual privacy long ago in basic training. One learns to hoard it like a dragon and its gold. I was grateful for the opportunity to experience it again, being used to shuffling around an enormous mansion for much of my adult life, at least the years not spent in the Royal Guard, with only servants for company. Though my mission, such as it was, continued to occupy a portion of my mind like an unwanted squatter who was proving difficult to remove, I could at least play my favourite game of 'pretend I'm not really here' again. Whatever was really happening was immaterial, for as long as this journey would take I could simply shut out the world, forget about being the Blueblood that everypony expected me to be, and just be a pony walking more-or-less alone through the barren wilderness. Everything considered, it was not an altogether unpleasant experience, and I even took the time to enjoy one of the few remaining Haybana cigars left in my collection as we marched [Blueblood did not mention this when Cannon Fodder packed his saddle bags, but knowing him as I do it's likely he still carried a few in an engraved cigar case in his pocket at all times along with his hipflask].

It was still unbearably hot even in the shade of those hills, a cover of clouds obscured the sun and had a stultifying effect upon the climate here; the humidity, already choking, became trapped and intensified until I noticed that I had managed to sweat through both my undershirt, my storm coat, and the thin linen robes that covered them. I thought about the last time that I had my uniform laundered, and was somewhat ashamed when I found that I could not recall. My body odour must have been terrible, but at the very least it was completely and utterly overwhelmed by that of my aide's.

Despite the roughness of the terrain and the fact that the more I looked at the map and the complicated mess of squiggles and symbols, all of which looked as though if I said a few wrong words in Old Equestrian I might accidentally open a portal into Tartarus and summon Tirek from his prison, I felt as though we were making good time. My special talent, fickle though it might be, had never failed me yet, and though its choices in where it felt I needed to be were sometimes questionable I could be reasonably assured that we would arrive at our destination in good time.

I could scarcely imagine ponies eking out any kind of existence here, with little to no grazing, even less water, and, oh yes, a veritable horde of Changelings beyond counting wanting nothing more than to wrap everypony up in nice safe cocoons, and drain them entirely of love like Blitzkrieg at a free bar. Even then if they could somehow find enough food and fluid to sustain themselves, no doubt via obscure means handed down from soothsayer to shaman or whatever passes for an educated pony around here, that still begged the question of whether or not it would still be an existence worth living. To live separated from the guiding hoof of Princess Celestia and, to a lesser extent, Princesses Cadence and Luna, was an alien concept to me, even if I continued to hold reservations about our alicorn rulers being truly divine after having spent so much time with them (it occurs to me that there is no greater argument for atheism than to spend personal time with a goddess, especially when she is sitting at a dining table and shovelling cake and confections into her mouth at a rate that would choke a normal pony). But to also go through life wilfully shunning the comforts of civilisation, such as running water, whisky, and servants, was just something I could not comprehend at all. I wondered if that illusory thing they call 'freedom' that drove them here in the first place all those centuries ago was truly worth such deprivation, but then I remembered that ponies still willingly live in Detrot and decided that perhaps there was just something fundamentally wrong with our entire race.

Eventually, I began to recognise some of the topographical features around us, and I felt a faint glimmer of hope as the familiar rocky shapes, all but indistinguishable unless one has spent as much time as I surrounded by them, loomed over us. From there it was a matter of following this cleft between two hills and then down further between the steep cliffs where this freshwater spring flowed. I even picked up my pace from a slow, languid walk more suited to ambling down Saddle row to a brisk trot at the promise of cool, clean, and crisp water that hadn't been first purified with chlorine tablets.

The valley soon narrowed, and our hoofsteps echoed ominously around us. Despite my excitement at advancing in our, well, it'd be charitable to call it a 'quest' but by my meagre standards this was rather adventurous, I found myself halting and looking frantically behind in case somepony or something had followed us. Each time, however, revealed only our hoofprints in the dust, but the nagging sensation of being observed was hard to dispel. This time I wanted to be found, though only by the right sort of native tribespony and not the ones who might stick me in a large pot and make a regal sort of pony stew. [Rumours of cannibalism among the Badlands pony tribes are entirely unfounded, but still persist unfortunately]

We turned a corner in the valley, and at the other end was something shimmering like sunlight reflecting off polished steel - the river, finally. As we approached, I realised that I hadn't put much thought into how I'd go about asking the natives for information; the language barrier would be a bit of an issue, but in the spirit of most tourists abroad I would assume that at least somepony spoke Equestrian and that any issues might be solved by speaking slower and louder and with excessive pointing and hoof gestures. That still all depended on there being ponies around to interrogate, and if they were at all inclined to listen to the strange foreign stallion in the scary uniform demanding the locations of another strange foreign stallion, a mare, and a colourful if ancient flag.

As it happened, I was in luck. When we reached the stream, the clarity of the water rushing over the rocks so very tantalising to my dry tongue, I saw two such natives on the other side of the shallow, narrow river. One was an earth pony mare, at least as far as I could tell, apparently ancient if the rough, jagged lines across her face that gave one the impression of a rolled-up sheet of paper that had been flattened out were any indication. She stood by the edge, her hooves all but touching the water, and watched as the other, a tall, broadly-built stallion, collected water in ceramic pots and piled them up neatly next to her.

They saw us approach, or were most likely alerted to our presence minutes before we came into view by the loud clanging of Cannon Fodder's ill-fitting suit of armour jangling like a wind-chime in a hurricane as he walked. The stallion stopped collecting the water, placing the half-filled pot to the side with the others as he stepped forwards to place himself between us and the mare. He was another earth pony, with a dusty beige coat and a cutie mark depicting some kind of desert flower that I recognised growing around this rare source of fresh water. Clad in a set of linen robes that approximated the colour of ever-present barren rock around, similar in style to the loose set that my aide and I had thrown over our respective uniforms, I could tell by the strange proportions and protrusions in said cloth that he had the same idea as us (or vice versa I suppose) and had thrown it over some sort of primitive armour. About his waist was a length of rope that served as a belt, and thrust far too carelessly for my liking into this was a bronze short-sword sans any kind of scabbard.

The stallion glared silently at me, his brow furrowed and his head tilted low as if he might suddenly charge forward. That initial assessment was confirmed when he snorted and stamped his hoof impetuously, though whatever intimidating effect he was going for was ruined by the splashing of water with each stomp. I returned his glower with one of my own as I approached the water's edge, and found to my satisfaction that I had a good few inches over this colt. After a few moments of silent, awkward staring at one another, daring to break the gaze and admit defeat in this apparent test of wills and stallion-hood, I decided that this whole thing was ridiculous and pulled back the hood of my robe to reveal both my face and the peaked cap that I still wore.

"Hello," I said while doffing my cap, relying on that traditional, non-threatening introduction. "I am Pr..." -I paused, and realised that it might be a little unwise to let slip to these natives that I was Canterlot royalty- "My name is Blueblood, and this is Private Cannon Fodder."

Cannon Fodder replicated my polite gesture a little more clumsily, though it was hardly easy to doff one's cap when it was a metal helmet. "Evening, sir and ma'am," he said.

There was no response from the stallion, and I wondered perhaps if, like the mare we found during our last visit here, he could not understand Equestrian. I was about to ask him if he understood what I was saying when the elderly mare suddenly stepped around him with a speed that belied her advanced age and then reached up to clip his ear with a hoof. She admonished him angrily, and from little snippets I knew of the bastardised dialects of Old Equestrian that they spoke I came to the conclusion that she was telling this stallion off for being rude to the 'foreign devils from the tyrant of the north', their terms for our fair realm and its beneficent ruler, I assumed. Perhaps I should have been offended at those less-than-flattering terms for my homeland and my dear auntie, but luckily for them I found their display mildly amusing. He at least had the good sense to look sheepish as he shied away from this mare, his formerly tall and defiant stature ready to strike me, the invader, down, was now submissive like that of a beaten puppy.

The mare huffed and approached me, muttering to herself in her native tongue. "I am sorry," she said in halting but still understandable Equestrian. Her voice sound subterranean, as though it was coming up from the very earth beneath our hooves. "He is young and very stupid and not mature. Please, we share our water with you."

That must have been some kind of cultural habit unique to these ponies, I assumed, so I bent my head down and took a few tentative sips from the stream. [The scarcity of potable water has meant that some Badland pony tribes hold it in almost religious reverence. Comparing this with the symbolic importance of the sun and moon in Equestrian society would be apt.] It was as cool and refreshing as I remembered, and after everything that I had been through over the past few weeks it tasted far better than any champagne I had up to this point. I glanced up just to check that I had not committed some diplomatic faux pas (though it wouldn't be the first or last time), but the elderly mare did not seem to be offended and instead watched with a sense of quiet, almost feline curiosity.

"I am called Bitter Salt, of the Agave tribe," she said, her voice dry and croaky with age. Her accent was curious, vaguely reminiscent of the melodic Bitalian accent but with the odd twang and drawl of the south of Equestria mixed in. "This is my, erm... I do not know the word in your language. I teach him so he will not be very stupid more?"

"Your student?" I posited.

Bitter Salt made a slow, nodding motion with her head. "Yes, Chipped Urn is my student. I teach him to fetch water so he may be of use to the tribe." She paused, and then looked both my aide and me down with a scrutinising eye that felt somewhat invasive. As a representative of Equestria and its ruling class I drew myself up to stand as tall and proud as I could, though the whole affair felt rather awkward when wearing these shapeless cloth robes and, while I was used to being the subject of many approving looks from mares and the odd stallion as Canterlot's most eligible bachelor, I felt instead like I was a piece of jewellery being appraised by somepony who lacked the necessary taste and breeding to truly appreciate it.

"Northern foreigners everywhere these days," said Bitter Salt abruptly. She began to pace around, occasionally in a circle around us and occasionally weaving in between, and every so often she would stop to poke and prod at our clothing and mutter to herself. I stood there and allowed this strange mare to indulge in her curiosity, though Cannon Fodder was a bit adverse to examination after his rather traumatic night spent subjected to Twilight Sparkle's invasive testing, and he would flinch and stumble back from the questing hooves. The strange mare seemed to get the message however, or she found the lingering smell of unwashed underwear and rancid sweat to be too much for her, and instead paid more attention to me.

"Scouts spotted two of yours walking south from the old towers," she continued, rearing up on her hindlegs and resting her forelegs on my back to get a better look at my cap. It seemed that the concept of personal space was not something shared across our two cultures, and if I wasn't so reliant on her help in finding the two 'northern foreigners' I might have pushed her off and into the water. "This is because of what happened at the bridge, no?"

"What do you know about that?" I asked, trying not to give too much away. Bitter Salt mercifully got bored of poking my cap with a hoof, moved off my back, and took up a nicer, more sedentary position in front of me.

"We saw the whole thing," she said. "We watch you as you march into our lands unbidden with your steel and your fire, we also watch as you fight Changelings and bring death with you, but now you fight our kin and we are confused. Pony should not kill pony."

If only things were quite that simple, I thought; 'pony should not kill pony', as she had so eloquently put it, and yet here we were having done just that. "It was self-defence," I said, which was only true if you ignored Scarlet Letter's horrendous lack of good judgement, but hopefully she didn't know about that. I had neither the time nor the inclination to try to explain to her the whole complicated and messy issue that was the state of the Royal Guard at the time, and the convoluted business with the thankfully deceased failed-officer too. Besides, their friendship had yet to be assured, and I would rather this mare and her tribe continue believing that we Equestrians are the unstoppable bringers of steel and fire, as opposed to desperately trying to patch up our malfunctioning war machine with string and wishful thinking.

"Such a thing was unavoidable," she said with a shrug. "Only a matter of time. You northerners did not once ask when you entered the lands of our ancestors and occupied their towers. We have no love for the Changelings, who hunt our ponies and steal them from us, so we would have freely welcomed you and shared our water. The other tribes are not so understanding."

I snorted and shook my head. As if we needed their permission to enter this land and destroy an existential threat to Equestria? Besides, if they believed that this worthless scrap of territory truly belonged to them then they were sorely mistaken; everywhere and everything the sun touched belonged to Princess Celestia, and likewise all under the cover of night to Princess Luna, and if we allowed these heathens to live in this barren waste free of their duties and obligations to their rightful princesses then it was only by our mercy that they... I halted that train of thought before it could crash into the metaphorical station and ruin everything; it was something my father would have said, the damned bigoted old fool that he was, and I wanted to keep the number of ponies, monsters, creatures, and so forth who want to kill me down to an appropriate minimum. [Blueblood's father's track record as colonial governor, diplomat, and explorer remains tarnished by a number of off-colour remarks he had made in public about every race known to Equestria including other ponies. However, his general lack of interest in the role of parenting and the young Blueblood's tendency to wander off and experience those cultures himself had shielded him from internalising this unfortunate mindset too much, though it appears some of it did seep in. As much as Blueblood was an elitist and a snob, his father was much worse even by the standards of Canterlot high society.]

"I need to find those two ponies," I said, hoping to just get to the bottom of this so I could return and drink myself into oblivion in my office.

"It is as I said, scouts say they walk south toward where the bridge was," said Bitter Salt. "One white in gold metal, the other blue with the many-coloured mane and very loud voice."

So that confirmed my suspicions after all. Rainbow Dash was behind all of this, and when I was through with her I'd have that 'many-coloured mane' sitting in my trophy room at home next to the tail of the manticore my grandfather shot and my twenty-five metre swimming certificate from when I was a colt. That, of course, assumed that I was not too late and there was enough of her left for me to take back.

"They seek the flag that was stolen, yes?" said Bitter Salt, tilting her head to one side in curiosity. "It must be important, this flag. The Rat Pony Tribe have it, and they boast of it constantly when tribe chiefs meet. 'Look how we took the northern foreigner flag,' they say. 'They are not so tough. We can stop them taking our land and enslaving our ponies if we work together'."

Her words hit me like a buck to the face from Applejack's ridiculously well-built older brother, or how I imagined that might feel after once having witnessed him at work in their apple orchard [Blueblood did not visit Ponyville until much later, so he is clearly writing this for dramatic effect and with the benefit of hindsight]; the native pony tribes here united and actively working against us was a terrifying prospect that rapidly turned the contents of my stomach into ice-water. As if the Changelings weren't bad enough, though they had been curiously quiet lately which was very worrying as it implied they were up to something (which later turned out to be correct, but I’m getting ahead of myself), but to have an unknown and hostile population disrupting our war effort would only lead to either a very embarrassing withdrawal for us or the committing of more troops to deal with this new issue. The former was unlikely, as the Royal Guard had been invested in stopping the threat on the southern border for too long to simply give up (though that was my favoured option as it meant going home), but the latter would only result in this already overly-long and drawn-out campaign being made all the more difficult and unpredictable than it truly needed to be.

"They're called the Rat Pony Tribe?" said Cannon Fodder abruptly, snickering a little like a colt who had heard a word he thought sounded funny. In all fairness he had a point, and I wondered who in their right mind would name their tribe that and why weren't they immediately cast out into the desert for even suggesting it. Bitter Salt looked at him as if she had momentarily forgotten he was here until he spoke, which, if one could ignore his persistent and potent body odour, was a rather common occurrence for him. She rolled her eyes and made an odd sort of bobbing motion with her head.

"It sounds better with our words," she said. Cannon Fodder's especially vacant expression implied that he did not believe her. "The tunnels, the ruined city buried in the rock they live in, it puts us all in mind of the little furry creatures that dig in the dirt. They remember what happened more than a thousand years ago, when Equestria drove our ancestors into this land when they did not want to submit to the tyrants of the sun and moon."

"We don't want to make anypony submit," I said softly. "Our fight is with the Changelings who attacked us, not with any of the ponies here. Things have changed in a thousand years."

Bitter Salt fixed me with that scrutinising glare once more, her cold silver eyes, sunken by age into deep, dark sockets that only amplified their penetrating effect, made me shudder involuntarily in spite of the heat. A second later, however, and her expression softened, and she gave a gentle, motherly smile. "I believe your words," she said, "but others will not. A thousand years have passed, but hatred is like a seed. It was planted when Equestria attacked our tribes and drove us from our homelands, and watered with resentment it has been allowed to grow into a tree. Sons and daughters were taught to keep this tree alive, and their sons and daughters, and so on, until everypony acknowledges that this tree has always existed and always will exist."

"But not the Agave tribe?"

She shook her head. "Trade with the north has brought us riches, and we are not so stupid to provoke ponies with steel and fire." Bitter Salt then made a sidelong glance at Chipped Urn, who was pointedly pretending to find a collection of pebbles under the water more interesting than our conversation. "Most of us. Your invasion has made the young ones interested in action and violence. Such things will bring only pain for us all."

It was getting late already, and Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash's lead had been extended greatly by our heading in almost entirely the opposite direction. It would take us hours to get to the site of the battle, assuming that we did not get lost, ambushed, fall into a sinkhole, or get struck by lightning along the way. At that moment it felt like any number of possible things could disrupt our mission, but I still had no idea just how unpleasant the next few days would be for me. Even if we did get there, which was not completely assured due to the aforementioned perils, it would likely be night-time when we arrived and it would be stupid in the extreme to expect to find our two intrepid deserters waiting patiently for us on that large rocky outcropping with a full picnic spread and champagne. One could dream, however, but that hurdle would have to be tackled once we got there.

I was about to thank Bitter Salt for the lesson in Badlands native tribal politics and for pointing us in the right direction, though now I wonder if I might have been spared a great deal of pain and physical scarring if I had gone straight to where the bridge used to be and caught up with the two. Before I could even finish manoeuvring my lips and tongue into the correct position to speak, the elderly mare reared up on her hindlegs and wrapped a foreleg around Chipped Urn's neck. "He will go with you and help."

Chipped Urn boggled at the elderly mare, who dropped back down to all four hooves. He said something in his native language; it was a single word, and the shocked tone of voice, its high pitch, and the speed at which it was delivered left me with absolutely no doubt as to its precise equivalent in Equestrian - "What?"

The stallion received another clip around the ear for his outburst, and lowered his head submissively and rubbed at the much-abused auditory organ with his hoof. Whoever this mare was and her standing in their society, she must have held a great deal of authority within it. My assumption was that she was a tribal elder of some description, and that with the lack of a correctly stratified and hierarchical political system based on hereditary titles and feudal bonds dating back to time immemorial (or should be, if it weren't for those damned democratic reforms, but I'm getting ahead of myself) their leadership structure was probably based upon age and experience. Not a bad system if the problems caused by senility and the need for frequent naps could be circumvented, I suppose.

"Go with the northerners," she snapped, raising her voice an octave or two in urgency. She still spoke Equestrian, apparently for our benefit. "Help them find their friends and get the flag back."

Chipped Urn stared incredulously at the mare, as though she had suddenly grown an extra head which then told him that he was adopted. His wide eyes, pupils shrunk to quivering pinpricks, flicked to me, who watched the two as dispassionately as I could manage despite being just as surprised as he was, and then back again to Bitter Salt. He said something, his voice a little more measured this time though his apparent unhappiness at this unexpected order was demonstrated aptly when he swung his hoof in my direction and gesticulated wildly with it, which had the added effect of splashing water onto the front of my robe. I picked up a few words, and from the context I gathered he was complaining about why they should help the northern tyrants who want to take their land.

"So we don't give them reason to take our land!" she said with an angry snort for emphasis. The young stallion recoiled at the force of her words, the tone of which certainly indicated that she was a mare entirely unused to the concept of being defied. "Imbecile! Think further than your next fight! We show northern ponies we can be friends and they will let us keep our lands. You want to be a stallion? Do this, and your journey will be complete."

I'd considered making an excuse and leaving, as I did not particularly want yet another sulky teenager to foal-sit on our journey through enemy territory, but I would never say no to having an extra body between me and said enemies. The afternoon, however, was making its transition into evening, and the awkward and somewhat embarrassing rumble in my stomach hinted that it was fast approaching dinner time. As the two native ponies stared at each other, apparently waiting for the first to break and admit the other was right in their assessment about whether or not Equestria and I were at all interested in annexing this vast expanse of nothing, my thoughts drifted to what the 1st Solar Guard's officers' mess would be serving - perhaps cauliflower sformato with crispy kale and caramelised pine nuts, or baked mushroom and celeriac torte. All I had to look forward to was another feedbag of oats which would keep me fed and energised for the march ahead, but severely lacked in flavour and emotional nourishment.

The sigh that escaped Chipped Urn's lips like air from a burst tyre brought me back from my reverie of the simple pleasures of complicated recipes. "I will do it," he said, shooting me a glare in the process. He pointed his hoof accusingly at me. "But no tricks."

I guided his hoof back to the ground with my magic, which he initially struggled against but soon accepted - it was good to assert who was really in charge here. "I wouldn't dream of it," I said.

Chipped Urn snorted. "You promise not to take land?"

That decision was hardly mine to make, for if the government of the day decided that it wanted to annex the Badlands and make Equestrian subjects of its equine inhabitants then it could (whether or not it would succeed in that endeavour is another matter entirely), and only a veto from one of the Diarchy could stop it. [My sister and I possessed supreme sovereign power in Equestria, which was delegated to Parliament. Therefore, we had the authority to veto Acts of Parliament, though as a convention we did not exercise that right except in extreme circumstances and if the two of us were in complete agreement.] In the interests of speeding this along as quickly as possible, I said, "You have my word as an officer of the Royal Guard that we will not take your land."

That meaningless statement seemed to mollify him a little, though his hard expression and tense body language certainly revealed that he was not at all happy with this arrangement, and neither was I, in truth, but then it had been a very long time since I had ever been happy. Bitter Salt insisted that we leave immediately, to which I agreed wholeheartedly.

“Thank you for sharing your water with us,” I said, giving a curt bow with a nod of my head. My knowledge of their cultural norms was still rather lacking, but I hoped that improvising a few words of insincere gratitude would at least leave them with a positive impression of me and Equestrians in general. “Our water will be shared with you too.”

That seemed to make Bitter Salt more than happy, and we prepared to leave, though our new guide seemed to complain about not being adequately prepared and something about the jugs of water he was collecting. This argument, like the others that had preceded it, was finished by a few short outbursts from the tribal elder, and soon enough Chipped Urn was grudgingly guiding us south-ish through the hills, his face becoming all the more sour with each dragged step.

The cloud cover had grown denser, and the dimming light of the slowly setting sun trying and failing to pierce through the steel blanket above us had cast a grim and bleak pallor over our surroundings. The omnipresent pale yellows and browns of the hills and plains had turned to grey, as if the colour had been washed out of them, and likewise the greens of the grass and shrubs whose roots were fed by that stream far behind us appeared as if dead or dying. As the sun set, sinking lower and lower with each methodical step, the striking shades of yellow, orange, pink, and purple that usually accompany a sunset here (one of the very few boons of living in this bleak place was observing my aunties' work in raising and lowering their respective celestial objects) failed to materialise, and everything simply became darker and greyer.

Night falls quickly here, and with it the temperature, making this the rare moment I was thankful that the commissar's uniform was made of heavy wool. By the time we had emerged from the hills and into the wastes beyond I thought it far too dark to proceed. Even in these wide open plains the gloom could hold anything from a single Changeling patrol to the entire horde of the bastards. I had a brief mental debate with myself about lighting up my horn, for even my feeble abilities in illumination magic would be visible from miles around. Stumbling awkwardly around in the dark over the rough and pitted ground, the risk of tripping and spraining an ankle, breaking a leg, snapping my neck, or any other unpleasant thing I imagined might happen, soon outweighed the risk of being spotted, and thus I lit my horn with a warm golden glow.

My light, though tiny, seemed to only deepen the darkness around us, though that might have been my imagination. Silhouetted against the deepening night, separated from Luna's moon and her night sky by the clouds that concealed them, the shapes of rolling hills and such on the horizon took on grotesque forms of monsters in my mind; dragons, minotaurs, bugbears, and a few conjured up by my own overactive imagination but nevertheless featured far too many teeth and eyes. The knot of fear and anxiety in my stomach only tightened as our journey continued, until it felt as though I might suddenly erupt into a shrieking and inchoate ball of terror. The feeling of solitude was no longer a comfort as it had been before, but now a very real sense of desolation and loneliness that seemed to strip away the pretences of my image as a stallion of Equestria's social elite and reveal the emptiness within.

I made an attempt to pass the time and relieve my anxiety through idle chit-chat, but Cannon Fodder is hardly a sparkling conversationalist even at the best of times and Chipped Urn proved to be rather incapable of the subtle arts of maintaining a polite conversation. Nevertheless, it was not a total waste, as I did glean a few interesting facts once the well of the old standbys of the weather and good books he might have read recently (he turned out to be illiterate) had run their course. I asked him what Bitter Salt had meant about his 'journey' being complete and becoming a stallion.

"Colts of the tribe must do a great thing before they can become stallions," he said, apparently confirming my suspicions that this was some kind of rite of passage for him.

"And Bitter Salt believes helping us retrieve our missing ponies will count as a 'great thing'?" I said, trying to conceal my sarcasm as best as I could. Fortunately, his inexperience with the Equestrian language meant that he didn't pick up on it.

"Yes," he said flatly. "I do not like northerners, but Bitter Salt is the elder and I do as I am told. I want to be a stallion more than I do not like you."

It was after that I gave up on further attempts of conversation. The itching in my hooves had returned, and it occurred to me then and there that I had been rather too trusting of the very first native ponies I had just met. Then again, what other choice did I have? The weight of the rapier hanging from my waist and Cannon Fodder's distinct bouquet reminding me of his continued, silent presence did reassure me, however, that whatever happened, there was still every chance that through guile or just running as fast as I could in the opposite direction I would make it out alive at the end. I like to think that I have become fairly adept at 'reading' other ponies, which is merely part of the process of covering my various misdeeds, of course, and while Bitter Salt appeared to be earnest in her desire not to provoke the great Equestrian war machine into marching straight into her home and ruining everything as it always does, this stallion was another matter, but I reckoned my dutiful aide and I could tackle him easily if it came to that.

If I had any conception of what would await me there at the site of the former bridge, and just how wildly inaccurate my assessments had been, I would have picked a random direction and just run into the darkness, and likely not stopped until morning came or I collapsed from exhaustion, whichever came first.

After an indeterminate period of time spent walking in near-silence, with only a few aborted attempts at further conversation, I spotted lights in the darkness. Flickering, yellow-orange pinpricks that pierced the gloom; probably campfires and the like. Buoyed by what I hoped signalled the end of our unpleasant trek here we picked up the pace a little, I was deluded enough by hope to think that perhaps it was Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash sitting around a blazing fire, singing obnoxious camp songs and eating those marshmallow things the common ponies rave about, then I can drag them home and be done with this whole silly affair. That thought died quickly, however, when my natural predisposition towards paranoia reasserted itself and I realised that those were more likely to belong to the native ponies here, the Rat Pony Tribe that stole our flag. I hoped they were as amenable to bribery as their name implied, and that the saddlebags full of money, gems, and military-grade steel would be sufficient to at least buy our safety.

As we approached, Chipped Urn trotted off ahead of us. The itching in my hooves grew worse, so I cantered off after him. Cannon Fodder appeared to have picked up the cues that something was amiss and followed behind with his spear readied. The two of us being laden down with supplies meant that by the time we had caught up with our supposed guide he was already conversing with a group of ponies standing by a modest campfire. Five such natives sat or sprawled lazily in a circle, basking in the warmth; sentries, I assumed, for after our last foray here I imagined this tribe would be particularly wary of any further incursion. Behind them was the steep valley, and in the warm glow of the fire I could still make out what was left of the bridge after it had been demolished - a set of supports on either end, and a short length of walkway that ended abruptly into jagged, broken masonry. I suppressed a shudder that was not entirely due to the plummeting temperature when I saw the remnants of my last brush with death.

The five natives rose to their hooves when they saw me, brandishing primitive bronze spears and swords. One, wearing a set of those ubiquitous linen robes, albeit with greater ornamentation in the form of dyes that were once lurid purple but had since faded in the sun, I took to be some sort of leader. He was a unicorn, though rather shorter and stouter than the usual elegant stereotype of our race, but with an angular, cruel sort of face that seemed out of place with his stature. The conversation had stopped, but Chipped Urn helpfully pointed me out to this unicorn, as if I needed to be.

"I come in the spirit of friendship on behalf of the Princesses of Equestria," I said, in Old Equestrian. Hopefully, this chap had some knowledge of our shared ancestral language, and, more importantly, would be amenable to the magic of friendship.

He was not. The moment he slapped my face as if I was a hysterical mare was the moment I'd realised that I had been an exceptional idiot that night, and when his horn had lit up with magic and the earth itself rose up beneath me in great, shuddering jolts that knocked me off my hooves confirmed my suspicions. I called out for my aide over the roar of the rock breaking and moulding itself to the whims of this unicorn, but my companion had unfortunately decided to stand a respectable distance from this little diplomatic tête-à-tête and thus too far for his unique abilities to take full effect, so it was in vain. As I clung to this rising pillar of earth, the force pinning me to the rocky surface and threatening to send the oats I ate for dinner back the way they came, I dared to peer over the edge to see that the others had wrestled Cannon Fodder to the ground, though he gave a fairly good account of himself judging by the one native pony bleeding out on the ground next to him.

I must have been about thirty feet in the air when the rapid ascent of this pillar had ceased. The unicorn mage, for he must have been one to cast geomantic spells of this power, was almost directly below me. If I could aim correctly, I could jump and land directly on top of him and hope that his stocky frame would cushion my landing somewhat, or he would simply step out of the way and I'd dash myself on the ground in a bloody great smear instead. I wasn't about to chance it, and not for the first time I wished that I had paid more attention in magic school and learned how to teleport properly, so thus I clung to the edge. The arrogant smirk on the unicorn's face, however, encouraged me to grab a loose pebble and throw it with as much petulance as possible at him. Whether it struck true or not I couldn't tell, because almost as soon as it left my hoof the pillar beneath me lurched violently.

To my horror, the pillar of rock was crumbling, albeit from the top down. The ground gave way beneath my hooves violently, and sent me tumbling with it. My world was a swirling maelstrom of rock, dry mud, and dust that assaulted my body. I could only flail my hooves in a bid to protect my face and right myself, but trapped in this rockslide I could find no purchase in the rolling mass of earth. My descent slowed, however, the collapse of the pillar no doubt controlled as such by the unicorn so as not to cause me too much damage, before I was dumped unceremoniously and rather painfully atop the pile of smashed debris that remained of the pillar. The bulky contents of the saddlebags I wore jabbed awkwardly into my side where I landed on them.

I wasted no time in clambering to my hooves, despite the pain flaring in my limbs and chest as I did so, and firing a shot in their direction. In fact, so incensed was I at having been assaulted in such a manner I had summoned the energy in my horn and discharged it before I even stood up. The shot missed by quite a wide margin, but a blast of scintillating magic projected at the speed of sound in their general direction was enough to scatter the natives. The missile briefly lit up the area around us, throwing everything into stark relief in the manner of a nearby lightning strike before the darkness of the night reasserted itself. The second shot, more carefully aimed this time, found its mark in the shoulder of one of the native ponies, and he collapsed in a heap like a coat dropped from a peg as this lump of raw magic ripped into his flesh and pulverised his insides. Two down, three more left plus the traitorous blackguard Chipped Urn; I had no idea what he said to them but he must have set them up for this, and by Faust I was going to make him pay.

Drawing my sword in a fluid motion, I charged straight at the unicorn, who had retreated to what he probably assumed was a safe distance. To say that my judgement at that point was clouded by anger would be an understatement, and to say that I was angry at myself for having walked merrily into such an obvious trap even more so. Nevertheless, in spite of the stabs of pain from the multitude of bruises and cuts I had received tumbling down the collapsing pillar of earth, I willed my aching limbs onwards. I could have fled into the Badlands, but the result would have likely been the same, albeit delayed, for this was their territory and it would probably be only a matter of hours before they tracked me down once more. No, there and then, in the few rapid fractions of a second I had to make my choice, I thought that if I could kill the pony I presumed to be their leader then that might induce the others to surrender.

It was not to be, however, as moments after I broke into a gallop with aim to run this unicorn through with my sword before he could use his powerful magic once more, I caught a glimpse of a pair of hooves just before they struck me in the right shoulder. Pain erupted through my body, exacerbated by the blows I had already taken, and the force from the buck sent me tumbling like a ragdoll hurled to the ground. All I could see was a momentary blur of the dusty pale earth and the utter black of the cloud-covered sky, interspersed with the orange glow of the fire. I came to a rest, my head spinning and my entire right side aching terribly, having landed on a particularly bumpy part of the saddlebag, and sharp daggers of pain pierced into my flesh as I struggled to get back to my hooves.

Chipped Urn was standing over me, and the fury inspired by seeing him was sufficient to provide one last burst of energy I needed to stand. Whatever happened, I was determined not to go quietly and that he should suffer in some way for this betrayal. My sword was still wrapped in my telekinetic grip, and without any of the sort of finesse or efficiency of movement my fencing instructor had impressed upon me all those years ago, I thrust it wildly in his direction. The stallion shouted in alarm and stumbled back, raising a hoof to ward off the deadly thrust of the rapier. The blade sunk into his foreleg and he shrieked in pain. I tugged the weapon free, and was rewarded with the sight of blood seeping from the open wound.

The satisfaction I felt in hurting him, potentially killing him if I was lucky enough to nick a particularly vital vein and if their medical science was as primitive as their tribal system implied, was short-lived. Strong hooves forced me to the ground, which I struck snout first, as the other two natives had apparently collected their wits and rushed me. I struggled against them, but it was in vain as they pushed my battered body down into the dirt. In one last attempt to free myself, I dropped the sword and instead drew upon as much magical energy as I could muster, which in truth was not much, but at this range even with my meagre talents in war magic the discharge in the form of a shapeless wall of force would have sent them flying. The pressure in my horn built and built, the soft golden glow of its aura brightening until I could clearly make out the snarling, aggressive expressions on the two ponies holding me down amidst the darkness. They babbled in their language, urgency inflecting the tones of their alien tongue, until one retrieved something from inside his robes.

My head was seized, though I wrenched it back and forth in a vain attempt to free myself. Before I could release the magical energy I had summoned, it all simply evaporated into nothing. The pressure was gone, and with it the ache that comes with drawing upon too much magic too quickly, leaving in its wake a dull sort of numbness. Try as I might, the wellspring of power that always lingered at the edge of a unicorn's senses that I never paid much attention to was gone. It was like being a blind pony groping around for an item that I knew was there, but some malicious individual had placed only just out of reach. The weight upon my horn and the sensation of cool metal upon the bony appendage confirmed my suspicions that they had slipped a null ring upon it.

Rendered powerless, the only thing I could do was shout and curse, but though I loudly promised all kinds of horrific retribution down upon the entire native pony race here that dared to attack me (especially Chipped Urn), such that if my ancestor Coldblood could hear what I said I would do to them even he might consider it to be rather excessive, most of my anger was directed at myself.

How could I have been so stupid? Even now, writing about this with the benefit of a half-century of experience, I can only conclude that I was young and therefore a moron. Yes, my survival instinct had invariably warned me that this was all too good to be true, that I was waltzing proudly into the most obvious of traps that even the most exploitative of all third-rate adventure stories that appear in the cheapest of the pulp fiction magazines would consider to be far too unrealistic. The only possible solution to this conundrum I can think of is that I had not yet learned to trust in those instincts, and that I was so wilfully hopeful that there could be a nice, safe, quick end to the problems that had built up over these past few weeks that I had deluded myself into accepting the first obvious and therefore wrong solution. With all that I had gone through, the universe had still decided that to have just one thing go right for once was too much to ask.

It was over, and the last thing I saw before a rough sack was placed over my head and I was hauled away was Chipped Urn looking on, a pained and somewhat guilty expression on his face that in the flickering light of fire seemed more mocking than it should.

Honour and Blood Part 17

It was some time before the hood was finally removed from my head, and considering that the first thing I saw was a disheveled Shining Armour staring back at me, with his mouth hanging open like a goldfish that had caught sight of its owner holding a tin of fish food from beyond the tank, I might have preferred it to remain there. Cannon Fodder and I had been taken, or dragged rather, to a large underground cavern, where a dozen or so ponies, including Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash, rested against the far wall. It was dark, with the only light coming from a few tiny glowing orbs that floated up to the ceiling. The stench inside was appalling even by the standards that I had grown somewhat accustomed to over the course of my military career, especially in close proximity to the unique aroma of my aide. I would find out its source soon, and I certainly wish that I hadn't.

The two native ponies that had 'escorted' me to where I would be living for the duration of my stay here shoved me into a dank little corner of the cavern next to Shining Armour, who looked on incredulously and with his jaw working uselessly in a vain attempt to articulate his surprise. Before I could even stand back up in defiance of the indignities inflicted upon me, not wanting to give my captors the satisfaction of seeing me sprawled on the ground, a crudely-fashioned iron manacle was placed around the fetlock of my left rear leg. An experimental tug resulted in the clinking sound of metal links, which I discovered were secured into the wall behind me with a sort of anchor drilled into the rock. There appeared to be enough slack to allow some limited movement around the cavern, but not nearly enough for me to get to the exit. Sitting awkwardly on my haunches, I inspected the manacle and found that while it appeared to have been cast by a five year old foal with the barest minimum of parental supervision, a lump of metal with a crude, if effective, lock on it was still enough to keep me restrained.

After they had dealt with me, the natives set to work doing the same to Cannon Fodder, who, after that initial explosion of violence, now accepted our capture with his usual admirable stoicism as though he assumed that this was all part of my master plan. In addition to the two who had brought me here, a few more tribesponies stood and threatened the other captives with spears and swords, while that damnable unicorn looked on with a rather grim expression on his face. I caught sight of Chipped Urn standing at the cavern entrance, which was little more than a fairly narrow tunnel, just wide enough for two ponies to stand abreast. I stared at him, and he limped away, unable to meet my accusing gaze. Oh yes, I will have vengeance, just as soon as I worked out how to get out of here.

The natives babbled in their own language, and it appeared to be a different sort of dialect to that spoken by the Agave Tribe members that I had met earlier. Whatever it was that they said, it culminated in an outburst of cruel, mocking laughter. Mercifully, they left us alone without inflicting any further indignities upon me. No, that was to come later. I noted with interest, however, that the entrance into this place, that I now understood to serve as a sort of prison for this tribe, had no door. It was likely that they simply did not have the raw materials to make barred doors, and judging by the roughness of the manacles and chains attached to each of us, my suspicions that quality iron was a luxury here was confirmed. But as I sat there, dejected and wallowing in the misery of my own failure, that one open path remained a tortuous reminder of freedom, taunting me with its apparent closeness, but never to be reached with the chain about my hoof.

"Blueblood?" said Shining Armour, apparently having collected enough of his wits to speak. "What are you doing here?"

He was without his armour, apparently having been taken from him by our captors who would likely prize the beautifully-crafted enchanted steel barding of the Captain of the Royal Guard. He therefore sat before me naked save for a nullifier ring upon his horn. His usually pristine white coat was covered in dust and dirt from the cavern he had been held captive in. Curiously, I noted that they had allowed Cannon Fodder to keep his barding, though I suspected that they were simply afraid of what they might find if they removed it.

"I was looking for you," I said, forcing a smile that definitely did not want to exist on my face. Leaning forward a bit, I could see Rainbow Dash sitting on her haunches next to him, likewise devoid of any armour or clothing, glaring at me angrily and with her forelegs crossed over her barrel. "And Rainbow Dash, too. It looks like I succeeded."

Shining Armour blinked vacantly at me for a few seconds. "Why?" he asked, a hint of venom colouring the tone of his voice.

"The Royal Commissariat takes a dim view of desertion, Shining Armour, and the Captain of the Royal Guard particularly so," I said firmly, letting a little of my anger at being dumped into this situation show. "And I could hardly face Princess Cadence and Lady Twilight Sparkle again if something were to happen to you."

It was downright cynical of me to exploit his loving devotion to his wife and his sister like that, but the sudden waves of shame that overwhelmed the coltish good lucks that my cousin apparently fell for did at least make me feel slightly better about my current predicament. It might have been cold-blooded and manipulative, and I am more than willing to accept those charges, it was about time that this figurehead of the entire Royal Guard considered the consequences of his actions in the longer term than the span of a few hours or days at most. If I had to feel like my life was falling apart in my hooves as a result of his mistakes, then I was damned if I was going to be the only one. He looked as though he was about to say something, probably apologise judging by the wetness that appeared at the edge of his blue eyes, when Rainbow Dash interrupted him with her usual lack of manners and tact.

"Hey!" she shouted suddenly, probably loud enough to alert the entire tribe. She darted around Shining Armour to face me, or as much as the chain would allow as she strained against it to get closer. "That was uncalled for! You just wanted to sit on your posh, fat flank and do nothing while these ponies have our flag! When some ponies take something important that belongs to you and kills your friends doing it, you don't just accept it, you get over there and make them pay."

I snorted and shook my head, still overwhelmed by her utter arrogance in her belief that she knew better than me or any other officer of the Royal Guard. Somehow, despite being beaten and locked up she still believed that she was in the right here. "And look where that got you and your best friend's brother," I snapped at her. "You rushed in without thinking, just like before, and ruined everything."

"It's still better than doing nothing about it," she barked back. I could see her straining at the chain around her leg like a leashed dog trying desperately to bite at something held just out of reach. Trim, corded muscle strained under sleek, sweat-soaked blue fur in what seemed to be an earnest attempt to break out of her restraint, just so she could get close enough to give me the beating she believed I deserved. Given her physical strength and athleticism, she might actually accomplish both of those things relatively soon.

She continued her rant, angrily pointing at me with a grubby hoof that was in sore need of a hooficure. "When Nightmare Moon captured Princess Celestia and tried to bring about eternal night, did we just lie down and accept it? No! We went into the Everfree Forest and rescued her and Princess Luna. When Discord turned Ponyville into the chaos capital of the world, we didn't just give up at the first sign of trouble. Well, we kind of did, actually, now that I think about it. But we still came through for each other in the end and won."

I let her finish her screed, arching an eyebrow in an affected air of superiority as I did so, as if what she said was somehow beneath my notice. One of the things that one learns growing up as an aristocrat, in addition to how to hold a knife and fork correctly and the correct glasses to decant alcoholic beverages into, is how to put lesser ponies in their place, and that can be just as effectively accomplished with merely a certain look as much as words, or more so perhaps. Conveyed appropriately with sufficient regal bearing, of course, even the most belligerent trade unionist would be reminded of their lowly position on Equestria's great societal ladder. I fear, however, in my bruised, battered, and unwashed state at the time I probably looked rather more constipated than dignified.

"It's not the same," I said, ignoring the complaints in my many bruises as I rose to my hooves. Towering over most ponies as I do generally tends to help, but this was a mare who had faced the literal nightmare of one of the most powerful ponies in existence made flesh, the most feared tyrant in all of recorded history, Nightmare Moon, and had beaten her. She merely stared back, still tugging at her chain; perhaps if I made her angry enough, she might actually succeed in breaking the relatively flimsy iron...

"How is it 'not the same'?" she said, her lips curled back in a rather animalistic snarl. "The way the soldiers talk about you, you're supposed to be some kind of war hero. You saved Rarity and Cadence, you won the Battle of Black Venom Pass and the siege of the fort, so what in the hay happened to you?"

I could tell her precisely what happened; I was merely in the wrong place at the right time, which happened to be rather crucial and violent events that invariably had an impact in what would later be termed 'history', whilst being just conspicuous enough for eye-witnesses to apportion undue credit to me. Everypony who might say otherwise being dead or in no condition to speak certainly helped with that, too. Besides, soldiers' gossip is almost always exaggerated, and more so with each and every new telling, to the point that if you asked a common guardspony about my alleged rescue of Princess Luna from Queen Chrysalis, they might tell you it was I who summoned the pillar of fire from the heavens that scourged the Changeling horde from the face of Equus.

"You make it sound as though I did those things alone," I said, shaking my head. As ever, with the ease of the practiced dissembler I merely spoke the truth, cleansed of a few unfortunate details and clothed in the finery of false modesty, which would only add further credence to my entirely fraudulent reputation for personal heroics. "I had some very good soldiers with me, some of whom didn't make it, and you insult their memory by implying those victories only belong to me. I did my duty, Rainbow Dash, and if my example encouraged others to fight all the harder for the Princesses then that is the only credit I can accept. Rushing off without support, without orders, without a plan is just stupidity."

Rainbow Dash did have the presence of mind to look a little chastened, but her youthful over-confidence soon re-asserted itself. "You mean, what you just did right now. Which is why you're locked up here with us."

Well, she got me there, I have to admit, and I was struggling in my exhausted state to come up with a good retort. Fortunately for me, it was Shining Armour who spared me the indignity of having to admit that I too had done something monumentally stupid (though if I must be completely honest, for honesty is the whole point of this little writing exercise, repeating another pony's ill-conceived and obviously wrong decision, with the full knowledge that it would likely result in utter failure, ranked even higher on the idiocy scale). He rose to his hooves, revealing in the dim light a rather nasty-looking set of bruises and a few cuts that he must have suffered in his capture, and positioned himself between the two of us.

"That's enough from both of you," he said firmly, using that same 'assertive kindness', as I have come to call it, that he used when admonishing enlisted ponies for minor misdemeanours. He looked to me, then Rainbow Dash, and stepped back to address the both of us: "We're in this mess together. We can bicker about whose fault it is when we get out, and I promise everypony here that we will. But until we do, the least we can do is avoid making our stay here any worse than it has to be. Understood?"

Damn him for being right, as usual. I suppose it was that ability to remain relatively calm, level-headed, and optimistic to the point of an almost blind hopefulness, which most find endearing but I find irritating, that earned him his appointment as Captain of the Royal Guard.

"You're quite right, I'm sorry," I said, and Shining Armour's eyes bugged so hard that I feared they might fall out of their sockets. It must have been the first time he heard me apologise, and come to think of it, it had been rather a long time since I've had to do that to anypony. The apology was not entirely sincere, as nothing would have made me feel better about myself than verbally beating Rainbow Dash into submission, but the wall of her stubbornness had, over the course of the past few weeks, revealed itself to be utterly impregnable, so I had to concede that continuing to argue would have been ultimately fruitless. At the very least I could feel a tiny amount of pride, like a flickering candle amidst the all-consuming darkness, that I had been the first to say the single most difficult phrase in the Equestrian language aside from 'I love you' and 'we have run out of wine'.

Rainbow Dash mumbled an apology and went back to sulking. She stared up at a spot in the ceiling, and following her gaze, after she gave me a venomous glare when she caught me staring, I saw a thin shaft of hazy light that emanated like a beam from a tiny hole drilled into the rock. It was a ventilation shaft, I assumed, but from her position, angling her head in a certain way, it might have been possible to see the sky, though it must have still been as dark and bleak as only an overcast night can be. At least our captors were kind enough to ensure that we don't suffocate down here. [Though it appears to still be nighttime, Blueblood mentions a shaft of light. It is likely that this came from an additional light source like a campfire near enough to the ventilation hole on the surface, or even one of the aforementioned glowing orbs inside what might have been an intricate system of air ducts that serviced the entire tribe in the caves]

I looked to the other ponies held captive with us in this cavern. That corner where they sat huddled was therefore a riot of pastel-coloured fur and manes, and a dazzling mosaic of cutie marks ranging from a hoofball to a chess piece to an orchid flower. Most of them were earth ponies, as far as I could tell, with the occasional unicorn and pegasus amongst them too. One or two looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place where I might have seen them before.

"What about them?" I asked Shining Armour, nodding towards the huddled mass of ponies.

Shining Armour glanced behind him, and then looked back to me. "They're from the 1st Solar Guard," he said. "It looks like we weren't the first to come up with this idea."

The deserters that I had overheard General McBridle speaking about earlier, I assumed. So that made three groups of ponies who tried to do exactly the same thing with exactly the same consequences. Perhaps, therefore, there was merely something wrong with ponykind in general, I thought, but kept that to myself. I watched as one of their number, a pegasus stallion with a pale, sky-blue coat and a cutie mark that resembled a spinning tornado, stood up, his chain jangling loudly as he did so, and trotted on over as far as his restraint would allow him to. He stopped when he reached that limit, snapped to attention with the sort of parade ground efficiency that could only have come from a pony who spent the bulk of his adult life in the Royal Guard, and saluted with likewise alacrity.

"Corporal Slipstream, sir!" he barked with a martial stomp of his hoof, as though he was practicing drill back in the Canterlot and not shackled up in a dingy cave in the middle of bloody nowhere.

I arched an eyebrow, not bothering to return the salute. NCOs were supposed to know better, being the conduit through which the authority of the commissioned officer flowed to the great unwashed mass of enlisted soldiers. "Care to explain why you and your friends here decided to go absent without leave?" I asked, sweeping my hoof in direction of said ponies huddled together.

[There is a technical distinction between desertion and absence without leave; with the former the offending servicepony has no intention of returning to the unit, but with the latter they plan to rejoin at a later date. Blueblood appears to use the two terms interchangeably, and we can assume that he was either ignorant of the difference or didn't care to learn.]

Slipstream frowned and tilted his head to one side like a puppy confused about something odd its owner had just done, which I suppose was rather apt when one considers the rather complex relationship between an officer and a private soldier. There was a few seconds delay, as I could see in the subtle movements of the muscles in his brow and cheeks reflecting his very careful consideration of the right sort of answer that would result in the least amount of trouble for him. Yet again, it was another common peculiarity that I had noted in speaking with any common guardspony from any regiment; that expression of vague puzzlement and subtle anxiety, and sometimes terror depending on the exact circumstances, which perfectly illustrated the insurmountable differences in social class between us. Only Shining Armour seemed to be immune to that sort of thing, in my personal experience.

"Same reason as you, sir," he said, having selected what he thought might be the safest option. "We just had to get the Colours back. They jumped on us as we marched here, and took our weapons and armour and shoved us all in here."

"And throw away your careers and potentially your lives in the process?" I said; the exhaustion that sapped the energy from my body and dulled my brain was making me more irritable than usual, or had rather broken my capacity to hold back my annoyance at the series of bad decisions that had led to it in the first place.

"Wouldn't you, sir? If you were one of us?"

Of course I bloody wouldn't; I liked to think that I had more sense than that, even if I was a commoner, but nevertheless here I was, trapped inside a dingy, stinking cavern with a rusty chain around my hoof. I had gone ahead and done it anyway, and I had been mentally kicking myself for it ever since. It was all their fault for me being in this mess in the first place, and that moment in time, looking between this pegasus sergeant and Shining Armour, who stared back with a studied expression of quiet interest in my answer, I thought that facing an angry and upset Cadence might have been a better option for me than trying to rescue her husband. I couldn't say any of this, of course, my undeserved reputation for heroics and, let's face it at this point, base competence, had its benefits but required a consistent level of maintenance with careful words.

"You're right," I lied, "I would have."

It was not the Royal Standard itself that really mattered, it was what it represented. This ancient, moth-eaten, faded sheet of cloth attached to a pointy stick was more than just that; for them it did not just embody the spirits that propelled our nation to greatness, it truly was Equestria, the Princesses, harmony, and friendship for these soldiers, who were all expected to fight and die for those vague concepts. Such symbolism, calculated and cynical in the extreme, was how we, by which I mean officers in general, motivate the ponies under our command to do these things against their best personal interest.

"Look," said Shining Armour, his voice now softer and taking a more conciliatory tone, "we're all tired and angry. It's getting late. We should all get some rest and we can figure out what to do in the morning."

I had to concede that he was right, again, in spite of how those words seemed to clog in my throat when I said it. Resting on my belly, watching the cavern entrance warily in case those natives returned to torment me further, an expectant and tense sort of hush descended. Out of the corner of my eye I would spot a soldier or Rainbow Dash staring at me, usually with expressions of quiet awe or confusion from the former and utter venom from the latter, but they would quickly look away when I turned my head to face them. There was mercifully no further attempt at small talk, at least as far as I was concerned, but the huddled troops would engage in short, whispered conversations about topics I could only guess at.

An attempt to remove the nullifier ring on my horn by trying to pull it off with my hooves revealed that it was completely stuck, as if it had somehow fused with the bony structure. I had thought it was too good to be true that our captors would allow us the full use of our forehooves to pluck off the hateful device, but I was unfamiliar with these unicorn-restraining devices and so that little spark of hope died rapidly. Examining the one on Shining Armour's horn, which I had to do without appearing to be staring invasively at him, I found they were large, crude devices imprinted with a particular set of symbols - a mountain rising out of the earth, a desert flower, a watering can, and a club. I could only guess as to their meaning, but after some thought I decided they were likely the cutie marks of the ponies who could remove them. Whatever it was, both the rings and that unicorn's prowess with manipulating the very earth beneath his hooves implied a certain affinity with the magical arts that neither I nor military 'intelligence' had anticipated.

My watch had stopped some time ago, so I did not know how long I had been there, but after a while I became aware that I needed to engage in that unpleasant activity common to all ponies regardless of status and wealth - using the bathroom (though I'm not sure alicorn princesses do, as I've never been brave enough to ask. I suppose all the cake that Celestia consumes has to go somewhere.) [We do.] When I discreetly asked Shining Armour where the latrine is, he pulled a face and pointed at a large hole in the floor that I hadn't noticed before. So, that was the source of the foul stench that pervaded this room. I could only imagine I didn't see it because my subconscious had blocked it out to spare me the indignity of how my imprisonment here would get far, far worse. You, dear reader, will be thankful that I will likewise spare you the details of the unpleasant and embarrassing business that followed.

Soldiers develop a preternatural ability to fall asleep just about anywhere, no matter how inhospitable, and almost at will. With a job that consisted of both strenuous manual labour and indescribable tedium, coupled with the ever-present threat of an officer with a desire to plaster as many bits of shiny metal and ribbon on his chest sending them off into battle with barely a moment of warning, it is not surprising that they learn to do this out of sheer necessity. It is with some personal irritation that I never acquired this to the same degree, though it might have something to do with the fact I never truly thought of myself as being a soldier. In spite of my inability to sleep, lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling, with my commissar uniform bundled up under my head to serve as an impromptu pillow, at least allowed me the time and space to think things through.

I was alive, and I held onto that one little fact like a foal's security blanket; it meant that on some fundamental level, for as long as my lungs drew breath and my mind could still scheme, then I could get out of this sorry state. This so-called Rat Pony Tribe had seen fit to keep me a prisoner, despite my aide and I having killed two of them in our capture, and our army an indeterminate number in self-defence much earlier, so I came to the conclusion that they must want us alive for some reason. It was more than likely that they had recognised me as somepony very important, no doubt marked out by the ridiculous uniform that Princess Luna had forced me to wear, which was forever a signal to every enemy of Equestria that I had to be killed very quickly. Therefore, I could safely assume they wanted to hold me captive, presumably to ransom back to the Royal Guard in exchange for something they wanted - bits, gems, steel, a promise to leave them alone, or some other such rot. All of that meant they had to keep me both alive and in relatively good health for their plan, whatever it might be, to work. I was, however, under no illusion that my happiness would be very low on their list of priorities, which was confirmed by the distinctly unpleasant conditions they kept me in, but at the very least I could draw some measure of comfort from this realisation.

That, as far as I could see it, left me with two options - sit around and wait for the Royal Guard to do something to secure our release, which, given the state of military at the time I wasn't too confident about; or try to escape myself, and while I did have a number of trained guardsponies, the Captain of the Royal Guard, and bearer of an Element of Harmony at my disposal, I still needed an opportunity to do so. I decided that the best course of action was to do both; we wait patiently for rescue or release, but if the chance for escape presented itself and the risk to my personal health not too great, then we would take it. There was also the possibility that Twilight Sparkle and the other Elements could mount their own rescue, but that would have been far too embarrassing a concept for me to contemplate.

Sleep did come eventually in short fits and starts, such that if it wasn't for a rather unpleasant nightmare featuring a demonic version of Princess Luna manipulating a cemetery filled with headstones via thin strings attached to her hooves, like a grotesque puppet master, I might not have been sure I got any sleep at all. My darker auntie must have been busier with more deserving sufferers that night, which on reflection was a good thing considering how upset she might have been if she saw that my subconscious still viewed her as some kind of monster.

Shining Armour was known for his fairness and his gently-firm approach to enforcing discipline in the ranks, but like everypony in the world he had his limits. The first was making Twilight Sparkle upset, which I found to my very painful detriment when I was a younger teenager; the second was making Cadence upset, which Twilight Sparkle herself discovered when said spouse was impersonated by Chrysalis; and the third I discovered when I was rudely awoken from my shallow, restless sleep by the sound of him shouting.

"Inside the hole, Prize Orchid, not next to it! For pony's sake, how do you expect to be promoted to the sharpshooter platoon with aim that bad?"

There would be no indulgence of my favourite game of 'pretend I'm not really here' that morning; the rude outburst from Shining Armour coupled with that ungodly stench and the roughness of the solid rock beneath me had ruined the potential for any fantasy I might have of being elsewhere. I struggled up to my hooves, finding the night spent lying on the ground in the cavern had not done any of my bruises any good, as dull stabs of pain accompanied almost every movement. Sitting on my haunches and taking in the thoroughly depressing view of the cavern before me, I made a show of yawning and stretching my limbs with a satisfying crack of joints.

"Good morning," I said, keeping my voice quietly optimistic but not so much that it would become irritating to everypony's increasingly frayed nerves.

The response from everypony was muted and despondent, as expected; a mere collective groan that might have sounded like 'good morning' as spoken underwater. It was clear that nopony was in the mood for small talk, which suited me just fine, really, as useless, empty chatter would have only grated on my slowly collapsing sanity. I was, however, eager to discuss our escape, but held back on that on account of not wanting to be overheard by any sentries that might be posted along the tunnel.

Rainbow Dash apparently hadn't picked up on the need for secrecy in planning an escape, or much else of what's going on around her for that matter, for the moment she saw me wake up she blurted out: "So, fearless leader, what's the plan now?" Her voice was soaked in enough sarcasm to float a battleship made out of pure spite. She even pulled on her chain, making the links clink noisily, to emphasise her point, as if somehow I was to blame for this.

I could have responded with something trite like 'getting out of here', which I expect is what she probably thought a noble 'hero' like me might say in a situation like this. The alternative was to tell her to shut up, but with the tendrils of a bad night's sleep still gripping firmly around my brain and fogging my thoughts I did not particularly feel like getting into the argument that the damned mare was trying to goad me into.

"Lord Captain?" I said, keeping my voice to a quiet hush. Shining Armour looked up from his contemplation of the floor by his hooves and swiveled his head to face me. "What are your orders?"

I wasn't really looking for his opinion, but I needed everypony here to remain positive and alert if they were going to get me out of this mess. After having berated him the night before, I felt his morale could stand to be boosted a little by allowing him to return to his former respected position as an officer of the Royal Guard. That was ultimately the whole point of a commissar, as decades later I try to explain to the new cadets in the Academy, not to order or force others, but to gently guide them to the right decision. If they felt as though they came to it themselves then so much the better.

"We watch and we wait," he said, whispering too. He gave me an expectant look, as if waiting for my approval, which I gave with a polite nod of my head. "Pass it down the line to everypony - observe everything our captors do and report back to Commissar Prince Blueblood and me. Then we can come up with a plan to get us out of here."

Perfect. And it seemed to mollify Rainbow Dash a little too. If anything, now that we had a relatively clear enough direction, the captured Equestrian troops seemed to perk up at the 'orders' from their officer. To do nothing was the root of many disciplinary problems within the Royal Guard, but when given an achievable goal to work towards and something resembling a method to get there, then that same energy that would have been wasted sulking and complaining could be put to something far more productive. Keeping me alive, in this case.

It was some time before our captors made another appearance. Half a dozen wretched-looking ponies clothed in dirty rags were marched in under armed guard, and I watched with an air of affected mild curiosity as they split into two groups. The first emptied bags of limp hay in front of each of us, while the second had the rather less enviable task of emptying the latrine hole with primitive shovels for one reason or another [My guess would be for use as fertiliser, given the poor quality of the soil in the Badlands]. Either way, it was all terribly unhygienic and rather put me off this breakfast. I was, however, amused when Shining Armour sincerely thanked the individual who had deposited his meal before his hooves, though he didn't touch it.

They were all silent as they worked, with their heads bowed and not daring to make eye contact even with us, and all the while they were subjected to jeers and taunts from the guards, whose mocking words required no translation into Equestrian to understand their meaning. I saw one such servile taking a little too long in dumping a pile of hay in front of Corporal Slipstream, apparently taking care to keep the food, such as it was, as far away from the latrine pit as possible. His initiative was rewarded with a snarling insult and a rude poke in the rump with the business end of a blunt spear, which drew a trickle of blood to mar an otherwise elegant cutie mark depicting a candle.

Rainbow Dash shot to her hooves when she saw it, wings erect again, apparently incensed at the mistreatment of others going on. The guards looked at her, laughed, but otherwise ignored her, and she slunk back to sit on her haunches in mild embarrassment.

"Slaves?" I posited. I would not put it past these savages to still employ that thoroughly barbaric practice, whereby ponies are bought and sold as mere property.

"Looks like it," said Cannon Fodder, munching on the hay in a manner that did further harm to my weakened appetite. "Poor guys."

I could only agree with my aide as I watched the second group carry out their unpleasant, disgusting task in carrying the effluent away in buckets. It was over quickly, which was some small mercy, but that only marked the start of the humiliations that were about to be inflicted upon me. The slaves slipped out of the cavern at the barked, guttural commands of their masters, who, after having lost their usual source of amusement in abusing the slaves, decided to turn their attention towards us instead.

The guards took up positions around the cavern, menacing us with threatening, albeit clumsy, jabs of their spears. I noticed that the trained and professional guardsponies did not seem to be overly bothered by what they must have seen as very amateur spear-drill, and most carried on either eating their impromptu breakfast, chatting with one another, or otherwise ignoring the natives. The rather blunt and rusty tips did not look as though they would cause much damage on their own, let alone penetrate Royal Guard steel armour, but the possibility of suffering some kind of infection as a result was ever present. A couple of the natives approached me; one held a spear threateningly at my neck while the other unlocked the chain around my hoof. A slap on the rear, which otherwise would have resulted in the blackguard being challenged to a duel he would most definitely lose were we back in civilised Equestria, motivated me to move forwards and follow the guards out of the cavern and into the tunnels.

"There's no need for any of that," I said, amicably enough despite wishing I had a glove on hoof to slap him with. He probably didn't understand me, judging by the vacant expression on his face. "I'm coming along quietly."

Quite why they picked on me I wasn't sure, but I imagined that my regal bearing, unique white fur, and above average height might have marked me out as a pony deserving very special abuse. As it happened, I was wrong on that account, but as I was marched down the tunnels, occasionally shoved and pushed by the guard behind me, it was somewhat reassuring to feel as though I still hadn't lost that special something that marked me out as a stallion of noble heritage.

The tunnels themselves were roughly hewn, and even I, not an expert in such things, could discern the marks in the walls from the tools used to carve this out of the earth. They were quite wide, though the actual width varied from approximately three ponies broad to large enough to host a modest military parade. Illumination was provided by more of these small glowing orbs, some of which floated aimlessly above our heads while others were fixed into place in crude sconces.

I passed a number of other caverns along the way to wherever it was I was being taken to, each containing scenes that I would describe as strikingly normal; one looked to be some kind of school where bored foals were lectured on something or other by an uninterested teacher, another had mares weaving thin cloth, one just seemed to be a space to socialise as native tribesponies sat around within and chatted amicably with one another, and so on. This must have been an entire city underground, sheltered from the merciless heat of Celestia's sun and the predatory Changelings above.

Our path sloped downwards, and my preternatural sense of direction informed me that I was being led down a spiral path that descended a considerable distance below. The background noise of the underground city died away, and the claustrophobic silence, broken only by the sounds of our hooves on the stone and the terse, clipped conversation from my escorts, descended like a fog. Further along, I could discern the sound of metal striking stone, which to me sounded rather like champagne flutes being clinked over and over. With each step this noise grew and multiplied into a cacophony that filled the pit of my empty stomach with a sense of cold dread, and my mind with all kinds of interminable horrors that could await me at the end.

Eventually, I reached my destination after what felt like an interminable amount of walking. My legs and hooves were already aching. I had been led to a cavern that was much larger than the one I had spent the night in, and it was filled with ponies of all colours and races labouring away in a variety of activities that I assumed was related to the business of mining. Such things are not obviously apparent to one such as I who has never lifted a hoof in manual labour in his life, but I made an educated guess based on things that I had overheard the Trottingham soldiers discussing. [The northern, midland, and Bales provinces of the Griffish Isles had a significant mining industry, especially in coal, iron, and tin, until the pits closed. Many of the soldiers in the 1st Night Guards would have had some link to the mines.] At the far end, ponies chipped away at the rock wall with a variety of tools that resembled pickaxes, while others gathered up the broken stone and ore to pile them into crude wagons to be dragged away somewhere. All of this took place under the supervision of more guards armed with spears, who observed their charges with a sense of casual laziness that implied to me that the propensity for slaves to revolt, common amongst all such primitive cultures that engage in this debased practice, was rather low.

I didn't have time to dwell on this, unfortunately, and neither to take in the full vista of industry that stretched out before me. Manual labour, working with my hooves; it was far worse than anything I could have ever conceived of. My escorts guided me, well, pushed and shoved I suppose is a better description, over to the far wall, weaving around the other working ponies along the way. There, facing the vast edifice of chipped and cracked stone, I was shackled to a single length of chain that bound all engaged in the onerous and infamously back-breaking job of breaking rock. A pickaxe, which is a grandiose term for what was effectively a length of wood the approximate size and girth of a pegasus' foreleg with a blunt chunk of metal embedded in one end, was thrust into my hooves. I looked at it, affecting an expression of quiet amusement in spite of the sickening fear that was still writhing in my gut.

"Just what do you propose I do with this?" I said, waving the crude implement as though I had no idea as to its true purpose.

Only one guard remained to supervise me, apparently having drawn the shortest straw while the others found something else to do. A short, thin earth pony with a blunt muzzle and wide, open eyes - he could only have been a teenager - stared up at me with an expression that belied a certain amount of trepidation. I decided to have some fun with him, and out of a sense of aristocratic arrogance I was going to make damned sure that his time with Yours Truly was going to be a struggle. On a more productive level, in accordance with Shining Armour's scheme, it would be good to test how far these natives would go in enforcing discipline.

The guard pointed at the wall next to me, and then mimed the action of striking the pick into it with a hoof. "Dig," he said, in blunt, accented Equestrian.

"You're kidding," I said. "You're kidding, right? Do you know who I am?" Under normal circumstances I absolutely despise that phrase; if a pony is important enough for others to recognise them on sight then those six little words are entirely unnecessary. In this case, however, it was certain that he had absolutely no idea with whom he was dealing, but I was determined to defy my captors in as many small, petty, and annoying ways as possible until I could escape.

"You are slave," he said, grinning to reveal a row of yellowed teeth that made me blanch at the sight of them. It looks like he understood Equestrian rather more than he initially let on, and he had evidently realised that I was mocking him. I was rewarded with a rather rude shove in the direction of the wall, followed by an aggressive wave of his spear in my direction. "Dig!"

A small crowd of other guards and even a few of the slaves gathered around us to watch my petty act of minor rebellion. Among their number I saw a vision; a unicorn mare of uncommon beauty who stood apart from the unwashed slaves and ill-mannered guards. Her slim, sensuous frame, though plump in the right places, was accentuated by a delicately thin, gauzy cloth draped over her curves. Her coat was a dusky brown colour and her mane black, which made the desert flower cutie mark on her pert rump and her striking magenta eyes stand out all the more. Put her in a nice dress and a chapeau and she would not have looked too out of place at the Grand Galloping Gala. Those eyes locked onto mine, and our gaze held across the gulf between us, before she broke off and turned to the filly attending by her side. Amidst the slightly quietened sound of the mining operation around us, I could make out a few words in their native tongue - "I want that one."

It's never a good sign when anypony says that about anypony else. She must have been their equivalent of a noblepony, I assumed, eyeing up a rather attractive new slave to take away for some depraved activities later. Nevertheless, I decided that I would have to deal with that later, whatever it was. One thing at a time, I reminded myself, and that was engaging in the noble and ancient art of shirking one's duties - an activity I had all but perfected in high school.

"Manners cost nothing, you know," I said to the guard, affecting the most sickly sweet and condescending voice I could manage (which is considerable with the benefit of years of elocution lessons from a very young age). I turned to face the wall, and with pick in hoof I started to half-heartedly chip away at the rock without any clear indication of what I was supposed to accomplish - was I looking for ore or helping them build an extension? All the while, I could feel that mare's hungry gaze on my flanks as I 'worked'.

So maybe that's what being leered at feels like.

Honour and Blood (Part 18)

My very first experience with manual labour (not counting the time my butler was off sick and I had to iron my own shirts) confirmed my suspicions that I would hate it, and I could not understand how anypony would willingly do such things unless forced to. The whole experience was exhausting, tiring, painful, and entirely undignified; Faust gifted unicorns with magic and the horns to use it for a reason, and to demand that I engage in this thoroughly unpleasant activity simply went against the natural order of things. Though I put the barest minimum of effort into this work, I felt about ready to give up after a few minutes of this ridiculous activity. I swung the pick, it struck the rock with an unpleasant jarring sensation that travelled the full length of my foreleg, whereby it then required a few good tugs to free it, then repeat. Over and over again. Ad nauseum. Once in a while, just to break up the monotony of it all, a lump of rock would fall free, sometimes right on top of my other hoof, then another slave would canter on over to take it away so the tedious work could continue.

Speaking of the other slaves, they were all a rather downcast and sorry bunch. Neither one on either side of me on this chain line was interested in conversation; even when I clumsily attempted to rile up their thirst for freedom in their native language, my attempts were met with dismissive grunts or bewildered looks. At any rate, my initial idea of inciting a slave revolt, much like the ones that used to occasionally threaten the Roamans in pre-Equestrian times, died a very quick and quiet death. I wondered if they had been drugged, or if this practice had been going on for so long that the very concept of rebelling against their masters had been so thoroughly stamped out.

I expect there are other explanations; that with the scarcity of resources and the ever-present threat of Changelings it was necessary for everypony in the tribe to work together without griping about such things as working conditions and fair pay, like the modern Equestrian peasant, as such things would only weaken the tribe. But as I worked away, stopping when the guards weren't paying enough attention to me, I could not for the life of me understand why my comments about rising up, turning our picks on our brutal masters, and starting a revolution were falling on deaf ears.

"Come now," I would say, in my rather clumsy approximation of their dialect. "Workers of Equus, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains." I had lifted the phrase from a pamphlet that I had previously confiscated from a soldier with delusions of vast societal upheaval some time before, but apparently coming from me, a prince, I imagine it did not come across as entirely sincere. The slave next to me shrugged and carried on with his onerous task, and I realised that I evidently could not rely on them for help when my breakout would begin. 'Scabs', I believe is the correct term for them.

After a few hours of this I was certain I was going mad - the sheer monotony of it all, the endless noise that filled my ears and drilled straight into my brain, the growing aches in my foreleg, and the utter lack of any kind of engagement from my fellow miners. I was not at all claustrophobic, having earned my cutie mark in the tunnels beneath Canterlot, but even then the ever-present rock hanging above and the press of ponies all around me made me long for the open sky, illuminated by the bright sun or the cold moon I did not care. The air tasted stale, and was rank with the sweat and odour of the unwashed slaves and guards. It all felt as though it was clogging in my throat with every laboured breath.

I was exhausted by the time this all finished - my muscles, such as they were, ached terribly, as did my joints, and I was about ready to just curl up and take a well-deserved nap right there. A shrill whistle cut through the sound of the activity around me, and it all ceased with a certain abruptness that felt very alarming. Simultaneously, the miners all placed their tools down on the ground, and the other slaves finished up their tasks of clearing away the displaced rock and mined ore. The guards removed the chains one by one, and the slaves were escorted from the cavern. I began to follow, stretching my tired limbs, my flesh feeling as though it was on fire with each movement, when a tug on my tail stopped me.

I turned around to face the impudent peasant who dared to do something so disrespectful to one of royal blood, but when I saw it was that mare with the deep magenta eyes grinning impishly at me, the tirade of abuse I was about to inflict died a dignified death. She was even more beautiful up close; the lack of any make-up or extravagant mane-styles, which I was used to with the sort of noble-mares who normally fought to get my attention, only seemed to increase her dusky allure, and she certainly seemed to know how to use it to turn a stallion into soft clay at her hooves.

"Come with me," she said in Equestrian. Her command of our language was far better than what I had heard from the other natives here, though that curious accent was still there.

[The variety of dialects and even entirely different languages used by the disparate tribes of ponies, Diamond Dogs, and other creatures in the Badlands had led to Equestrian being used as the lingua franca for trade and diplomacy as much with each other as with Equestria out of necessity. It is considered normal even in the most isolated tribal groups for their leaders and traders to be fluent enough in Equestrian to hold a conversation with one of my little ponies.]

One of the guards said something in protest, gesticulating to me with the point of his bronze gladius. The mare did not even look at him when she said a few quiet words, and whatever they were it certainly shut him up. He could only look on incredulously as this strange mare stepped in front of me, brushing her long, soft tail against my chest in a deliberate manner as she did so, and walked elegantly onwards into the tunnels with a defiant and domineering swing of her hips.

Summoning the most arrogant smirk possible to my lips, I gently grasped the stallion's wrist and lowered it and his sword back down to the ground. "Careful," I said, "you'll have somepony's eye out if you keep waving that thing around." To my surprise, he actually complied, and stared blankly at me with a hint of trepidation in his wide-open eyes. It did occur to me that I could have grabbed the weapon and run him through with it, but being surrounded by at least a dozen natives armed with weapons both metal and arcane, and slaves who would probably pounce on me too if it meant extra rations or a reprieve from the constant abuse, I would have been cut to ribbons before I could even cry 'freedom!'.

I followed the mare out of the cavern and into the tunnels, though one of the guards had taken it upon himself to follow me, presumably to make sure that I didn't get any funny ideas about escaping. Up through the same spiral pathway we went, and then after some time navigating the maze of tunnels and smaller chambers we three emerged into a vast cave.

Before us was a grand boulevard, something that would not have looked out of place in any modestly sized town in civilised Equestria. Flanking this broad thoroughfare filled with ponies going about their normal business were squat, square buildings with flat roofs. Their thick, stone walls were covered in plaster and were whitewashed, with shades ranging from a dusty pale straw colour to brilliant white. A few had elegant floral patterns painted on their surfaces, apparently to advertise the manner of business conducted within but whose purposes I could only guess at this stage. The city was a sprawling mess of these small buildings inside a massive cavern, approximately half the size of Canterlot's Old City district, [The original foundations of Canterlot, which existed before the capital was moved there from the Castle of the Two Sisters following its destruction during the Nightmare Heresy. Prince Blueblood owned property there and a good deal of his income came from charging rent] with a veritable rats' nest of alleyways and nooks between them. They were quite densely packed together, with some apparently having built extensions over one another in curious, intrusive ways that I could only imagine generated a great deal of animosity between neighbours.

The fatigue that sucked the strength from my limbs faded, as the sights and sounds before me seemed to invigorate my much abused body from within. We carried on into the city. The mare adopted an elegant pace that was determined yet open to variety, as though she had to bring me somewhere in particular in a relatively short time, but not so urgently that she could not disappear down one of those quaint little side streets if she spotted something that tickled her fancy at the end of it. It also allowed me to drink in my surroundings; the visual pleasures of civilisation, with its accompanying noise and smells both exotic, enticing, and nauseating, and thousands of ponies each with their own story to tell striving to live their lives as best they could.

This main road itself stretched out before us into the heart of the settlement, which was dominated by a larger building that towered over its smaller brethren. There was a single, rectangular block that stretched about thirteen storeys high, with two broader wings on either side of it. A sky-blue dome capped the central tower, atop which was a flagpole where a red sheet of cloth hanged limply in the still air. A crude image of a rat was painted on this alleged 'flag' with black paint. [The name 'Rat Pony Tribe' is an inexact translation. The small mammal that the tribe is named for is a jerboa, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a desert rat]. Above the entire town was rock where I would have expected the sky to be, with illumination provided for by daylight streaming through a series of large holes drilled into its surface. Despite the relatively wide open space, the sensation that this vast ceiling might collapse down upon us in a lethal hail of falling stone was hard to shake, and the moment the thought had entered my mind it remained there to stop me ever feeling truly comfortable down here.

As I was led down this street, noting that the crowds parted quietly and respectfully to allow the strange mare to walk unimpeded, I struggled to reconcile the crudely carved out tunnels and caverns I had seen earlier with the more complex and refined architecture before me. The more I looked, the more that I saw places where these cube-like buildings were patched up or extended with rather more primitive masonry, whose haphazard and lumpen construction meshed awkwardly with the near-perfect geometric structures. I came to the conclusion that this must have been an ancient city, long abandoned and buried in the earth, but excavated and occupied by this Rat Pony Tribe.

When we emerged into a modestly-sized square, rather like a piazza in a Bitalian town, I saw a tall obelisk about ten hooves tall. Its ancient, whitewashed surface was absolutely covered in a maddening array of strange pictograms carved into the stone; some were identifiable as Haygyptian hieroglyphs, but others were merely an unpleasant jumble of circles and lines placed seemingly at random and without any particular heed to proper and readable typography. Cresting the very tip of this pointed pillar was a symbol of a stylised pony skull, rather primitive in its design with an almost circular cranium and two oversized pits for eye sockets, and it was framed in a carved circle. Trailing beneath it like streamers were three straight lines, giving one the impression that this skull, the symbol of the inevitability of death common amongst all cultures across the world regardless of race or creed, as if buried in the collective subconscious of all mortal beings, was in some way ascending from below.

My stomach lurched when I recalled where I last saw that particular symbol and those weird pictograms; in the buried temple-tomb complex beneath Fort E-5150, from which the Changelings had emerged to massacre the Diamond Dog occupiers and again to nearly do the same to us. Back then I was ignorant of what that symbol meant, and looking back now I wish I remained as such, but nevertheless it still provoked a peculiar, primal fear within me that was all too happy to take up space in my hindbrain next to my more immediate problems.

We carried on, and I thoroughly enjoyed the delightfully callipygian view ahead of me granted by the gently swaying flanks of the mare leading me. She must have sensed my leering gaze, for she glanced over her shoulder and soft, knowing smile came to her lips. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment at having been caught, and I tore my eyes away from that display and turned my attention back to my surroundings. At least I was not punished with a slap or, considering my prior treatment by the natives here, being beaten by my escort. We must have reached the commercial district of this city, for I saw stalls selling strongly spiced food, fruit, vegetables, and assorted craft goods lining this street. The air was filled with these exotic scents, and likewise the clamouring noise of the traders crying out to be noticed by the wandering ponies around them. If it was not for the guard with the sword behind me, who stared at Yours Truly with a look that implied he was thinking very hard about the best way to impale me with said weapon through my rear end, and the implied promise of some fun with the mare when we arrived at our destination, I might have wandered off to explore on my own accord.

I found myself longing to be a flâneur in this strange and exotic underground city; to sit by the side of the boulevard with a dry gin martini for company and just out of the way of everypony else so as not to be a nuisance, and to merely watch and observe the inhabitants of this place as yet untouched by Equestrian culture, occupying the same space as some long-dead civilisation, go about their daily business. And if the dry gin martini, the greatest contribution to world culture to ever come out of Manehattan, had yet to make it to this distant corner of the world, then I would either have to teach them or find an appropriate local substitute. An urge to wander through these intricate streets and alleys, to find the hidden bars, the gambling dens, or the other places of ill-repute that inevitably spring up where large numbers of ponies congregate, overtook me. I resolved to return after this was all over, if I could ever escape in the first place and if war between Equestria and this tribe could be avoided that is. I could even write another guide book, and one that would surpass my first in terms of decadence and controversy.

Watching the city simply exist around me, with its multitude of ponies going about their daily business with nary a thought about the captured prince walking amongst them, had enraptured me to the point that when the mare had stopped before a townhouse that was somewhat larger than its neighbours I hadn't noticed. I walked straight into her, gently nudging her forward as my chest bumped against her flanks. She looked back and up at me with a somewhat shocked expression, which slowly and almost luxuriously transformed into a lascivious grin. I stepped back, feeling an odd tingle on my fur where her rear touched, and realised that it had been a long time since I had been in quite that close contact with a mare, without having to come to some sort of arrangement about payment first, that is.

She spoke to the guard, and whatever it was made him rather upset. He protested, babbling some aggressive-sounding words and pointing at me. The mare shook her head, turned up her nose in a dismissive, aristocratic sense that I deduced must be common amongst nobility regardless of culture, and made a shoo-ing motion with her hoof. The guard then mumbled something, and then reluctantly took a position next to the open door, sulking.

The mare pushed the door open and slipped inside. I stood there, trapped between a desire to go in and see just what all the fuss was about or to take my chances and flee into the crowds. The former, which I acknowledge was merely an expression of lust triumphing over rationality, won over, and I crossed the threshold. The guard glared at me, and silently drew a straight line across his neck with the tip of his hoof. There was only one way I could respond, and that was with a cheeky grin and a wink, before shutting the door behind me.

Inside was an oasis of relative calm, away from the noise of the city outside and the horrors of captivity and slavery in the tunnels and caves below. The ground floor was a single, open plan room, divided between a living area at the front and a kitchen at the back. It was all sparsely furnished, with but a few cushions scattered over a floor that was covered only with a selection of rugs each intricately woven with geometric patterns in bright colours. The bare stone walls were decorated with hanging tapestries, each with similar designs as the rugs and no two identical.

Sprawled lazily atop a pile of cushions, the mare observed me with eager eyes. "You are not like the others," she said, in between delicately placing dates in her mouth. "The other slaves, I mean. Look at you there, standing so tall and defiant, where they are meek and cowed and oh-so-desperate to please their masters." She puffed her chest out, apparently in imitation of my rather rigid and awkward stance by the door, through which I planned to flee should the exciting things she did with her servants prove to be less of the sordid but ultimately pleasurable sort and more of the murdering kind. "What is your name? You have one, no?"

"I am Blueblood," I said, once again leaving my regal title absent.

The mare rose from her seat and trotted on over, appraising me with her gaze. A collection of small scratches that were scabbing over on my withers, earned in the fight the night before that led to my capture, caught her attention, and elicited a small giggle from her. "Yet you bleed red like the rest of us!"

I snorted. "Well, that's the first time I've heard that," I remarked dryly. "Today." And so I discovered yet another cultural touchstone between Equestrians and the native Badlands ponies was that bloody joke that has haunted me for my entire life.

My sarcasm was apparently lost on her. "My name is Dahlia," she said, leaning in rather too close to me. I could feel her warm breath on my chest as she stared up into my eyes. Hers smouldered fiercely like hot coals in a pit. "Are all you Equestrians so... so..."

She let the words trail off, clearly expecting me to complete her sentence with another cringe-inducing attempt at seduction. 'So handsome', perhaps, or 'so tall' given the diminutive stature of most of the natives I have come across. I imagined this kind of talk might have sounded better in her native tongue, and I would get to know her native tongue quite well in the coming hour, but dear Faust, I wondered if this act ever really worked on any stallion. Looking at her, however, with the soft proportions of her face and slim frame that was plump in all the right places, she probably didn't need her act to bed them.

"Where is this leading?" I said, trying to sound just bored enough.

Dahlia blinked in shock, and stammered a little before regaining her composure with the expert alacrity of a pony used to navigating strict social hierarchies and their accompanying rituals and rules. "So direct, then," she said with a grin. "And direct I shall be, too. I am bored and I have nothing to do. When I am bored, I go to the mines and pick a slave, a pretty one, and then I bring them here and then we have some fun. Once it is over, they go back to their lives and I go back to mine until I am bored again. It is a simple arrangement that works well for all involved."

I had suspected as much from the outset, though a lingering portion of my mind felt that 'fun' was still open to some degree of interpretation other than the most obvious. Still, even if it meant a nice game of backgammon then it was still better than being thrown back into that dingy cave with Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash again. In fact, most things would be preferable to that. "I see," I said, keeping my voice measured. "And so you picked me."

She shrugged, and tossed her head back with an imperious swish of her mane. "It is like I said, you are not like the other slaves; you do not have your will broken by a lifetime of servitude, and you remember what life is like without a chain about your hoof. A quick rut with a slave is satisfying enough, but I tire of their sycophancy. I want a real stallion."

So in the absence of one she settled for me, I thought. Dahlia turned on her heels and walked up the flight of stairs, evidently trying to entice me to follow with a deliberate swish of her flanks with every step. She stopped around halfway, and looked back at me over her shoulder, her eyes half-lidded. "You still believe yourself to be a free pony, so I will allow you the choice. You may follow me, or, if your honour forbids you, you may leave and my guard will take you back to your cave."

It was all rather too transparent and convenient; I've had more than my fair share of mares trying desperately to seduce me with varying degrees of success (including a certain unicorn from Ponyville with delusions of marriage and princess-hood), so I like to think I've managed to work out how to differentiate between those who just want to sleep with a prince of Equestria and brag about it, and those who are merely trying to advance some kind of agenda. It turned out that my suspicions were completely right in the worst possible way, but I'll allow you, the reader, to discover that as I did.

What I will tell you now, however, was that it was much closer than you probably imagine. My youthful reputation as something of a philanderer and hedonist is not entirely unfounded, though stories of my exploits and tastes became more and more exaggerated until it was eclipsed by my less-deserving reputation for personal heroics. I was hardly one to say 'no' to a willing mare, and I dare say other stallions, or indeed other mares, would be able to say otherwise in my position without lying, but my instincts for self-preservation were engaged in a screaming match with my libido. Paranoia shouted louder than lust, and I was about to thank her for the offer and leave when my stomach chose that exact moment to growl noisily.

Dahlia laughed that melodious laugh of hers, and my cheeks flushed hotly with embarrassment. I hadn't eaten since the previous night and I had just done what might be classed as heavy labour. "I have fresh fruit in the bedroom," she said, before languidly ascending up the staircase and slipping through the door at the top.

Hunger voted with lust and paranoia lost, and so I trotted up the steps to follow.

***

A gentlecolt never tells or brags, even in this most private of memoirs. Whoever reads this will have to rely on their own depraved imaginations [Of that, I am thankful], but I will only state that what took place there was merely a mutual exploration of a shared, shallow attraction. Puritans out there will likely condemn me for this, and indeed have done so many times in the past before I 'grew out' of sleeping around, but I have always ignored their pathetic whining; there is nothing wrong with two adult ponies indulging in a mutually pleasurable activity, it is how one deals with the accompanying swell of emotion in the lead-up and the aftermath that truly separates the ladies-stallion from the bounders and cads of the world.

There was a little more to it, at least on my part. Whether intended or not, what Dahlia and I had done together marked the first kindness anypony had displayed toward me for a considerable length of time. After what I had been through over the past few years, it surely was not too much to ask for me to indulge in the comfort granted by bedding a willing mare, especially without the stain of prostitution that comes with visiting the many brothels that had sprung up in the wake of Army Group Centre's stilted advance. The moments after detente had been reached were, in a way, more rewarding than the act itself. I lay there on the comfortable bed with my limbs wrapped around her smaller frame, holding her against my barrel, and I wondered if remaining here would actually be to my advantage.

The bedroom was rather modest, especially compared to the extravagant boudoirs of young noble-mares that I was used to. The lack of any personal items implied to me that this place was not a permanent residence, but likely a property away from Dahlia's home to be used for the purposes of secret liaisons, much like my apartment in Canterlot's Old City. There was a large and comfortable bed upon which we both lay, a wooden dresser, a few more wall hangings depicting neat geometric designs, and a cabinet up against one wall. An empty plate that half an hour ago held a small pile of dates and citrus fruit rested atop the dresser, the fruit having been hungrily devoured by me before we began. Light streamed through the gaps between the thin curtains of the large open window, basking the room in a peculiar sort of twilight-like ambience that actually appeared to heighten one's senses when in the delicate act of dipping one's biscuit [I'm not sure either, I can't say I've ever heard of that particular euphemism].

"So," I said, after the silence had reached a point where it ceased to be comfortable. Dahlia turned her head and shifted her body in my embrace to look up at me, smiling quite happily as she did so. "Who were you trying to get back at?"

Her smile was marred by a slight frown of confusion, before she regained her composure. I loosened my grip on her as she squirmed to turn her body to face mine. "What do you mean?" she asked, stroking along the line of my jaw affectionately with a hoof.

"I'd quite like to know who I may be duelling for your honour soon," I said. "It's only polite."

Dahlia laughed. "It is a common occurrence where you are from, then?" she said. "My current husband, he is the chief of this tribe but he does not care for me."

"Then he's missing out." The itching in my hooves returned, or perhaps it had been there all this time and I had been much too distracted by more immediate pleasures to take heed of the warning that something was wrong.

"It was, how you say, a marriage of convenience," she continued, her voice growing rather more plaintive. "My first husband, Bludgeoner, was chief before him, but he died. Your soldiers killed him at the battle where we took your flag. He was an earth pony, a big one, with a big club made of metal that he always used in battle. You might have seen him if you were there. Then his brother, Earthshaker, became chief and took me as his wife to secure his position. I went along with it because I did not want to give up the life of luxury."

A big earth pony with a large metal club. It was probably a coincidence, I thought, but that sounded far too much like the one whose brains were dashed out and pulverised into jelly by my hooves at that awful battle. Naturally, I held my tongue at that potential revelation, as few things would sink a freshly blossoming relationship faster than disclosing that I might have been the one who killed her first husband, even if it was entirely in self-defence. I couldn't help but feel at least a little bit guilty, though; this whole affair, and being forced to fight and kill other ponies as opposed to Changelings, left a distinctly malodorous stain upon my conscience, which, yes, it turns out I really do have.

"But this Earthshaker chap doesn't truly appreciate you?" I posited. She would hardly be the first mare in a noble family obligated by social position to marry somepony they hated to keep them from a life of penury.

I felt her shrug her shoulders. "He thinks only of forcing Equestria from our lands," she said. "Everypony thought he was mad for even suggesting a confrontation with your country, but now that he has you and the other Equestrians and even the Captain of the Royal Guard, he might even be able to do it without violence."

"Or he'll force Princess Celestia's hoof and bring war," I said, feeling an odd mixture of vindication that my suspicions were correct and uneasiness about its potential implications. I didn't much enjoy being a playing piece on the great board game of international politics. "I'd rather it didn't come to that."

"And what of you?" she asked, apparently trying to change the subject. "Is there a mare waiting for you in the north?"

Several, actually, but she probably wasn't thinking of the ones I regularly fooled around with over the course of the various galas and parties that made up the Season [The name given to the period in Spring and Summer where the elite of Equestria attend various social events in Canterlot, including the Wonderbolts Derby, the Grand Galloping Gala, the Canterlot Garden Party, and culminating in the Royal Swanifying Ceremony. Though it has become more egalitarian in recent years, at the time Blueblood is writing about, it was intended for noble families to present sons and daughters who have come of age so they may find a spouse]. Settling down with just the one mare, thus surrendering my title as Canterlot's most eligible bachelor to perform my regal duty of producing an heir to my noble line was, as Spike might put it, a problem for future-Blueblood, but, my life being what it is, by the time that sense of stability was starting to look attractive to me, Princess Luna had already swept down from on high and placed the commissars' cap upon my head.

"No," I said. "I remain blessedly single."

Dahlia bit down on her lower lip, and began tracing small circles in the fur on my barrel with a hoof. "You could stay here with me," she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper. "You'd be my personal slave; no longer confined to the mines and that cave, instead you'll live with me in the palace, attending personally to me and my needs."

The idea was certainly tempting, particularly after the rather vigorous activity the two of us had just indulged in. I would not be free here, that much was certain, but I would still be fed and taken care of in return for keeping this nymphomaniac satisfied. On the whole it sounded rather pleasing. Out there, back on the surface, was only the war; where boredom and tedium awaited, where the unfair amount of responsibility and obligation rested upon my weakened shoulders, and all with the ever-present threat of a needless and undignified death looming over me like a black cloud ready to burst. That was not true freedom in the slightest either, and at the very least I would be much safer down here with Dahlia.

She would soon tire of me, however, once the novelty of owning an Equestrian slave wore off. Dahlia did not strike me as the sort to want to maintain such relationships, being driven by what appeared to be the selfish pursuit of her own pleasure that came with being a spoilt noblemare. I had seen it all before, when lesser nobles and gentry attempt to worm their way up the social ladder, only to be discarded and disgraced like last season's fashion when they ceased to hold any interest to their higher-born paramours. Except here the consequences would be rather more disastrous than a mere loss of dignity and respect. My fate would once more be that of a butterfly trapped in a gale, buffeted from one potential horror to another. Say what one will about the Royal Guard, at the very least they had a certain level of job security and a nice fat pension at the end should one survive long enough to see it. Besides, I was forgetting who I was: a prince of Equestria, and I was damned if I was going to spend the rest of my life in servitude to a sex-crazed mare, despite how appealing that might sound on the surface. My mind was made up, and was already working on how I might exploit this new connection with Dahlia, apparently a mare of some worth in this tribe, to my advantage to aid in my escape.

"Sorry," I said, stroking a hoof delicately through her short mane. "I don't think I can. The Princesses would be most displeased if I abandoned my oaths. In fact, I plan to escape." Specifically, Princess Luna would tear me up into tiny thin ribbons if she found out I willingly gave up my duties as a commissar for the first native mare who slept with me.

Dahlia sighed in disappointment. "This is about that stupid flag of yours, isn't it? You would risk your life for a flag?"

"I'm a soldier, it's what I signed up to do." A massive, colossal, skyscraper of a lie, but it was the sort of thing the bluff old soldier I pretended to be was supposed to say. Dahlia still looked confused, and I don't expect that this hedonistic, sheltered mare could ever understand the concepts of duty and honour (I understand them on principle, just not why I should be the one beholden to such ideals at great personal risk), but I tried to explain anyway. "The Royal Standard has been present for every important event in Equestria's history - its founding, the wars for its very survival against heathens and gryphons and monsters, even the Nightmare Heresy and the Reconstruction."

"And when Equestria invaded the lands of our ancestors, murdered our ponies, raped our mares, burned our villages, and banished the survivors here, your flag was still there," she said coldly. [All sides were guilty of committing what would be called war crimes today, but such things were merely considered an acceptable part of warfare at the time. However, I still recall these events with considerable personal shame for having allowed them to happen. The concept of jus in bello, justice in war, would only be codified following the horrors of the Nightmare Heresy.]

I confess ignorance of such matters, having rather little interest in history beyond that of my illustrious family and its various feuds with other noble houses. The past was barbaric and violent, even ours, and these events might have been more than a thousand years old but for some of these natives they might as well have happened yesterday. "And if you want to make sure that doesn't happen again, then all of us need to be freed with our flag. We could sort out a treaty and work together against the Changelings. I could even be Equestria's official ambassador to your tribe, and we could still get together for some special, one-to-one negotiations."

"I'd like that," said Dahlia, proffering a small smile that caused an odd twinge in my heart when I saw it. No, I couldn't allow myself to get too attached to her at this early stage, not when I was trying to escape, but damn me if it wasn't difficult.

"You know," I said, moving my hoof down to her chin and lifting it gently. "There are more things we could do together if you removed this damned ring from my horn."

Dahlia chuckled, and playfully swatted at my chest in mock admonishment. "Nice try, Blueblood."

The bedroom door swung open violently, with such force that it left a rather unpleasant crack in the whitewash where it struck the wall. Dahlia shrieked in surprise, and scrambled out of my embrace with a flurry of flailing hooves to stumble out of the bed. Standing in the open doorway was that unicorn, the one who had presided over my capture and whose magic manipulated the very earth beneath our hooves. It was then that the realisation struck me; this very pony staring at me aghast as though he was mentally willing me to burst into gory shreds right there, who had tossed me around with magically summoned clods of earth and stone, was Dahlia's husband and chief of the Rat Pony Tribe, Earthshaker.

The expression of a husband discovering his wife in bed with another stallion (or more than one), was one that I had seen before, and often enough for that look to have become readily identifiable to me. It was a mixture of betrayal, disgust, anger, horror, and sadness; all of those played out over Earthshaker's face, before he eventually settled on the more usual righteous indignation. Unlike the previous times I had been caught in this compromising position, I could not simply open up my chequebook and start scribbling down numbers of increasing size until he promised to be quiet, nor could I challenge him to a duel for this 'lady's' honour. In short, I was completely and utterly doomed.

A yellow glow enveloped me before I could even think about making a break for the window and leaping to temporary freedom. Despite Dahlia's loud, impassioned protests not to hurt me, I was lifted from the bed and hurled none-too-gently onto the floor. The unicorn regarded his spouse with a disgusted sneer as she rushed towards him, apparently begging for some form of mercy, which was repaid with a back-hoofed slap that sent her recoiling to the floor.

"Bitch," he spat, then he turned to me with a look that could rot an apple in a single, terrified heartbeat. "You. Not enough that you violate our lands, you must do the same with our mares." Dahlia scrambled to her hooves and backed up into the corner of the room, staring at the two of us with wide, terrified eyes.

The guards who had accompanied Earthshaker then seized me by my forelegs, hoisted me up, and I was dragged out of the room, down the steps into the living room, and out into the streets once more. This time, there was no sense of awe and mystery as I saw the city pass by, only a cold, shivering terror that struck me dumb and sapped any energy I might have had left to try to escape. The crowds parted, but this time it appeared to be out of a sense of fearful anticipation than respect. Some jeered at me, and I imagine it was some small mercy that I could not understand about half of the mocking words hurled in my direction.

Each singular second of my journey I was forced to imagine the horrific fates that awaited me at the end. If they engaged in the barbaric practice of slavery, then there was no telling what kind of further cruelty they were capable of inflicting upon undesirables; our own past, for example, is filled with such horrors as beheadings, the firing squad, and the iron maiden to name a few. Even in this more enlightened age flogging was still considered an acceptable form of punishment in the Royal Guard. Whatever it was, it was unlikely to be quick and painless, and judging by the twisted look of barely-controlled rage on Earthshaker's face I could not rely on him having enough restraint to remember that, if he wanted to ransom me in exchange for Equestrian withdrawal, then I should be kept alive and as undamaged as possible. The only restraint he seemed to have was enough to delay my punishment a little longer, as opposed to doing to me what I might have done to his brother the moment he saw me in bed with his mare.

I always knew my taste in mares would get me into trouble one day, but never quite like this. I was taken to another piazza-like square much like the one I had passed through before, and in the centre was what looked like a modest bandstand where the previous one had an obelisk. There were two pillars of stone set in the centre of this raised circular platform; plain, standing about thrice the height of a pony, and unadorned except for a shackle dangling from a chain set into the very top of each column. The very sight of them inspired a sudden and overwhelming terror in me. No longer able to hold back, I cried out and tried in vain to pull away from the iron grips of my captors. I pulled and wrenched and squirmed but to no avail. Kicking out my hindlegs to try and trip them earned me a blow to the side of my head that made my vision swim. Cold sweat that was not at all related to the heat and humidity of the climate drenched my fur.

They hauled me up the steps, and in spite of my struggles they managed to pull my forelegs over my head and strap a shackle around each fetlock, such that I was forced to stand on my wobbling hindlegs. A crowd had gathered by now, with all sorts of ponies gathering to watch whatever punishment was about to be inflicted upon me. Before me was a sea of curious faces, most of whom I assumed had never seen an Equestrian before, let alone a prince of the realm. The keen, expectant expressions, like those of an audience waiting for a play to begin, only heightened the sense of panic that rose up within me; public displays of punishment, or even execution of prisoners, might still be regarded as light entertainment by these savages. The sudden appearance of stalls selling all manner of snacks likewise inspired yet more dread.

I was shaking with fright, using what was left of my panic-inspired strength to tug at the rusty chains. Sickly bile rose up my throat, but I managed to choke it down, and yet nothing could quieten the rapid beating of my heart. My chest felt as though it was about to explode. A glance down at the floor revealed that it was covered with a strange rusty brown coating, which flaked off when I scuffed it with my hooves. They wouldn't kill me, I hoped, but that glimmer of light felt very faded and fragile indeed against the monstrously dark storm that surrounded it. Surely, they still needed me alive and whole. Yet I more than others perhaps knew the depths of rage that a pony can descend into, where all concept of rational thought and even base common sense is drowned utterly by the sea of righteous indignation when presented with a target upon which to inflict all of that pent-up malice and hate.

The sound of horseshoes on stone cut through the jumble of thoughts and anxieties swirling in my head. I dared to look over my shoulder, twisting my torso in an awkward, somewhat painful manner as I did so, and saw Earthshaker striding purposefully up those steps. Hovering next to him, wrapped up in his sickly yellow aura, was a crudely fashioned whip all coiled up like a snake ready to strike. Upon reaching the top of the steps, just a short distance behind me, he stopped, and let the length of the whip uncoil and trail on the ground. A few experimental swings sent it writhing on the floor.

"Oh Celestia, no," I gasped. In truth it was almost a relief to know that was my fate; it was something my mind could grasp, articulate, and react to. It still did not make what came next any less excruciating.

"Your false goddess cannot save you now," he said in almost perfect Equestrian. I wrenched my head away, clenched my eyes shut, and waited for the pain to begin.

Honour and Blood: Part 19

The whip struck. A lance of fire ripped through my back from shoulder to hip. I had not been given the usual piece of cork to bite down on, so I cried out in unbearable pain; dear Faust, I had never known such horrible agony before. I recoiled, instinctively trying to escape the long reach of the whip, but the chains held me secure. That didn't stop me from trying by pulling uselessly at my restraints, however. The crowd roared in appreciation of my torment, with jeers and clopping of hooves on the ground filling my ears with noise and my soul with shame.

I had wanted to face my punishment with as much dignity as one could possibly muster, like a proper stallion ought to, but such things are better said than done. Earthshaker swung the whip again and again, each strike was a fresh strip of hot, searing pain laid upon my back. My hindlegs quivered under the onslaught of blows, and soon gave way so that I hung sagging by forehooves. It was not long before tears streamed down my cheeks and I howled most wretchedly.

"Please!" I shrieked. "For the love of Faust, stop!"

I braced myself for another blow, but it did not come. It would have been no use anyway; it would all hurt just the same. My back felt as though it was burning, and my vision swam drunkenly. A field of stars sparkled, swirled, and danced before my dazed eyes as though Princess Luna had taken absinthe before crafting the night sky, blurring my vision. The audience of gathered ponies that stretched out before me became a grotesque kaleidoscope of mocking, hate-filled daemons luxuriating in the misery and debasement inflicted upon me. I felt the distinctly unpleasant sensation of something very warm and wet trickle slowly from the lattice-work of wounds upon my back, down to my rump, and then to my hindlegs or tail to splatter onto the floor. When I tried to raise my head to look over my shoulder at my tormentor standing behind me, the borders of my sight closed in and the bile rose rapidly up to burn my throat. Nevertheless, I willed myself on, despite the contents of my skull feeling much too heavy for my neck to support, and stared at him.

Earthshaker stepped back, though the handle of his whip was still held in his aura. His chest rose and fell heavily, as though he had over-exerted himself in flogging me. His whole demeanour was such that I feared he might at any moment discard the whip and just tear me to pieces with his bare hooves; the monstrous, twisted expression that looked as though his face was trying to eat itself, as all facial muscles clenched and contorted in unnatural ways.

"Stop?" he said through gritted teeth. "Why?"

I was at a complete loss as to what to say, but talking meant at least a brief reprieve from the torture. "I'll give you anything," I said, between ragged, desperate breaths. "I'm close to Princess Celestia. Anything you want, just please make it stop!"

"Anything?" Earthshaker grinned widely, demonstrating to me that the concept of dental hygiene had yet to be fully accepted by these natives. That might have been an odd thought to enter my mind as I was being flogged, but I was desperate for anything at all that might distract me from the horror being inflicted upon me. He lowered the whip a little and approached, close enough for me to feel the warmth of his stinking breath disturbing what fur on my back hadn't been already torn away by the lashings I had received. "What could you possibly have to offer me?"

He was toying with me, certainly, indulging in prolonging my torment as long as possible like a cat with a mouse, but with my back feeling like a solid block of pure agony and the fear that death was all but certain, I was willing to try anything at all.

"Money!" I exclaimed, being the first thing that I could think of that these impoverished ponies might want. "Gold, gems, steel, weapons, my sisters' hooves in marriage. Anything! Just stop, please!"

His grin slowly and inelegantly turned back into its hate-filled snarl over the course of my frantic pleadings. "What I want," he said, sotto voce, but still filled with so much hatred that I recoiled from the sheer venom directed at me, "is for my brother's life back, for my wife unsullied by your filth, and for Equestria to leave us alone!"

I held his gaze as best I could, despite my head lolling pathetically atop a neck that struggled to support it and my blurred vision swinging from side to side with vertigo. First, I spat on the cobbled floor between us, and then said with as much sangfroid as I could muster in the rather compromising state I found myself in, "I don't know about the first two, but I’ll arrange the third if you stop this and let me go."

Earthshaker barked a short, hacking, mirthless laugh. "But only after I make you into a eunuch, you motherless bastard. It will be a tiny recompense for what you have done."

If I was going to die, I thought, then I wanted it to be something memorable - an anecdote, as it were, to be recited by soldiers gathered around in the pub close to last orders, or for history students to snicker about as they read of my untimely demise in some dusty old book. It was an unpleasant, fatalistic thought, but one can hardly blame me for allowing my thoughts to stray in such a direction while I was held up by my forehooves and flogged by a vengeful cuckolded husband. I had no way to hurt him, at least physically, but I could at least wound his pride, such as it was.

"Why?" I said. "Are you going to take my stallion-hood so you can see what you need to satisfy Dahlia?"

In hindsight, this was all a very bad idea. Taunting one's enemy might be an activity that adventure book heroes might readily engage in, or a simple part of the 'theatre' around a duel or a fencing match, but out here in the real world, with somepony with both the inclination and the means to kill me, it was about on par with feeding a Yakyakistani some cocaine and letting him loose in an operating theatre in terms of bad ideas. I heard a wordless cry of anger, the crack of the whip, and half a second later, a fresh line of agony erupted across my back.

There were two more lashes, and then nothing. The pain was indescribable, but I'll try anyway; it reached beyond mere skin and seemed to seep straight into my vitals, and while I could not see the damage I imagined the ribbons of hide that the whip had turned my back into. I felt as though I was being burned alive and stabbed at the same time. I heard voices, but my strength at last failed me and I could only leave my head sagging to my chest. The first I recognised was Chipped Urn, and it sounded like he was imploring Earthshaker to stop killing me.

"You saw what the Tyrant of the Sun did to the Changelings," he said, at least as far as I could tell according to my limited grasp of their tongue. "The sun burned them. That is what will happen to your tribe if you make her too angry."

"He has wronged me," barked Earthshaker. "He must die for this."

"Make him suffer, yes," said Chipped Urn, apparently trying to be the voice of reason for purposes I could not quite understand at the time. "Throw him back in the cave with the others. Make the other foreigners feel fear for what you did to him and what you may in turn do to them. He is more useful to you alive than dead."

Silence, damnable silence, ensued. I spat on the ground once more, and was disturbed to see blood splatter on the tiles. Either something life-threatening had happened to me or I had merely bitten my own tongue, I could not tell. I looked out at the crowd, all apparently enraptured by my suffering. There were even foals amongst them, watching me with varying expressions of horror or enthusiasm, or merely running around as they are wont to do when adults are distracted. There was a strange party-like atmosphere that I found sickening, as though this was the audience to the Summer Sun Celebration and not corporal punishment. I cast my mind back to the pillar of fire that Princess Celestia had summoned from the heavens to burn away the Changeling horde, and I imagined the same happening to this miserable tribe. Auntie 'Tia would never countenance such a thing, and a good thing too that our beneficent, immortal ruler has more patience and wisdom than I, but standing there with my flesh being gradually turned into minced meat [A Griffon culinary practice by which the meat of their prey is finely chopped with either a knife or a machine called a 'meat grinder'] it was a very entertaining fantasy to indulge in.

I must have fainted, because the next thing I can remember is waking up on the rough, uncomfortable floor of the cave, resting on my front with my limbs splayed out awkwardly and my back raging in agony. A low moan, followed by a spluttering, hacking cough that only exacerbated my pain, had apparently signalled to the other prisoners that I was awake and alive. Shining Armour's face suddenly filled my vision, and had I any strength left I'd have pushed him away.

"He's awake!" he announced, sounding rather optimistic about it too. He looked back to me with an expression of genuine concern that I found worrying. "How do you feel?"

Well, how did he think I felt? I almost snapped at him, but decided that being tactful was probably for the best if I wanted to milk some sympathy. "I've been better," I said, my voice hoarse and rough as though I had been gargling with gravel. It felt like it too, my mouth and throat were awfully dry. "How does it look?"

Shining Armour sucked air through his teeth, which was never a good sign from anypony.

"Looks like an amateur did this," I heard Corporal Slipstream say, in the same tone of voice as if he was appraising some shoddy work a tradespony had done on his garden fence. "Look at that. I think I can see a rib there."

"Slipstream," hissed Shining Armour.

"Oh Celestia!" I cried out, and buried my face in my hooves. I was going to die here, I was certain of it, and the stiff upper lip routine expected of officers was of scant comfort here. There was no point, if the wounds didn't kill me outright then some kind of infection from the awful conditions we were forced to endure would, and it would be a slow, painful, lingering sort of death.

I had ordered floggings before, and right there and then I regretted each and every single time a pony was struck by the lash at my command. The Royal Guard is at least professional about it, however, before corporal punishment was banned, of course; a medic was always on hoof to observe and administer healing if necessary to preserve the offender's life, and the provosts were trained in the gentle art of inflicting a maximum amount of pain with a minimum of lasting, physical damage. Yet after having suffered such a thing, at the hooves of an 'amateur' as Slipstream had put it, I understood now that the wounds of the psychological sort were far deeper and more permanent than the lines of scars inflicted upon mere flesh.

"You'll live, sir," said Cannon Fodder, as he wandered lazily into view. Hearing his voice was an immense relief, for I knew he was so lacking in tact that if I truly was doomed then he would have just said so. "Do you have your hipflask with you?"

If there was any time to start sipping from the chalice of regret, now was as good a time as any. I might not get another chance to partake in such a fine vintage again. "It's in my jacket pocket," I said.

My aide disappeared from view momentarily, and then returned with the said silver flask. He dutifully unscrewed the top and offered it to me, and in the manner of a foal suckling on a bottle I greedily drank down the dark, heady cognac that I had filled it with prior to embarking upon this doomed excursion. Much of it was wasted dribbling down my chin and onto the floor, and I was far too distracted to fully appreciate the generations of hard work and expertise that came into crafting that most noble drink of princes, but it helped nevertheless. The effect was almost instantaneous; I did not feel 'better', but the strong liquor at least had a warming and comforting effect upon me. Little did I know that it was simply to brace me for what was to come next.

"That's one for you," said Cannon Fodder. "And one for your back."

Before I could utter a single word of protest, the remaining contents of my hipflask, XO Neighpoléon Grande Champagne cognac, was poured all over the open wound that was my back. What had dulled to a throbbing ache just on the periphery of becoming somewhat bearable if I had more to drink suddenly ignited into sharp, stabbing pains as though a thousand needles had been thrust into each gaping laceration. I swore, loudly and profusely, and promised Cannon Fodder a cut to his wages should we ever get out of this alive. [Cannon Fodder most likely saved Blueblood's life by pouring the brandy on his back, as the strong alcohol disinfected the wounds. This was something of a tradition in the Royal Guard after floggings, which fell out of practice when flogging was abolished.]

***

To this day I don't know exactly how long I spent in that cave, switching between moments of horrid wakefulness where every moment was spent in agony and terror to a sort of mad, incoherent delirium where I must have babbled incessantly about everything and nothing. [Both Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash reported that he pleaded for 'Celly', his nickname for me when he was a very young foal, to save him.] The pain had dulled somewhat into a persistent ache, though now I felt thoroughly nauseated and a pounding headache ensued. There was nothing to be done, or could be done, except to lay on my front and await whatever it was that fate had planned for me. I remember very little of the intervening period, only that time seemed to pass strangely; from moments where every excruciating second dragged horrendously, and then I would blink and hours would have passed in an instant.

Shining Armour and Rainbow Dash tried their collective best to cheer me up, but my mind was too distracted by both the pain of the present and the fear of the future to listen to their drivel about staying positive and waiting for the perfect opportunity to escape. What use would I be in a breakout if I could barely stand or even think? I feared that if such a chance did arise, that I would be left behind so as not to slow everypony else down. It all felt very hopeless, and even death itself was starting to feel like an attractive option.

Dahlia came thrice to attend to me, always accompanied by guards, of course, who observed with barely-disguised disgust at the two of us. She would sit quietly next to me, applying and re-applying strips of cloth to my wounds that would soak up the blood until it was all one great ugly scab. My feelings towards her were now only of hatred, however, despite the affection she continued to show me. This was all her fault; she had lured me on, exploited my wanton desires for her own selfish pleasure, and it was for that I had been viciously flogged. After a few minutes of tending to my wounds she would leave at the barked orders of one of her guards, and I would overhear my fellow captives speculate on just who this mare was and why she was so concerned about me. I thought it best not to tell them the truth just yet.

At some point my body and mind agreed to give up, and I must have drifted asleep. I found myself standing once more in that damned cemetery from my nightmares; endless rows of grey headstones in serried ranks like soldiers standing to attention on parade stretched on into infinity in all directions. The sky was dark and overcast with a leaden layer of solid cloud cover, through which a curiously dimmed sun struggled to penetrate. As if a filter had been placed over it, the glow of Celestia's great orb was an ominous shade of blood red, which stained about half the sky in a mottled patchwork of dark crimson and charcoal grey.

The absence of any physical pain alerted me to the fact that this was merely a nightmare, but this time lucidity did not allow me mastery over my dream as common knowledge implied. Regardless of how hard I tried, the demented hellscape around me failed to transform into the pleasant gardens around Canterlot Castle. The realisation caused my pulse to quicken, and though I knew it to be a completely illusory stimulus it still felt utterly and dreadfully real. This was no ordinary bad dream, that much was certain.

I turned frantically, but each view was almost completely identical. Everywhere I looked I saw those matching headstones receding endlessly into the distance. I examined one, trying to find something to centre myself upon, but the words engraved in the crumbling stone were vague and indistinct. I moved to the next one along and found that this one was the same, and the one next to it, and so on. The names were different, I could tell that much, but my eyes refused to focus on the words themselves. The letters were finely chiselled into the stone and I recognised them as such, but for some queer reason I could not articulate them into actual words. It was maddening, as if trying to remember a hazy, distant memory that failed to materialise in one's mind, no matter how hard one tried.

My chest felt tight - every breath that I knew was not real took conscious effort. I wanted to wake up, for even the pain of the real world with all of its agony was preferable to the rising fear that wrapped its claws around my throat and squeezed tighter and tighter. Looking away from the headstones I stared at the ground and my hooves standing atop it. It was neatly trimmed grass, though what should have been a verdant green had faded to a macabre grey. I noticed that I felt neither warm nor cold, but merely the absence of those sensations that caused my skin to crawl over my flesh.

Alone. I was utterly alone here. The tightness around my chest worsened until my rapidly beating heart felt like it was straining to escape from a vice. Looking this way and that, I looked for any sign, no matter how fleeting or remote, that there was something, anything, here, besides these headstones and their mockingly vague names. There was nothing, no change, no breeze to shift the grass. Only the graves remained, and in all directions the view was damnably the same.

"Princess Luna!" I shouted desperately to the crimson sky. Only she could help me, the mare who fought the encroaching forces of the Nightmare in the dream realm for night after thankless night. "For pity's sake, help me!"

Nothing happened. My voice disappeared into the ether. I sank to my haunches next to one of the headstones, waiting for either wakefulness or Princess Luna to save me from this nightmare. She must have been busy again with more deserving dreamers. Perhaps this was real, I thought; I had finally expired from my wounds and ended up in Tartarus where damned sinners like me belonged, and this was the sort of ironic punishment that I deserved.

Leaning against this one headstone, the stone edifice felt cold. No, it was more than that, it was not cold in the traditional sense of lacking heat, but a sharp, sucking sort of chill that seemed to leech away the warmth from my body instead. Curious, and having exhausted just about anything else to do, I tried to read the name engraved upon its weathered, chipped surface. To my faint surprise I found this time I could decipher the letters clearly: 'Gliding Moth'.

"Please," I whimpered, bowing my head before the headstone, "don't do this to me."

I saw now that the grave that it marked had some kind of silvery cable, about an inch in diameter, plunged straight into the very centre of it, as if it had descended straight down and penetrated the earth to reach the coffin and its grim contents. Looking at the others, the rest of them had one such thread too, and while I felt that they weren't there before, one could never be so sure in the dream realm - reality, permanence, and the linear passage of time itself were things that we took for granted in the waking world, but here were regarded as mere suggestions. I looked up, my eyes following the mess of cables up and up to see their source.

Princess Luna, or rather, a monstrous vision of her crafted by my subconscious to torment me, loomed over the entire landscape like a titan. Great forehooves shod in silver, each large enough to grind the Sanguine Palace into dust, stretched out over the infinite cemetery, and these were where these cables were connected. Her pose was like that of a puppet master, poised and ready to bring her grim marionettes into a sick parody of life. She was clad in the distinctive red tunic of a general, complete with the gold braid and rank pips along the starched mandarin collar. Upon her head sat a peaked cap, which cast her eyes in a deep shadow so they could not be seen. Her lips were curled into an arrogant, superior sneer, as she regarded all beneath her as being quite literally just that; beneath her notice or caring.

This figure had haunted my nightmares for some time, but this time it seemed more vivid and terrifying. Everything that had happened to me since Fancy Pants' benefit party was Luna's doing; if she hadn't placed that damned cap on my head and tied that sash around my waist, apparently deluded to think that I wanted to be pulled from my comfortable if boring desk job and hurled head first into the war, then I wouldn't be in this appalling mess to begin with. This titanic figure representing the Princess drowned me in its vast shadow, and I felt tiny and useless in its presence.

"Princess Luna!" I cried out. "Why are you doing this to me?"

The clouds parted suddenly, and everything was lit up with stark, white moonlight as if from a powerful spotlight. I looked away from this giant horror that hissed and recoiled and writhed as if in pain from the light, to see the moon shining brightly through a growing hole in the leaden cloud cover. Everything this sacred light touched dissolved away into nothingness; the headstones, the demonic vision of Princess Luna, even the dead grass beneath my hooves faded away like, well, like the memory of a bad dream.

Princess Luna, the real one, as it were, landed before me with a delicate flutter of her large wings, which she still spread to grant her already tall stature even more grandeur. She wore her more standard regalia, consisting of a black gorget around her neck depicting the crescent moon, highly polished horseshoes that reflected my gaunt, haunted expression back at me, and the simple black tiara perched atop her head. It was less extravagant than her sister's, but its simple elegance combined with the stern, regal bearing of its wearer to give the alicorn standing before me a most commanding and empowering impression.

"Is this how you see me?" she said. Her expression was unreadable; she stared down at me as I sat most pitifully before her, tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know what felt worse, that she had seen how my subconscious mind viewed her or that she saw me, her apparent champion, in a state of duress unbecoming of a prince of the realm.

"I'm sorry," I muttered. Unable to meet her gaze, I bowed my head and looked to my hooves; there was no use in feigning strength that I did not possess any more.

The Princess of the Night then did something most unexpected. I felt strong forelegs wrap around my torso, and I was pulled forwards until my face was pressed against a wall of soft, velvety, midnight blue fur. It took me a second or two to realise that I was being hugged, and after a moment to overcome the initial shock I found that the sensation of being embraced was not altogether unpleasant. In fact, after all that I had been through over the past day or so it was rather pleasant and soothing. All princely decorum and aristocratic detachment was cast aside as I buried my face into Luna's chest. A hug from Celestia, of which I have had a great deal since I was a little foal, is like being bathed in the warmth of the first light of dawn in high summer. With Luna, however, it put one in mind of sitting beneath a cloudless night sky, and being overwhelmed by the cold, awe-inspiring majesty of the endless expanse of stars and the soft, delicate light of the moon. Different, perhaps, but no less pleasant.

"I don't want ponies to be afraid of me," she said, her voice curiously soft and gentle compared to the more imperious and loud tone that she usually took with me. "Least of all you, Blueblood."

The embrace ended, and we pulled away from one another. I recovered enough of my aristocratic composure to stand as tall and erect as I could, enjoying the ability to do so without agonising pain wracking through my body as much as I possibly could. Luna, however, merely sat rather more casually on her haunches before me; this, the dream realm, was her domain, inviolate and the one place where her power and authority outstripped that of her elder sibling's entirely, so it made sense that she would drop the regal masque that she wore in the waking world when she engaged in her duty of banishing nightmares and playing therapist to dreamers. Tonight was my turn, for once, and frankly I didn't really know what to make of it.

We were now in the gardens around Canterlot Castle, or a representation of such, though it seemed utterly devoid of all other life including the usual guards who patrolled the grounds and the servants and nobles engaging in clandestine trysts behind Auntie 'Tia's prized bougainvilleas. It was night time, and a cloudless one at that which allowed one a perfect and untarnished view of the stellar artistry that blanketed the world. The castle itself loomed up next to us, the elegant alabaster walls reflecting the stark white light of the moon, which itself shone down over the sleeping realm.

"Do you like it?" said Luna. I realised that I had been gawking in silence at the vista stretched out before us. She must have created it to try and put me at ease, and although this was the safest that I had felt in years I still could never truly lower my guard around the dark mistress of the night.

"It's wonderful," I said. The detail was impressive, too, right down to the view of the city of Canterlot below the balcony a short distance away, where the pinpricks of light from the multitude of streetlights were but a shallow reflection of the stars above, and beyond that the vastness of the realm of Equestria lay open for us to gaze upon. Forgiving the absence of other ponies, it was as though I was really there, and I felt a pang of longing in my heart as I wanted more than anything else in Equus to stand upon the same patch of delicately cut lawn in the real world and take in this view once more.

Overcome by this hopeless nostalgia, I rambled on. "This is the spot where Princess Celestia told me the story of the Mare in the Moon when I was a foal. I think I had a fight with my sisters, or something, I can't remember why, only the story. I never thought I'd get to meet her."

"Or that she might be family," she said, with a soft smile. I could only splutter in response, which she seemed to find amusing; I had never heard her even imply acknowledgement of the rather tenuous familial relationship between the two of us, but this marked a first. Then again, it had been a year or so since our last meeting, which was under rather more testing circumstances to say the least, and I could only assume that Celestia had a little word with her in the intervening time.

"I fear I have neglected your dreams," she continued, a hint of guilt colouring her tone. "The Nightmare draws strength from feelings of fear, anxiety, depression, and guilt. There are few feeding grounds more bountiful than the psyches of those ponies who have suffered the traumas of war."

"So it's decided to pick on me." Of course, just when I thought things could not get any worse, now I was under attack from a metaphysical force of corruption.

"In a manner of speaking, yes. Guilt is a tempting morsel for the Nightmare, and so easily can it be directed into other negative emotions for it to feast upon. I don't suppose there's anything you feel particularly guilty about?"

Dear Faust, where do I begin? There was much for me to feel guilty about, or at least I should based on society's rules on propriety and behaviour of its upper class, which, I should point out, very few of us nobles actually follow to any degree of acceptability. She was looking for one thing in particular, however. Was it my drunkenness, whoring, lavish spending, casual blasphemy, general cowardliness, lying, cheating, gambling, cheating at gambling, philandering, bullying, or snobbishness? No, it had to be something that I felt genuine guilt for, and those sins were rather petty compared to those committed by the supposedly saintly members of Equestrian society, who moralise against such wicked things while indulging in them once they think nopony is looking. At the very least I had integrity enough not to try and conceal these faults; in some cases I was rather proud of them, but ponies have the tendency to block out facts that clash with their own deeply held ideas of how the world should run, and the myth of my reputation appeared to supersede all of the times that I had been caught with my hoof in the metaphorical cookie jar fondling the goods within. Besides, the more I sinned, the more others would pray for my soul on my behalf, as if Faust herself had any special interest in it; it was a most equitable arrangement that I simply could not be happier with.

I scanned Luna's expression, looking for any implication that she might be trying to entrap me into confessing to being a pathetic coward and a generally useless waste of resources, but found only genuine concern hidden in that gentle smile and slight frown. There could only be one thing that she was thinking of, and the realisation hit me like a punch to the stomach.

"Gliding Moth," I said, remembering the one legible name on the gravestones. "I was supposed to keep her safe, and I couldn't."

"She knew what she was getting into," said Luna. "Every soldier knows that when they march into battle there is every chance that they might not make it back. She gave her life for Equestria."

And for you, I thought. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. [An Old Equestrian saying - 'It is sweet and proper to die for one's country'.] There was nothing decorous about being stabbed through the chest with a spear and bleeding to death on a scrap of foreign land hundreds of miles away from one's home. I almost told her that, but bit my tongue; Princess Luna meant well, but the old platitudes sounded more hollow and more insulting each time I heard them from ponies who exhorted others to fight in their stead from the safety of their homes.

"She would still be here if I did my duty and executed Scarlet Letter after that, uh..." I paused, waving my hoof to try and coax the word that described the utter mess that was the Siege of Fort E-5150 without descending into vulgarity and offending the Princess. Fortunately, she did that for me.

"That shit-storm," she posited, grinning inanely. If she wanted to get some sort of humorous reaction out of me then she certainly succeeded; I almost choked on my own breath at a Princess of Equestria, and Luna, no less, swearing. It was like seeing Celestia kick a puppy; it simply was not done. "I have been learning the modern vernacular," she explained.

I felt my cheeks flush red, in spite of the non-reality of the dream realm. "Yes, most apt, that. I should have killed Scarlet Letter when I had the chance."

Luna tilted her head to one side, making her ethereal mane swish in the gentle night's breeze. "So why didn't you?"

I shrugged. This was a conversation I'd already had with Shining Armour, and neither of us could come to any kind of closure except by drinking ourselves into a stupor, and I had no such luck playing this talk out in my mind either. "Because I could not bring myself to do it, and I thought being sent home in disgrace was enough to stop him. Because I couldn't conceive of the depths of his ambition and his incompetence, which together always spell disaster when such a pony is placed in a command position."

"It's all too easy to look back on the past and think about what you should have done." Luna reached out and touched my shoulder, stroking it in a rather tender way. I felt somewhat embarrassed by her attempts to provoke some kind of familial bond, as if this made up for all the abuse I suffered at her hooves since her return from the moon. "When we have all of the information to hoof the best option is obvious, but in the moment when one is forced to make a difficult choice the truth becomes clouded and elusive. You did what many would consider to be the right thing, not to kill a pony in cold blood, but none could have foreseen the consequences of that decision."

"It doesn't change the fact that it was my decision that led to all of this."

"We must all live with the consequences of our decisions, but we can still choose to let guilt hold us back, or move on and learn from it. You do not honour Gliding Moth's spirit by punishing yourself for her death, instead you should let her memory guide you forward." Her hoof moved from my shoulder to my cheek, which she stroked affectionately. In spite of the awkwardness of the gesture, it still felt 'nice' in a strange way. Perhaps her desire to help me was genuine after all.

"Listen to me very carefully," she continued. "We haven't much more time; you're going to wake up soon. I tried to organise a rescue, but Parliament has blocked my efforts. Some nonsense about not wanting to risk starting another war, even though the foalnapping of Equestrian royalty constitutes a declaration of war anyway. Celestia is taking the diplomatic route, but nopony knows how long that will take. Blueblood" -she suddenly held my chin very firmly, such that I could not move my head, and her eyes became cold and determined as the old, more familiar Luna took hold once more- "you must survive. Help is coming for you, but if you die then a state of war will exist between Equestria and the Badlands ponies."

So, no pressure, then. I'm not sure I can say that I truly felt better about myself after that little motivational speech, but being told that my best course of action was, essentially, to sit around and wait for rescue grated on me a little. Once again my life had been reduced to that of a playing piece in that vast and convoluted board game called war, and while circumstances beyond my control (since when have they ever been?) had made me momentarily important to the players, sooner or later that usefulness would expire and I would be cast aside once more, assuming that I survived. Still, I appreciated the sentiment, and thus I thanked Princess Luna for her assistance.

"I will do everything within my power to help you," said Luna. "The dreams of your captors are open to me, and I will sieve through their thoughts and confound their plans as best as I can. Though, it is strange that the wife of the Chieftain is closed to me."

“Dahlia?” I blurted out. My knowledge of all things to do with the dream realm was lacking, as I must admit is the case with very many things in the world, but somepony strong enough to keep Princess Luna from invading one’s dreams had to be a particularly powerful mage. I could hardly imagine that sex-crazed harlot brushing up on her Meadowbrook’s ‘Fundamentals of Magic’ in between being rutted by a succession of stallions queuing outside her bedroom door. My hooves itched - Dahlia was not to be trusted.

Princess Luna arched an eyebrow imperiously at me, and a faint smirk appeared on her lips. “Thou knew her?” she said.

The sudden switch to her archaic, Middle-Equestrian tongue left me in no doubt exactly what she was implying. Oh Faust, she knew everything. “I, uh, overheard the other slaves…”

“I must go now,” she said, mercifully interrupting my pathetic attempts to talk my way out of being caught out. “Good luck, Blueblood.”

The dream-constructed vision of Canterlot Castle began to fade around me, as though the colour and light was being drained from it until it was all absorbed by the impenetrable darkness. I awoke to the sensation of thousands of tiny needles piercing the flesh across the entire surface of my back. Reality, and all the misery that it entailed, ensued.

[While Princess Luna patrols the dream realm nightly to provide relief from nightmares for all of our little ponies, such things are deeply personal. These memoirs are one of the very few accounts of this written in detail. Their subsequent publication has seen a marked increase in what might be called ‘fan-mail’ directed to my sister, for which she is very appreciative.]

Wakefulness was not a particularly pleasant sensation at that time, but when I lifted my head from the ground, I noticed that everypony was staring at me expectantly. Rainbow Dash in particular looked as though she was about to explode with anxiety, sitting there with that big stupid grin on her face and her body twitching as though she had drunk much too many cups of espresso. In addition to the more obvious pain of the flogging I also felt like I had a bad hangover, only without the half-remembered Night Before to provide succour from the very many painful sensations of the Morning After. My usual cure for hangovers - being merely a palliative, but had served me exceptionally well in the past for its stimulating effect on the morale - consisting of a close shave, a very hot bath with as much lavender scent as possible, followed by the donning of full morning dress to armour myself for the day ahead, would most likely be ineffective here, and not least because my back being one enormous open wound would make getting into a tailcoat both impractical and unhygienic. At the very least, it would make me feel marginally better, and it had occurred to me that I hadn't had much in the way of opportunity to wear day formal dress since I rejoined the Royal Guard, and the realisation saddened me.

"What?" I croaked out.

It was Shining Armour who answered, with a twinkle in his eye and that absurdly handsome grin of his almost splitting his face in two. Something was definitely up, and I wished that everypony would stop holding me in suspense and actually tell me what was going on in a straightforward manner for once. "Private Cannon Fodder, why don't you tell him?"

I followed the source of that familiar odour to see my aide sitting in his corner of the cave, next to me as usual. He had that rather sheepish look on his face that he always got when he found himself unexpectedly the centre of attention, which tended to make him feel uncomfortable as far as I could make out.

"Well, sir," he said, in that curiously quiet tone of voice that ponies adopt when explicitly told to speak as quietly as possible, "they took me out to do some mining, but when they put me back in here and chained me up the guard didn't do the lock properly. It's fallen off my leg, sir."

I could have kissed him, if it didn't mean getting some kind of interesting skin disease hitherto unknown to Equestrian medical science. For once my luck had started to turn; I had a bad run of it lately, so it was about time that whatever fates out there decided such things smiled generously down upon me, and they had delivered in the form of a freak of nature who regarded personal hygiene as something that applied only to other ponies. It was probably that very trait which disinclined the guard from securing Cannon Fodder properly, and this was that opportunity I had been waiting for, and by Faust you can be certain that I was going to take it.

Princess Luna had told me to sit around and wait for Celestia to do something. Merely 'survive', as she had so eloquently put it. Well, I tell you, dear reader, at that point I had just about reached the limits of what I could take, and being flogged like a common guardspony caught drinking the colonel's sherry was sufficient to tip me over the edge. I was quite sick of having my fate decided by others - mad officers, callous generals, Scarlet Letter, Twilight Sparkle, Luna, the Changelings, Celestia, these damned heathens - to Tartarus with the lot of them! This time, I was getting out of here, and it would be entirely on my terms for once and Faust help anypony who was going to get in my way. This might have been uncharacteristically brave of me, and you're probably right, as looking back I might have avoided a great deal more personal suffering if I did simply curl up and wait for Celestia to fix everything for me, but the indignities that I had suffered awakened a certain fire within me that I had not known was there before. Or, as is most likely, the pain and fever had so addled the decision-making processes of my mind that I was quite willing to try just about anything in the vaguest hope that I might see the conclusive end of this recent misery.

My mind had been made up, and I was set upon this enterprise for better or worse. I beckoned Shining Armour, Cannon Fodder, and Rainbow Dash closer. "Very well," I rasped out, "this is what we're going to do."

Author's Note

I can personally vouch for Blueblood's cure for a hangover. Morning dress really does help.

Honour and Blood: Part 20

As cunning plans go, this one wasn't exactly the best one I have ever come up with, but then again, the ones that I thought were so cunning that they had earned a doctorate in cunning from the University of Cunning Plans had usually ended in more pain and misery for Yours Truly, so perhaps just 'winging it', as Rainbow Dash would say, was actually the best option for me. However, I have almost always come out of these sticky situations more or less on top, which is to say that I survived with as much of my body intact and whole, so I still had that going for me. The plan itself was relatively simple, but it largely depended on Dahlia turning up as she usually did to change the dressings on my wounds, and on the guards' lackadaisical approach to security. Trusting in the ineptitude of your enemy always incurs a great risk, and it's usually safer to assume some base level of competence on their part, but here we had nearly a full platoon of trained and disciplined soldiers of the Royal Guard (and me) versus a mob of lazy peasants armed with pointed sticks, so one could forgive me for feeling a little too hopeful about our chances.

I don't know if it was something that Princess Luna had done to me in the dream, or if some kind of natural healing process had taken place, or if my improved mood, buoyed by the now-tangible promise of escape, had done it, but I felt rather better than I had prior to my sleep. A few experiments found that I could at least stand and move about, albeit with some pain and difficulty, but at the very least it meant that I was unlikely to slow everypony else down too much and therefore be left behind. Not that I imagine Shining Armour would even consider such a thing, being an officer who fully subscribed to the heroic if naive ideal of 'nopony left behind', even if that pony happened to be me. For the plan to work, however, I needed to continue to present an image of complete and total helplessness, like a sick Breezie, at least until the moment where we would spring into action, inasmuch as anything that the Royal Guard ever did could be described in quite so proactive terms.

Dahlia arrived rather promptly, her face full of concern and worry as I made the necessary moans of pain to provoke the appropriate feelings of sympathy. I lifted my head up, affecting to make the gesture appear much harder than it truly was, to see her approach, and flanked by the two guards as usual. The mare knelt by my side and performed the usual tasks of pouring water on my abused back, gently peeling back the soaked strips of bloodied cloth that she had placed there before, taking care so as not to tear out the scabs that had formed, and then re-applying fresh strips. She muttered quietly as she worked, which I assumed were soothing words, but I was only half paying attention to what she was doing.

My focus was instead aimed directly at the two guards, who had lost interest in what their charge was doing to me and instead focused their attention on watching the other captives. At least, that's what I thought they were supposed to be doing. The two guards seemed to be entirely caught up in their trite and meaningless little conversation, as pointless and meandering as it was, to pay attention to what was going on around them. If they were Night Guards and Square Basher caught them gossiping like that on duty, their bodies would have to be reassembled by expert Griffin taxidermists after she was through with them. Listening in, I had translated enough to understand that somepony's sister was with a stallion that they disapproved of, and they were trying to come to some sort of consensus about the correct course of action.

Well, that was just going to have to wait now, as I was about to introduce something rather more important for them to deal with. I looked to Cannon Fodder, gave a small nod, which he reciprocated. With a speed and agility that was at odds with the usual languid, torpid state that he existed in, he suddenly leapt forth and collided messily with Dahlia. The very briefest of struggles ensued, but my aide's mass and strength won out over that of the pampered lady's. He rolled her onto her front, and pinned her down beneath him with his body.

“That’s it!” I cried in triumph. “Hold her down, firmly now!”

The guards jumped at the sound of Dahlia's high-pitched shriek, but were too slow in reacting to be of any use. Caught by a split-second of indecision, and having accidentally wandered too close to the shackled soldiers, this allowed those closest to lunge out and seize them. It took only a few seconds for the two to be subdued, and with rather more enthusiasm on the part of the captured guardsponies than was strictly necessary, as they were pinned to the ground and their weapons taken from them.

"Good work!" cried Shining Armour. "Search them; they must have the keys."

"What?" Dahlia shouted in Equestrian, clearly trying to raise the alarm, for all the good that it would do her now. She sounded a little annoyed, as opposed to upset or fearful, but so elated was I at our success that I didn't pick up on that certain incongruity. "What are you doing?"

"Escaping," I said, as I rose to my hooves. The soldiers had completely disarmed and disrobed the two guards, who I imagine must have felt very foolish for committing such a lapse in duty that anypony reading this might consider this to be much too far fetched to be real. I tell you, it did happen, and ponies are capable of committing acts of great stupidity when they believe themselves to be completely in control of the situation and that any act of sabotage is utterly impossible. "What does it look like we're doing? Now be a dear and remove this damned ring on my horn, won't you?"

"What makes you think I can?" said Dahlia, wiggling under my aide's not-inconsiderable mass in a vain effort to try and get free.

"Your cutie mark is one of the symbols on it," I said, allowing a hint of well-deserved smugness to inflect my voice.

A victorious exclamation from one of the soldiers signalled that they found the keys to their relative freedom in the belongings of the guards, and set about unlocking their shackles with the sort of enthusiasm normally seen in poor orphan foals on Hearth's Warming. The keys were passed around quickly, like a hipflask of warming brandy around the survivors of an airship crash on a bleak mountainside, and soon I was freed too.

There was a brief argument about the weapons, too, which Shining Armour quickly solved by taking one spear for himself and giving the other to Corporal Slipstream. A dagger, a rather ornate thing studded with jewels that proved that either this tribe was capable of at least some independent artistry or that they were prone to common banditry, was given to Cannon Fodder, which, under my direction, he held threateningly but gratifyingly close to the soft curve of Dahlia's elegant neck.

"Do it," I hissed, "or I'll order Private Cannon Fodder here to slice your damn whore neck open."

"Blueblood, please." Dahlia looked up at me with wide, pleading eyes. I was having none of it, however; the mare would get no sympathy from me, not after the brutal flogging I had received for satisfying her animal lusts (and mine too, I must admit now that this could have all been avoided if I held my libido in check, but back then my blood was up and I was hardly thinking straight given the excitement and terror of the escape).

We needed her alive for this to work; a hostage, you see, with which to bargain our freedom. If she was clever, which I doubted considering her current track record, she might have worked out for herself that we needed her to be kept alive. The irony was not lost on me, but I was in no fit state to appreciate it, and I was getting frustrated by her sudden and unexpected reticence. I could hear hoofsteps and shouting coming from the corridor, muffled by the distance but growing steadily in volume.

“I’ll bloody well do it myself if I have to!”

I took the knife from Cannon Fodder, stood as close to him as my olfactory senses would allow me to, and held the blade against Dahlia's neck, close enough to give her a somewhat mediocre shave and certainly so she could feel the cold chill of the bronze on her skin. A little bit more pressure and her jugular vein would open and her blood would flow like champagne from a shaken bottle. As much as I was angry, determined, and in great physical and emotional pain, the thought still sickened me to my cowardly core, which, paradoxically, was a fact that I still found to be rather comforting in an odd way - it meant that I hadn't gone completely blood-crazy just yet. All that was necessary, however, was for everypony else, including her, to believe that I might be mad and stupid enough to actually do it.

Five or six of the natives blundered into the chamber, some carried weapons but a few among their number appeared to be civilians who were caught up in all the excitement and thought they might join in for whatever reason. I imagine there's not much to do around these parts when another pony isn't being flogged for their amusement. One, a large, heavy brute of a mare armed with what at first I took to be a club but later turned out to be a rolling pin, saw me standing there with a blade held to the throat of the wife of their ruler and let out an oath that I shan't repeat here in case a lady of good standing is reading (which, if you are, don't you have anything nicer you could be reading instead?).

"No closer!" I shouted, first in Equestrian and then again in a rough approximation of their language. "Or I return Dahlia’s spirit to the earth from which it came!" [Though the Badlands pony tribes share an animistic belief system, actual practices vary greatly. The Rat Pony Tribe revere the spirits of the earth the greatest, which Blueblood appears to have picked up on, despite not mentioning where he got it from.]

I was sweating like a sinner in church, and not just because of the cloying humidity in this dank, filthy hole in the ground. What if it didn't work? Perhaps they knew I hadn't got it in me to gruesomely murder a defenceless pony, and would rush us and it would all be over quicker than it started. A few of them galloped off down the corridor, while the big mare and the armed ponies backed away warily with weapons aimed in our direction. It seemed to be working then, and I suppose that I looked mad and desperate enough for anything; unshorn fur matted with foam and blood, the long lines of lacerations on my back that looked as though a maniac had used it to play noughts-and-crosses with a knife, and sporting what was probably a very crazed look on my face. I was terrified, truly, but I suppose that was easily mistaken for rage.

"Now get this bucking ring off me!" I shouted.

Except she couldn’t, what with Cannon Fodder on top of her and his unique ability preventing the unlocking of what was a magical lock. That I forgot all about that in my eagerness was a touch embarrassing, but I had a vested interest in keeping his status as a blank a secret as much as possible, given how useful it has been thus far. I shoo-ed him off Dahlia with a motion of my hoof. He gave a nod of understanding, apparently having come to the same realisation as me but dutifully kept it to himself as ever, and went to go and stand in his usual corner. With my free forehoof I held her pinned to the ground.

Dahlia made a whimpering noise, then her horn flashed with a sickly green light that seemed a little too familiar, though I couldn't quite place it at the time. The ring fell from my horn, and I felt magic, the primal forces of creation and destruction that underline the universe entirely, flood into my body as though I was an empty and dry glass, long forgotten at the back of the drinks cabinet, now filled with the most exquisitely balanced gin martini. After an entire day of feeling this blank numbness where that wellspring of power that lay just beyond the skein of reality should have been, to be able to tap into that same source once again was such a relief.

Whatever it was that Dahlia had done also affected the other unicorns in the cave, as they too were freed from those damned rings. Good, we would need all the firepower we could get if our captors recovered enough of their wits to remember that they had us severely outnumbered. Shining Armour's skill in defensive magic, his famous force shields, would certainly prove very useful in the tight confines of the caves and tunnels too.

Speaking of the natives, there was some sort of commotion amidst the group watching over us from the cave entrance. From what little I could tell, it was the sort of animated discussion that comes when a pony in a position of authority of some description comes along to help sort out a problem, but somepony else already present believes that they're in the process of fixing the issue and certainly does not require the assistance of another, thank you very much. I watched this proceed, trying to fight down the growing terror gestating in my gut like some sort of parasite ready to burst out. The jabbering intensified, almost turning into a heated argument, and I hoped that perhaps it might spill out into violence and solve one problem for us. Then, the newcomer had managed to force his way to the front somehow; Chipped Urn stumbled out past the big mare with the rolling pin, and found himself face-to-face with Yours Truly.

"You!" To say that I reacted poorly to his sudden appearance might be something of an understatement. I quickly forgot about Dahlia, as she was just some daft young mare who couldn't resist a bit of the old princely charm; Chipped Urn was the true architect of my misery, and I was going to make my displeasure completely obvious to all observing.

"Blueblood, what are you-" Chipped Urn didn't get a chance to finish that question, because I slapped him in the face with the back of my hoof. He staggered back from the blow, though it was probably more to do with the shock than any actual pain I might have inflicted [presumably having dropped the dagger, otherwise Blueblood might have stabbed him instead]. Nevertheless, he sat on his haunches and gingerly touched his cheek where I had struck him.

"Traitor!" I hissed, advancing on him while Cannon Fodder once again took on the duty of subduing Dahlia.

I moved to strike Chipped Urn once more, and he raised his hooves in front of his face in an attempt to ward off the oncoming blow, but somepony had seized me by the elbow. Shining Armour glared at me, and gingerly guided my forehoof back to its proper position back on the ground.

"Careful," he said, positioning himself roughly between me and the cowering earth pony, "you don't want to make it worse for you."

Damn him, he was right; the dull ache throbbing away across the surface of my back had swollen to a crawling, burning sensation as the scabbed-over wounds must have re-opened in all of that excitement. The unpleasant sensation of something wet and warm flowing over my already matted fur had returned, with the implication that I was bleeding again. A nod of his head towards the natives at the cave entrance, however, and I divined his other meaning. The natives were watching warily, but had advanced a little closer into the cave, their spears, swords, and horns aimed firmly in my direction. One wrong move from a single pony on either side would spell disaster, mainly for me, for even if we dealt with this obstacle we would still have an entire tribe of very angry ponies to fight through.

Shining Armour went over to help Chipped Urn back to his hooves, which the young lad accepted most eagerly. "Now, what's all this about?"

I explained, hurriedly, so that Chipped Urn would not have a chance to give his side of this sordid tale of betrayal before I did - how we had come across an elder of the Agave Tribe and her charge, who was assigned to be our guide for some peculiar cultural practice that I didn't quite understand, but had something to do with his coming of age from colt to stallion, and how he had sold us out to Earthshaker and his minions at our first meeting. It was this duplicity that led to our capture and my subsequent torture at the hooves of this hate-filled, petty-minded Chieftain, whose selfish desire for revenge over what was a horrendous misunderstanding placed his entire tribe in danger of an Equestrian intervention. I might have come across as naive in this particular telling of this story, but doing so would engender an element of sympathy in Shining Armour, knowing how highly he valued such things as honesty and trust amongst all equines.

Chipped Urn sat through all of this, forelegs crossed over his chest and glaring at me as though he was trying to make my head spontaneously catch fire with magic his mud-pony body did not possess. When I finished and I basked in the momentary sympathy projected from my colleagues, he had to ruin it all with six little words: "I know where your flag is."

"What?" Shining Armour blurted out, apparently forgetting about me and rounding on Chipped Urn. Damn that sand-dwelling, water-collecting, dust-eating heathen to Tartarus twice over; first for getting me into the infernal mess that whose greatest consequence was that I could never show my back in public ever again for the shameful scars that would mark it forever, and second by complicating our escape by reminding our honour-blinded Captain of the Royal Guard of his initial foalish goal of retrieving the Royal Standard. "Where? How?"

"It is in the treasure chamber of the Chieftain," said Chipped Urn, "along with your weapons and your armour. It is not very much far from here."

Shining Armour whinnied in triumph, all but prancing on the spot. A ripple of excited whisperings travelled through the assembled guardsponies like a wave, and I knew then and there that dissuading these ponies from this diversion would be impossible. Even Rainbow Dash was elated by the news, and let out an excited, "Aw, yeah! Now we're talking!"

"One moment, please," I said. "Let's not forget about the little fact that you sold me out. I'm still a tad miffed about that. Just a tad."

"I had to," was his laconic reply, and I boggled in utter incomprehension at him. "I had to make the Rat Pony Tribe trust me, so I presented Chief Earthshaker with a gift - you. Then I could safely find out where your flag is."

"But they flogged me!" I shouted. "Look at what they did to me! Look at it!"

Chipped Urn turned a sickly shade of pale when I turned and sat on my haunches, putting the criss-crossed red and black ribbons that decorated my back on full display. Let him stare, and the rest of them too, I'll have plenty of that when I return home to Canterlot and have to endure passers-by in the street, fellow nobles in court, or members of my club gazing accusingly at me in horror and shame, whispering to one another, 'what did Prince Blueblood do to deserve being flogged like a common delinquent soldier?'. Faust, I don't think I could ever stand it. If I ever made it home, at least; the initial excitement and hope of our escape was rapidly fading, to be replaced by the more usual feelings of dread and contemplation of the inevitability of failure.

He stammered out a meagre reply: "Do you not remember? I must help you if I am to be a stallion, but the path which I take to do that is for me to decide. I made Earthshaker stop before he killed you, which he surely would have had I not spoken up. And nopony forced you to rut his wife in the first place."

Oh, horseapples, the secret was out. Whatever, it was too late, and I would simply have to put up with Shining Armour, Mister Goody-Four-Shoes as always, glaring at me as though it's just been revealed that I kick defenceless puppies in my spare time. For pony's sake, he knew I've been up to worse in my time, though I supposed it was more the fact that he'd given me an awful lot of sympathy for something he just found out was a consequence of me fornicating with the wrong mare. Rainbow Dash stared slack-jawed at me, then looked to Dahlia who, pinned beneath my aide's bulk, appeared to be trying to bury herself into the stony ground out of shame, before pulling a disgusted face and covering her mouth with her hooves as though the very thought of me in flagrante delicto was going to make her vomit.

"Nice!" exclaimed Corporal Slipstream, drawing out the word lasciviously. He raised his hoof in my direction in a gesture I believe the younger ponies of this time called a 'hoof-bump' or a 'bro-hoof'. I duly ignored it.

“Don’t you judge me!” I snapped at, well, everypony around me. “I didn’t know who she was. It’s not as though she wears a crown like royalty ought to, or even a badge would have helped. She initiated it, and I followed along because it beat being stuck back here with you lot, by a long shot, I must add. Do you honestly think I’d have rogered her if I had the slightest inkling who her husband is?

“And you.” I rounded on Chipped Urn, who flinched when I directed my rant against him. “You could have told me your plan ahead of time and saved me a great deal of misery.”

"I had to make it look convincing," said Chipped Urn, and a little too damned casually for my tastes, given what I had just been through. "And it worked, up until you decided you just couldn't keep it in your sheath any longer. I will not be blamed for that."

Rainbow Dash let out a loud, exasperated sigh that mercifully cut through the absurd tension that had arisen in the cave, like opening a window after Cannon Fodder has entered a room. A few beats of her wings brought her to the fore, and with her usual lack of tact or subtlety simply forced past Shining Armour and myself, hovering in place like a large, angry hummingbird.

"We're wasting time with this stupid drama!" she shouted, waving her hooves wildly with such force she might have knocked either Shining Armour or me out if we leaned forwards a little too far. Looking up at her, hovering a few inches above the level of my head, I wondered if pegasi did that as another ridiculous means of trying to compensate for their stereotypical lack of height. "Who cares who bucked who? We can sort all of that out after we're back in Equestria. Besides, I just had breakfast and I don't want to lose it, what with all the mental images of His Royal Horniness here, ugh, doing 'it'."

Finally, the voice of reason, and it came out of Rainbow Dash's mouth, of all ponies. I ignored the insinuation that the prospect of a night of passion with me was something to be disgusted by, and put it down to either misplaced jealousy and lust or the possibility that she just didn't like stallions. The problem, however, was Chipped Urn, and I was well aware of the possibility of being led into yet another trap. We still had Dahlia as our hostage, however, and if this Earthshaker fellow truly valued his partner, though the relationship seemed to be more like that of a collector and an expensive vase than truly husband and wife, we should be able to get through this without too much of a hitch. With over two dozen soldiers, soon to be re-armed, of course, if our little helper from the Agave Tribe turned out to be duplicitous once more I could simply order them to run him through like the blackguard I imagined him to be.

Shining Armour had his heart dead set on retrieving the flag, and to be fair, getting the soldiers' their Royal Guard equipment back was probably a good idea, given the near-inevitability of everything coming crashing down upon me. If the Royal Standard happened to be in the same room as the sets of full plate armour, then fine, I decided I could afford this diversion just this once.

"Right," I said, and then jabbed at Chipped Urn's chest with the tip of my hoof, "but no more plots and deceit, I'm bloody sick of all of it and I am thoroughly done. Do you hear? The first indication that you're up to something, and I'll tear off your hide and sell it to a griffon as a blanket. Is that understood?"

The cowed expression on Chipped Urn's face was most satisfying. He nodded his head, eyes wide and looking to Shining Armour for support, but found little more than a sympathetic look. That, I thought, would work in my favour, if he was so afraid of my terribly empty threat then he would be more amenable to doing whatever he was told by the apparently nicer members of our group.

We moved out, with Chipped Urn leading the way. Dahlia and I stumbled behind him, and I held the jewelled dagger close to her throat, just to remind both her and the natives who were backing away from us down the tunnels what was at stake here. The dagger wobbled precariously in my telekinetic grip, which was likely due to the fact I was so filled with fear and pain that I could barely concentrate on the spell. The guardsponies formed two ranks, led by Shining Armour, and marched in drill ground fashion behind us, each synchronised hoofstep echoing down the stone tunnel like cannon-fire. Rainbow Dash took the opportunity to stretch her wings, and flew lazily above the formation as high as the ceiling would allow.

We carried on, through twisting tunnels interspersed with open galleries and caves, trusting in our guide to lead us to the right place. Corporal Slipstream trotted up to my side and informed me that a group of natives with spears was following us, meaning that we were completely surrounded. If it did come to a fight, we might be able to hold out, but attacked from the front and the rear in such close quarters and largely unarmed we'd be slaughtered in a matter of seconds. They kept their distance, however, and I was immensely thankful for that, and I hoped that they lacked the necessary coordination to pull off a simultaneous attack like that in the first place. Perhaps this Dahlia was rather more popular than I had initially considered, but reminded of her certain proclivities towards being rutted by just about any stallion she could get her hooves on, I suppose it made sense that the warrior class, being made up primarily of males as far as I could see, would be rather wary of the risk of losing their prize whore. [Like old Equestria, in many of these tribes mares held positions of civilian political authority while the military was usually the preserve of stallions, though this is by no means consistent across the various clans in the Badlands.]

My luck continued to hold, however, and we came into a modestly-sized chamber without getting massacred. A hole in the far wall provided some dim light, and looking out I could see a view of a wall of solid rock a short distance from it - the opposite wall of the ravine, I surmised. Chipped Urn described this place as the 'treasure chamber', and when I saw it and its contents I found that term to be more than charitable. Perhaps I, a prince of the realm, had my expectations spoilt by the great riches of Canterlot Castle and, to a slightly lesser extent, my own, but I had expected a bit more than a few sad piles of tarnished gold coins, dull gemstones, and the occasional sceptre. Judging by the reactions of the common soldiers as we all filed into the room (and I noted with a great deal of trepidation that there was no other way to get out, aside from leaping out of the window), it was still a great deal more than what they had seen in their lives before. There were also a few wooden boxes piled up in a haphazard manner, forming a sort of obstacle course around the room, but no obvious sign of the standard or the Royal Guard equipment.

"The penalties for stealing still apply, lads," I warned as we entered, not that I cared overmuch; any diplomatic incidents could be ironed out by the Foreign Office later. Besides, as far as I was concerned, these heathens owed us for sticking us all in that filthy cave and forcing us to mine, so I was willing to turn a blind eye to a few wandering hooves.

"Wouldn't dream of it, sir," said one soldier, staring transfixed at a pile of gold coins.

"But you get to take a mare back with you," whined another, pointing at Dahlia, who seemed to be at the verge of tears at the moment. It was at that moment that I started to feel a little bit guilty for how I was treating her, though the stabs of pain in my back, exacerbated by all that damned moving about and walking we had just done, soon put an end to those thoughts.

"She will be let go after we get back," I said, though mainly because I didn't want to see her again. Looking at those shapely flanks, however, and remembering how they felt beneath my hooves, perhaps there was some room for forgiveness in my withered, dried-up heart after all. "We're soldiers, not pirates."

"Aw."

I moved away to look for the Royal Standard, which, of course, was the entire reason behind this daft venture. Truly, it could have stayed there and be used as a tablecloth for all I really cared for it then; history and tradition are all well and good when it serves to keep the peasants in line and the nobility on top of it all, but not when it serves as a hindrance to such things. As I walked past Dahlia, however, she reached out and touched me on the shoulder. I considered pushing her away and leaving, but something in those huge, magenta eyes made me stop.

"Blueblood, would you really kill me?" she said.

"I'd rather it didn't come to that," I said, choosing my words very carefully. The last thing I wanted was her friends watching us over there thinking that I was too soft for it. "But that depends on your tribe's co-operation."

"I thought we..."

"Had 'something'?" I interrupted. I wasn't going to let her manipulation work on me. "I believe that's what ponies call it. No. It's remarkable how mares believe they're entitled to more from me just because I gave them a damned good rutting, and that's all it was and that's all it will ever be."

Dahlia's expression grew hard, and if it wasn't for Cannon Fodder standing nearby with a spear I would have wondered if I had gone too far. "You think too much of yourself, Blueblood. You were not my first choice, but that one" -she pointed at Shining Armour, who was busy shifting aside some wooden boxes to get at something, and appeared to be completely oblivious to our conversation- "said that he was married to 'the most beautiful mare in all of Equestria' and refused my offer."

"Second pick after Shining Armour," I said flatly. "I don't know what hurts more, that or the flogging."

"Actually, you're the third pick," said Rainbow Dash. She had perched herself atop a pile of gold coins next to me and had an insufferable grin on her face. "I was flattered, but I don't swing that way. Sorry."

My pride wounded beyond all repair, I skulked away to join the search for the Royal Standard. Of course, the only reason that I had been third in line was a matter of timing; Shining Armour and the others had already been prisoners for some time before I had even arrived, nevertheless the idea still stung. I consoled myself that after today we would never have to speak of it again, and I must admit the mental image of Rainbow Dash and Dahlia together in sapphic ecstasy kept me very entertained as I poked around the boxes and piles of alleged treasure.

There it was, around a wall of those useless boxes and tossed into the corner like a mouldy old blanket; the Royal Standard of the Two Sisters, this oriflamme that bore with it the long and bloody history of Equestria's founding and ascension to a great power, was bundled next to a large pile of Royal Guard uniforms, spears, and armour. Seeing it, the pale sky-blue with the seal of Equestria and the names of past glories emblazoned upon it, I took back all reservations I had about our quest to find it. My breath caught in my throat as I approached, and I tentatively reached out a hoof to touch its ancient cloth. It was like a spark of electricity - what I had told Dahlia about this mere object representing all that Equestria had done and the Harmony for which it stood was, perhaps, less of a lie than I had thought.

I took the pole and held it up. The banner itself hung limply, but the sight of it invoked a sudden sense of quiet reverence amongst the soldiers present. Everypony stopped what they were doing immediately to stand and stare, and a few even bowed and pressed their noses into the dirt before it. Feeling a tad awkward with nearly all eyes on me, I carried it back to the centre of the room and presented it to Shining Armour.

"We have what we came for," I said, a little too flippantly perhaps but I was eager to be off. I gave the standard to Cannon Fodder, not feeling up to carrying the surprisingly heavy thing as I had done years ago when I was a younger and much fitter ensign of the 1st Solar Guard. He accepted it with his usual lack of enthusiasm, apparently regarding the personification of the honour of the entire Royal Guard as little more than an extra little thing I wanted him to do.

Shining Armour grinned so damned wide his face might have frozen like that for the rest of his life if he wasn't careful. He reached out and seized me by the shoulders, which I was quite alarmed by, and exclaimed, "We've done it! Don't you see, Blueblood? We've saved the regiment!"

And your career and reputation, thought I, or what was left of either of those things. His forelegs wrapped around my upper body in a hug before I could protest, and the indignity of being embraced by Shining Armour was second only to the sudden stabs of pain as his hooves touched the half-healed wounds on my back. When I shoved him off me, he did at least have the good manners to look guilty as he saw the white fur of his fetlocks stained with my blood.

"Sorry," he said, and I wondered if I could get away with ordering his flogging when we returned to the fort. I'd already suffered under the lash, so why not make it an even two in the number of Equestrian princes doomed to go through the rest of their lives with scarred backs? "Don't know what came over me."

It took too long for the soldiers to don their armour, as I could see that our 'escort', the native guards watching over us, were growing more and more tetchy by the minute. Earthshaker himself even made an appearance, standing at the threshold of the chamber and glaring at me with a look that even a windigo would find withering. I made sure to return the gaze, still holding the dagger as close as I dared to his wife's neck.

By the time they had finished, however, I was immensely relieved by the sight of these armed and armoured guardsponies in full uniform; tarnished and stained golden plates glimmering in the wan light. Corporal Slipstream approached me, carrying a wrapped bundle under his armpit. Back in uniform, he appeared to slip into his 'persona' of the disciplined NCO as he snapped to attention and saluted, which, on subconscious impulse, I returned with as much professionalism as the stiffness in my back would allow me to.

"I believe this is yours, sir," he said, offering the bundle to me.

I took the bundle in my magic, and unwrapped the cloth to find that it contained Gliding Moth's rapier and scabbard. Something rose up my throat and I almost choked when I saw the last memento that I had of her; the perennial reminder of my failure to keep her safe.

"I'm just taking care of it for somepony else," I said, attaching it to my belt. The weight of the weapon on my hip felt reassuring, somehow, as though it had always belonged there. My uniform had been left behind in that cave with the chains, including that damned peaked cap, but I wasn't overly concerned about leaving that hateful thing with its grotesque imagery behind.

"Sir?"

"Never mind. If everypony's ready, we can move out."

So far everything had gone well, better than that, actually, which set my hooves itching. If any venture goes according to plan, or even exceeds the expectations of said plan, then it is all but certain to go horrendously wrong. I call this 'Blueblood's Law', though I don't think the term is going to catch on in everyday speech. Though the Rat Pony Tribe had been curiously compliant with our demands to the point of arousing suspicion, I didn't think they would truly attempt anything while we had something precious of theirs at our mercy. Earthshaker was violent, aggressive, and impetuous, but I did not think he was stupid, at least by the standards of the Badlands natives; he wanted his wife back safe and sound, and ultimately he wanted to avoid a violent confrontation with Equestria, which was an admirable goal even if he went about it in the worst possible way. Whatever happened, as long as nopony on either side did anything daft or foalish, if every single pony present could keep their passions calm and controlled, then I was certain that Princess Celestia could iron out this little incident with the subtle art of diplomacy.

No, it was Dahlia who my paranoia was metaphorically grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming about instead, but wasn't being particularly clear about why exactly. Her reactions to what had been going on had been a little 'off', was the best way that I could describe. Oh, she projected the expected fear quite well, but now and again I would notice a certain scowl or frown when she thought I wasn't looking at her. I like to think I had some skill in 'reading' ponies, as it were, honed over years of lying and embellishing from when I was a small colt (I once convinced Auntie 'Tia that it was Philomena who ate an entire wedding cake, not me, despite having cake frosting on my blazer) [That conniving little...], and it was that same instinct that kept poking my hindbrain with a stick and tried to tell it in frustratingly vague terms that something was awry.

We were in the tunnels again, and I was getting quite sick of them too. The pegasi in our contingent, Rainbow Dash included, were getting twitchy about being enclosed in a tight space with no access to the sky, and though I had no comprehension of the unique sort of claustrophobia that afflicts our winged cousins even I was starting to sympathise. Though we were being led by Earthshaker and what looked like a section of natives, my special talent at least told me that we were heading in broadly the right direction, which was simply 'up'.

We reached another open chamber, quite large and roughly oblong in shape. I surmised this place must have served as a junction of some sort, judging by the number of other corridors that branched off around us and led to other parts of this vast underground complex. A few guards manned what I took to be a checkpoint of some description, though they displayed their usual lack of attentiveness in their duties until they saw their Chieftain march past them with us in tow. I could taste the fresh air, such as it was in this benighted portion of the realm, but compared to the stale and dank air of the caves, filled with the scents of so many unwashed ponies and the general filth that accompanies large urban conurbations, even the choking, humid air of the Badlands was sweet and refreshing by comparison. Hope dared to flare in my heart, only to be crushed utterly.

Dahlia had stopped. My fellow escapees fanned out in the room, the Royal Guard training having kicked in so they could cover the myriad entrances and exits to this place, while Shining Armour was making his rounds checking on everypony before we could set off once more. Cannon Fodder, Rainbow Dash, and I stood with Dahlia in the approximate centre of the room, between the Equestrian soldiers and the native guards. She looked angry, and she was staring directly at me.

"Dahlia?" I said.

"Stupid," she hissed. Those perfect, magenta eyes of hers had turned jade, and I realised that I had made another terrible mistake. "This has been fun, but you had to ruin everything by not dying. Now I’m getting tired of this game."

Her horn lit with a green aura, and a split second later a blast of that sickly emerald magic was projected in a rough, unfocused beam. It struck the rocky ceiling. Dahlia swung her head, carving a great rent into the rock, before the ceiling itself crumbled and broke.

The earth rained down upon us in great, heavy clumps that would have crushed us were it not for a green shield projected over the four of us. I saw a flash of purple as Shining Armour raised his own shield over him and his troops, but the collapsing chamber merely piled up over it until he and everypony else was gone from view. The cacophony of the falling rocks filled my ears with a wall of roaring noise.

"What are you doing?!" I shrieked over the sounds of the collapsing chamber.

"Oh, you still haven't pieced it together, Prince?" she said, stepping towards me with the sort of self-assured grace that comes with a pony who believes they have already won. She didn't raise her voice, yet I somehow heard it clearly despite the din. "Here, let me show you!"

Dahlia was engulfed in blinding green fire that stung my eyes to look at, but I forced myself to anyway. The flash of heat that singed my fur was like opening the door to a hot oven. Her silhouette grew to an unnatural size, almost that of an alicorn princess, and the 'shell' of a pony peeled away like a reptile shedding its skin. I knew what it was before the fire cleared, and I'm sure everypony reading this had probably worked this out for themselves long ago, and will likely feel very smug about themselves for having spotted the signs long before I did, but I tell you, right there and then, it was a dreadful and horrifying shock. Standing before me was a horror, an unnatural abomination that was rightly feared across the battlefields of the Badlands, the callous generals and enforcers of Queen Chrysalis' seemingly infinite armies - a Changeling Purestrain.

No two are identical, at least that was the prevailing theory at the time, save for their imposing size and the wicked intelligence smouldering in their penetrating green eyes. It was tall and broad, with thick chitin that seemed more like lacquered plate armour than the usual insect-like carapace normally seen on their kind. Even its head was framed by this thickened chitin, such that it appeared to be wearing kabuto, and even the jagged horn resembled a sort of elaborate crest [A helmet design favoured by the samurai warrior class of Neighpon, usually identified by a dome over the top of the head, a large, flanged neck guard, and a family crest]. Unlike the others that I had faced over the course of this war (and killed, I might add), this one seemed to possess a strange sense of nobility about it. It was not the sort of hideous, slathering monster that I had faced in the catacombs of Canterlot or in Black Venom Pass, but a stern, stately overlord that inspired a different, but no less potent, type of fear within me. Where the others would rip my body into gory shreds with their bare hooves or with raw magic, this one looked as though it would exact a precise sort of torture before killing me when it grew bored of my pain.

Oh no, thought I, I had sex with that.

The cave-in had stopped, mercifully, and the shield that had protected us disappeared with a quiet pop. A few pebbles fell from the shattered roof, but the dome of smashed rock had fused with the heat of the magical blast and held fast, for now at least. Cannon Fodder, Rainbow Dash, this Purestrain, and I were surrounded by the piled-up walls of rock, with the other ponies who were with us either behind them or crushed beneath, I couldn’t tell, though the glimpse of Shining Armour’s shield gave me hope that they had survived. Behind me was one of the tunnels, but where it led I had no idea.

"I am Odonata," said the Purestrain, its voice sounding distinctly feminine, if somewhat deep and hoarse, despite its appearance. I wasn’t sure if Changelings had genders at the time, or names for that matter, besides their ruler Chrysalis, of course. The fact that it was apparently important enough to have one only added to the sense of terrible majesty this creature possessed.

"I serve Queen Chrysalis, and she has taken a very special interest in your demise, Prince Blueblood. I intend to fulfil that desire of hers."

"I can't imagine why," I said, backing up a little to make sure that, whatever happened, I could still reach the tunnel. Rainbow Dash and Cannon Fodder both flocked to my side; the latter stood impassively, holding the Royal Standard high in apparent defiance of just how appalling our situation had become, and the former crouched low, stamping at the ground as if ready to charge. It would have been useless, for unless I could get my aide close enough for his unique abilities to take effect, we all would be reduced to piles of smoking ash before she could even say 'charge!'.

"I thought we 'had something', after all," I added.

Odonata followed our movements, always staying a few pony-lengths away from us, but it was a leisurely sort of gait that implied a complete and total assurance of victory. A cruel, fanged smile spread over its black lips.

"Funny," it said. "Always with the dry wit. But like I said, you were not my first choice in this. Shining Armour would have suited best for my plans, but his devotion to his wife is much too strong for even my allure. I can see why our Queen grew so powerful draining his love."

"Uh-huh." That's it, keep the Purestrain talking and make it think that it's won. I just had to get a little closer to that tunnel, then I could make a break for it. It was a thin sliver of a chance to survive, but as I've mentioned time and time again, I would always take the slimmest of opportunities over none. Never let it be said that Prince Blueblood would just lie down and give up, not when there is at least something, no matter how hopeless, that could be done to ensure the survival of his wretched, wasted life. "So after Rainbow Dash turned you away, you settled for me?"

"A prince of the realm, and I knew you wouldn't be able to resist me. Lust is a poor substitute for love, but I was so starved and you were so full of it - it was a veritable feast for me." The grin grew wider, showing more and more of those hideous fangs. I was almost tripping over my hooves trying to get into position, and once there it took nearly every ounce of what willpower I had left to keep myself from just bolting away. Not yet, I had to know more, and fortunately another trait these Purestrains all share is an overweening tendency to talk, as though they seek a sense of validation out of their victims that they just don't get from ordinary Changeling society, if such a thing even existed. I could scarcely imagine it coming from Chrysalis or any of their other peers, but I was happy to oblige here if it meant increasing my chances of survival.

"I intended for us to get caught," Odonata continued. "Earthshaker was supposed to kill you by flogging. A slow, lingering sort of death as befits a pony who has frustrated my mistress’ plans for too long. With you murdered by a Badlands pony tribe, Equestria would have no choice but to declare war. Your regiments would be tied up fighting a hopeless, endless conflict against a native population you could not possibly hope to subdue; exhausted and distracted, all we would have to do is mop up the mess and the way into Equestria will be open to our armies. But that idiot Chipped Urn had to ruin it."

"How did you know we would get captured in the first place?"

"I didn't," it said with a shrug. "I have been in deep cover here for a while now, gathering intelligence and love for the Queen. It was I that nurtured the chiefs' distrust of Equestria; you falling into my hooves was simply a stroke of good luck.”

“And what of Dahlia?” For some reason, I wanted to know; it was a strange cocktail of emotions I was feeling, and though the spirit of terror was strongest in this mix, I could not help but feel as though I had been cheated. Did the mare I lied with truly exist? And where was she?

Odonata’s grin grew wider, and a forked tongue slithered out to lick its thin lips. Its head tilted to one side, and it waved a hoof dismissively at me. “What about her? Hundreds of ponies and Changelings dying in this war and you’re worried about one little mare? Maybe she’s in one of our hives being harvested, or she’s lost in the Badlands after I cast her out. Or perhaps she never existed and I made her up for this operation. It’s not as though you’ll have anything to do with her ever again, what with the three of you about to die in the next few minutes.”

"Hah!" exclaimed Rainbow Dash, stomping on the ground with a hoof. "I'd like to see you try! We've all faced much worse than you."

Which, I should add, is one of the worst things one could say to a creature very capable and very willing to commit acts of great and extreme violence upon oneself. Purestrains rarely needed any sort of encouragement to do just that, anyway.

I nudged Rainbow Dash with my elbow, and whispered, "Follow my lead." She gave a nod of understanding, and braced herself to charge, wings flared to their fullest extent.

I drew my rapier, and held it before me in the en garde position. Despite my back complaining, I stood poised and ready to strike with a deadly thrust. My heart was racing, pounding in my ears, and sweat induced by pure terror soaked and foamed in my stained and matted fur.

Oh Faust, this was hopeless, I thought; the three of us - a crippled stallion, an insane stunt flyer, and a unicorn with no magic - against a thing that could only be adequately described in our language as a horror of perverse Changeling magic. Yet that was the hoof I had been dealt, and only an idiot soon to be parted with his bits believes that card games are solely down to what the dealer's given him. I always held an ace up my Prench cuffs, metaphorically and literally, and I was damned if the last mare I slept ever slept with was a bloody Changeling. There was only one chance for this to work.

I ran away. A quick about-face, I bolted down the tunnel as fast as my hooves could take me. Cannon Fodder was quick off the mark too, despite being weighed down by the standard and his armour, but he was soon firmly behind me at a fast gallop.

As the darkness of the corridor enveloped me, forcing me to ignite a feeble light in my horn to keep us from stumbling, I heard Rainbow Dash shout in exasperation, her voice echoing off the cold stone walls:

"Oh, come on! Seriously?"

Honour and Blood (Part 21)

I galloped down the tunnel as fast as my legs could carry me. My back cried out in agony, but mortal terror, I think you'll find, is an excellent, if temporary, sedative. When every single instinct is screaming at one to get away as far away from a murderous crime-against-nature as possible, preferably the next continent over, something like pain tends to get drowned out. It wouldn't last, though, and sooner or later the adrenaline would run dry and my strength would give out, but hopefully by then I'd have reached a point of relative safety.

A multi-coloured blur shot past, then slowed to allow us to catch up. Rainbow Dash was not looking best pleased as she settled into what was to her an easy and steady sort of flight, just above and between Cannon Fodder and I.

"What gives?" she shouted. "You left me there on my own!"

"Shut up and run, damn you!" I barked.

As if to punctuate that point, a bolt of magic tore through the narrow space between Rainbow Dash and me, briefly lighting up the tunnel in a horrid emerald glow. She yelped and swerved out of the way. I felt the heat of the blast singe my fur all along my left side. A little further to the right and it would have struck me in the fundament, burned through my internals, punched a hole through my chest, and all that would remain of my earthly form would be a severed head bearing a vaguely surprised expression and four stubs of hooves. The thought sent an icy chill down my back and propelled my legs faster than before.

Rainbow Dash snarled and let out an exasperated grunt, but the instinct for self-preservation won out over her brashness and she did as she was told. The sound of our hooves on the stone and the steady beat of her wings filled the tunnel, but louder still was the frantic beating of my heart and my ragged breath. That thing, Odonata, it called itself, was behind me, and though I dared not look, something told me that it was drawing nearer.

The tunnel turned abruptly to the right, and just in time too. A scramble of flailing hooves brought me into approximately the right direction, and as I darted away another blast struck the wall where I had been just a second before. My tail was caught in the blast, but luckily it struck only hair and not the fleshy part. It still stung from the intense heat, though. The smell of burnt hair and the ozone of discharged magic burned my nostrils.

"Now where do we go?" Rainbow Dash shouted. She was further down the corridor, hovering in place at an intersection with Cannon Fodder. Dammit, my fears were coming true and I was just slowing everypony else down with my injuries. Raw terror and adrenaline can only carry one so far, and the burst of hysterical energy both provide must invariably be paid back with interest.

I stopped, briefly, to take in my surroundings. The corridor flared out at this intersection, and there were signs that this place had once served as another guard checkpoint before being abandoned for whatever reason. A broken chair lay in pieces against the wall, which itself was covered in graffiti scratched into the stone. Carved into the rock were small alcoves, which I assumed must have been used for storage purposes. Looking up, I saw that the tunnelling here was of lesser quality than the more populated parts of this underground city. The ceiling in particular was broken and rough, with large cracks criss-crossing its surface like a spiders' web. I had skipped past piles of rubble that could only have come from the broken rock above. This place must have been deemed too unstable for general use and was thus abandoned, I assumed.

"Left!" I shouted. It was a pure guess, but I trusted in my special talent, even when it often disagreed with me on what 'where I need to go' actually means. "Go left! Now!"

The sound of hooves on stone echoed behind me, filling my heart with dread. Cannon Fodder and Rainbow Dash had already gone, but if you think I was about to stand and nobly sacrifice myself for their escape you are sorely mistaken, and clearly haven't paid attention to a word I've written. There was a chance, though a slim one, of at least slowing the Purestrain if not stopping it, but it was better than nothing. I summoned as much magic into my horn as I could, until it throbbed and ached with the pressure.

The hoofsteps were not rapid, as one would expect with a gallop, but something more of a trot, as though this Purestrain had all the time in the world to find and kill me. I was put in mind of the Griffon aristocracy, who had turned the already abominable practice of killing animals for food into a grotesque and morbid sport (they call it a sport, but I don't ever recall seeing the prey win when I observed these hunts). The ‘entertainment’, if it could be called that, was in the chase and the hunt as opposed to the act of killing itself, and in these tunnels I felt precisely like a fox running for his life through the undergrowth from the hunter. [Although hunting is a national tradition in the Griffon Empire, farming practices have eliminated the need for most griffons to hunt for their food. The hunt, therefore, has become a hobby and a 'sport' for the aristocracy and country gentry, who engage in hunting parties in estates managed by gamekeepers. Blueblood attended a number of these hunts as part of a number of state visits.]

I saw a flicker of movement, and I fired. The shot was panicked and premature. It struck the ceiling, whereupon the cracked rock fell in a heap on the floor. Not enough - the beast had turned the corner, jumped, and cleared that meagre obstacle with ease, eyes alight with the promise of spilling my regal blood. I hastily fired a desultory volley of shots into the ceiling again. This time it had the desired effect; the ground beneath my hooves shook as the tunnel caved in, and great piles of rock, earth, and dust fell crashing and rolling from above to fill the chamber from floor to ceiling. Dammit, if I had held my fire a little longer I might have caught Odonata in the collapse, though I had no idea if that would give the murderous Purestrain even a scratch on its chitinous armour.

Not wanting to stick around to admire my hoofwork, however, I darted after Rainbow Dash and Cannon Fodder, the latter still holding onto that damned flag. The two of them were waiting for me a little further down, but settled next to me at a trot as I reached them.

"That'll hold it for a bit," I said. I felt sick, more so than before, and the edges of my vision closed in. There was that curious feeling of being submerged in water, and while I was aware of various sensations, mostly pain and nausea, they felt indistinct and distant. We carried on, however, and I forced myself to as near a gallop as I could manage. The aforementioned effects of fear and adrenaline were being outweighed by exhaustion and pain, and I didn't dare to imagine what this exertion was doing to my still-raw back.

Presently, I heard the sound of a discharge of magic followed by a rippling noise of rock crumbling. That little obstacle only bought us a few minutes of breathing space, but it could still be the thin dividing line between life and death.

[Changeling magic is very unrefined by the standards of most unicorns, with the notable exception of shape-shifting. Purestrains are the only kinds of Changelings able to directly manipulate magic through their horns, but typically their repertoire of spells is usually limited to raw offensive blasts. Furthermore, the amount of power one draws upon is dependent upon how much emotional energy the Purestrain has taken. In this case, we can conclude from these writings that Odonata must have glutted herself on lust, as a substitute for love which their kind usually feed on, in order to have cleared the cave-in Blueblood had caused so quickly.]

"Are you just making this up as you go along, or do you have a plan?" said Rainbow Dash, yelling above the din and apparently oblivious to the fact that I was on the verge of fainting.

"The plan is 'shut up and run'!" I barked, though at that point I considered changing it to 'sacrifice Rainbow Dash to the Purestrain and hope it chokes on all of her damned ego'. She rolled her eyes and growled in response, but otherwise wisely kept further thoughts on the matter to herself.

We kept on going. Once or twice, I'm not sure, I stumbled on the rough and pitted ground, but each time Cannon Fodder helped me back up and we carried on. But before long, I felt as though I was spent, completely and utterly. Everything hurt in that peculiar, abstract way that was still horrendously unpleasant. It was mostly in my limbs and my back, and my head felt as though somepony had rammed a hosepipe up my nose and turned it on until my skull cavity filled up with water. Every breath, already laboured with the exertion of flight, was agony, like a thousand needles filling my lungs. I was sick too, I think; I don't recall the actual act of vomiting, only that at some point there was a lingering foul taste in my mouth with a coppery tang to it, and the feeling of something dribbling down my chin.

It was getting closer and closer. The rapport of hoofsteps behind me seemed to grow louder and louder until it was almost deafening, bearing with it the portent of imminent death. I imagined feeling its hot, stinking breath closing in my neck, ready for the kill. Oh Faust, I was going to die down here, either ripped to pieces, burned to cinders, or just giving up to expire quietly - hundreds of miles away from home and from anypony who held even the slightest of positive opinions about me. But I kept on galloping as best as I could through the seemingly endless tunnel, past fleeting images of empty chambers and caves. Now and again, I'd look over my shoulder and fire a shot or two down the empty passageway, each bolt jarring like a kick to the horn. I doubted my feeble magic could do more than lightly char its thick chitin, but I hoped it would force it to keep its distance.

I saw daylight. The tunnel lurched violently to the right, then after a short distance opened up to a sort of balcony set deep into one side of the ravine. The top, that is to say, ground level, looked like a smooth ribbon of bright daylight above us, but to look down was to see the sheer walls sink into an impenetrable darkness. This great cleft in the ground, like an axe wound, stretched on to the left and right, turning away in a sort of crescent. The opposite wall was a dozen yards or so away, and in the disconcertingly smooth rock there I could make out a hole almost directly opposite us. I would guess that there had once been a bridge here that had long since collapsed, and another glance either side confirmed my theory as I saw ropes and wood suspended between other such openings further along. [The Rat Pony Tribe's underground territory did extend across both sides of the ravine, though most of the settlement was on the side closest to Equestria.]

I still recall with utmost clarity the feeling of utter horror at seeing this dead end. Dread was already gripping my heart and giving it a good squeeze, but the sight of the ground dropping off into the near-infinite depths below and vast cliff looming above us, with the open sky mocking me through the thin sliver that was visible, sank my spirits into such despair as I had never known before. I thought, perhaps, that my injuries had become so severe that even my special talent had somehow become damaged. There seemed to be no way off, save from jumping off and plummeting to my doom, and then I remembered Rainbow Dash.

She had no sarcastic comment this time; her face was grave and ashen, but I realised that she was looking directly at me and not the precipitous drop into infinity below or the sky beyond the ravine above. If I were her, and I thank Celestia that I'm not, I'd have flown off to freedom as soon as I glimpsed the pretty blue overhead, and then I would have kept on going, not even stopping to report back at Fort E-5150, and carried on until I reached either Zebrica or Griffonstone, whichever was closer, and then tried to claim political asylum. I expect that as she was the bearer of the Element of Loyalty, that precluded her from such sensible actions. Nevertheless, the look that she gave me, devoid of its usual brashness and carefree self-assurance, had the same effect upon me as if I had been slapped - when Rainbow Dash of all ponies looks as though all hope is lost, then it really, truly is.

Damn that rot, however, for as far as I was concerned it only meant she wasn't thinking hard enough. I looked at her, then up at the sky, then at her again, noting the lean but powerful musculature that lay hidden beneath that garish blue fur. The idea I had was ridiculous, but in the absence of any better ones and with the beast bearing down upon us, merely seconds away, it would have to do.

"Carry us," I said. My voice sounded hoarse and dry, and I was alarmed at just how weak it sounded.

"What?!" exclaimed Rainbow Dash. "Are you crazy?"

"Are you or are you not the best flyer in all of Equestria?" If in doubt, and you want Rainbow Dash to do something she thinks is impossible, one merely has to appeal to her ego. For all of its size and the excessive posturing it inspires, it can be a remarkably fragile thing that needed constant assurance, like a rare and expensive orchid that will die if one stops paying it any attention.

Rainbow Dash puffed her chest out, and her wings spread like a heraldic eagle on some ancient knight's shield. "Of course I am!"

"Then prove it!"

Rainbow Dash stared, apparently sizing up Cannon Fodder and I, then her self-assured grin returned. She barked out an abrupt affirmative accompanied with something approximating a salute, and darted towards us. I had no time to prepare myself before she wrapped her right foreleg around my upper body, just under my armpits, and hoisted me onto her back with an ease that I would have found thoroughly emasculating were I not in mortal peril. Her forelegs wrapped Cannon Fodder's torso in an awkward sort of embrace, and she grimaced at the close physical contact with his grubby body. As she spread her wings and flapped she made a few grunts of exertion, and then leapt into the air and the three of us were airborne.

My hooves left the safety and security of hard, solid ground, and I clung desperately with my forelegs wrapped around her upper body and neck. I was reminded of flying on Auntie Celestia's back as a colt, though the fact that I was a bit bigger than Rainbow Dash made holding on rather more precarious. That I had effectively ‘mounted’ her, with her firm flanks against my crotch, was already deeply awkward and embarrassing, and it was fortunate that I was much too terrified to make the situation any more so for the both of us.

It was shortly after take-off that I learned of the second thing that unnerves my aide, Twilight Sparkle being the first. As soon as we were airborne, soaring heavenwards with all the grace and elegance of a swan that had over-indulged on bread and gin, Cannon Fodder made some very disconcerting noises that seemed to emanate from his gut, and the skin beneath his grubby beige fur had turned a distinct shade of green. Flying disagreed with him, as did most things, come to think of it, but this was one of the few activities where he felt it necessary to reciprocate.

Nevertheless, despite her initial misgivings, it appeared to be working. We were flying, albeit at a much slower pace than Rainbow Dash preferred, and our ascent in the direction of the top of the ravine and apparent safety was slow. The pegasus grunted in exertion with every beat of her wings, and I could see her face screwed up with the effort of it all. Likewise, the taut musculature of her forelegs bulged as she held my aide, a full-grown stallion in armour, as though he was an oversized doll won at a fairground.

A shrill shriek of discharged magic and a flash of heat felt against my left flank reminded me that we were still being hunted. I dared to peek over my shoulder to see our pursuer in flight behind us, horn glowing ominously with that putrescent shade of green that I have come to fear. Odonata's carapace had opened at the back, revealing large translucent wings that beat so fast they were almost a blur. That said, judging from the way this large, armoured Purestrain lumbered into the air and lurched awkwardly, flying was not one of its strengths.

"Stop squirming!" shouted Rainbow Dash. I felt the rippling muscles on her back beneath me shift and flex with every beat of her wings. "I can almost make it to the top!"

"Don't!" I snapped back. "We'll be sitting ducks out in the open, head further into the ravine and evade."

She nodded. "On it, sir!"

Rainbow Dash brought us into a steep dive, and with it the bile rose up my throat once more. Picking up speed, assisted by the frantic flapping of her wings, the air rushed in my face and stung my eyes. We lurched to the right suddenly, and then up once more, just as another hellish green beam tore through the space we occupied not more than half a second ago. It struck the wall where the cleft turned sharply to the left, and the rock erupted into a cloud of dust and showering debris.

Onwards, Rainbow Dash carried us. Down here, far from light, the ravine was not so smooth, but twisted and turned with great clumps of rock jutting out, but she skilfully avoided each and every one without injury to herself or her passengers, but there were a damned too many near misses for my liking. A few inches higher and my forehead would have clipped an outcropping, but I had to cut her a little slack considering that she was carrying one stallion in heavy armour and another for whom the Royal Guard fitness regimen had proved ineffective against a lifetime of éclairs and port.

Odonata was still 'on our six', as the Wonderbolts would have put it. A volley of shots were fired, and Rainbow Dash, alerted by my panicked screaming, weaved left and right, up and down, and around this deadly fusillade. She was grinning, and she seemed almost on the verge of laughing. Damn her, she was enjoying this; it was just another bloody competition to her, though the prize for first place is mere survival and the only reward for second is a grisly death. If I didn't know any better, she was showing off too.

It wouldn't last, though. Even I could tell she was getting tired, and sooner or later, Odonata would catch up and that would be it. The beast seemed to know this, and was relentless in its pursuit. It made no real effort to close the distance, merely firing shot after shot in the knowledge that Rainbow Dash could dodge it with contemptuous ease, but reassured that eventually those wings that propelled her to perform such great tricks like the sonic rainboom would have to tire some time. Whether or not our flyer here knew was another matter, but the realisation to me was as stark as a splash of ice-cold water to the face.

There was only one thing for it, and I didn’t like it. Cannon Fodder’s anti-magic aura, usually such a great boon, had become a hindrance and I was unable to return fire, not that my feeble shots would have done much in the way of lethal damage. This left only one viable alternative. I looked at the Colours in Cannon Fodder’s hooves, with its sharp pointed tip like a spear, and then to the rapier still hovering in my magical aura.

“Rainbow Dash!” I shouted.

“Yeah?” she snapped. “I’m a little busy here!”

She swerved violently, and I almost lost my grip on her narrow chest. Another blast of magic burned through the air, much too close to us for comfort, and then ricocheted off the wall at a shallow angle. We flew straight through the resulting cloud of dust and vapourised rock, pelted with a spray of falling pebbles and shattered stone.

[It is likely that Blueblood misremembered this detail, as magic missiles do not ricochet off solid objects, besides being reflected off enchanted crystals. Either the shower of dirt mentioned had clouded his vision, or the blast had struck a vein of crystal hidden in the rock.]

“Have you jousted before?”

“What?”

“Pegasus aerial jousting!” I snarled. “Have you done it before?”

“Why are you asking me this now?”

Damnation, she was dense sometimes, though I supposed her mind was fully occupied with the task of flying and keeping the three of us alive. She demonstrated this by expertly swerving around the paths of two further beams of magic. It was that or too many trips at high altitude had starved her brain of enough oxygen to cause permanent damage.

“Turn us around!” By now I was screaming at her. I may have used the Royal Canterlot Voice, I couldn’t tell for my ears were already filled with the roar of the air rushing past us. My blond mane was getting stuck over my eyes again, and I cursed my continued avoidance of a less elegant but more practical military buzz-cut.

"I thought you wanted to get away from the monster!"

I saw she hadn't quite grasped the severity of our problem, and seemed to think that she could carry on and out-fly this beast indefinitely. Under normal circumstances, yes, there wasn't the slightest shadow of a doubt in my mind that Rainbow Dash could fly rings around the big, ungainly Purestrain before tweaking its nose and blasting off into the sunset with a rainbow trailing from her taut, toned rear end. These were hardly normal circumstances, carrying two adult stallions and being shot at, and thus it called for the most extreme of drastic measures. I had to explain in as simple terms as possible for this single-minded mare:

"Fly me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!"

I waved the appropriate article in her face and she soon divined my meaning. She barked another curt, "Yes, sir!", and then brought us into a very sudden and sharp climb. My stomach carried on in straight and level flight for a time before rejoining the rest of my body. Some very worrying noises emanated from my aide, and the greenish tint to his skin had become much more vivid. He even covered his mouth with the hoof not occupied by holding the standard, and his cheeks bulged.

We rose upwards, but Rainbow Dash flared her wings suddenly. Our ascent stalled, and just at the apex of our climb before gravity would take its hold, the longest feathers of her left wing twitched almost imperceptibly. The world spun drunkenly before my eyes, then I stared into the black abyss of the ravine and a very surprised-looking Purestrain staring up at us.

We plummeted towards our pursuer. Rainbow Dash closed her wings around her body, presumably to maximise our acceleration. I scarcely had time to raise my rapier before she flared her wings again, bringing us out of the dive and straight past our foe. The blade certainly struck something - I could feel it slicing deep into something soft. [This aerial combat manoeuvre is known as the Hammer Head Turn, named for its creator Hammer Head, a pegasus ace of the Nightmare Heresy. Many stunts as used by the Wonderbolts in their shows were originally based on military manoeuvres of that era, and have survived as tricks.]

The wall of the ravine loomed up before us, but a deft course correction, so sharp that the edges of my vision momentarily clouded over, brought us out of harm's way and we faced the enemy once more. A blast of foul green magic struck the wall above us, showering us with clods of dirt and broken stone.

The hours upon tedious hours of repetitive drill forced upon me by my old fencing instructor had paid off in that moment, as I saw that my blade had found the miniscule gap in the Purestrain's chitin between the neck plate and shoulder guard. The Changeling beast hovered in place, membranous wings buzzing frantically, and with a look of utter horror twisting its face it held its hooves to the wound in a vain attempt to stem the arterial spray of ichor flowing from it.

We came in for another pass, quicker now that we momentarily had the upper hoof. Cannon Fodder wielded the Royal Standard like a spear, but the point was deflected by the Purestrain's chest armour, where it left only a small scratch. I, however, struck true once more, and this time my blade found a gap between the plates on its belly, plunged in deep, and was then wrenched free. Odonata hissed in agony, and lit its horn with magic. As we tore past and swerved to come in again, a volley of green fire swept in behind us to strike the wall. Great chunks of solid earth were blasted into non-existence, leaving big, pony-sized craters as though the dirt and rock had been carved out with an enormous ice cream scoop. The fight was not over yet.

Odonata was severely wounded, perhaps fatally if the flow of ichorous blood was any indication, but apparently having glutted itself on the lust of Yours Truly and Luna knows how many other stallions in the Rat Pony Tribe, its offensive magic made it still very much a threat. We had to finish this, and quickly too - Rainbow Dash was clearly tiring herself carrying the two of us, and I wasn't about to gamble on the Purestrain bleeding out faster than our pegasus' endurance.

"Get us in closer!" I shouted, almost hysterical now that the end was almost within my feeble grasp. "Ram it! Pin it against the wall!"

With a wordless cry of anger that echoed through the ravine, our pilot turned us around once more. Her blood was up and with it the red mist had descended, clearly, as I doubt that any sane pegasus would consider ramming a far larger and stronger enemy. The distance was closed in a panicked heartbeat. I saw confusion in the Changeling's face as we collided. I dared to stretch out my right hoof, keeping the left wrapped tightly around Rainbow Dash, and shoved it against its massive, armoured barrel, and I pushed with what little of my strength remained. Rainbow Dash likewise did not stop, but kept on flying, and our enemy was forced straight into the ravine wall. I heard something crunch, and saw that those delicate insect-like wings had been broken by the impact, and hung limply like scrunched up silk from the creature's back.

Hissing, shrieking, snarling - the Purestrain was more like a trapped wild animal than the patrician and noble overlord we had faced in the caved-in chamber. Ichor gushed from wounds that should have been almost immediately fatal to any lesser creature. Its great hooves flailed and kicked, and one struck me in the side of the head and stars floated across my sight. Stronger than the three of us, we were forced back, but that proved to be its downfall.

Odonata - wings broken, bleeding heavily, and no longer pinned to the wall - simply plummeted into the darkness below and was swallowed up by the gloom. We hovered there in place above the spot where the beast fell, and I stared into that horrible black abyss, straining my eyes to catch any glimpse of movement and my ears to hear anything besides the beating of both pegasus wings and my overworked heart. There was nothing, I was sure of it; the Purestrain had been gallantly vanquished and would never trouble us again, or so I had thought, but then and there, with a myriad shapes swirling and dancing before my tired eyes and the subtle howl of the desert wind my mind interpreted all manner of horrors lurking there. Any one of these could presage the abomination rushing back up against us, somehow surviving its injuries, with its horn blazing with magic to blast us out of the air. Yet each moment, counted by the rhythmic thumping of blood in my ears, brought only nothing, and I dared to believe that we had finally won.

Rainbow Dash didn't want to admit that she was tired, but it was damned obvious to all. Her sleek body was coated in a layer of foamy sweat, and my grip on my barrel seemed to be much more slippery than I felt before. At my direction she carried us back to the ledge, and all the while I watched the darkness below, despite the sight of the drop chilling me to my core, I could not take my eyes off that impenetrable blackness for the fear that Odonata would come screaming from that hellish abyss to finish what it started. There is no doubt that we could not possibly survive another fight, for our flight back was slow, and damnably so when one's hooves longed for the safety and security of solid ground. Each beat of her wings was accompanied by a pained moan that she seemed to be doing her best to hide, but the exertion was simply getting the better of her. By the time that ledge swam into view, our path could no longer be described as 'straight and level', but rather simply 'wobbly'.

We did not so much land as just drop from the sky onto the ledge from which we first took off. The impact was hard, and jarred my bones quite painfully when I gave up clinging on and slipped off to fall about three feet. Nevertheless, the feeling of hard, solid, dependable ground beneath my front as I sprawled out atop it was most reassuring. I could almost kiss it, were such a gesture not beneath one's dignity. Cannon Fodder had landed on his hooves quite well, and then staggered off to vomit over the side of the ledge like Yours Truly over my Canterlot apartment's balcony after a long night of carousing, while our pegasus flyer had more or less crashed a short distance away in an awkward tangle of limbs and wings. Still, she managed to extricate herself from her position in the furrow her alleged landing had carved in the dirt, as though landings like this were a common occurrence for her.

"That. Was. Awesome!" exclaimed Rainbow Dash, once she managed to get herself more or less upright. She thrust a forehoof into the air, apparently trying to punch it, but fell onto her side.

I stared at her, incapable of understanding how she or anypony at all could possibly interpret our near-death experience as anything other than harrowing. Then again, this was a mare who flew straight into lightning storms and picked fights with quarray eels purely for the purposes of fun. Damned pegasi, there must be something about living in clouds that damages the mind, I thought. It couldn't be healthy.

"Good, because I don't want to do that again," I said. Or much of anything else, I mentally added, except to just lie there and wait for a peaceful death or salvation, whichever came first. Either would have suited me just fine, after all of the mess I had just been put through. My body felt like it was just one solid lump of pain - everything hurt. To be more accurate, though, it was a great multitude of smaller agonies that seemed to mesh and merge to create one horrid cocktail of torment; my back was the foundational spirit in this metaphorical drink that dominated the palate, the bathtub-brewed rye whisky as it were, followed by bitters and vermouth of horn-ache, nausea, and general fatigue.

"You were pretty good out there, Prince." I tilted my head off the dirt to look up and see Rainbow Dash standing over me. She was grinning, but there was a definite hint of concern that softened the usual manic glint in her eyes. "I mean, jousting with the Changeling? I didn't think you had it in you to try something that crazy, to be honest, let alone actually pull it off."

"I saw an opportunity and I took it," I said, meaning that I had run out of sensible ideas to preserve what was left of my hide and had to resort to a stab in the dark once more. Injured though I may have been, the strictures of aristocratic deportment still overpowered mere equine weakness, and I struggled back up to my hooves. It simply wouldn't do for Prince Blueblood, Celestia's nephew, Duke of Canterlot, and so on and so forth, to be spoken down to like that, not in this moment of alleged triumph. My stance was a little wobbly, like that of a newborn foal straight out of the womb, and my vision swam and filled with stars, but I at least managed to avoid fainting or throwing up again. "I wasn't sure if you could carry the two of us, though. Well done, Rainbow Dash."

She snorted and shook her head. "I carried Rarity and three unconscious Wonderbolts when I did the sonic rainboom at the Best Young Flyer Competition, so I think I can handle two unicorns. You're a bit heavier than Rarity, though, and the Wonderbolts too. Individually, I mean, not all together."

"How are you holding up?" I asked, fearing that we may have to do something like that again.

Her wings fluttered and then flexed a few times, apparently testing out the range of movement. She hissed a few times at what must have been a few aches, but held them spread as if for me to inspect on a parade ground. "I'm just a bit winded. Give me a few minutes to catch my breath and I'll be back at peak performance!"

I glanced up at the ribbon of daylight above, and pointed towards it. "So, you'd be able to take us up there?"

A nervous grin stretched across her face, and she chuckled awkwardly. Her wings hurriedly folded back up against her body. "Well, when I said 'peak performance' I really meant 'nearly peak performance', and when I said 'a few minutes' I meant 'maybe in a day or two'. I could make it up there on my own, and then I could fly back to the fort and fetch help."

She cast a scrutinising eye over me, and I realised that I must have looked utterly dreadful standing there even with my conscious efforts to maintain as much of my dignity as possible. I stiffened, trying to stand as straight and upright as possible the way Father always told me to, but that just made my back hurt even more.

"But I can't just leave you here on your own like that. Somepony's gotta keep an eye on you."

Her concern would seem touching, I'm sure, but I was merely thankful for another body between me and whatever else was out there to kill me. There was no telling how many more Changelings lurked within this tribe, if any, ready to strike me down in this most vulnerable state. Besides, the natives too were, at this point, something of an unknown quantity, and while I hoped that Dahlia's unmasking as a Changeling Purestrain, a creature bent on exploiting a war between our two nations, would help seal the rift between us and allow me to leave freely with the Colours, Earthshaker could scarcely be counted upon to act rationally. No doubt the war-hungry chieftain of this miserable little group of sand-dwellers, his mind already tainted with Changeling lies, would put all of this down to Equestrian trickery, or undertake some other kind of mental gymnastics of the particularly ridiculous sort to justify another excuse to have me killed for the sake of a grudge thousands of years old that, I would say with the utmost confidence, precious few ponies in Equestria were actually aware of.

Princess Celestia was going to bail me out of this mess, as she has often done in the past; I reminded myself of what Luna had told me in the dream, 'help is coming' she said, but, cryptic as always, had neglected to tell me when and in what manner. Right there and then I'd have been happy to see her descend from the heavens, armoured as she had been the previous time she had to bail me out of a very sticky situation, and leading the entirety of Army Group Centre behind her. She certainly has a knack for turning up exactly when she is needed, though not necessarily when one expects. [One does one's best] I would still have to wait, but I was certainly not going to do it right here on this damned ledge.

"I think I get it now," Rainbow Dash continued, snapping me out of my vacant musings on how I was still neck-deep in mortal peril. She had an odd, far-off look in her eyes as she stared up at the sky above, as if willing the ravine to break apart further so that she might see more of the soft expanse of blue her kind called home. "All the stuff you and Captain Blitzkrieg and Shining Armour have been lecturing me about all this time, I mean. Back then, in the cave, I would have charged at the Changeling thing."

"And gotten yourself killed," I said. "Or captured."

"Yeah, that." She turned and looked straight at me, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed as she appeared to be trying to trawl through her limited vocabulary to find the right words to express herself. "I screwed up, badly, and I know it's all my fault. I hate to lose, and if you stick an obstacle in my path or tell me I can't do something, then I'm only going to try even harder to beat it and prove you wrong. But that's not what you want in a soldier, is it? When you ran away like that I was so mad because I thought I'd finally have the chance to show you what I can do, because that's all I've ever wanted to do since I got here! But I was so wrapped up in wanting to prove myself to you that I didn't appreciate just how much danger we were all in, or that you might have a plan to get us out alive."

I stood in silence, though the image that I was going for the sort of stern, authoritarian officer humouring some soldier's feeble excuses was ruined a little by the unholy sounds of Cannon Fodder retching. Some plan, just running away, but it was a tried and tested tactic that had worked for me in the past, and this time again, relatively speaking. Besides, it was best to allow ponies to assume that my making things up as I went along was actually all part of an elaborate scheme that I had planned all along. It usually made them more eager to do what I wanted them to do, if they thought it all served some higher purpose in some grand scheme.

"I was trying to make it right," continued Rainbow Dash. She was pacing now, and rather impatiently as though she wanted us to just get a move on, despite her previous assertions of fatigue. "I thought I could fix everything if I just went and got the flag back, but it made everything worse again."

She had stopped ranting, and was looking at me as though she expected me to say something. Damnation, why do ponies think I am some sort of font of wisdom? As if anything I could ever say would 'make it right', as she had put it. I just wanted out of this miserable place, really, and to never have to see her again.

"We have what we came for," I said, deciding to rely on the bluff old soldier routine that usually served me well.

"Yeah, we do," she said, eyeing the flag that Cannon Fodder was still holding onto, despite continuing to express his thoughts about Rainbow Dash's flying techniques into the ravine below. "Look, you might think this is all about me trying to get back into the Wonderbolts' training programme, and I'd be lying if that wasn't some part of it. But I couldn't just go back to Ponyville without at least making an attempt to put things right. And we blew it."

Well, this was all nice and dandy, I could tell you, as Rainbow Dash finally learned to put her ego aside in the name of the general war effort, and all it took was a couple of near-death experiences on my part for the lesson to sink in. With the suspicion that I might be getting rather low on blood creeping its way into the drawing room of my mind and taking up all of the space on the chaise lounge, my tolerance for her peculiar need to justify her own actions was at an all time low. Nevertheless I humoured her, primarily out of a sense of gratitude as, after all, she was instrumental in our dispatch of the Purestrain, but the need to get a damned move on before I lapse into unconsciousness became most pressing.

"I'll write a letter to Captain Spitfire," I said; much of this was her fault, after all, with her peculiar need to have the Wonderbolts be seen to doing their part in our great crusade against the Changelings, which all went about as well as any reasonable pony might expect from stunt flyers pretending to be soldiers. Reasonable ponies were still in very short supply in the higher echelons of the Ministry of War, evidently. "But I can't make any promises, as this is no longer a Royal Guard issue, and I'm in no fit state to write correspondence at the moment anyway. I think we should find Shining Armour and the others, it's only polite after running off like that."

Cannon Fodder had, by now, completed his necessary tasks over the edge of this balcony, and trotted on over as though nothing untoward had happened. He had the presence of mind to wipe his mouth with a rather dirty hoofkerchief that might have been white cotton at some early point in its life, but now was made up of varying shades of beige and pale yellow. The gesture did nothing to improve the cleanliness of his face and beard, however. He produced a water canteen from within the multitudinous pockets and pouches that festooned his armour and uniform, and despite initial reservations about its proximity to my aide's body and the unique aroma it emanates, thirst won out and Rainbow Dash was soon drinking greedily from it.

"Where's my hipflask?" I asked, realising that I must have left it and my cigar case in the pockets of my uniform, which lay in a neat bundle in the cave. After everything I had just been through, fine cognac would certainly have been agreeable.

"Left it behind, sir," said Cannon Fodder. He gave an apologetic look as he took his water canteen from Rainbow Dash before the greedy mare could down its contents, and offered it to me. I took a few small sips, the cool, slightly antiseptic taste was, in my battered state, far better than any liquor could have hoped to be. I instantly felt better, not perfect but merely better, and it would still be a very long time before I felt I could do anything much more strenuous than resting on a fainting couch and reading a mares' swimwear magazine. To be fair, I felt like that for a very long time, but recent events had only compounded that sensation.

"Blast, that was my father's." I returned the canteen, and it was then secreted back inside an anonymous pouch.

"We could go and get it back," said Rainbow Dash, she was trotting in place and flexing her wings, apparently as eager to be off as I was, if not more so. "If it means that much to you."

"No, I hated him," I said. The damned natives could keep that particular memento to the detestable old fool, for all I cared; it wasn't as though he was going to materialise out of wherever he got lost in Zebrica, and then demand it back along with everything else I'd inherited after he was declared legally dead. Rainbow Dash gave me an odd look, but took the wise decision not to press me further about it. "Come on, we've wasted enough time. Let's get a move on before Shining Armour runs into trouble again."

Honour and Blood (Part 22)

We tried to retrace our steps, though that proved rather difficult to do, so once again we relied upon my fickle special talent. I was still in considerable pain, so the going was rather slow. Rainbow Dash was likewise in a state of fatigue, no longer flying a few feet off the ground as she usually does, but walking by my side. Behind us, Cannon Fodder took up the rearguard, and the Royal Standard was still held reverently in his hooves. The immediate danger of death, dismemberment, disembowelment, or other such unpleasant things beginning with the letter 'D' had passed, for now, but the lingering sensation of dread was hard to shake.

Our hoofsteps, three sets of them, continued to echo around these nameless corridors, and I strained my ears to the point of madness to try and hear any sound beyond them, but anything else that I could discern was just vague and indistinct enough to set my imagination screaming. A trickle of pebbles falling behind us, or the drip-drip-drip of water from some crack in the ceiling could have been a thousand hissing Changelings, or an army of natives, or maybe even something far worse. Faust knows what else still lurks in these dark corners of the world.

We came into areas that I thought I recognised, though even with my special talent one corridor made of rock looked very much like another, and during our flight through them I was paying very little attention to the scenery. Nevertheless, the feeling that we were on broadly the right track was a pleasant one, and I dared to think that I might even get out of this mess alive. Now that we weren't being hunted by a murderous Purestrain, I could take a closer look at our surroundings, and found everywhere signs that this place had been inhabited at some point in its existence but had since been abandoned. It appeared that the ponies who once lived here were quite thorough in packing up their belongings, for all that was left was furniture that was probably too big or heavy to carry and useless rubbish that nopony wanted anymore. There were probably valid reasons for their evacuation, but my paranoid streak as ever focused in on the more unsettling theories like an astronomer gazing at the stars with a telescope; horrid monsters lurking in the dark, baleful curses, a plague, and so on and so forth.

At length, we returned to the intersection where I had attempted to delay Odonata by causing a cave-in. The pile of rocks and debris that had fallen from the ceiling where I shot it would have completely blocked the far end of the room, were it not for a great, ragged hole blasted through it. Around the edges of this gap the rock had melted, run in great sloughs and rivulets, and then solidified like candle wax. The air was warmer here, too, as the re-solidified stone still radiated the residual heat absorbed from the blast. I felt a cold shudder crawl over my ruined back - just how powerful was that creature? And, by extension, how much of that power was drawn from the lust it had absorbed? Still, considering that I had been the last pony it had fed from, I decided to take it as a compliment to my skill as a lover.

There, we rested. Though our going had been slow and steady, with the two relatively hale ponies having the patience to walk at the speed of my slow limp, I still felt exhausted and just had to stop before I could pass out. I took a seat close to the wall, though in truth I wanted nothing more than to simply flop onto my front like a beached whale, and allow the hard, unforgiving ground to take the weight of my ungainly frame off my hooves. There would be time for that later, and hopefully on a comfortable hospital bed and surrounded by attractive nurses in uniform. Rainbow Dash sat next to me, while Cannon Fodder stood close by and kept a watch on the corridors branching out.

Rainbow Dash was babbling, perhaps as a way of relieving the stress of the situation, or she was still 'pumped', as she might have put it, after that fight. I expect there's some biological mechanism for pegasi to hold onto that adrenaline rush that we unicorns lack, or something, I didn't really know or care, but in spite of my usual distaste for the sort of incessant, pointless chatter she likes to indulge in, it did at least help somewhat in taking my mind off of the pain.

"...and then we swooped in!" she said, demonstrating this with a series of dramatic waves with her forehooves. As far as I could tell, her left one represented the Purestrain, and her right one was her carrying Cannon Fodder and me. "And the Changeling was all 'bleeeegh', and you were all 'sha-weeeeeng', and you stabbed it in mid-air, and it was like, 'oh nooo, I'm dead!' That must have been a thousand-to-one chance of hitting it!"

I waited until she had apparently run out of things to say, and then a little longer just to make absolutely sure she didn't have anything further, and certainly no obnoxious sound effects, to add. "Yes," I said. "I was there, if you recall."

"But how did somepony like you learn to do something that awesome?"

"Somepony like me?" I said, arching an eyebrow.

"Well, yeah." She shrugged. "I mean, you're not exactly the kind of pony I'd associate with that kind of awesome swordplay. Jousting with the Changeling; that's like something out of a Daring Do story, not one about a, uh..."

She hesitated, so I completed that thought for her: "A namby-pamby pony prince?"

"I wasn't going to say that!" she exclaimed loudly. Her voice echoed down the tunnels, presumably alerting anything that might be lurking in the deep shadows to our presence. Though I was annoyed, I lacked the energy to summon anger at this, and upon reflection, being found was exactly what I needed. Either Shining Armour and whomsoever survived that cave-in would help escort us to the surface and safety, or it would be the natives to whom I could explain that this was all a horrible misunderstanding predicated on Changeling espionage and that we should be allowed to go home immediately. Fat bloody chance of that, but it was nice to hope, at least.

"Oh?" If my brow arched any higher it might have torn itself free from my forehead. "But you certainly thought it." I allowed myself a chuckle at her expense, though Rainbow Dash seemed more bewildered by my revealing of a lighter side to my personality, as opposed to the grim authority figure who doled out punishments like candy on Nightmare Night I had been in uniform.

"It's quite alright," I continued, taking the rare opportunity to expound upon my hobbies for once. "I expect two years on the frontline still isn't enough to completely exorcise one's reputation for indolence and luxury." Would that I could still indulge in such things, of course, but I kept that to myself. "But what you commoners probably don't appreciate anymore is that there is more to the life of a noblepony than parties and opera and growing fat off the hard work of others. A noblepony must be cultured, sophisticated, learned, and, most importantly, be capable of defending one's honour should it be insulted. The duel is a noble and ancient tradition by which wrongs are set right and honour is satisfied, and fencing is the sport by which a noblepony keeps one's skills with the blade honed. I happened to develop a knack for it, which is a good thing too when one considers all of the ponies I've insulted over the years. These days, ponies sort out their differences with lawyers - disgusting creatures. It's much less fun that way."

As a general rule, I might add, I never enjoyed duelling, even though à l'outrance [Literally translated as 'to the limit', a duel in which honour cannot be satisfied until one party was mortally wounded] was extremely rare, it was, back when such things were almost legal, still a tremendous faff appointing seconds and organising locations, weapons, and dress codes, and I'd rather spend that time partaking of more edifying activities like drinking and chasing mares. Fencing, yes, is one of the very few socially acceptable hobbies out there that I have any particular skill in, but it's a rather different beast when the combatants are encased in padded armour, iron masks, and wielding blunted swords, or simply using illusory weapons as my Auntie Luna prefers. That said, for the most part a pony who has dared to impugn my honour, or the other way around as is usually the case, will often back down once the glove has been slapped across his face and he realises he's just picked a fight with a skilled duellist, and failing that a chequebook proves just as efficient.

"Yeah, well, figures that Canterlot unicorns would make something as cool as sword-fighting and turn it into something prissy." She paused, looking at me with an expression I might best describe as hopeful, like a puppy asking for a treat. "Teach me? Please?"

I stared at her, boggling at how she could switch so effortlessly between insult, praise, insult again, and then asking a favour of me, but then I realised that she probably did not intend those insults to be interpreted as such. It was a vulgar lower-class thing, I decided; the trick with speaking with Rainbow Dash was to pay more attention to the last thing she said, and try to ignore the nonsense and excessive superlatives that preceded her point.

"Pegasus style fencing is a bit beyond me," I said. "No wings, you see, so that rules out the ancient Pegasopolis school in particular. Obviously you can't learn the unicorn style without a horn either, which leaves us with the hoof-held and mouth-held techniques such as mensur, the earth pony styles, and possibly the Cloudsdale school."

Looking at her face, dripping with sweat and with dirt and dust clinging to it, her mane frazzled and uncombed, and her cheerful smile so full of confidence despite the dire situation we were in, she struck me as very attractive. Certainly, she was not the sort of mare I would normally pursue, both in terms of looks and personality, being rather skinnier and more athletic than the pampered daughters of aging nobles I was used to. I imagined a night of passion with Rainbow Dash would be an exhausting experience, and she would probably have turned it into some sort of competition, but it never hurt to broaden one's horizons. Then again, considering that my previous sexual partner had turned out to be a grotesque monstrosity hell-bent on destroying Equestria, going back to the familiar would do me some greater measure of good.

"Not mensur, though," I said, taking her youthful features in. It would have been a shame to ruin her unique, unrefined beauty with those hideous scars. [Mensur is an obscure traditional type of fencing practiced by university student groups in Germaney. It is technically not a duel or a sport, as there are no winners or losers, but intended as a means of training and educating character and personality. The goal is not to score points or force one's opponent to submit, but to stoically endure pain and injury. The scars inflicted are seen as badges of honour, especially on the face.] "I'll tell you what, get me out of here alive and I'll give you a few lessons, if I ever get the time."

Rainbow Dash seemed very pleased with that arrangement, though I had little to no intention of actually following through with that. Besides, even though I planned to make my convalescence to recover from my injuries as enjoyable as possible, I was all but certain that the Commissariat would decide that if I could not serve the Princesses by leading on the frontlines, valiantly charging to certain death in General McBridle's next offensive, then I would have to do so sitting behind a desk and processing vast amounts of paperwork. Still, the life of a bureaucrat, as base and low and monotonous as they are, was preferable to that of a soldier on campaign, and I would not have been too unhappy with that arrangement. It was a griffon's chance of passing finishing school of that happening, of course; getting the Royal Standard back and rescuing Shining Armour and a Bearer of an Element of Harmony would only inflate my reputation further in the eyes of the hunched-back, wrist-cramped idiots that run the organisation, who would then decide my dubious abilities were wasted in an office building where the greatest threat came from paper cuts and office politics.

I decided then that we should get a move on. The stop had been pleasant enough, relatively speaking, and sorely needed. Cannon Fodder passed his canteen around, and kept a close, wary eye on Rainbow Dash should she take more than her fair share again, and soon enough we were ready. Once more we walked along the path we had fled through in a blind panic. Well, I was in a blind panic, my aide had seemed entirely nonplussed by the horrifying monster chasing us and our pegasus here was more annoyed at me for running instead.

As we stumbled along slowly, through the hole blasted through the rubble and back through the corridors again, Yours Truly still limping on at what felt like a crawl, Rainbow kept on chatting. It appeared that my running through of the Changeling with a rapier earlier had inspired some sort of interest in swords, though I wondered how much of this was in the heat of the moment and if she would just lose interest when she discovers that the sport of fencing has quite a lot of reading and tedious practice involved. I don't recall much of it, as I had ceased paying careful attention quite a while ago, and was content to just let her blather on at will. Though when she asked me a variety of questions about where one might procure swords without falling afoul of the law, I was all but forced to listen, if only out of a concern for the safety of others around the clumsy mare.

"What about a katana?" she asked, having gone through the usual list of rapiers, epees, sabres, estocs, and so forth to reach the more exotic weapons of the Far East. "They look so cool! In Daring Do and the Jade Emperor, a samurai uses one to cut right through a unicorn's shield spell."

I chuckled politely, though it was by now getting a bit tiresome. "Contrary to what ponies think, there is nothing intrinsically special about the katana," I said. "Besides, if I remember that story correctly, the samurai's sword was forged by the legendary Maresamune and imbued with the power of his ancestors' spirits."

Rainbow Dash stared, jaw hanging open as if it had been recently broken. "You read Daring Do?" she said, once she had collected what remained of her wits. "Isn't that, you know, kind of beneath you?"

"Despite having mass appeal, it's a guilty pleasure," I admitted; heaven forbid that I might indulge in some of the same trashy, pulp, escapist fiction that the common ponies like as well. The decadent poetry of Prench syphilitics and so-called high literature could only get one so far in terms of entertainment value. "You can blame Twilight Sparkle for that, when we were at school together."

It was best to keep it at that, I thought, and not explain that I had found the book when I had stolen her saddlebag and was about to toss its contents into the fireplace for a reason I can barely remember and was probably stupid anyway. Yes, foals can be cruel and I was about as cruel as one could get at the age of nine without breaking the law, but I think I've already explained that, and I remind whomever reads this drivel that I have already apologised profusely to Twilight for my past indecorous behaviour. Her Daring Do book with its striking cover had caught my eye and I decided to keep it to read instead of burning it along with her homework, and from then on I was hooked on the series. It occurred to me that I should probably return it one day.

"How is she, anyway?" I asked, wanting to quickly deflect the Bearer of the Element of Loyalty from the shameful actions of my youth, being the few such acts that I might actually feel something approaching shame for, lest her newfound positive feelings towards me get ruined. Then again, I had no idea how much Twilight might have told her friends about her past.

"Twilight?" Rainbow Dash gave me an odd look, as though she doubted my intentions towards her close friend. To be fair, I wasn't entirely sure why I asked either, but, in my state of some exhaustion, for some unexplainable reason I thought that it was quite important that I found out. "She's doing alright. I heard something about Princess Celestia moving her to the next level of her studies, whatever that's supposed to mean. Sounds like really boring egg-head stuff, but she's excited about it. So, you know, whatever makes her happy. Why'd you ask?"

"Just curious," I said, speaking mostly the truth. Perhaps I could call upon her if I was invalided back to Canterlot, should I be lucky enough for my injuries to be severe enough to qualify for a nice trip to a hospital there but not so much that I would end up crippled for life, though I could understand perfectly well if she never wanted to see me again. Now that I think of it, I can barely stand being in my own presence either.

The opportunity for more mindless chatter, which, while irritating, was still more pleasantly diverting than contemplating our current predicament, stopped when I heard the sound of voices further ahead. They were speaking in Equestrian, as far as I could tell, and I thought I could recognise Shining Armour's warm, overly-familiar voice giving what sounded like orders. Rainbow Dash started to quicken her step, apparently buoyed by that sound, but I raised my hoof to block her from rushing forth; for all we knew, it could be a trap, and, knowing my luck, that was all but certain. She seemed about to protest, but apparently having learnt that I am quite often right in my caution (at least, when Princesses' Regulations allow me to be), she relented and followed behind me.

I drew my sword, levitating it in front of my muzzle in the en garde position as I crept forwards. Cannon Fodder remained at the rear, following along with his usual lack of interest. We crested around the corner, and the sight of a deep crater scooped out of the hard stone wall of the tunnel, left of where I had narrowly dodged a shot that had singed my tail, made me shudder at the thought of just how close I came to death. I wondered if I would have even felt it, had I been struck dead-on and incinerated in the same way the solid rock had been.

The tunnel continued on, and then after a short distance opened up into the partially-collapsed chamber where we seemed so tantalisingly close to freedom. The sounds of voices and of physical labour, things being moved and tossed away by my guess, was clearer here. I almost wanted to gallop down there, but my natural inclination towards pessimism told me that it was too good to be true, so we crept forward slowly and steadily. Naturally, any attempt at stealth was ruined by my aide, whose heavy armour and the abundant equipment hanging from it combined with his usual clumsy gait meant that he sounded like a wind chime in a hurricane.

I heard one of the voices say, "Somepony's coming", and another, Shining Armour by my guess, telling them to be quiet. The industrious noises came to an abrupt end, as did the chatter. They could only be guardsponies, thought I; few ponies in all of Equus could switch between garrulous, vulgar banter and dead silence with such efficiency, and that conclusion gave me hope.

"Hello?" I called out. "Is somepony there?"

A pony's head peered around the lip of the corridor exit, framed with the familiar golden helm and topped with the scrubbing brush crest of a soldier of the Solar Guard. He squinted into the darkness and aimed his spear in my general direction. Behind him, I could make out more of his comrades lining up in a phalanx with spears, swords, and horns at the ready. As I stepped closer, brightening the feeble light of my horn to illuminate myself and my companions, such as they were, and I recognised the pony as Corporal Slipstream.

"It's the Prince, sir!" he barked to somepony unseen, mercifully pointing his weapon away from me. "And the Wonderbolt, and the, uh... the other one!"

I thought that was a little unfair on Cannon Fodder, doomed as ever to merely be 'the other one' despite having made the greatest contribution in keeping me alive throughout the years I have worn the peaked cap and red sash of the commissar. We reached the exit, and I was presented with the sight of a two dozen or so ponies with weapons and horns pointed directly at me, while Shining Armour, standing off to the side, eyed me warily. The sight was as deeply unsettling as it was an immense relief, and though I knew their caution was well-founded given the unmasking of the Changeling infiltrator, having quite so many spears, swords, and charged horns levelled at my pretty face just after everything I had been through was enough to send my heart racing as frantically as when I was being hunted.

Shining Armour approached, horn lit, and I felt a queer tingle across my fur as he cast the unmasking spell. I was relieved to find that I was not a Changeling spy, and, by extension, so was he, as he let out a deep sigh that sounded like a leaking dirigible. "Stand easy, colts," he said. "It's really him."

"I should bloody hope so," I said, crossing over into the chamber. "But it's my turn now." I cast the spell myself, being one of the precious few more complex than telekinesis or projectiles that I could do reliably. It was just as much of a relief to me to find that it really was Shining Armour I was speaking with.

The Captain of the Royal Guard's skill with shield spells had certainly paid off for the guardsponies, as all had survived the cave-in. It also appeared that while I was running for my life and jousting with Odonata, they were busy clearing out the piles of rubble around them, and it looked as though they had made good progress in doing just that. As the soldiers returned to the laborious task of clearing the way out, with unicorns blasting away at the smashed rock, breaking it into smaller chunks so that the earth ponies and pegasi could carry them out of the way, I noticed something troubling. There was no sign of the natives; no survivors of the cave-in sitting huddled in the corners and no mangled bodies being pulled out from the rubble. It was as though they had simply disappeared. The realisation set my forehooves itching anew, signifying something that my hindbrain had deduced but, not able to speak plain Equestrian, was unable to articulate.

“What happened to the natives?” I asked, once the penny finally dropped for me.

“Beats me,” said Shining Armour. “We found a hole in the ground that wasn’t there before, but it’s been filled. My guess is they went through there.”

"Wasn't the welcome back I was expecting, Shiny," said Rainbow Dash, trotting up by my side and not so much as interrupting my train of the conversation, but rather derailing it entirely. She puffed her chest out and flared her wings, grinning proudly. "Especially for the ponies who just took down a Purestrain!"

If Shining Armour was supposed to be impressed by that, he didn't show it, and the soldiers around him were either too busy getting on with the tasks of clearing the room or deliberately ignoring Rainbow Dash's habitual boasting. In this case, however, it might have been warranted, but a small amount of modesty tends to go much further than blustering about.

"It was a close-run thing," I said, being quite honest for once. "But we pulled through in the end, and we couldn't have done it without each other."

"So, Dahlia was a Changeling all along?" said Shining Armour, apparently having just worked out the bleeding obvious. "And you two, uh-" he made an odd thrusting motion with his hoof, backwards and forwards "-you know. Together."

"I'd much rather not think about that." The mental image made the feeling of nausea churning in my stomach even worse, and it would be many hot soakings in a full bathtub brimming with the most caustic soap available before I could feel even remotely clean again.

"Sorry, I just wanted to say 'welcome to the club'," he said, and then trotted off to supervise his stallions. Once I had worked out his meaning, my mind ably assisted by Rainbow Dash sticking her hoof in her mouth and making exaggerated retching noises, it almost drove me to swearing off sex for the remainder of my miserable life.

I trotted over to a corner where I would be out of the way of the ponies working, having served my purpose now and wanting to just coast along until we returned to a hero's welcome, and I contemplated taking a short nap there, but that notion was ruined when I saw that Rainbow Dash had followed me. It appeared she had taken an unexpected liking to me, which was odd considering the way that Captain Blitzkrieg and I had deliberately mistreated her in a vain and misguided attempt to make her give up and go home. Blast, I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and not be conscious anymore, which would at least give me a momentary respite from the pain and anxiety that still gripped me.

"Yeesh, what's his problem?" said Rainbow Dash, throwing up her hooves. "He's not normally like that."

"He's working," I said, watching Shining Armour slip effortlessly into his persona of the Captain of the Royal Guard. He was, and still is, an immature colt at the best of times, and even in combat I had seen him lead his regiment into a charge with a grin on his face and cheeky quip to his opposite number in the Night Guards. Now, however, when things had reached a state of such a delicate balance - between the reveal of the Changeling infiltrator, yet another near-death experience on my part, and now the vindication of his entire career almost within his grasp - all of that had been subsumed utterly by the driven officer barking orders at his troops.

Shining Armour looked tired. He masked it well, for the benefit of the soldiers who looked up to him and wanted to believe that their commanding officer had everything under control, but beneath all of that I could see that he was barely holding it all together. Everypony has their breaking point, and though the Royal Guard likes to pretend that officers are far too gentlecoltly to have one, if one knew how to peel back a pony's facade as I do and glimpse the trembling, frightened foal beneath, it was obvious he was on the verge of reaching it. Indeed, I had seen that vulnerability firsthoof when we got drunk and maudlin together in his office. Even if we got out of this alive, returning to the fortress with the banner fluttering gloriously in the hot desert breeze, after all of the horrors of this war I doubted there was much else left of him to give. That was his greatest flaw, and why history dismisses his record as Captain of the Royal Guard; his special talent, to protect ponies, could only drive him to invest far too much of himself into his job to the point that when something invariably went wrong with no direct involvement on his part, such as the whole affair with Scarlet Letter, but still affected those under his aegis, he could only blame himself for those failures. He simply could not, or just refused to, distance himself emotionally from his duties, as all good officers must invariably do to avoid falling into that same trap. While it served well in peacetime and certainly built the sort of rapport with the soldiers that I could only dream of, in war it was to be his downfall.

All of that was just speculation, of course, as I sit here scribbling these notes and sipping the brandy that my servants keep topping up. I miss Shining Armour, in some odd way, and the short time that we had spent together before he departed north to the Crystal Empire. For all I know, what I have just written could have been utter nonsense, for who can truly tell the innermost thoughts and fears of another? Or themselves, for that matter. Faust knows that I look back on all of this and wonder how much is really true.

It was all immaterial, anyway, but I mused on this as I watched the soldiers work. Even Chipped Urn was mucking in and helping, or getting in the way, rather, judging by the way everypony else yelled at him. Soon, a passageway had been cleared in the rubble, and I could feel the desert air faintly against my fur and taste it with each ragged breath. In comparison to the stagnant atmosphere of the caves, it was like the cool, crisp air of Canterlot in the winter. In spite of my injuries I rose to my hooves, feeling almost giddy with the excitement of finally leaving this dreadful, hideous place. If I had known what awaited me out there, I might have been a little more cautious in my approach. Having been captured, held in a dingy cave that stank of substances best not mentioned, forced into slave labour, flogged, then chased by a deranged Changeling, one can surely overlook my uncharacteristic excitement.

The gap, deemed 'practicable' by Corporal Slipstream, was about wide enough to permit one modestly-sized pony to slip through without much discomfort. Shining Armour went first, before anypony with a lick of sense could stop him, and with the absence of the sounds of violence and screaming on the other side it was deemed safe. Apparently, there was simply more tunnel at the other side, which did put something of a damper on my lifted spirits, but after all of that unpleasantness and with the prospect of spending the next few weeks or so filled with nothing but bed-rest and pretty mares in nurses' uniforms (some of whom may not be qualified nurses but will nevertheless provide a valuable service in maintaining one's morale and physical acuity), I could afford a few more moments' delay.

When it came to my turn through the gap, getting through was a bit more difficult. The passage through which I was expected to crawl through was up a small slope of rubble which led to the ceiling, and while the soldiers could have cleared more of it away, it would have taken up more time than was necessary. What followed was an undignified crawling on my belly through this hole, taking the utmost care so as not to scrape my mauled back against the rough ceiling. I made it and tumbled out the other side, however, without further injury except to my pride and my once-pristine white fur.

Getting the remainder of the platoon through the gap took a little while longer, but eventually this tunnel, through which warm air trickled through like a small stream through a valley, became rather cramped with the press of bodies. Far be it from me to deliberately position myself at the front and therefore the second most dangerous position of any party, the rear being the most popular target for the sort of cowardly ambush these tunnel-dwelling natives liked to employ, but claustrophobia was getting the better of me. Besides, the allure of freedom of a sort, with an open sky above me and the wide open plains of the Badlands stretching out to the horizon and no mad stallions with whips, was enough for me to suspend my habitual caution.

"Should we block the hole again?" said Slipstream. The soldier next to him snickered, and was silenced by a quick blow to the back of his head by the Corporal. "Don't want those bastards sneaking up on us."

Shining Armour looked up at said gap in the rubble thoughtfully. "There's no time, and we don't want to give these ponies any more reason to hate us."

I had to agree with him, though mainly on the first part and not the second. Now that I thought about it, however, I realised that with 'Dahlia' gone, if she even existed in the first place, then we had no leverage over our former captors should we run into them again and they proved to be less than pleased about this turn of events. All the more reason to make haste, then, and thus we proceeded down the tunnel.

The passageway was broader than the others, probably serving as some kind of wider thoroughfare to the surface. It proceeded another fifty feet or so, and then opened up into brilliant, glorious sunlight. We all emerged, blinking and shielding our eyes, dulled by our time stuck underground and in the dim, murky light there. The heat seemed to singe my fur, as though I had just walked into a furnace, but to stand beneath the warmth of the midday sun, as though our Princess herself had placed it there especially for us, brought strength back to my exhausted limbs and quelled the agony of my wounds. This uplift in my mood lasted about as long as the time it took for my eyes to adjust to the harsh light of day, and standing before us and arranged in a semi-circle around the tunnel from which we had just crawled through were what looked like hundreds of the native ponies.

Earthshaker stood at the centre of this half-ring, directly in front of me and a relatively short distance away, and looked about as bad as I felt. Dark rings surrounded his pale blue eyes, which were narrowed in an expression of cold determination in spite of whatever it was that had afflicted him. His posture, though not exactly tall and erect in the first place, was slumped, as though he was putting conscious effort into remaining standing, breathing, or even keeping his heart pumping blood. The skin beneath his fur had a pale grey tinge and a clammy texture to it that certainly was not there before. I was no expert on such things, but it looked to me like this unicorn was in the early stages of some form of magical exhaustion. How and why I could not say for certain, but my suspicion, later confirmed, was that it had something to do with the mysterious disappearance of the natives from the chamber; I had seen his skill with geomantic magic before, so it would not have been beyond the realms of possibility that he had used this same power to mould the earth to his will and save his ponies, though draining himself in the process.

That didn't stop him from trying, as a clod of dusty pale earth the size of a melon was wrenched from the ground, encased in a shaky, flickering aura, and then hurled in an ungraceful arc in my direction with what looked like a lethal velocity. There was a sudden shriek of a magical discharge, and the world around us turned an all-too-familiar shade of purple. The projectile struck Shining Armour's shield spell and bounced off harmlessly, whereupon it fell to the ground and broke apart. I was immensely thankful that Cannon Fodder had taken his usual place by my side, and was thus far enough away so as not to allow his affliction to impede the casting of the spell.

Earthshaker suddenly cried in pain, clutching at his horn, which sparked with uncontrolled discharges of waste magical energy. A stallion moved to help him, but he pushed him aside.

[Based on the symptoms described, it appears that Earthshaker was suffering from hypothaumaplegia, when a unicorn drains their magical reserves far quicker than they can be replenished. It usually passes within a few days of rest, but pushing oneself harder may result in permanent loss of all magical abilities.]

"What have you done with her?" he shouted, his voice ragged. "What have you done with my wife?"

He was addressing me directly, apparently, and so against my better judgement I stepped forward towards him. I stopped just before the shield, with the transparent purple wall, glimmering with all the power of Shining Armour's special talent. Looking around I saw that we had been encased in a dome, like a much smaller version of the one that had almost protected Canterlot from invasion, and I wondered just how much air was inside and how long it would last.

"She was a Changeling," I said matter-of-factly. I'm sure you'll appreciate that after being flogged by him I didn't particularly feel the need to be tactful about the fact that his darling wife, such as she was being a purely political arrangement as far as I could tell, had been a grotesque, deformed, and hideous sin against nature masquerading in equine flesh.

He laughed, sort of. It was a single contemptuous 'hah' that sounded more like a dog barking than an expression of mirth. "More Equestrian trickery!" he growled, then broke into great, hacking coughs like a colt experiencing his first cigar.

I shrugged, and that bloody hurt. "That's what happened," I said. "We've been played, both of us. Think about it, old chap, only the Changelings will gain anything from conflict between us."

Earthshaker stumbled forwards, flanked by two guards with roughly-forged bronze plates attached by fraying ropes around their barrels. He stopped very close, so that if Shining Armour's shield spell had been a pane of glass I might have seen his breath condense on its surface. I could just about see the mental processes in his head working as he digested the wisdom of my words, which I was making up on the spot, mind you, in an increasingly desperate ploy to save what was left of my worthless hide.

"The Changelings have been our enemy for hundreds of years," he said. "But Equestria has been our enemy for more than a thousand."

"Have we now?" I said, affecting mock surprise. "The truth, my dear Chieftain, is that Equestria doesn't reciprocate those feelings. We don't consider you our enemy. In fact, until recently we have barely considered you at all. You are a mouse observing a fight between a cat and a dog, and you decided to bite the dog because the cat convinced you that it was a good idea."

The dog was Equestria in that stupid analogy, and it made absolutely no sense if you actually put the tiniest modicum of thought into it. Earthshaker's eyes smouldered in their deep-set sockets as he stared at me through Shining Armour's shield, and the dark rings that surrounded them, looking as though he had been bucked in the face by two well-targeted hooves, only added to their piercing quality. He didn't say anything, so I carried on, all in the hope that it would get him to see sense and let us go or until Princess Celestia arrived, which could have been any time between now and the next few days.

"We can work together," I continued. "So much has changed in the past one thousand years. Equestria doesn't want to steal your land, nor do we want to subjugate your ponies. The only thing we would ask is for your friendship."

"Friendship?" he said, grinning mirthlessly. "Not content with driving our ancestors from their lands, you now come to our home without permission, you destroyed our bridge, and you murdered our ponies. If that is how Equestria shows friendship, then you are undeserving of ours."

He had me there, I had to admit. We could have just fought our way out, and considering Earthshaker's state of obvious exhaustion after whatever magics he invoked to save his ponies and the natives' lack of skill in war compared to the humble Equestrian guardspony, we might have even succeeded. But even then it would have been a risky endeavour; they had numbers on their side, if not skill, and Faust knew how many were still lurking in unseen tunnels and caves nearby. The political ramifications too would have been disastrous, and though I might have survived, Odonata's plan would have still succeeded.

I lifted my hoof and placed it on the shield, whereupon it glowed purple. It felt like glass, smooth and cold. Glancing behind my shoulder, and ignoring the stab of pain on my back and shoulders as best as I could, I saw Shining Armour and the troops watching us warily. A few of the soldiers looked twitchy, being this close to restoring their lost honour, the last thing a soldier can say they truly possess after signing their life away on the dotted line of the enlistment form, only to be presented with this last obstacle. I would not put it past some of them to want to fight their way out.

"It's true, we did those things," I said with an affected sigh of sympathy. "The Changelings attacked us; Princess Celestia imprisoned, the Elements taken, and Canterlot occupied by a hostile power for the first time in a thousand years. We were angry and frightened, and we wanted revenge. You can understand that, can't you? You're probably feeling exactly the same way right now. But we were so blinded by our hatred of the enemy we didn't stop to consider the impact of our actions, and for that I'm truly sorry. Please, for the sake of your tribe and its ponies, don't make the same mistake that we did."

"Pretty words are meaningless without action." Earthshaker shook his head, and I could detect a hint of reluctance in that gesture, as though the drivel I was spouting made logical sense but there was something stopping him from admitting I was right. Pride most likely, that thing that smothers the eyes and ears of otherwise rational ponies.

There was only one thing for it, and it was a huge gamble, but it was still better than remaining stuck at this impasse. "Shining Armour," I said, "dispel your shield."

Shining Armour looked at me as if I had spontaneously grown a pair of wings from my ruined back, but after a moment's hesitation when he finally divined my intentions, he complied. The transparent magenta dome surrounding us rippled, like the surface of a clear lake disturbed by the dropping of a stone into it, and then vanished with an audible 'pop'. The natives lowered their spears, and likewise our troops rallied into a defensive shield wall, as much as they could with their mix of earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi. [The Equestrian phalanx, or shield wall, is usually used by earth ponies, despite its origins in ancient pegasus tactics as a means to combine the strength of a unit in the face of the superior physical power of earth ponies or magic of unicorns.] The effect of which was to leave Earthshaker and me standing out in the open between them.

I held my hoof out towards Earthshaker, offering it in the universally acknowledged gesture of friendship. Across all cultures, the presentation of a bare hoof demonstrates that one is not armed (despite a unicorn's deadliest weapon being his horn) and that one's intentions are friendly.

"What happens next is up to you," I said. "You can try to take us all prisoner again, but I don't think these stallions have much more in the way of patience for that, so it'll be a fight to the finish. Either we fight our way out, or we're all slaughtered. Then what? In both cases you've committed an act of war against Equestria, and the full force of the Royal Guard will be brought down on your tribe like a hammer on a walnut. Except, of course, it won't be that simple - you'll survive, your kind always have done, so we'll have a futile, bloody conflict that neither side can win without a whole lot of blood spilt. Do you want to be remembered as the chieftain who brought more needless suffering upon his tribe, or the one who finally brought peace and friendship between us?"

After what felt like an eternity, he raised his hoof and tapped it against mine. I was expecting a gentlecoltly hoofshake, as opposed to a juvenile hoofbump, but given the circumstances it was more than enough. Earthshaker barked a command, and his native war band hesitantly lifted their spears and sheathed their swords, and our guardsponies followed suit.

"Go," he said, tossing his head in the vague direction of Equestrian-held land. "You may take your flag back to the north. Do not think that this makes us friends, slaves of the Tyrants of the Sun and Moon."

"Thank you," I said, giving a respectful bow in the form of a slight inclination of my head. "Though in time, perhaps, we might be friends?"

To Tartarus with that, I thought, I was still very miffed about being flogged and I was not about to forget that any time soon, even if it was only at the subtle manipulations of cruel Changeling deceit. A nice word to that effect, however, would speed things along, and I simply could not wait to get out of this miserable place and into a bed, or the bar, whichever was closest.

"I do not know," he said, shrugging. "But today, I make a gesture to Equestria. In exchange for our continued liberty I will let you go, and I will pray to the spirits of the earth that I have not made a grave mistake."

And I to Faust for the same reason, though I expect She's still busy running the entire universe to pay much attention to one lonely supplicant. Nevertheless, I had done it; I had talked my way out of a sticky situation, and all I had to do was make vague promises of a diplomatic nature that I had no power or authority to actually do. Well, I did, kind of; the constitution of the Equestrian state was a tad unclear on what was and was not within my remit, but whatever happened, I could be reasonably assured that either Princess Celestia or Princess Luna would be able to sort out the whole mess. I am a commissar and my business is war, whether I wanted it or not, and though I had just averted one, another still awaited me. The relief that I felt at this development, provided Earthshaker could be trusted not to ambush us on the way home, was tinged with that shade of melancholy that comes with the realisation that such a respite was always temporary in nature.

That, however, was a problem for the future. It took the platoon a few more minutes to get themselves ready for the journey ahead, and asking for assistance in crossing the great plains of the Badlands felt like pushing our luck. Besides, we still had Chipped Urn with us, still lingering as far away from me as possible lest I give him another slap for his apparent betrayal, which, I admit, was still very much a risk when I felt like punishing him each time my back would flare up with pain.

We had retrieved our sacred banner and with it the honour of the Royal Guard, and now Shining Armour could end his career on a high note. I was exhausted, drained, and on the verge of collapse, but finally we carried on, with the Royal Standard of the Two Sisters leading our way back to Equestria. As we carried on at what felt like a dreadfully slow pace I wondered if it had been worth it, insomuch as anything in war can be considered 'worth it'. It was not an easy question to answer, and to this day I am still unsure what, if anything, we had actually accomplished besides an enforcement of a status quo and the warming of relations between Equestria and some damned sand ponies. The one thing that I can take some tiny measure of solace from, however, is that in taking back our flag I could at least say that Gliding Moth's spirit would rest a little easier.

"Is that it, sir?" said Cannon Fodder, suddenly and apropos of nothing as we made our sullen journey. Sometimes I envied him for his simple mind; for him we had gotten what we came for and that was the end of it, but I knew that there would be no end for either of us except that which awaits all mortal beings.

"Yes," I said. "We're done."

We were spotted by a patrol of pegasi a few hours into our journey and were escorted back. By the time we arrived at Fort E-5150 it was starting to get dark, in fact, as we crossed through the portcullis gates of the fortress I caught sight of Princess Celestia herself in the courtyard halfway through the process of lowering the sun for the night. A crowd had gathered to observe this ancient ritual, off-duty soldiers and those who really should have been on watch, but when the sentries cried out at our approach they all swarmed around us as we all stumbled onto the parade ground.

The sun had set, and with it darkness descended and the moon rose at the bidding of a Princess hundreds of miles away from here. Her sacred task completed, Celestia turned to look as we approached. Braziers and torches were lit, casting the square in a flickering orange glow that tinged her otherwise pristine white coat. She must have just arrived, as one of the many royal chariots stood to the side, with her two Royal Guard escorts with their glittering golden armour standing out amidst the dirty and dusty soldiers around them.

I stood at the head of this group, flanked by Cannon Fodder who still held the Royal Standard high and Chipped Urn who stared at the God-Princess of all Equestria and approached with legs trembling and ears pinned back in fear. A quiet, reverent hush had descended across the courtyard, and even the sounds of activity that were ever-present in a crowded and busy military base seemed subdued.

It was then, finally, that my strength gave out. Seeing her, reassuring me that I was truly safe, meant that I could now afford myself the luxury of collapsing. My legs simply dropped from under me as though they had turned to jelly and I fell to the dusty ground to land awkwardly on my belly. Celestia rushed forwards, calling for a medic as she did so, and the crowd likewise surged closer. I was faintly aware, in that odd, distant manner just before one loses consciousness, of ponies doing something to the bandages stuck to my back.

"Hello, Auntie 'Tia," I said, painfully lifting my head up to see her crouched over me, her face full of worry and concern. "I've found your flag for you."

[On that note, this entry in the Blueblood Manuscript ends. For those readers interested in further elucidation on the aftermath of what would later be called the Twisting Ravine Incident we must once again turn to Paperweight's A Concise History of the Changeling Wars, and I have appended an extract below. While it lacks detail to truly satisfy the academically curious reader, it will suffice to provide some much-needed context.]

***
The Twisting Ravine Incident led to the Equestrian-Badlands Ponies Conference, held in Dodge Junction two days after the return of the Royal Standard. Chaired by Princess Celestia and attended by delegates from seven of the native tribes, including the tribes of the Agave, the Rat Pony (Jerboa), and the Hill Hawks being the three largest and most influential, it resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Dodge Junction. Contemporary sources dismissed the strategic importance of the treaty as being a mere distraction, but with decades of hindsight it is difficult to dismiss the impact it would have on the development of the war.

In addition to formalising diplomatic relations between Equestria and the native tribes after more than a thousand years of relative isolation and neglect, the Treaty stipulated Equestria's guarantee of the independence of these tribes, free from both Equestrian and Changeling interference, in exchange for unhindered military access through their territories. In obligating Equestria to protect the liberty of the natives, the goal of the war shifted from revenge for the attack on Canterlot to the liberation and protection of fellow equines from the threat of Changeling occupation. After two years of inconclusive fighting with very little progress made on all three fronts, support for the continuation of the war had started to flag with both the general public and in Parliament. Indeed, it became the official policy of the opposition party in the House of Commons to seek a white peace with Chrysalis, until the Treaty made such a position politically unviable.

Furthermore, the inconclusive planning around General McBridle's offensive into the Badlands and to strike at the Changeling Hives, while bold, illustrated the administrative flaws in the Royal Guard and hastened calls for reform. There is very little doubt among military historians that even without the incident disrupting the preparation of the offensive, the tiny size of Army Group Centre and its lack of decisive leadership would have resulted in a costly failure for the Royal Guard. McBridle retired without seeing his offensive put into action; in fact, he offered his letter of resignation the moment Prince Blueblood limped into Fort E-5150 with the Royal Standard.

Shining Armour likewise resigned from his post as Captain of the Royal Guard and Colonel of the 1st Solar Guards Regiment. He would not command another regiment in the war, but left for the Crystal Empire to take his place alongside Princess Mi Amore Cadenza as Prince-Consort. There, he would play a leading role in the re-founding of the Crystal Guards and their integration into the Equestrian military.

The failure of the trainee Wonderbolts under the command of Rainbow Dash would force Cloudsdale to reconsider its contribution to the war effort. Bereft of unicorns and earth ponies, the city was incapable of raising conventional regiments of hoof. An attempt to restore the ancient pegasus warrior culture was half-hearted, resulting in the deployment of a single squadron whose leader lacked the appropriate knowledge of war to execute her orders effectively. Then again, very few officers of the Royal Guard could say the same. As such, the militarisation of the Wonderbolts was put back to the Cloudsdale Assembly for reconsideration and Captain Spitfire censured for her mishandling of the situation. For the time being, Cloudsdale would turn its efforts to the military applications of pegasus weather control, including such schemes as weaponising lightning and the use of clouds as cover.

All of this provided fertile ground for the seeds of reform to be sown. And at the end of the second year of the war, the Twilight Sparkle Commission published its findings and recommendations. The timing of this could not have been more apt, as the work that General McBridle had put into planning his audacious advance into Changeling territory would not go to waste. The stage was set for the new offensive early in the following Spring, and the horror of the Battle of Virion Hive that was to follow.

First Blood (Part 1)

FIRST BLOOD

Prince Blueblood and the Second Incursion of Canterlot

Prince Blueblood is a renowned war hero, who has served with distinction during the Changeling Wars and numerous other highly crucial military operations that have ensured the survival of our great kingdom. Throughout his extensive military career as a commissar of the Royal Guard he has proved to be a popular hero with soldiers and civilians alike, with a combination of inspired leadership, unrivalled courage, and quick-thinking that allowed him to turn many a near defeat into a glorious victory. As such, his worth as a propaganda figure is almost as great as his worth on the battlefield, with our recruitment centres being swamped with ponies wishing to emulate their great hero.

The truth, as ever, is always far more complex than its fiction. Those of us who knew him personally prior to his meteoric rise to fame generally believed him to be a boorish and unpleasant individual, utterly self-absorbed and arrogant to the extreme. The disparity between his public image of the noble hero and the Blueblood who once used a mare as a pony-shield has often confused me.

His memoirs, ‘To Serve the Princess’, were published a few short years ago, these are infamously inaccurate, having been written by a ghost-writer and the truth doctored to preserve the image of the all-conquering hero. As I was going through his personal effects I discovered a manuscript; a rather more frank description of his life, amusingly entitled ‘To Serve Auntie ‘Tia’, which provides a fascinating insight into the mindset of this popular public figure.

This manuscript provides a very candid appraisal of the events surrounding Blueblood’s life, showing him to be very much aware of his fraudulent reputation, and bizarrely, he appears to have been rather shameful of it. It appears that behind the boorish swagger of this high ranking noble lay an ingrained inferiority complex. Indeed, throughout the manuscript he seems to dismiss genuine moments of courage and selfless sacrifice as the actions of a self-centred coward.

Most of this manuscript appears to be written as a stream of consciousness, and often its tone makes it feel like a confession as much as memoirs. True to Blueblood’s self-centred personality, the manuscript tends to focus solely on his own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Where necessary I have attached extracts from other works to help explain the big picture of the circumstances around his life.

With the aid of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony and my sister Princess Luna, the ponies who perhaps knew him best, I have compiled this loose collection of memories and recollections into a publishable format. Where necessary I have added notes that we hope will clarify on certain points raised in this manuscript. These notes will be in parenthesis, in italics, and coloured red.

We hope, dear Reader, that this manuscript will illuminate you as to the true thoughts and feelings of Equestria’s champion, but above all we hope that you merely find it interesting.

Needless to say that in order to preserve Blueblood’s worth as a propaganda hero this document is classified as Top Secret. Unauthorised individuals caught reading this will be banished.

H.R.H. Celestia

If I were to pick a single moment that turned my entire career from comfortably sitting in my manor licking chocolate off mare’s flanks to being thrust repeatedly into many violent and life-threatening scenarios, it would have to be Fancy Pants’ benefit party of ’12. This was the moment where the seeds of my fraudulent reputation for heroics were first planted and subsequently snowballed.

The party was held in the aftermath of the first Changeling invasion of Canterlot, in which somehow nopony had noticed that Princess Cadence had been replaced by an evil doppelganger hell bent on sapping all of the love out of the city. Especially her fiancé, Shining Arsehole [evidently Blueblood’s nickname for Shining Armour, I recall Twilight getting most upset when he taught it to Spike], who probably should have noticed.

At any rate, the immediate aftermath of a hostile invasion didn’t seem the best time to host a benefit party for Canterlot’s elite. However, Fancy Pants was of the view that despite Equestria being in a state of total war we should continue with ‘business as usual’. This meant hosting another party for Equestria’s upper crust with the aim to raise money for rebuilding parts of the city that were ruined in the invasion. Naturally, as Princess Celestia’s nephew, I was invited.

Up to this point I was doing my utmost to avoid being drafted into the frontline infantry to be sent halfway across Equestria to the Badlands, where the Changelings were massing once more, and so far I had largely been successful. Having a military background (all members of the royal family are expected to serve in the Royal Guard) and being Canterlot royalty would have guaranteed me a role as an officer, however, I had no plans on risking myself getting killed or taken prisoner on the frontlines, so with a little wrangling I managed to secure a position as Commissioner for Supply in the War Ministry overseeing the all important supply lines. Granted, it was not particularly interesting, and if I ever had grandchildren they would not be impressed when they ask me ‘what did you do in the war?’ and I answer ‘signing requisition forms’, but at the very least I was guaranteed to live long enough to have grandchildren.

Of course, had I any indication of what I was getting into in this party I’d have grabbed up my sword, screamed ‘for Auntie ‘Tia!’, and personally walked across the accursed Badlands to Queen Chrysalis’ domain. Life, as I have learned, likes to play a little game called ‘Screw Blueblood’ in which every time I think I have everything arranged so that I’m not in constant mortal danger, fate contrives a way to bring it all crashing down upon me.

So I arrived at Fancy Pants’ estate fashionably late as usual, with my esteemed aide Cannon Fodder in lieu of a date. Sadly, despite being Canterlot’s most eligible bachelor there were no young, impressionable mares available at such short notice, and I would rather go and tell Iron Will he’s a pansy to his face than ask any of the desiccated old mares at the office to come with me.

As Royal Commissioner for Supply I was assigned an aide to assist me with the vast mountain of paperwork and requests I had to deal with on a daily basis, and as luck would have it I had to get a stallion for whom personal hygiene was something that happened to other ponies. He was a unicorn pony from the Royal Guard with a grubby beige coat, black messy hair, and two crossed spears for a cutie mark. I later found out that his coat is actually white but the accumulated mud and dirt had stained what should have been lustrous alabaster fur into a sickly shade of off-white. You may be wondering why I would associate myself with such an unkempt and unclean pony, but I found that his malodorous scent was outweighed by his knack for organisation, scrounging things, saving my life, and, perhaps most importantly, dissuading individuals who didn’t have anything truly important to discuss from annoying me.

That said, he was hardly the pony for Fancy Pants’ little soiree, but I brought him along as a little reward for helping me clear out a six month backlog of paperwork (requests for extra paperclips for Auntie Luna’s personal army of ghouls [The Night Guard obviously]). At the very least, Cannon Fodder was unimaginative and phlegmatic enough not to cause an embarrassing faux pas on my behalf. Also, I was relying upon his innate tendency to follow orders to the letter as I ordered him only to speak when he was spoken to this evening.

It had taken us hours to prepare, much of which was spent on trying in vain to get Cannon Fodder to look presentable. After a three hour bath and a failed attempt to remove the gravy stains from his Royal Guard uniform my maid announced that there was nothing more that she could do and subsequently quit her job, which was a shame because she had an amazing derrière.

Fancy Pants’ estate was magnificent, not as wonderful as mine obviously, but still very impressive for somepony who was nouveau riche. I watched disinterestedly through the window of our carriage as we were brought up the expansive driveway. The gardens were lavishly decorated, with a well manicured lawn and numerous bushes trimmed into pleasing shapes and a smattering of statues of ponies I didn’t recognise.

The mansion itself was rather understated compared to the garish designs of other such self-made millionaires, lacking the hideous classical minarets that Canterlotians find so attractive for some peculiar reason. Instead it was modelled on the delicate white curves of Canterlot Castle and, for once, not festooned with purple and gaudy chunks of gold. In fact, it was rather modest compared to the other palatial estates on this road.

The carriage stopped, and the door opened to allow us exit into the cold and dark night. I stepped off first, followed by Cannon Fodder, and I was amused when I saw the carriage driver turn his nose up in disgust at Cannon Fodder’s appearance and odour. I paused for a moment to adjust my own uniform in the reflection of one of the many gothic windows of the house, while the other party guests streamed past us to enter.

I had decided to wear my Royal Guard dress uniform since I would be representing the Royal Guard at this soiree, which consisted of a red tunic and brass buttons, a red sash, yellow epaulettes, and a sword strapped to my back. However, it did make me look rather dashing, and mares always love a stallion in uniform (Cannon Fodder excepted).

“How do I look?” I asked.

“Very good, sir,” answered Cannon Fodder in his usual laconic manner. He had chosen to wear his full plate armour and carried his trusty spear. I questioned why he, a mere office drudge now, was still expected to wear that but I chalked it up to bureaucratic incompetence as usual.

At any rate, I wasn’t likely to attract any ladies with Cannon Fodder hanging around, but that night I was feeling rather sorry for him. The poor guy had spent so much time going through all of my paperwork and sorting out the Western Front’s paperclip supply lines, so I felt compelled to reward him by giving him an insight into the upper class world in which I am most at home. He, on the other hoof, seemed to take my offer of a colt’s night out as a direct order rather than a mere suggestion. I had another motive for bringing him along, with the risks of another Changeling incursion I felt it necessary to bring along a bodyguard just in case things went pear-shaped, which they inevitably did.

Now ready, I entered through the great oaken doors into the mansion. The interior decor echoed the exterior’s design with its sleek lines and lack of gaudy ostentation, at least what I could see of the main entrance hall. The hall itself had been repurposed for the holding of parties; Fancy Pants’ usual venue of one of the many banquet halls of Canterlot Castle unavailable as they were being used as weapons stores for the army massing there.

While smaller than the Canterlot Castle banquet halls, Fancy Pants’ own entrance hall was still sufficient to the task. It was three storeys tall with a high vaulted ceiling reminiscent of a gothic cathedral and was supported by tall marble pillars. The ceiling had several windows which allowed Auntie Luna’s stars to shine down upon the party. The rest of the mansion was constructed around this lavish entrance hall in a ‘U’ shape, with balconies overlooking the hall.

I stepped inside, taking in the sights of the upper class at play. The hall was sparsely filled; however, as despite Fancy’s insistence that business proceed as usual, the majority of Canterlot’s aristocracy preferred to huddle in their estates in case of Changelings. I couldn’t blame them myself, if it weren’t for my social standing as the Princesses’ nephew I’d have probably retired to my room in the castle with a copy of Playmare magazine and a bucket of ice cream.

Despite there having only been about twenty or thirty guests in the hall the party was lively enough, though concentrated in a small area of the room. As I looked around at the enormous hall I could only wonder what Fancy Pants used it for when he wasn’t hosting parties, indeed even I thought this building was much too vast for merely one pony.

There were a few ponies I could recognise, admittedly since the last Grand Galloping Gala I haven’t taken part in many social gatherings. That was such an unpleasant experience which very nearly swore me off attending any parties, charity auctions, museum openings, or any activity where I would have to associate with a large number of ponies. As such I was unsure of the subtle movements in the delicate social hierarchy, indeed my own standing was put into some measure of disrepute in the aftermath of that shameful display, but I was confident I would be able to regain some of my waning reputation. The act of bringing Cannon Fodder, who was the most lower class individual I could find, would no doubt improve my standing in the eyes of Fancy Pants, who held a peculiar affection for the low borns.

The host was busy chatting away with his small group of hangers-on and associates who, in their efforts to appease the number one trendsetter in Canterlot, were sycophantically agreeing with every word he said. He was a unicorn who, despite his low birth, looked every bit the upper class host. His white fur was expertly groomed with particular attention paid to his cutie mark to make the three crowns printed upon his flanks shine as if they were gold. His suit was suitably starched, with not a crease to be seen. In fact, I was rather jealous; that particular suit was a finely tailored ensemble by the prestigious Hoity Toity fashion designer before their establishment was destroyed in the Changeling invasion and he snapped up the only remaining suit at auction before I could.

“Ah!” Fancy Pants detached himself from the conversation and approached us. “Prince Blueblood, it’s always a pleasure, I’m so glad you could come.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Fancy Pants,” I replied, slipping into my ‘party’ persona where I pretended to be somepony of wit and grace (last Grand Galloping Gala notwithstanding).

I always found Fancy Pants to be rather irritating. He was amicable enough, to the point where he could get on as well with the low born proletariat as he did with high Canterlot royalty such as me [It should be noted that technically Blueblood is only considered minor royalty, but as far as the aristocratic hierarchy is concerned he is among its upper echelons]. Yet it was that incessant cheeriness that I found to be rather grating, and frankly, why should somepony as he, who had just dragged himself out of the low born masses we rule over, continue to associate with them? However, I was at an important social event and therefore had to pretend that I liked him.

“And is this your date for tonight?” he asked jokingly, meaning Cannon Fodder. If he was the least bit shocked or confused over the dour guardspony’s presence, odour, or appearance he was doing a very good job of masking it.

“No, sir, I’m the Prince’s personal aide,” replied Cannon Fodder plainly as the joke clearly went over his head.

“Yes, I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “He’s been working so hard and I thought a night off would do him some good. Cannon Fodder, this is Fancy Pants.”

“Nice to meet you, sir.” Cannon Fodder extended a grubby hoof towards Fancy Pants, who regarded it with a fleeting expression of disgust at the unclean extremity before grudgingly shaking it.

“Yes, quite,” he muttered as he absently wiped his hoof on the marble floor. “Anyway, I do hope you enjoy the party, it’s for a very good cause.”

From there Fancy Pants turned to welcome the next batch of arrivals to his little soiree, leaving Cannon Fodder and I to mingle with the other party guests. Unfortunately it seemed that my reputation amongst the Canterlot elite was so low, or they were so repulsed by Cannon Fodder’s appearance and musk, that they seemed to be actively avoiding me. Attempts to start up conversation were met with increasingly transparent excuses to leave; Lord Flash Heart had left his oven on, Baron Shilling misplaced his wife, Lady Goldenrod was worried about her pet cat, and so on.

Eventually we gave up and found a spot to relax by one of the empty tables. At that point I began to regret bringing Cannon Fodder along, he was singularly ruining all of my chances at climbing up the social ladder. It wasn’t his fault of course, it was all mine; I took him way out of his depth and thrust him into a new and unfamiliar situation. On the other hoof he seemed to be enjoying himself, as he stuffed his face with cucumber and lettuce sandwiches with all the grace of a starved Diamond Dog. I reminded myself that this was for him, after all, without him I’d have drowned in all that paperwork weeks ago before being fired and sent off to the frontline to die in some pointless battle. [It’s possible that Cannon Fodder was the closest thing Blueblood had to a real friend at this point.]

It wasn’t that we were being deliberately ignored; indeed I caught a few furtive glances in our direction and a few snippets of conversation about me ‘slumming it’. Thankfully, it seems that Fancy Pants found Cannon Fodder to be ‘delightfully rustic’ and, like sheep following their shepherd, their opinions soon fell into line. At that point I wondered if any of my compatriots in Canterlot’s upper crust were capable of forming independent thoughts.

I noticed a familiar bright pink alicorn approaching me, Princess Cadence, my cousin and one of the living goddesses who rule our fair realm, though her grandeur was somewhat diminished having grown up with her and I will always remember the little filly who fainted in sex education classes. In the tradition of most royals she was rather naked except for her crown, breastplate, and shoes. Not that she needed clothes; she looked regal enough with her minimalist wardrobe.

“Blueberry!” she exclaimed as she approached me, and I cringed at the mention of my childhood nickname. “So good to see you.”

“Likewise,” I retorted, “how was your honeymoon?”

“Los Pegasus was wonderful,” she said as she levitated a canapé from a passing servant’s tray, “admittedly it was difficult to get some time to ourselves with the paparazzi around all the time, but Shining used his shield spell to keep them out of our villa.”

“Yes, quite, insufferable lot journalists are,” I said as I took a glass of wine from another servant. As expected, it was a fine vintage.

“Oh, they’re only trying to earn a living,” she smiled. Dear, sweet, innocent Cadence, she could find the best out of nearly everypony, which must be one of the reasons why she can tolerate my company.

“Where is Shining Armour anyway?” I asked, realising that he was nowhere to be seen.

Cadence looked sullen for a brief moment, before putting on her happy party face once more, “He’s working late drilling the new recruits for the upcoming war. I do hope he will be okay.”

“I’m sure he will; he’s a capable soldier,” I lied, but it was the sort of platitude she was looking for. As Captain of the Royal Guard, Shiny Armoire [Another one of his nicknames] could have just sat back several miles behind the front lines while the Royal Guard did all the fighting, but he had the strange and unwise tendency to lead from the front. It made him popular with the troops, but it was certainly not what I would have done.

“You’re right,” she smiled. “I suppose it’s only natural to worry.”

“Blueblood!” Fancy Pants cried from halfway across the party. He weaved his way through the mass of party guests towards me. “I would like you to meet somepony, a very important somepony!”

“Oh?” I asked, somewhat disbelieving of him. “I think I should know anyone who’s important.”

“Well, I must admit she’s rather new, but she’s fitting in wonderfully.”

My hooves started itching, which was always a sign that something bad was about to happen. I decided to ignore this warning; however, considering I was at a fairly sedate little party held by Fancy Pants, the host whose parties were least likely to end in disaster, so I felt that I could handle whatever fate had in store. Since the disastrous Grand Galloping Gala of last year I had learned my lesson. I concede that I acted in a less than chivalrous manner regarding a mare who was deluded enough to think I would instantly sweep her off her hooves and marry her right there, which resulted in both of our evenings being utterly ruined. From then on I decided to try and act with a great deal more tact, which, as it turned out, helped me develop my skills in lying and arse-covering that would prove so useful in later life.

Looking back on this relatively innocent period of my life, I can only long for the days where the greatest threat to my life was a very large cake and not insane generals who sought to get me killed in increasingly suicidal missions.

I made my apologies to Princess Cadence, placed my glass of wine on the table, and followed Fancy Pants across the hall with Cannon Fodder in tow like an obedient dog. The soldier did his best to walk and eat his sandwich with his hooves at the same time, but managed to do so without tripping or dropping his meal. Such was his complete and total lack of any magical ability, despite having the relevant anatomy in the form of the horn protruding from his forehead, that he was incapable of levitating anything at all. I theorised that must have been why he was discharged from the frontline infantry and sent to work with me in the never-ending battle against bureaucracy and paperwork.

I caught furtive hints of conversation discussing the ‘brave guardspony’ and all that he had sacrificed in the name of keeping Equestria safe, no doubt purely to impress Fancy Pants by agreeing with everything he said. Up to this point all Cannon Fodder had sacrificed in the name of Equestria was my sense of smell.

It was then that I saw the mare Fancy Pants was talking about and instantly I had flashbacks to the horrors of common carnival fare, improper protocol before one’s social betters, and vast amounts of cake frosting.

Standing before me was a white mare, whose pristine coat had been so thoroughly cleaned she looked rather like a shiny silver statue come to life. Her purple mane was expertly styled, no doubt by the best spa ponies in all of Equestria, and was of the same lustrous sheen as her coat. Yet what was most striking about her was her dress; not too overstated like the hideously garish designs that I’m sick to death of seeing the upper class mares of Canterlot wear, but instead it was rather subtle in its divine elegance. It accentuated her mare-ly curves but without coming across as too inappropriate for this high society event, it was of a deep maroon colour to compliment her hair and alabaster white fur and bedecked with shiny jewels that formed sleek lines down her front.

Her face wore a fleeting expression of surprise upon seeing me, but it was soon replaced by a serene look of thoroughly aristocratic aloofness that would make Auntie Celestia want to give up her throne. This was one of the six ponies responsible for ruining the last Grand Galloping Gala with their inane country bumpkin ways, great heroines of Equestria they may be but that is not enough to allow them the opportunity to wreck the single most important social in existence.

“Oh, Prince Blueblood, how lovely to see you again!” she said once she had regained her composure, her polite demeanour gave me hope that whatever resentment she held against me was gone.

“You two know each other?” asked Fancy Pants.

The mare’s right eye twitched slightly, but she kept her composure, “Why yes, Blueblood and I met at the last Grand Galloping Gala.”

“Indeed we did,” I said, trying to sound amicable and doing my hardest not to remember how much getting my suit dry-cleaned cost me; damn thing nearly bankrupt my entire estate.

It was at that point that I realised I had completely forgotten the mare’s name. I know it seems rather inconceivable, but it’s not as if I maintain a list of every single pony I have insulted and offended in my lifetime as such an endeavour would likely use up all of the parchment in Equestria. I wracked my brain trying to remember the mare’s name but strangely I was drawing up blank, and as the awkward silence settled across the entire hall I could feel hundreds of eyes gazing accusingly at me.

“Er... Fluttershy?” I said, saying the first name that came into my head that sounded mostly plausible.

The mare’s eye twitched again and she shook her head.

“Octavia?” I ventured.

She shook her head. The walls of her composure were rapidly crumbling as her right eye twitched more violently and the gentle smile on her lips morphed into a strained grimace.

“Spike?”

“It’s Rarity, you insufferable oaf!” she shrieked suddenly. “Honestly, Blueblood, after the way you treated me at the Gala the least you could do is remember my name.”

By now the awkward hush that fell across the hall had become incredibly uncomfortable. This was just perfect, now another embarrassing situation for ponies to use against me, no doubt I’d have my titles and land revoked and be reduced to a mere peasant pony.

Rarity blushed nervously as she realised she was causing a scene. “I mean, excuse us, there is something I must discuss with Blueblood, if you’d come with me please.”

Not wishing to argue with her and cause even more of a scene I followed her, accompanied by my aide and the quiet murmurings of the party goers as they no doubt chatted about how much of a cad I’ve been. It seems that in my absence Rarity had soared up the social ladder, which is remarkable for a simply country lady from the backwards little village of Ponyville. Unfortunately, it seems that she now outranked me. Ponies now looked to her as an example of how to behave, what clothes to wear, and what to find acceptable instead of me. I found it galling that a mere commoner; somepony who has to work for a living, who doesn’t own land, and who didn’t descend from a long line of great nobles, was more popular than me.

On the other hoof I wondered why I bothered trying to please these ingrates.

I followed Rarity up one of the many staircases that led to the first floor which ran like a ring around this party hall. Finding a room that wasn’t occupied by servants or a couple attempting to fornicate was rather difficult, but given the sheer size of the place it was only inevitable we found an empty room.

This was probably a servant’s room on account of its rather plain decor, though I wouldn’t know as I’ve never been anywhere near one before. There was a small bed in the corner by the window, with a bedside table which held a book and other personal effects belonging to whoever slept here. Opposite the bed on the other wall was a modest wardrobe with a small mirror on it. On the other remaining wall was a faded old poster of Sapphire Shores.

Rarity shut the door behind us and then turned to face me, her eyes glaring at me with enough intensity to burn holes in my tunic and her mouth contorted into a rictus grin.

“I thought I made it clear that I never wanted to see you again,” she spat at me.

“Don’t tell me you’re still upset about the whole Gala thing,” I said dismissively, not wanting to be dragged back into that ridiculous little debacle.

“Upset?” she said, looking rather shocked. “A lady does not get upset, but she can get offended by the loutish behaviour of a certain prince.” She then finally noticed Cannon Fodder standing there, dutifully consuming a canapé he picked up from somewhere, “And who is this?”

The guardspony’s mouth was stuffed full of food so I answered on his behalf, “That’s Cannon Fodder.”

“Blueblood!” she gasped and brought a hoof to her mouth. “How can you be so callous as to call a brave pony of the Royal Guard ‘cannon fodder’? They are risking their very lives to keep us safe!”

I smirked and shook my head, “No, no, that’s actually his name. Private Cannon Fodder, he’s my aide in War Ministry.”

“Ma’am,” he said, which caused a small trickle of crumbs to escape from his mouth. He snapped to attention and clumsily saluted Rarity.

Rarity flushed with embarrassment, “Oh dear, I am sorry Private Cannon Fodder, please forgive me.”

Cannon Fodder blinked a little in confusion before shrugging, “S’alright, ma’am, we all make mistakes.”

That little ‘mistake’ now put her on the back hoof, and I was about ready to press my attack when I heard the distinctive ‘snap’ sound caused by the displaced air of a magic missile being discharged. I froze, recognising that sound from my previous and uneventful career in the Royal Guard, while Rarity held that perplexed look on her face. Cannon Fodder's training as a guardspony snap into action as he ceased his gorging and took up a defensive position by the door and drew his spear.

I carefully approached the door, hearing the sounds of the panicking guests and more discharges of mage fire. With Cannon Fodder watching my back with his spear poised I drew my own blade and slowly pushed the door open a little. Through the crack I could see masked unicorns barge into the hall below, firing their magic missiles over the heads of the fleeing party guests. Earth ponies approached with their spears levelled, and from above pegasi soared down from the ceiling windows.

“What’s going on? Let me see!” Rarity complained as she barged against me.

“Shush! I think we’re under attack.”

“What? Is it the Changelings?”

“I don’t know, they look like ponies to me.” I only now realise the stupidity of that statement, if they were Changelings then of course they would look like ponies to disguise themselves.

“Of all the worst things that could happen, this is the! Worst! Possible! Thing!” Rarity shrieked and collapsed on the servant’s bed.

I rolled my eyes at the drama queen, though I had to agree with her assessment.

The invading army brought the crowd under control fairly quickly and herded them all into the centre of the hall. Fortunately, they were ignoring the first and second floors but I knew that wasn’t going to last, so if I was to make my escape it would have to be now.

“Right,” I whispered back at Rarity and Cannon Fodder, “we need to get to the cellar.”

Rarity widened her eyes in surprise, “What on Tartarus for? You can’t want to see Fancy Pants’ wine collection now of all times! Honestly, Blueblood, you never cease to provide me with new ways for me to despise you.”

I nearly slapped her, and in hindsight I probably should have, but I kept my irritation in check for the sake of my own survival. “So we can get into the Canterlot catacombs and escape to tell everypony what’s going on. All of these old mansions are connected to the network of gem tunnels that lie under the city; don’t you pay attention to anything here?”

To her credit, she held her tongue and didn’t turn this into a full blown argument that would have attracted the intruders, though I was wondering how these mooks would deal with an enraged Rarity on their hooves.

“It should be near here,” she said finally. “This is the servants’ quarter of the house and there’s a set of stairs a few doors down from here.”

I smirked, “Been here often then?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, unlike you Fancy Pants is a perfect gentleman!”

I could think of a few other ‘perfect’ appellations to describe Fancy Pants, but again in the interests of saving my own hide I ignored them for now. “Alright, can you teleport us?”

Rarity shook her head, “That’s Twilight’s domain. Can you?”

I couldn’t bear to tell her that I flunked Advanced Thaumatology in school so I just shook my head in response. If Rarity and I couldn’t teleport a short distance to this stairwell then Cannon Fodder clearly had no chance.

“Looks like we’re going to do this the hard way,” I said as I opened the door slowly, fortunately the invading ponies were focused on containing the party guests in the centre of the hall and hadn’t branched out to search for anyone hiding in the upper floors. Clearly these ponies were amateurs, I thought; if they were letting ponies like me, Cannon Fodder, and Miss Drama Queen move about unhindered in the floor above.

I did consider just surrendering there and then, but then I had no guarantee that these ponies would treat their prisoners well or even keep them alive. If they were seeking to take hostages to be ransomed back to their families then they should, in theory, keep them nice and safe, unless they were brutish thugs who didn’t for honouring deals. So, in the interests of not being tortured and/or killed I decided escape was my best option.

We slinked out of the room one by one, hugging the walls carefully and tentatively observing the scene below. The mysterious ponies said nothing as they moved amongst the stunned party goers, ignoring their increasingly vocal, and probably unwise, protests. Fancy Pants himself was rather livid at the interruption of his party and his persistent complaints earned him a backhoofed slap that sent his monocle flying, which I would have found rather amusing if it weren’t for the very real peril I was in.

They seemed to be looking for something or somepony, which might have explained why they were ignoring the upper floors for now. I hoped they would find whatever, or whoever, soon as to facilitate my escape. To their credit, it seems that my first analysis that the ponies were amateurs was clearly wrong; the terrorists were extremely professional. They were eerily silent and kept the crowd under control mostly through intimidation alone; their faces were concealed by black ski masks and their cutie-marks blacked out with what appeared to be paint to avoid any risk of identification. These were not mindless thugs gate-crashing an upper class party just to steal something and/or take hostages, they were professional and had a greater agenda than mere money.

“It’s here,” Rarity whispered as we approached a set of double doors.

From our vantage point above I could see the mysterious masked ponies grab Princess Cadence and haul her off down the hall. She didn’t resist, probably because she’d been taken prisoner before and was used to the ordeal or something. Anyway, I doubted there was anything she could have done, though alicorns’ powers are extremely potent, Cadence’s abilities were focused around spreading love. While much has been written on the power of love it would be useless in a hostage situation, unless you could make your captors engage in a sudden orgy [A gross (in every sense of the word) misunderstanding of how Cadence’s powers work, she does not make ponies fall in love but simply rekindles the love that already exists between two ponies].

I pushed the door open slowly, holding my sword in a telekinetic grip in front of me in case the enemy had wised up to our little escape plan and lain an ambush in the stairwell. To my surprise and evident relief it was completely empty, so I widened the door a little and stepped through followed by Cannon Fodder and Rarity.

The stairwell, much like the servant’s room we were in a short while ago, was plain and unremarkable. After a few tense moments of scanning the room for any signs of life other than ourselves we slowly headed on down the steps.

We tried to be quiet and Rarity and I were doing a pretty good job, but Cannon Fodder had chosen to wear his full plate armour and was therefore sounding like Pinkie Pie trapped in a china shop after being given an espresso. So it was with bated breath that we made our journey down the steps with weapons held ready for inevitable combat, yet each time we reached the end of a flight of stairs I was met with the relieving sight of nothing.

We reached the bottom without incident and were presented with another set of double doors that presumably led to Fancy Pants’ infamous wine collection.

“Cannon Fodder, take a look through the door,” I ordered. Somehow I had fallen naturally into the role of leader; either they were in awe of my non-existent leadership skills or simply saw no other alternative to following me. It was probably the latter, I think. Given the choice I wouldn’t follow me either.

Cannon Fodder did as he was told and stepped over to the door. He opened it cautiously and peered through the crack.

“There are two guards,” he whispered back, “and they’re standing by a big door.”

“Probably the entrance to the catacombs,” I surmised.

“Wait,” he ducked back inside and shut the door quickly. “There’s more coming and they’re bringing the Princess-Lady.”

I frowned, “Why would they want to take her to the cellar?”

“Probably taking her into the catacombs,” said Rarity, “It might be how they got in here in the first place.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to me that the enemy might have used the very means of our escape as a way of getting in, but now it seemed that we might have been getting out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. Yet it was our only hope of escape, and as far as I was concerned a small glimmer of hope for survival was better than none.

I heard the sound of a door slamming shut. Cannon Fodder pushed the door open carefully to peer through.

“They’ve gone, but the two guards are still there,” he said in the same sort of voice he used to tell me that the 5th Regiment of the Solar Guard was late on their invoice paperwork again. “We’ll have to take them out.”

“Is there no way to sneak past?” I asked, hoping to resolve this without the risk of getting killed.

“No, they’ve got the entire room covered. We’ll have to fight our way past them.”

I was afraid of that. I had to admit since my tour of duty in the Royal Guard ended I had become increasingly out of shape and somewhat pudgy from an easy life eating cake with my Auntie Tia. Still, we had the element of surprise and weight of numbers on our side. Hopefully, by the time the guards were through butchering Cannon Fodder and Rarity they would be too tired to attack me.

“Can you fight?” I asked Rarity.

The mare stuck her nose up arrogantly and said, “Fighting’s not really my thing, I’m more into fashion, but I will if it means saving Princess Cadence.”

“Good, so you’re not going to be a whiny mare-in-distress after all,” I said dryly as I took my place by the other door.

“Hmmph! Just because I’m a lady does not mean I am adverse to violence, it simply means I do so with decorum.” She then pointed at me, “Can you fight?”

“Lady, I served in the Royal Guard, I think I can handle myself in a fight,” I said mostly for her benefit. In truth, when I was serving in the Guard our main duties revolved around standing next to the Princess and looking imposing and the greatest threats we had to face were errant cakes. Oh, how I miss those days of innocence.

I steadied myself by the door, trying to ignore the anxiety cloying in my gut as I tentatively flexed the blade in my telekinetic grasp. I am a competent swordspony, having been trained from a young age in the art of fencing. Unfortunately in the world of real combat, the thing trying to kill me tends not to adhere to the rules of fair play. [Another example of Blueblood’s inferiority complex; he is in fact an excellent swordspony and certainly more than just ‘competent’. Thus far he is the only pony to have defeated my sister and me in fencing. In fact, after one defeat Luna was heard to remark that Blueblood must have been born with a sword in his hooves and likely performed his own caesarean]

“Three, two, one.”

We forced the doors open and charged. Cannon Fodder reared on his hind legs and hurled his spear, as I darted towards the two guards I watched the spear overtake me and imbed itself in the closest guard with a sickening ‘squelch’ noise. The one remaining guard had a fleeting expression of disbelief on his face before he raised his own sword to block mine.

Steel met steel with an almighty clash. Holding the advantage I pressed the attack, thrusting my blade at the pony in series of overhead swings and thrusts in the direction of his chest. He reacted purely defensively; blocking my attacks capably but doing nothing to counter them. I noticed the glassy, vacant look in his eyes as if he wasn’t focused on me at all.

A blur of white flashed from my left side and slammed into the pony. I flinched back, not wanting to accidently hit Rarity, if I did I’d have one less body between me and whoever might try to kill me next.

The elegant fashion designer wailed into the guard mercilessly, but despite the abject violence of the onslaught she moved with the same grace she did when, well, doing anything really. The guard collapsed unconscious under the assault of hooves. Rarity stepped back, suavely readjusting her hair and dress.

Now that the immediate threat was over I could afford to take stock of my surroundings. Only a select few had been allowed to view Fancy Pants’ famous wine collection, indeed amongst some of the more impressionable high society ponies this was the closest thing to the holy land they had. The cellar was as large as the grand hall but without the height, and was filled to the brim with a veritable labyrinth of huge wine racks. It felt much like a library, but with bottles of wine instead of books.

The cellar was dimly lit by torchlight, which cast off deep shadows down the ‘corridors’ flanked by wine racks. The air was cool, as was the stone beneath my hooves.

“Sir,” said Cannon Fodder. He was standing over the first guard and tugged his spear free from the corpse, “I think you need to see this.”

I sheathed my blade and stepped over to see what the problem was, admiring Fancy Pants’ extensive collection of wine along the way. I wondered whether Fancy Pants actually ever drank this rare and expensive wine or merely collected like some posh version of a comic book nerd.

There, on the floor by his hooves, was a dead Changeling.

“Oh my,” was all I could say as I beheld the sickening form of the Changeling. It was distinctly insect in appearance but with the size and shape of a pony. It was armoured with thick black chitin, with glimpses of the dark flesh beneath, its eyes were huge and glassy. Sickly green ichor leaked from the wound on its neck onto the floor and flowed through the gaps in the flag stones.

“Oh, how horrid!” Rarity shrieked, the skin under her alabaster fur getting distinctly paler.

“Sir, we need to move quickly before the Hive Mind notices this one’s dead,” said Cannon Fodder blankly.

At this time in the war we only had basic theories on how Changelings worked, and the leading theory was that they operated according to a latent psychic Hive Mind that broadcast orders directly into their brains. Individually they were mindless, oversized, magic bugs, but under the control of one of the more intelligent subspecies of Changeling their efforts could be co-ordinated effectively towards an objective. [This is a largely accurate summation, however, once severed from the control of the Hive Mind, individual Changelings will eventually start to develop their own personalities over a long period of time. Therefore they are anything but ‘mindless’]

I nodded in response and pushed the door to the catacombs open, revealing a pitch black tunnel that led downwards into the earth.

“Wait, won’t there be more Changelings down there?” asked Rarity, which was a fair point. If the Changelings were taking Princess Cadence down there, then there were likely to be even more hiding amidst the gem tunnels.

I frowned, “Obviously, but it’s our only chance of escape.”

“But it looks so dusty and dirty in there,” she complained. “Oh, I spent so long on making this dress.”

I rubbed my temples with a hoof; I swear this lady could weaponise whining. What I should have done is merely march her back up to the hall where the Changelings were keeping the hostages and just let her whine until their heads exploded.

She looked down on the dead Changeling and cringed, “Well, I suppose needs must.”

Not wanting to waste any more time than we already had I headed through the door with Cannon Fodder covering the rear. Rarity followed tentatively, making each step into the dusty old cavern as if it was physically hurting her hooves.

“Ick! Dust!”

I shut the door behind us but there was no way to lock it or secure it. It would only be a matter of time before the dead Changeling would be noticed so, despite Rarity’s continued protestations we headed down the dank tunnel.

The air was surprisingly cool there, though there was a lot of moisture in it. The tunnel itself was wide enough for the three of us to walk abreast without much discomfort (the only discomfort being in close proximity to Cannon Fodder’s odour and Equestria’s biggest drama queen).

Rarity and I both flickered on simple light spells with our horns, illuminating the tunnel about ten feet in all directions. Beyond that was pure, untainted darkness that concealed all manner of Changelings and other beasts that call these dark catacombs home.

“So, Blueblood, I do hope you know where we’re going?” asked Rarity after a while of walking.

I puffed out my chest a little with pride, “My special talent is navigation.”

“Really? I’d have thought it was being rude and unpleasant.”

I ignored the snide remark, rather too focused on trying to keep myself alive than engage in verbal sparring. “Why do you think my cutie mark is a compass rose? When I was a colt some of the local foals thought it would be funny to convince me there was lost Alicorn treasure down here, so I went into the tunnels under the school and got lost.”

“Oh, how horrible!” I glared at her, but for once she wasn’t being sarcastic. “Foals can be just terrible sometimes.”

“It took a bit of trial and error,” I said, continuing the epic tale of how I got my cutie mark, “but I worked out how to ‘read’ the rocks and stone around me. It’s a little hard to explain but I just subconsciously know where I am and where I need to go provided I know where I started from.”

“Like a compass in your head?”

I nodded, “Something like that yes. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

Rarity sighed and shook her head despondently, and I can’t say I blame her. She was being forced to put her life into my hooves, and I could barely trust me with my own life these days.

The tunnel expanded, the rock walls becoming jagged and less smooth as we entered into the older parts of the gem mines. Glistening diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other brightly coloured gems could be seen peaking through the deep cracks in the walls where the old miners hacked into the rock with pickaxes. Rarity’s expression soon changed as she saw the jewels hidden beneath the mundane rock, her eyes sparkling with wonder.

I rolled my eyes; they were just shiny rocks as far as I was concerned.

“So what happened to you in the tunnels?” she asked as she finally tore her eyes away from the shiny things around her.

“I starved to death,” I said dryly. “That’s why I’m here now talking to you.”

Rarity kicked my hind leg lightly and wore a scowl on her face, and I could only grin in response which, in turn, simply made her scowl harder in a peculiar vicious cycle.

“Fine, I navigated through the tunnels on my own and found my way out through the secret escape passages under Canterlot Castle. I ended up in the castle ballroom as Auntie Celestia was negotiating a high profile trade treaty with the Gryphons. I was crying my eyes out but she still stopped the meeting to comfort me, then this thing appeared on my flank.”

The mare blinked a little disbelievingly, “The Princess stopped a meeting to help you. I can scarcely believe that she of infinite patience and love would deign to associate with one as crass and rude as you.”

I shrugged; there were more important things on my mind now rather than having to explain myself to her. Clearly she held a lot of resentment against me, no doubt inspired by the horrendous Grand Galloping Gala disaster last year. While I had no real desire to play counsellor to this deranged little mare I knew that if we were to survive this ordeal we would have to work together, so that there would be two bodies between me and the Changelings rather than just one and a stroppy Rarity, who might not lift a hoof to aid me.

We had been walking for about ten minutes or so in the darkness, and the bleak oppressiveness of our surroundings was starting to take its toll on Rarity. The only sounds were our own hoofsteps and our breathing, yet every so often we heard the scurrying of rats and other foul vermin. Cannon Fodder was being as phlegmatic as usual and regarded the immense amount of earth and rock above our heads with only a passing interest, while I was already intimately familiar with these mines.

After a little more walking in the direction I hoped Canterlot Castle was we came to a fairly large clearing with three tunnels branching off into the darkness. I wanted to keep on going but for Rarity’s sake I decided we should stop for a break, after all, if she was tired then she wouldn’t be able to fight effectively to save my own hide.

Rarity was looking rather despondent; her pretty dress was now covered in a thin film of dust and the elegant train was scuffed and ripped after being caught on jagged rocks. She sat down, her tired eyes glancing worriedly down the infinite darkness of the three passageways.

I sat next to her while Cannon Fodder stood guard, his spear levelled and ready to meet any onrushing intruder.

“I do hope Cadence will be safe,” I said, trying to make conversation.

“I didn’t think you cared about anyone except yourself,” Rarity bit back. I sighed and shook my head, deciding to put her hostility down to the stress of the situation.

“She is my cousin after all,” I shrugged. “Is this about the Gala?”

“Yes, of all the times you could have wanted to talk to me about the Gala you had to pick when we are trapped underground with a Changeling army after us. You have had plenty of opportunities to apologise to me for your behaviour, especially that time I grudgingly had to stand next to you to christen that new airship, but only now, when our lives are on the line and the fate of Equestria hangs in the balance, do you take that opportunity.”

I blinked at her in surprise. “You... you want me to apologise to you?” I said, doing my best to keep my voice quiet and level.

Rarity made a disgusted face, “Oh for Celestia’s sake Blueblood, you don’t even know why I’m mad at you. You didn’t even remember my name!” She looked away and down at the ground by her hooves. “It’s not just the cake, or the way you insulted my friend Applejack’s apple treats, or your loutish behaviour.” She suddenly looked up, fixing me with an intense glare that reminded me of seeing a Gryphon stalking its live prey in their hunting rituals, “It’s me, actually.”

“Pardon?” I blurted out, not quite expecting this turn of events.

“You see, for most of my life I have always wanted to live in Canterlot. I dreamed of meeting my ‘Prince Charming’ here. I, a little innocent mare from little old Ponyville, quite out of sorts in the bewildering city of such glamour and culture, but possessed of such poise and style to impress even the bluest of bluebloods in the city, would attract the attention of none other than Princess Celestia’s own nephew. At the Gala our eyes would meet across the hall, our hearts would melt...”

Already I could see where this was going, the poor deluded mare, so I raised a hoof to interrupt her long soliloquy.

“Except I didn’t meet your vision of perfection,” I said. “You fell in love with what I am instead of who I am. I dare say you’ve been reading too many trashy romance novels.”

“Humph, too right you didn’t meet my vision.”

I sighed, “Rarity, you are a commoner and I am royalty, my so-called ‘loutish behaviour’ was only a result of time-honoured social traditions that stretch back to the founding of Equestria itself. The very idea of a common pony even thinking they could converse with my royal person is just unheard of.”

She shook her head, “That does not excuse you. A true gentlecolt is courteous to all regardless of their social station. However, as I have said, it was partially my fault. I was naive to believe we would fall in love at first sight like a fairy tale and I paid the price for that.” Rarity tapped a hoof to her chin, then made a face when she realised she just smeared dust and mud on her face by accident, “I think something positive can be taken from that rather traumatic experience. I learned a very important lesson that day; my dreams won’t just happen overnight, but they will require hard work and perseverance.”

I nodded, but couldn’t think of much else to say. Yes, she was a mare of uncommon taste and elegance, but the class difference was absolutely insurmountable. A commoner could not mix with royalty any more than oil with water. It was rather a shame as the truth was I was starting to like her, but it was accident of birth that kept us separate. The more I thought about it the more I found it to be rather ridiculous.

This was not the time to be dwelling on such things, with an unknown quantity of Changelings out to kill me and a possible threat the very existence of the kingdom I think I had more important things to deal with than a certain mare’s emotional baggage.

“Sir,” Cannon Fodder spoke up, having been silent throughout the entire exchange, “there’s something coming this way.”

I clambered to my hooves, stretching my tired limbs before drawing my sword cautiously. Rarity too stepped up cautiously, flexing her legs in preparation for any further violence. In the distance out of the rightmost tunnel I could see the faint glow of magical light, probably from a unicorn’s horn, slowly emerging.

“Shouldn’t we kill our lights?” asked Rarity.

“No point,” answered Cannon Fodder. “Changelings can see perfectly in complete darkness.” [Not technically accurate, Changelings have the ability to see in the infra-red spectrum which, for all intents and purposes, means they can ‘see’ body heat]

“Can’t be the Changelings then,” I said.

“And why not?” ask Rarity.

I grinned as the answer was completely obvious, “If they can see perfectly in the dark then why do they need horn lights?”

That shut her up for the time being. Despite being certain that they weren’t Changelings I was still wary. The gem mines were supposed to have been abandoned, but if there were definitely Changelings down here then there could be all sorts of monsters and beasts inhabiting these ancient tunnels. Dragons, perhaps, drawn by the allure of the many shiny things hidden in the walls or maybe brigands and thieves hiding from the Canterlot law in the labyrinth under the city.

“Challenge them,” I ordered Cannon Fodder.

He nodded, adopting a defensive combat stance by lowering his spear towards the tunnel entrance and crouching low, ready to burst into sudden and bloody violence at the slightest provocation.

“Halt!” he cried, his gruff voice echoing through the tunnels. I winced, hoping it wouldn’t cause a cave in. “Who goes there?”

The most welcome sight imaginable stepped out of the dark gloom: a Royal Guard unicorn in full plate armour, followed by two earth pony Guards. They bore the same stern expression of all Royal Guardsponies; merciless and uncompromising in their sacred duties to uphold the laws of Equestria and ensure the eternal rule of the Princesses. Despite the dust their armour was perfectly shiny even in the dull light and gleamed warmly.

“Sergeant Spear Point of the 3rd Regiment of the Solar Guard,” said the unicorn as he bowed low before my royal presence. “Prince Blueblood, it is an honour, Your Highness.”

I smiled and puffed out my chest in pride as the remaining two guardsponies bowed before me. Finally a pony who treats me with the respect I deserve, then again as a guardspony it was his job to do so. Rarity rolled her eyes and sighed in irritation.

“Rise, Royal Guards,” I said, and they complied.

“We were despatched in response to the hostage situation at Fancy Pants’ benefit party to ensure the safety of you and Princess Mi Amore Cadenza,” he said in the usual laconic manner of Guardsponies.

“It’s the Changelings,” I explained. The Sergeant tilted his head to one side. “They took her into these tunnels.”

“I see.” He motioned one of the earth pony guards towards him, “Return to the castle and inform the Captain of the Royal Guard of the situation.”

The earth pony snapped off a smart salute and galloped off down the tunnels. I wondered how he was expected to be able to navigate without a source of light, but at the time I put it down to superior Royal Guard training that allowed them to memorise routes. Perhaps he had a similar cutie mark and special talent to mine. Still, I noticed that my hooves were starting to itch rather uncomfortably.

“Your Highness, I would respectfully request your assistance in rescuing Princess Mi Amore Cadenza.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Rarity before I had a chance to say anything at all. Grudgingly I nodded in agreement, despite my growing desire to just go home and relax on my chaise lounge with a glass of fine port and a copy of Equestria Daily. I couldn’t very well tell everypony that; I had yet to earn my fraudulent reputation for heroics but I was still a Prince of the Realm with military training and therefore expected to lay my life down for Princesses and Country, lest I lose Rarity’s new but grudging respect for me.

On the other hoof having two extra, heavily armoured bodies between the Changelings and my handsome self was no bad thing.

“Lead the way, Sergeant,” I said, trying to sound as authoritative as possible.

Spear Point saluted smartly and directed us down the left most tunnel. We followed them, or rather Rarity did and I followed her and Cannon Fodder followed me.

Bloodstained (Part 10)

Part Ten

In some strange and quite twisted manner I was actually looking forward to the offensive, but only in the same way that one looks forward to having painful dental surgery; one merely wants to get the whole unpleasantness over and done with as soon as possible so as to alleviate the cloying anxiety that is often far worse than the ordeal itself. Nevertheless, it had imbued me with a sense of impatience as I waited with my fellow officers, General Crimson Arrow and his staff, Twilight Sparkle, and ‘Cloudless Sky’ for Lieutenant Southern Cross and his merry band of Horsetralian Engineers, on which the success of this operation so depended.

Much of the previous night was spent lying stone cold awake and in varying stages of sobriety and drunkenness on my cot, shivering beneath my covers and gazing up at the worn, moth-eaten ceiling of my tent as my mind frantically searched for a way to get out of this hateful predicament short of shooting myself in the hoof or eating gunpowder (I had recently punished a few ponies attempting to be invalided back home by doing that, so it would not have done my false reputation any favours by trying the same thing). [Gunpowder contains nitrates, charcoal, and sulphur, and in large amounts it is extremely poisonous. However, in small doses it induces stomach cramps, diarrhoea, and shakes, and could therefore be used by the more cowardly of soldiers to feign illnesses. That it was such common knowledge, especially to the commissars and provosts, dissuaded its widespread use as a means of deserting except in the most desperate of deserters.]

Predictably, my alcohol-addled, distraught, sleep-deprived mind had failed miserably to come up with anything even remotely productive, which in turn did very little to improve my already plummeting self-esteem. Though on a rational level I knew that guarding Twilight should keep me free from the hardest of the fighting, I fear, however, that I was in a dreadful funk that night, and on occasion broke into foalish wails as I lamented my unavoidable fate. I was fortunate that the combined snoring of Cannon Fodder and Spike helped to drown out whatever pathetic noises I was making.

It is a relief to know years later after the event that all that ponies remember is my stern, sober, and generally heroic demeanour, looking oh-so-dashing and noble as I gazed out wistfully at the treacherous landscape which we would be fighting over for the foreseeable future. If only they had known that I had spent the night before weeping pathetically into my pillow. It’s all immaterial, anyway; what ponies remember, or what they want to remember, rather, is far more important. I like to think I had gotten over that anyway when the hangover started to set in at about the same time Celestia’s sun started to rise; it felt as if my brain was pounding against the confines of my skull with every heartbeat. That said, as I looked around at my heavily-armoured colleagues I was thankful I did not have to slog through this unbearable heat while wearing seventy pounds of enhanced steel plus equipment and rations, though a glance back at the jagged hills to the south, beyond which lay endless hordes of Changeling drones did much to dissuade me of that notion.

Twilight Sparkle sat nearby, a little off to the side of mob of officers, with a small notepad and pencil hovering steadily in front of her muzzle as she would watch and take notes. She was clad in some spare Night Guards’ armour that was in portions too big and too small for her; the saddle was bound tightly across her midsection in a way that had to be quite uncomfortable, and the helmet in particular would frequently drop over her eyes without warning and jab painfully into the bridge of her muzzle, forcing her to readjust it periodically. Flanking her was ‘Cloudless Sky’; Shining Armour (who, like everypony else, was completely oblivious to the true identity of the pony standing not more than three feet away from him); Spike, who was looking thoroughly bored and dejected that he would not be following us on this mission (I had personally vetoed that idea, as while Colonel Sunshine Smiles’ insistence that the battlefield was no place for a ‘lady’ was ignored, all would agree that no child should be exposed to its horrors. That, and his continually irritating habits would have forced me into performing acts upon his person that would have made anything he might have witnessed in war look like a picnic in comparison); and Captain Red Coat’s second-in-command, Company Sergeant Major Square Basher who had been assigned to train Twilight Sparkle in the use of her new armour and how to keep her head down when things inevitably go pear-shaped.

“He’s late,” said Lieutenant Sir Scarlet Letter for the umpteenth time, referring to the missing Southern Cross. Like the rest of us, the irritating little unicorn was positively dripping with sweat, such that it seemed to pool in the crevices of his armour plates whereas mine simply soaked into my uniform to leave unsightly dark patches in awkward places. He attempted to cool himself by wafting before his face a small, elegant silk fan, which was decorated with some delicate Cathayan calligraphy that he must have believed was some beautiful and inspiring poem about cherry blossoms, the fleeting ephemeral quality of life, or some other such rot, but with my limited understanding of their impenetrable language I could more accurately translate the script into Equestrian as ‘buck the eighteen generations of your ancestors’. [An insult considered to be very offensive in Cathay, as ancestor-worship is considered a very important part of their religion and culture.] It was, however, my only source of amusement as I waited for what seemed like decades for Southern Cross, so out of that and a slight sense of vindictiveness I decided not to tell him.

“Saying it five times in a row won’t make him appear,” I snapped, fast losing the will and the inclination to mask my irritation. Luckily, the ponies around me took my sour mood as frustration at not being in the thick of battle yet born out of an eagerness to get ‘stuck in’ with the enemy, as opposed to being generally upset that my life was not turning out quite the way that I had planned.

“We’re still early,” insisted Major Starlit Skies. He checked his pocket watch, and as he did so, he wiggled his nose in that peculiar, disarming gesture of his that settled his small pince-nez spectacles into a more comfortable position. His presence was not strictly needed, and neither was that of Colonel Sunshine Smiles, and Captain Blitzkrieg, as they were not joining us in this insane expedition to certain death, but apparently those three felt the need to come and publicly wish me and everypony else unfortunate enough to have been selected for this mission good luck. We would need it, though frankly I never put much stock in the common soldier’s superstitious adherence to Lady Luck; I prefer to take more pragmatic steps to ensuring my survival than in the fickle whims of a bored personification of random chance, though, needless to say, the amount of times that I have owed my survival to the metaphorical roll of the die is quite disconcertingly high.

The distinct aroma of unwashed underwear forewarned me of Cannon Fodder’s approach a full second or so before he swam into view, bearing one of the many enamel mugs that he had somehow secreted amongst his armour. I accepted the tea gratefully, though mindful of drinking something hot in this positively scorching heat, some more fluids would undoubtedly help towards alleviating my pounding hangover, so I sipped slowly as I scanned the indistinct horizon, which appeared to have turned to quivering jelly by the haze of heat rising from the dust.

“The inspection is not due to start for another few minutes,” the Major continued. He snapped shut the gilded cover of his pocket watch as if to punctuate that remark, and tucked the antique timepiece back into the recesses of his armour. Cannon Fodder offered the older stallion one of his many mugs of tea, which he accepted gratefully, but only after wiping down the sides and rim of the enamel receptacle with a hoofkerchief, and blowing on the surface of the tea contained therein to try and cool it. “Thank you.”

“That’s no excuse,” grumbled Scarlet Letter, apparently oblivious to the hint that he should shut up for once, but it seemed that he was as immune to taking hints as my aide was to taking baths. He sponged at his sweaty, dripping brow with a pristine white hoofkerchief, which he had somehow secreted within his uniform without getting it creased or stained in some manner.

I shook my head, and soon regretted it as the pounding of hammers against the inside of my skull intensified briefly. Returning my gaze to the quivering horizon, where the bland yellow ground met the equally uninteresting clear blue sky, I noticed emerging from the haze of heat that rose from the parched earth a large, amorphous grey smudge, accompanied by the distinctive, percussive beat of dozens of ponies marching in step. Well, about bloody time, thought I, as, dispensing with all attempts at maintaining what shred of dignity that I had been hoping to present, simply sat my princely rear on the dusty ground to watch. The smudge soon coalesced into shapes vaguely identifiable as ponies, as the rhythmic sound of iron-shod hooves, which seemed to beat in time with my throbbing headache, grew louder and more distinct, and soon they became identifiable as formation of sappers, their bulky, armoured forms made to look even more ungainly by the sheer amount of equipment strapped to their bodies, marching towards us.

“They’re a slovenly bunch, these colonials,” said Scarlet Letter as he watched the formation of ponies emerge from the haze towards us. “Can you believe these uncouth peasants want to rule themselves and that worthless scrap of land they call home, sir? Ridiculous! I dare say they’ll all be ruined within a half a week if we grant them self-rule!”

“On the contrary,” I said, “devolving power to the colonies will alleviate the administrative and logistical burden on Canterlot.”

Scarlet Letter briefly pulled a face as if he had just walked in on his mother fornicating with King Sombra. “O-of course, sir,” he stammered, in what was perhaps the fastest display of back-tracking that I had ever seen in a pony. “How foolish of me,” he continued, laying on the sycophancy so thick I that could have spread it like brie on a cheese cracker. “I did not consider the greater implications, but certainly a pony of your experience in power must have clearly seen the bigger picture vis-à-vis the administration of the colonies. It is fortunate that we have leaders with such clear vision and insight, sir!”

As the words tumbled out of his mouth in a frantic rush, such that I half-hoped that they would become clogged in his fat neck and choke him, I scanned his voice for any tones of sarcasm. Sadly I found none, for if he was being sarcastic I would have still found it far less insulting than his absurdly transparent attempt at toadying. I still don’t know what I found more offensive; the sycophancy itself or that he believed I would be fooled by such a clumsy attempt to do so. I was too tired and hungover to have done anything about it, except to wave a hoof dismissively in his direction and make an annoyed ‘grunt’ sound in my dry throat. However, he appeared to have taken that as an invitation to continue talking; I soon wondered if I could shove him in the way of Southern Cross’ engineers to be trampled to death, and claim that he had tripped over on a rock.

“But that Lieutenant Southern Cross’ impertinence makes my blood boil, sir!” He stamped a hoof at the ground. “He speaks to superior officers and to common soldiers as if he is their equal, with no regard to the rank structure and traditions of Their Highness’ Royal Guard. He has no courtesy, no manners, and takes nothing in this business of war seriously! It really is infuriating, sir!”

“He’s a little rough around the edges, true,” I said, watching the formation of engineers slowly becoming clearer and more distinct, as if emerging from the fog. Compared to the average guardspony they were positively laden with equipment, such that underneath the pouches, saddlebags, lengths of rope, spades, pickaxes, axes, and Faust knows what else strewed about their bodies, it was nigh impossible to see the steel grey armour beneath. The noise of their hooves pounding against the ground was joined by that of all of this equipment clattering against itself and the armour it was lashed to, sounding like someone had hurled the entire percussion section of the Canterlot Symphony Orchestra off a cliff.

Scarlet Letter snorted condescendingly. “That’s putting it mildly, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir. He was raised up from the ranks, I hear, and their sort are often ill-disciplined and discourteous.”

As was his commanding officer, Shining Armour, thought I, glancing over my shoulder to see the Captain of the Royal Guard himself chatting amicably with his younger sister, and though I could not hear their conversation over the background noise surrounding us, judging from Twilight’s irritated expression her brother was fussing unnecessarily over her safety. “They often are,” I conceded, remembering the old adage that common soldiery promoted to the officer caste simply do not fit in amongst the rarefied company of their social superiors. “But nevertheless I’m sure that he is a fine officer.”

Then, as if they had been waiting for the opportune moment to embarrass me, the advancing platoon of engineers, which were now no more than ten or so feet away from us, suddenly burst into song.

Lieutenant Southern Cross, who led his platoon from the front and twirled his axe like a baton, started, and then thirty gruff, heavily-accented voices joined in as the engineers marched past. Their leader had the sort of ridiculously wide grin on his face that implied he had been planning this stunt for quite some time now.

The song itself was cheerful, and the tune itself was of a martial rhythm as the ponies marched in step with it, even if the lyrics were of a decidedly silly nature that probably little to no sense to anypony outside of their backward little island commune. [The song was in fact a popular advertising jingle for a Horsetralian condiment known as ‘vegemite’. The recipe for it is rather obscure, and personally I cannot stand the taste of it, though my sister is rather fond of the stuff.] The odd spectacle had the effect of silencing the gentle bubble of polite, and somewhat forced, conversation around me, as the officers, and, indeed, some of the braver guardsponies who conveniently forgot that they were at attention, stopped whatever it was they happened to be doing and watched with expressions of varying levels of incredulity; from the imperiously-arched eyebrows and vague looks of condescending disdain, as if finding a foal has just stolen all of your biscuits, to the bug-eyed, slack-jawed idiocy that I was fast becoming used to around here.

The one exception to this parade of stunned faces was Scarlet Letter, who looked at me with an expression that I could only describe as smugness triple-distilled into its purest form by the most skilled alchemist of the Royal College of Magi. It took a not-inconsiderable amount of will and personal discipline, which was in increasingly short supply here, not to try and punch it out of him, but thankfully I succeeded. Laying hooves upon fellow brother-officers of Their Divine Highnesses’ most honourable Royal Guard is generally frowned upon, unless it’s a duel, of course, in which case one is free to simply murder one’s opponent. As I had little to no desire to sully my hooves anyway, I simply shrugged and muttered some empty platitude about how a little levity now and again can improve the morale and fighting spirit of the soldiers.

“If you say so, sir,” he muttered, evidently unable to resist rubbing it in.

When the song ended as abruptly as it had broken out, Lieutenant Southern Cross peeled away from his unit, which marched off to take its pre-arranged position at the vanguard of the battalion’s marching column, and walked towards our small group. There was a definite swagger in his step, which was matched in its cocky self-assurance only by the same big grin that every serial prankster wears now plastered on his face, as the other officers stepped to the side to form a small tunnel for him to reach General Crimson Arrow. Glancing around, we had all appeared to have taken to the unspoken consensus that it was best to pretend what we had just witnessed simply did not happen, and proceed accordingly.

With everypony present and correct, finally, we proceeded with the inspection. It was more of a formality than a strict necessity; Company Sergeant Major Square Basher had already taken the liberty of conducting a full inspection of the entire battalion a few hours before. It is a very rare occasion that I encounter a mare able to look me in the eye without first rearing up on her hind legs, standing on a box, or first being in possession of both a horn and a pair of wings, as I am quite tall myself, but CSM Square Basher of the earth pony company, affectionately known as Sergeant Bash or simply ‘Marezilla’ owing to her intimidating size, build, and temperament to match, was one of those few. She was a non-commissioned officer of the old school, by which I mean she seemed to believe that victory in war had less to do with inspired leadership, superior strategy, and good logistics, but everything to do with how loud one can shout. Watching her unleash invective after colourful and creative invective at those ponies for having committed a few minor infractions with their uniforms a few hours before had provided some element of amusement for me.

Nevertheless, the officers of the Royal Guard were sticklers for tradition, and I, being a pony who owed his lofty position on the Equestrian aristocratic hierarchy to the great and noble traditions that this nation is founded upon, could not be seen to disapprove of this, regardless of how onerous I found the concept of examining the uniforms and equipment of over three hundred ponies. The inspection itself was to be led by Captain Red Coat, but given his youth and relative inexperience with, well, everything, frankly, he relied upon his Company Sergeant Major to help direct him as the senior officers, plus Twilight, Spike, and both of my hangers-on sifted through the serried ranks of guardsponies. Once or twice, every few moments, an officer would make some light comment about the standard of dress of the soldiers, and everypony else would titter in agreement.

“You have a fine body of troops, Captain,” said General Crimson Arrow. I could tell by the uninterested tone of his voice and the equally bored look in his eyes that, like me, he was merely going through the motions and would much rather be someplace else. He paused and indicated with a hoof to one of the soldiers, who stood as a perfect facsimile of the other two standing either side of him; stock still and as unmoving as a statue. “You are to be commended.”

Captain Red Coat’s cheeks flushed red. “T-thank you, sir,” he said, grinning inanely as if he had just been given a boiled sweet from an elderly relative. “But I think Sergeant Major Square Basher deserves most of the praise, sir.”

Sergeant Bash probably deserved all of the praise, thought I, as I looked over at the rigid forms of the soldiers around me, which gave me the unsettling impression of being trapped in a giant chess set and surrounded by exquisitely crafted pawns. I could hardly imagine Captain Red Coat, as enthusiastic and eager to please as he still was, bringing a full battalion of three hundred ponies into line all by himself; the soldiers, many of them having already served in the Royal Guard when their commanding officer was struggling with the three times table, would have eaten him alive were it not for ‘Marezilla’s’ presence.

“I was only doing my job, sir,” said Square Basher flatly. Her voice was calm, deferential, and even had a tone of timidity about it, which was in stark contrast to the highly aggressive torrent of violent and highly creative profanity I witnessed being unleashed on the enlisted ponies just a few hours before. Nevertheless, her chest puffed out with pride, which only did more to emphasise her intimidating bulk.

“That’s what Sergeant Majors are for,” said General Crimson Arrow off-hoofedly, and waved a hoof at the nearest soldier, “somepony needs to keep the scum in line.”

There were a few general mumbles of assent from the other officers, and we started to wander onto the next platoon before we were all interrupted by a certain quiet, inquisitive little voice.

“Excuse me,” said Twilight Sparkle, and I noted that General Crimson Arrow emitted a none-too-subtle sigh of exasperation at the slightly nagging sound of her voice. The young mare had since given up on wearing her helmet, as the nose plate of which had by now formed a rather unsightly bruise in the shape of a crescent moon a few inches across on the bridge of her muzzle, and had instead taken to tying it by the chinstraps to the buckles on her saddle so it dangled awkwardly around her midsection. I vaguely mused that if she didn’t want it then maybe I could have it. “Did you just refer to the guardsponies as ‘scum’?”

“Yes I did.”

Twilight hummed thoughtfully for a moment, and then scribbled down something resembling a long stream of squiggly lines on her ubiquitous notepad. “Could you elaborate, please?”

“May I, sirs?” said the CSM, much to the General’s evident relief. She glanced over to Captain Red Coat and me as if silently asking the both of us for approval. I gave a well-practiced, reassuring nod, while Red Coat appeared to have been inflicted by that sense of shyness that often ensues when he is in the presence of Twilight Sparkle, and he probably believed that such behaviour was regarded as ‘endearing’ by those of the opposite sex. Apparently satisfied, and probably relieved too, that she had been granted permission to do whatever it was she had in mind to prove her point, she then turned away and marched towards the closest soldier.

“Name and rank!” she bellowed, her face a mere few inches from the guardspony’s face and yet he did not flinch even in the slightest.

“Private Shield Warden, sir!” The stallion punctuated his response in the time-honoured fashion of raising his right forehoof and then stamping it into the ground as if it were the exclamation at the end. [Non-commissioned officers are generally not referred to as ‘sir’; however, there are a few exceptions to this rule which include sergeant majors and Royal Equestrian Marine Corps drill instructors during training. Furthermore, contrary to what one might expect, female officers in the Royal Guard are not addressed as ‘ma’am’, but as ‘sir’.]

“What were you before you joined the Royal Guard?”

Shield Warden hesitated. “A criminal, sir!”

“What were you?” she bellowed louder, moving her face just slightly closer to the guardspony, who bore this invasion of his personal space with the same stoicism and nonchalance as the drill manual (a sacred tome for all non-commissioned officers) demands of him during parade. The only indication that he gave of even being slightly affected was a moment or two of slightly more rapid blinking than usual, as flecks of spittle sprayed in an unsightly manner over his face.

“I was a thief, sir; I mugged ponies to pay off my gambling debts. They gave me a choice between the workhouse and the...”

The slightly wordy stallion didn’t get a chance to finish detailing his life story.

“You were scum!” interrupted the Sergeant Major, and the amplitude of her voice leapt a good few decibels, which elicited a quiet, impressed noise from ‘Cloudless Sky’ just behind me. She had all but head-butted Private Shield Warden as she proved once again that personal space is as alien a concept to NCOs as politeness is to Manehattenites, and pressed her bulky muzzle against that of the guardspony’s with a dense ‘clang’ of metal hitting metal. The soldier flinched slightly, but otherwise stood his ground admirably. Nevertheless, that slight movement was noticed by the aggressively fastidious Square Basher, who told him, in a much quieter tone that was somehow even more menacing than the unremitting torrent of invectives she was known for, to stand up straight and proud like a stallion.

“You were pathetic!” the Sergeant Major continued, more than living up to her nickname. “Useless! You were nothing!” Panting heavily with exertion, and the skin beneath her dyed grey fur flushed a deep crimson with large, distended veins snaking across her temples, she took a step back, and I could see a tiny flicker of relief flicker across the blank, masque-like face of Shield Warden. “But what are you now?”

The guardspony hesitated for a brief moment, mulling the answer over. In the rather interesting movement of muscles in his brow I could almost see the gears and levers turning in his mind as he sought the wisp-like phantasm of the answer that was least likely to result in him getting shouted at further. “A soldier, sir?” he ventured.

Sergeant Major Square Basher nodded her head, and a thin smile – that most rare of facial expressions amongst those who hold her rank – tugged at the corners of her thin, grey lips. “Well done, Private!” she said, and though I searched the tone of her voice for any hint of sarcasm or irony, I found none and believed it to be one of the few times she and her ilk were genuine in their compliments. Apparently satisfied that she had proven her point, she turned to address Twilight Sparkle. “You see?”

Throughout the Sergeant Major’s display, there was the muffled sound of wood tapping against a thick wad of paper, as Twilight Sparkle drummed out a regular tattoo with her pencil. “I still don’t follow,” she said, rather meekly.

“I think I can answer this one, Lady Sparkle,” I said, hoping to end this ridiculous farce; it was bad enough that we send these poor sods charging straight into Changeling jaws without having to add public humiliation into the bargain. That and I hadn’t said much in a while, and I felt that it was high time that I should. “The Royal Guard takes those ponies that the rest of us would rather pretend simply didn’t exist; the poor, the destitute, the wastrels, and the criminal classes, and they are fashioned into steel and fire. We take that purposeless anger each of these youths feel, and ponies such as the Sergeant Major here and me forge it into something useful, for the good of Equestria. For many of these ponies, their term of service in the Royal Guard will be the first time they have had discipline applied to them in a consistent manner, and with that martial discipline we will instil constancy, proper respect for their betters, and that which is most lacking in these times: a sense of duty to their country and to their princesses. In short, we make something out of nothing.”

I left out the part about what we did with these ponies when their terms of service were over, however long we required them for, or rather, what we didn’t do with them. For upon their completion of their term of service, should they survive, of course, they were simply let loose back into Equestrian society with no further means of support. I expect many would simply return to their previous life of crime, or perhaps other more idealistic or luckier ponies might actually turn their lives around, but many yet would simply re-enlist with the Royal Guard with naught else productive to do with their lives. I wasn’t about to tell her that, of course, but I’m sure being a smart filly she’d be able to work it out for herself at some point. Twilight made another, vaguely intelligent-sounding ‘humming’ noise and jotted something unintelligible down on her notepad.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself, sir!” said the Sergeant Major, though I was uncertain as to whether she was being sincere or sycophantic.

“That is what I’m paid to do,” I remarked dryly, half to myself, though inwardly I thought the pittance I receive monthly was not nearly enough for the amount of mortal terror this job forces me into.

I felt we had wasted enough time, so I cleared my throat in what is the universally accepted sign that all business has been concluded, and turned around to catch up with the other officers, most of whom had trotted away over to where the Solar Guard contingent of the battalion stood in gleaming lines that coruscated in the bright sunlight. However, it was to some sense of vague disappointment and slight dread that, upon glancing over my shoulder, I saw that only Cannon Fodder and ‘Cloudless Sky’ had followed me. There, Private Shield Warden stood stock still at attention and gazed unfocused at the back of the pony in front’s head, though his view of this wondrous sight was blocked by the ungainly forms of Twilight, Square Basher, and Spike. The first of those three had taken to interrogating the second, much to my irritation and that of the third member of their little group, though I like to think I was much better at concealing it.

The flow of searching questions was probably very interesting from an intellectual standpoint, I might imagine, but this was hardly the place and time to voice them, and was interrupted when Square Basher raised a large, armoured hoof and poked hesitantly at the helmet that dangled awkwardly from Twilight’s midsection. The offending piece of armour jangled noisily against her saddle. “Why aren’t you wearing your helmet?” the Company Sergeant Major asked.

“Huh?” Twilight looked startled for a moment, as if the sudden stoppage of question and answer had left her momentarily disorientated, before glancing around at the offending piece of armour. “Oh, it didn’t fit properly.”

“Helmets are very important,” said Square Basher, and as she did so I noticed that she carefully removed the pace stick that she had always carried sheathed like a sword underneath her left armpit. [A long stick carried by warrant officers and senior NCOs of the Royal Guard. It consists of two lengths of polished wood, hinged at the top so it can be opened like a drawing compass, and is used to accurately measure out certain lengths, such as that of a single pace or the distance between ranks of soldiers, for the purposes of teaching drill] Her voice was curiously quiet, level, and calm, which, in personal experience having gone through officer training at sixteen years old [after he had been expelled from high school for poor grades and behavioural issues, Blueblood had almost immediately bought a commission with his considerable inheritance and joined the Royal Guard as an ensign in the 1st Solar Guard] usually signified something rather unpleasant and quite violent in one’s immediate future. “Do you know why?”

“Uh...”

There was a loud and distinctly unpleasant ‘crack’ of polished wood striking what could only have been a skull, as Square Basher had swung the pace stick down upon Twilight’s head. She flinched under the blow, her forelegs giving way as she reached up to clutch what would likely become a rather large bump that would likely make it even more difficult for her helmet to sit properly on her head. Despite my antipathy towards Twilight, and having inflicted similar blows to the head during our foalhood when I was roughing her up for lunch money or to alleviate my boredom, I felt the first inklings of what I suppose is called ‘sympathy’ by other ponies. It was rather unpleasant.

“That’s why,” Square Basher snapped. She had yet to learn that while beating soldiers is considered to be not only acceptable but actually quite beneficial in correcting their behaviour and moulding their psyches into correct and proper military discipline, doing so with civilians tends to be something frowned upon lest the gutter press start moaning about military brutality and all that rot.

Spike protested loudly, and tried to force his way between his wounded mistress and the intimidating mare, but was simply brushed aside with a hoof. With surprising tenderness that was in stark contrast to her sudden display of violence, the Company Sergeant Major helped Twilight back to her hooves. “If I was a Changeling,” she said, taking the helmet and fiddling with the internal supporting straps, “then your skull would have caved in, and all those big, fat brains of yours that make you Princess Celestia’s personal student would be spread all over the ground like strawberry jam. Got that?”

Twilight nodded rapidly, and winced slightly as Square Basher placed the helmet on her head and began fussing with the various straps and harnesses to fix it around her chin. “Helmets protect your head,” said the Sergeant Major as she worked. “You might want to make a note of that, Spike; helmet protects your head.”

If helmets were so bloody marvellous, then why didn’t I get one? As I watched Square Basher faff with Twilight’s helmet straps until it was sufficiently tight for it to stop falling forwards with every slight movement, I pondered this eternal question further, and even considered lining the inside of my cap with the same enchanted steel that standard Royal Guard armour was crafted from, should I be lucky enough to source some. I had actually confronted Princess Luna about this, on the off-chance that she had found a gap in her hectic schedule to do Faust-knows what to grace me with her dark presence as I worked on paperwork, but only after drinking half a bottle of fine brandy that Cannon Fodder had scrounged up for me from somewhere. She explained in rather condescending tones, as she normally does with just about everypony, that one of my many duties was to inspire the troops by example as well as rousing speeches, and what better way to boost the fighting spirit of the regiment than to show utter contempt for the enemy’s abilities by not wearing armour?

I thought that the best way for the troops’ morale to be utterly ruined was to see my heroic head caved in like a chocolate egg, but I kept that to myself. Besides, given the dark, gallows humour prevalent in this regiment, I’m certain most of the soldiers would have found that to be rather funny.

“Helmet... protects... your head,” Spike mumbled as he scribbled down the note as bidden. He arched an eyebrow sardonically. “Huh, even I knew that one.”

“You’re gonna go far, kid.” A deep, throaty chuckle reverberated from Square Basher’s lips, and she ruffled the stiff spines on Spike’s head with her steel hoof, from which Spike flinched from. “You’re going to be a field marshal one day,” she joked, blissfully unaware as we all were of just how terrifyingly prophetic her words would become. [Spike would later join the Royal Guard upon maturing as an adult dragon, and would eventually reach the rank of field marshal. Prince Blueblood would later go on to serve as an independent commissar attached to his command staff, and if Spike’s own memoirs are any indication he regarded my nephew as being something of a mentor and guiding force throughout his career; an idea that Blueblood was in equal parts amused and terrified by.]

We caught up with the other officers and proceeded with the inspection. The Solar Guard platoons were absolutely immaculate, and nopony would have expected anything less from ‘Celestia’s Own’; their neatly trimmed and bleached fur and scintillatingly-bright golden armour hurt one’s eyes to look upon in this intense sunlight. We passed without much further comment, aside from the compliments paid by the General to the respective commanding officers. Scarlet Letter, however, almost could not be stopped from gushing in the most sickly sweet and transparently sycophantic terms about how honoured he was to receive such gracious compliments, and it was to my discomfort that I found that Crimson Arrow responded most agreeably to that; he always had quite a fragile ego that required constant nurturing lest it wither and die like a delicate, rare orchid given as a birthday gift to one’s beloved aunt and then forgotten about. [Blueblood, I am so sorry about that.] Conscious of the time, however, I got him to shut up in time to move onto the Horsetralian engineers.

The difference between the spotlessly clean and utterly perfect turnout of the 1st Solar Guard platoons and the rather more grimy engineers was readily apparent to all; the single platoon of the Royal Horsetralian Engineers were caked utterly in a thick film of dust, such that their armour appeared to be of the same yellow-ish colour as their fur. I assumed it might be laziness on their part, and thus affected a suitably disapproving expression as I and my fellow officers scrutinised their appearance, but nevertheless I told myself that, should it come to the point that I would have defend Lieutenant Southern Cross, it would make an effective camouflage in amongst that omnipresent tan-coloured dust.

“They’re looking a bit scruffy, sir,” said Cannon Fodder, without the faintest hint of irony.

General Crimson Arrow pulled an odd face that looked as if he was trying to keep himself from appearing too disgusted. “Well,” he said, his voice strained as he tried to word it properly, “they are a little unkempt.”

“Soldiers are dirty,” said Southern Cross, who had been standing alongside his comrades. He was grinning inanely as usual, as if he was still amused by the ‘prank’ he pulled a few hours ago. “Equipment is clean. Look closer, mate.”

We did, and saw that he was indeed correct. Their equipment – spades, axes, knives, lengths of rope, and a myriad other curious items that I could not possibly identify the use of – was absolutely spotless. Upon closer inspection their dirtiness was nowhere near the level of that of my erstwhile aide, replete as he was with unidentifiable food stains and Faust knows what else caked over his armour and non-regulation facial hair, instead theirs was simply the result of a more utilitarian approach to the strictures of uniform maintenance; their armour was purely functional, devoid of the shiny accoutrements that adorned that of their fellow brothers-in-arms from the Equestrian mainland, and thus indicative of Lieutenant Southern Cross’s strictly practical approach to soldiering. Crimson Arrow snorted uninterestedly.

“Even the spades?” I remarked as I examined one such example strapped amidst the array of baggage and tools to an engineer’s back.

“Especially the spades,” he answered. Then, turning to address his troops, he called out, “Engineers! Present spades!” In a series of deft, well-practiced movements that proved they had all been drilled effectively, his engineers had unstrapped the aforementioned tools and planted them handle first into the dust, supporting the wooden shaft with a foreleg to hold the spades perpendicular to the ground with the bright metal tips aimed towards the skies.

“The spade is an engineer’s best friend,” he said, taking one from a guardspony. “It will dig trenches, foxholes, fortifications, latrines; clear minefields and obstructions; and in a pinch it’ll serve as a deadly weapon. Look after your spade, or one day it’ll dig your grave for you.”

The Engineers having passed (not that we could have failed them at this late stage, as doing so would invariably delay the offensive, though the thought had crossed my mind), we moved onto the final contingent; the remnants of the 16th Royal Artillery. The guns and their respective crew were arranged in a long row, with the artillery pieces placed in order of size of calibre; long-barrelled cannons, howitzers positioned at a precise forty-five degree angle in some semblance of a salute (and would probably annihilate some peasant’s outhouse a few miles away if they were fired), mortars that resembled squat, fat chamber pots on wooden supports, and probably a half-dozen other sorts of guns whose differences were likely only appreciated by pedants.

Such things did not interest me much, as I’d rather leave what I don’t understand to those ponies who do, and so I only assigned enough brain power to keep myself moving forward at a steady pace behind Twilight Sparkle and mutter the occasional encouraging platitude, and the rest to admiring the callipygian sight before me. Sergeant Bramley Apple, acting commander of the reformed battery, discussed in animated tones with Major Starlit Skies about how with the correct application of the appropriate sums his cannons could strike a watermelon perched upon a pony’s head a mile away without causing any injury to that individual. I jokingly suggested testing that theory on Spike, to Bramley Apple’s and Spike’s mutual enthusiasm, which earned me a stern glare from Twilight that only grew more intense as my facetious grin widened involuntarily.

Despite my inattention, I noted that all of the guns had name plaques nailed to their side, all lovingly polished to a high degree of shine so as to stand out against the darkened steel of the weapon it adorned: ‘Bertha’, the impressively sized 25-pounder howitzer I had seen in the previous battle; ‘Dora’; and ‘Maribel’, for example. The artillery ponies always held a peculiar reverence and affection for their weapons, one that was quite alien to me as I noted that these guns tended to explode violently and injure their crews with alarming regularity.

“It’s an Apple family thing,” explained Twilight, when I off-hoofedly pointed it out to her. “Applejack names all of her apple trees. She says it encourages them to produce juicier apples, but I haven’t had the time to test that hypothesis yet.”

The inspection of the artillery culminated in the viewing of the powder magazine, which was a small area nearby where the barrels of gunpowder and the ammunition had been piled up on ruggedly designed carriages ready for transport. Upon our approach Sergeant Bramley Apple, who was leading us past the guns and their crews arrayed for our perusal, stopped suddenly and from one of the many pouches that adorned his armour he retrieved a number of small horn rings that appeared to be hewn out of darkest obsidian.

“Begging your pardon, sirs,” he said, though he appeared to have been overcome by his habitual sense of shyness when speaking with officers and was instead addressing the area of empty air just above General Crimson Arrow’s head, as opposed to the area of empty air inside his head. “Ya’ll unicorns are going to have to wear these nullifier rings before coming any closer. One errant spark or flame and the entire camp will be blown sky-high, so, uh, you’re going to have to sit this one out, dragon.”

Spike groaned in annoyance, folded his little arms indignantly, and muttered something about being left behind again, but otherwise I ignored him and took the ring. As I placed it upon my horn, I felt a sudden ‘deadening’ within my very being that I expect would be quite difficult for those ponies not blessed to have been born unicorns to understand. I suppose the closest description to the other two thirds of Equestrian subjects would be like a pegasus losing his wings or an earth pony losing his ability to grow plants, or something. I don’t know. Anyway, it was a damned unpleasant, cold, nauseous sensation that made me shiver despite the intense heat beating down upon us. My headache intensified.

Having left Spike under the supervision of the gunners, we were encouraged to view the barrels of gunpowder and the variety of ammunition; from the standard round shot to explosive shells, shrapnel shot, and canister shot. I don’t know if it was the uncomfortable feeling of the ring upon my horn, being as a dense weight pressing down on my skull that was in no way helped by my hangover, but I felt a distressing chill and a wave of nausea as Bramley Apple proudly unscrewed the top from a canister shell, like an oversized jam jar, so we could examine the deadly shards of ragged metal and ball bearings packed within. The remainder of the inspection proceeded with my usual lack of attention as the acting commander of battery rambled on about something, though I effected on occasion to appear to be very much interested in the cannon balls stacked neatly in a sort of pyramid shape, and as we stepped back to what the gunners had informed us was a safe distance I returned my nullifier with barely-concealed relief.

The sight that greeted us upon our return did much to improve my mood, albeit temporarily. For wedged in the barrel of Bertha was Spike, with his head and upper body swallowed up inside the gun’s gaping maw and thus leaving the lower half of his body, stuck by his fat belly, exposed with his stubby infant legs and tail flailing manically in a desperate effort to free himself. From within the gun barrel, muffled by the inches of thick steel, one could hear his barely audible cries for help. Naturally, I found this utterly hilarious and could not help from chuckling, and the gun’s crew thought so too and were paralysed in fits of raucous laughter. Shining Armour burst into lively guffaws in a manner quite unbecoming of the Lord Captain of the Royal Guard, and he leaned on my withers for support. Indeed, the only pony who did not amused by this (even Princess Luna raised a wry smile), aside from Twilight, who rushed over to her assistant’s aid, knocking over one of the stallions in the process, was Sergeant Bramley Apple.

“Land sakes!” he bellowed, anger etched in the ragged lines that creased his face as it twisted into an expression of utmost rage, the effect of which only made Shining Armour’s already exuberant reaction even more enthusiastic. Surreptitiously, I gently brushed the Shining off me and let him collapse in a giggling heap on the ground. “Ah leave y’all alone with him for five seconds!

Bramley Apple chased after Twilight and in the finest traditions of the NCO caste of the Royal Guard beat some semblance of martial discipline and sense into these soldiers, paralytic with laughter, quite literally with howitzer’s ramrod. “Ya’ll better have a damn good explanation as to why Big Bertha’s blocked!”

“Uh, Big Bertha ate Spike,” said one of the stallions, battered and bruised but still filled with mirth. At least, he was until he was given another blow to the head with the ramrod.

“We dared him to, sir,” ventured the other. It was a fair enough reason, I suppose.

Bramley Apple sucked in a deep breath through his teeth, and then tapped at the gun with the tip of the ramrod. “Well, how do y’all propose on getting him out of there?”

One of the gunners raised a hoof. “We could load a charge of gunpowder there and fire it. That’ll clear the blockage.”

“What?” shrieked Twilight. She had seized Spike’s legs tightly in her purple magical aura, and was struggling in vain to free him from his gunmetal prison. “Are you crazy? You’ll blow him to bits!”

“Y’all call yourself gunners?” said Bramley, his voice a few decibels lower now and slightly calmer. “This here howitzer’s a muzzle-loader, so there’s no way in Tartarus y’all are going to get a charge of gunpowder in there. We’re going to have to grease him up like a pig at hog wrasslin’ and ease him out. Go to the canteen, they should be swimming in grease.”

Spike, I am sure you will be pleased to know, was eventually freed, and was not too terribly upset by his ordeal. Looking back, he seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention for once, despite being a little shaken. Nevertheless, it was to this happy memory that I clung to for comfort, like a security blanket or a cuddly toy, when I found myself skulking with the battalion through the dark ravines and valleys of those infernal hills. Once he was freed and appropriately fussed over by Twilight before being hoofed over to one of the officer’s wives appointed as his nanny, the inspection wound up to a natural conclusion on account of there not being anything else that needed inspecting. [It was not unknown for officers and some soldiers to bring their families on campaign with them, and often they would perform administrative work for the regiment. For the sake of completeness, Twilight Sparkle has informed me that it was Captain Fine Vintage’s wife, Ruby Claret, who looked after Spike.]

We wrapped up the end of the inspection; the earth ponies and unicorns took to their pre-arranged positions in the column surrounding the baggage and supply train, the pegasi took flight and went through their standard combat air patrols, while the gunners were lashed to their guns and ammunition carriages. In matter of a few short minutes we were ready, and it was with a hollow pit in place of my stomach that I looked forlornly out at those mountains once again and moved to take my position by Captain Red Coat’s side, and once again plunge into the breach entirely against my will but with no other recourse to save my hide that would not result in my reputation being shattered beyond repair.

“Blueblood,” someone called out, and I turned to see General Crimson Arrow behind me, having approached me during my brief reverie.

“Crimson,” I replied. Standing either side of him was his usual coterie of aides and staff officers, each with identifiable by their dress uniforms with the red band around their peaked caps, and all with an expression on their faces that seemed to indicate that, like me, they would much rather be elsewhere. A generals’ staff, I mused, was simply not used to being this close to the enemy.

“I, uh, wanted to wish you good luck,” he said, extending a slightly dusty but well-trimmed hoof at me.

I took the hoof hesitantly and shook it, if only because I was wary of the hundreds of pairs of eyes that might have been watching me at this moment and I felt it best to be polite, despite my unease. “Thank you,” I said, trying to inject a little confidence in my wavering voice. I feared for a moment that he might have noticed that my handshake was rather weaker than usual, but if he did he gave no indication. Nevertheless, I made up for that by looking longingly at the ragged, broken chain of hills that loomed over us ominously like a frozen tsunami moments before impact, and adjusted my cap in a manner that I hoped appeared most heroic and noble. “Keep that bottle of brandy safe for me; I shan’t be long.”

We saluted one another, and then, as a drop of rain is absorbed into a greater puddle, I took my place in the marching column, off to war.

***

Given any other circumstance I might have found this terrain rather beautiful, or even romantic. The desolation provided one with a sense of quiet and peace about it, emphasised by the lack of the trappings of Equestrian civilisation or indeed anything that appeared to be alive aside from some desiccated-looking shrubs and a rodent or two, so I expected it would have been perfect for a weekend break of quiet introspection were it not for the billions upon billions of Changelings not more than a few miles away all wishing to drain one of love. The hills towered over us menacingly, making me all too aware of just how trapped we were. The myriad crags, crevices, hillocks, valleys, boulders, caves, and dry shrubs could have concealed the entirety of the Changeling army and we would have not known until it was far too late and with no means of escape. From the gaps between those rocky peaks sunlight peaked through in thick rays, as if one could reach out and touch them, to illuminate seemingly random spots across the darkened valleys, giving the impression of being inside a vast cathedral as light pours in through the stained glass windows.

As we trudged through the valleys at a snail’s pace, my imagination dredged up all sorts of horrors that could be hidden within the darkened shadows, made worse by every slight flicker of movement both real and illusory, watching and waiting for the opportune moment to strike down from their vantage point and eliminate me, singled out as somepony special by my ridiculous uniform. I would look up from time to time at those broken, ragged peaks towering above us all, and I felt as if the hills themselves were crouched in ambush against us.

It should have been no surprise for you, dear reader, to learn that our advance through those hills was not exactly a pleasant walk through the gardens of Canterlot with your best mare by your side; anypony with sufficient mental capacity to understand the Equestrian language reading this should have worked that out by now. No, what I endured was a gruelling march over the harshest, roughest terrain this country has to offer – entirely inimical to the transit of ponies and of wheeled pony-drawn vehicles – and surrounded entirely by dour, tired, frustrated, complaining soldiers and a firm contender for the ‘most irritating unicorn in Equestria’ competition (beaten only by Rarity, my sisters, and myself). A journey that would have been over in a few short hours over flat, clear terrain was projected to take the entirety of this afternoon and the following morning, with an uncomfortable overnight stop where I feared we would be at our most vulnerable.

Our progress was slow and halting; necessitated by the terrain over which we travelled. Every few steps or so we had to pause and send out pegasus patrols to scout out the most viable paths through the valleys ahead, while Captain Red Coat and I poured over the latest aerial reconnaissance photographs to try to make sense out of the grainy images and apply it to our own limited, myopic view of things down here. Were it not for my special talent of navigation we would have certainly found ourselves dreadfully lost in there. Upon discovery of a viable route, which in itself took an inordinate amount of time to do so, the engineers would have to be sent forth to clear the route of any obstacles with spade, hoof, and, much to Southern Cross’ enjoyment, judicious use of high-explosives. Even then, the going was still rather tough on the earth ponies dragging the baggage trains and the artillery, who oftentimes would find a wheel stuck in a pothole or trapped in rocks or simply find that the path was not wide enough, necessitating further valuable time spent trying to free them.

About a few hours into our unhappy journey, in which the cool shade of the hills providing some small respite from the relentless heat was the only relief in this cavalcade of utter misery, Twilight Sparkle complained of headaches. I found that she had already consumed her entire day’s ration of water and was starting to feel the effects of dehydration. She was given some painkillers for the headache by one of the medics and told to take smaller sips from her canteen regularly rather than gulp it all down in own go.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, taking a sip from my own water canteen that I had so graciously allowed her to borrow. With water being so strictly rationed here, at least until we could get to that damned fortress and hopefully find the well there still in working order after all these years, I had allowed her to drink from my own water ration just this once. Despite most certainly not wanting to, the gesture would have been appreciated and I hoped that it would go some way in making me look good for her report.

“For what?” I asked. We had taken yet another one of our breaks as the pegasi were reconnoitring the route ahead, and as the sun was starting to set, casting the sky in a lambent orange glow to the west and a darkening blue to the east, it would not be long before we established a camp for the night. Captain Red Coat was up ahead with Lieutenant Southern Cross, discussing how to remove the latest blockage. On this mission I wanted him to concentrate so I tried to keep him away from Twilight Sparkle as much as possible.

“I should’ve known better.” Twilight returned the canteen to me, and I rubbed clean the mouth of the bottle with my sleeve before taking a sip myself. “I did so much research and preparation before setting out on this report, and not just on the Royal Guard but also on survival in arid climates. I read books, I read journal articles, I read ancient scrolls from the Canterlot archives about the Badlands theatre of the Nightmare Heresy, I even planned on taking an airship to Saddle Arabia, but Spike told me I wouldn’t have time to make it to Dodge Junction after. I really should have known better than to drink all of my water ration in one go!”

“We all make mistakes, ma’am,” said Cannon Fodder, who had hitherto remained silent by my side. He noisily munched on one of the ubiquitous ration bars that always had a suspiciously unidentifiable taste.

“I-I’m not allowed to make mistakes!” exclaimed Twilight. “I’m Princess Celestia’s personal student and she’s entrusted me to help reform the Royal Guard, I can’t afford to make stupid mistakes like that!”

I removed my cap and rubbed at the sweat that had accumulated around the hat band and then made some vain attempt to smooth the blond mop of my mane back into something resembling a style. “I imagine that’s the problem with preparing for war or survival; there’s always bound to be something that you can’t prepare for or you’ve forgotten about.” And it was that which tended to get one killed rather messily, thought I.

A sudden rumble and a burst of debris and smoke erupted without warning from further along at the head of the column, followed by a loud cheer from dozens of accented pony voices. Twilight flinched slightly in alarm at the sound. I, for one, was rather more concerned about the noise attracting unwanted attention, but the brains behind this operation and the engineers had all agreed, without consulting me I might add, that the use of very loud explosives was the quickest and easiest way to clear a path for the artillery.

Twilight chuckled anxiously as she recovered, seemingly rather lost without her number one assistant to keep her grounded. All around us the soldiers of the battalion, those who were not on patrol or on the picquets and were therefore using the opportunity to banter with their friends, gamble, or try to catch up on some much needed sleep, scrambled up alert and readied themselves for the signal to advance.

“Do you think we’ll win?” she asked, gazing out at the stallions as they each checked their equipment and armour and assembled into a marching column under the direction of their officers.

I arched an eyebrow at the question; it was not as if I could answer it truthfully, as Princess Luna still lingered nearby, falling into the traditional role of the passive, emotionless bodyguard with about as much animation as a piece of furniture perfectly.

Seizing the opportunity to score a few extra brownie points with the guardsponies I had been trying to endear myself to, I gave a vague sort of shrug and said, “I don’t know, Lady Sparkle, but perhaps we should ask the stallions what they think.” Then, I turned to address the battalion, or, at least, what part of it happened to be within earshot of me. The soldiers had arranged themselves into platoon marching order, in files of three as a long, snaking column that would wind its way like snake through these narrow valleys. Each of them looked tired, as soldiers often do on campaign; already covered in dust and dirt despite having spent hours cleaning themselves and their uniforms for the inspection not a more than a few hours previous, though to me it felt like an eternity away.

“Lady Sparkle wants to ask you all a question,” I said, projecting my voice clearly so that it echoed around the valley. If the enemy could hear me, they would probably have been alerted by the small chain of explosions that preceded our advance anyway. “She wants to know if we’re going to win! Well, what do you all say to that?”

The soldiers responded with a single, wordless roar that filled the entire valley and answered her question perfectly. Despite their frustration at their slow progress and at the harsh terrain they marched over, they were all without exception in high spirits for they were doing something that worked towards what they thought was an achievable goal after weeks of doing nothing seemingly productive following that inconclusive battle in Black Venom Pass. I, however, could not share in their enthusiasm, and as I rejoined the column with Twilight Sparkle, Cannon Fodder, and the disguised Princess Luna by my side, I could not shake the uncomfortable feeling that we were being watched.

Author's Note

22/02/2020 - I've removed the copyrighted song lyrics to make sure this story follows the no-copyrighted-song-lyrics rule. I have no idea if this applies retroactively, but I've decided to remove it just to be safe.

The 'Vegemite Song' is indeed a real advertising jingle. I had an Aussie co-worker who would sing that damned song when he spread his imported Marmite knock off all over his toast every morning. If you're really curious to hear it I'm sure it's on YouTube.

Anyway, a silly, throw-away gag aside, here is the next chapter. This one was a bugger to write, but just like everything out there I just had to keep bashing it until I came out with something to post. I don't know how other writers manage to pump out 10,000+ word chapters, proof-read and of very good quality writing, in a matter of weeks, and I'm stuck struggling to write 100-200 words a night. Of course I'd like to imagine there's some sort of 'knack' or secret to it, but the reality is I'm probably just a lazy git.

A more serious note which I would like your input on, and it's about swearing. For now, I've been substituting the word 'buck' for the F-word like some other writers I've seen here, and I'm considering dispensing with that. I have to admit ignorance over exactly how ratings work and where exactly the border between Teen and Mature lies, so I'm not sure if I go back and change every single instance of 'buck' (there aren't many, I've checked) will force me to increase the rating of this story from Teen to Mature.

Bloodstained (Part 20)

Part 20

It would be wrong of me to deny that my first thought upon seeing Princess Luna fall from the skies like a vaguely pony-shaped shooting star was 'I bloody told you so', although I am very much aware of the fact that admitting it is as petty as it is treasonous no matter how right I was. I could only watch the falling, twisting form of my divine Auntie plummet with agonising slowness, turning and flailing in a clumsy and futile attempt to right herself in a manner that was entirely unlike her usual self-assured dexterousness, with a strange sense of numbness, as if my mind either could not or simply refused to adequately process what I was witnessing. Judging by the vacant and slack-jawed expressions on the other ponies around me who were in a position to be able to stop and look, I was not the only one (though with Cannon Fodder it was difficult to tell, as he almost always looked like that).

From my low vantage point within the courtyard, close to the castle itself where the wounded received triage and a fair distance away from the fighting that was still raging close to the shattered gates and the breach in the castle walls, I saw and felt a violent discharge of magical energy, like tense knot directly behind my horn, as a flare of blue, then green, and then emerald-green once more flashed briefly from behind a dark cloud. Then from the dense cover of murky grey a dark blue and silvery speck in the sky, glinting brightly in the harsh moonlight as it tumbled and turned violently, dropped in a single straight line earthwards and then disappeared just behind the outer walls of the fortress. There was an ominous 'thud', and then silence reigned. [Blueblood is likely exaggerating for dramatic effect here, as just the previous paragraph he describes the battle as still raging and it is highly improbable that he would have heard Princess Luna hitting the ground with such clarity.] In an instant, the bright mood of unbridled triumphalism at our imminent victory was utterly crushed, and I could only stand in quiet, dawning terror and exchange horrified stares with the soldiers around me.

I cannot stress how damnably lucky we were that out of those soldiers present on the field only a relatively small minority were not sufficiently occupied enough to watch Princess Luna fall, which was not likely to be a significant proportion of our meagre battalion as the majority were still fighting for their lives pushing the enemy back to the outer walls. I couldn't speak for the pegasi still up there, visible only as tiny black specks when they darted across the face of the moon, but as they had a metaphorical front row seat to Luna's humiliation I can't imagine that the mood up there was entirely sanguine. Those of us still on the ground who did witness her rather undignified failure reacted about as well as I did, which is to say with blind panic and horror, though I like to think that I managed to mask the sudden thrill of overwhelming dread that crept up from behind and suddenly enveloped me as if a towel drenched in ice-water had been draped across my shoulders. The dry mouth, the chill that slithered over my skin, the pounding of my heart, and the churning of my guts; I had become far too familiar with these sensations in all too short a time, and despite what other soldiers might tell you one never truly gets 'used to it'.

With my legs rapidly turning into quivering jelly I looked to the ponies around me, and as I saw that those who were not wailing in unbelieving horror stared at me expectantly, from the lowly guardsponies to their officers, and even the medics and those wounded not rendered insensate by painkillers and sedatives, as if I somehow knew what was going on and how to fix it. Naturally, I had no bloody clue what I was supposed to do now. As ever to do nothing would have been suicide, whereas performing any action, no matter how foolhardy or insane, always offered at least some small sliver of survival. Already a plan was rapidly forming in my head, and at the same time a more careful and paranoid portion of my mind was busy formulating a way for me to avoid actively taking part in said plan.

"You there," I said, pointing towards a rather timid-looking ensign. The young colt stared bug-eyed at me, before he apparently remembered who I am and stiffened slightly.

"S-sir!" he said, his barely-broken voice stammered awkwardly.

"Find Captain Red Coat and Lieutenant Southern Cross and bring them here." I then pointed towards his friend, another ensign standing next to him. In the darkness of night and illuminated only by a few flickering torches by the castle walls, the pitch black shadows danced wildly across his face and his wide, terrified eyes. "And you, I need you to round up any fighting pony you can find who isn't already on the front lines. A full platoon should do. Find any walking wounded who can still wield a spear if you have to."

I took a brief moment to pause for dramatic effect, casting my gaze over the huddled mass of guardsponies crowded around me. A veritable sea of eyes stared back, illuminated and made almost lambent by the flickering torch lights and the magical glow of various horn lights. Each one, silently pleading with me to get them through this awful night alive, felt like vast weights had been placed upon my back as the pagan god of old who must bear the weight of the sky. Faust almighty, but seeing the haunting sight of all of those desperate faces all fixed upon mine was almost enough to shatter this hastily-built facade of counterfeit authority that I had erected about me like armour. The fact that I had no bloody clue as to what I was trying to do certainly did nothing to help warm the ice water that seemed to rapidly fill my lungs, but I knew that keeping these guardsponies busy would at the very least keep them from realising the true futility of our cause and start considering contemplating the dreaded 'S' word.

"Right now the Princess needs us," I said, lowering my voice slightly to a suitably grave level. Turning my gaze over the soldiers, I took a pause ostensibly for dramatic effect but really to try and organise the jumbled, chaotic mess that my thoughts had become. "Her life and the course of this war may hinge upon what we do in the next hour. Future generations will read of the choices we make tonight, so let's make sure they only read of our heroism and our dedication to our duty. Now go."

The two ensigns scampered off to follow my orders. I turned away and walked towards the outer castle walls closest to where I had seen Luna fall, my legs feeling as if they were about to snap under me like dry twigs. That short speech certainly was not one of my better ones, which are by and large cobbled together from those sickeningly patronising slogans vomited onto print paper by those hacks in the Ministry of Misinformation and carefully reworded in a way that made grammatical and thematic sense, but even by my abysmally low standards of public speaking those few sentences were the most abysmal, clichéd nonsense imaginable. That some of them have been remembered and recorded in those irritatingly officious collections of 'inspirational' quotations from supposed great ponies troubles me greatly. Nevertheless, those passé sentences were the best that I could manage for now, and as I stepped away I looked over my shoulder past Cannon Fodder waddling after me and saw that, at the very least, it still had the desired effect in motivating the troops for now. I crossed the short distance to the wall and mounted the steep, narrow stairs to the chemin de ronde, and a ridiculous thought had entered into my weary mind; I had become one of the lowest and most base creatures to crawl upon Faust's good, clean world: An actor.

I stumbled a few times on the stairs, parts of which crumbled disconcertingly beneath my hooves, but despite those minor setbacks I had made it to the top with only my dignity wounded. There, away from the rather dubious protection of the ancient stone walls, with the chill wind from the north plucking at my still-damp uniform and sending ice-cold daggers through my flesh, I looked out across a sea of darkness and felt horribly exposed and isolated. To the left where the first tinges of morning had coloured the clouded eastern sky with a deep shade of royal purple, there was a fuzzy and indistinct mass stretching out before me that I could imagine was the cracked and undulating surface of the ground, and where it met the roiling chaos of dark storm clouds billowing across the skies was indistinct, the effect of which meant that the demarcation of the horizon was unclear and thus quite unsettling to me. Nevertheless, despite my eyes having become used to the darkness by now I failed to find the fallen alicorn in the darkness. I scanned over the desolate, empty wasteland, with the bulk of the Changeling horde a smear the colour of a malevolent shade of dark green that rippled and crawled closer like spilt water spreading through a tablecloth, to find only vague and indistinct shapes against the black that seemed to shift in and out of existence whenever I tried to focus on them.

Luna had to be out there, and my signature blue bow tie would be replaced with one of rope if I crawled back to Canterlot and tried to explain to the Commissariat what had happened to Princess Luna. Even if there was nothing that I could have done about it, ponies would undoubtedly want somepony to take the blame for her capture or death. [I would like to believe that my little ponies are more forgiving and understanding than that, though I cannot help but agree with Blueblood's point here.]

Standing there with only Cannon Fodder for company I felt an overwhelming sensation of loneliness and fatigue hit me, as if the strain and exhaustion of what I had gone through these past hours had finally caught up in the first moment of peace and solitude I had experienced for what felt like a very long time (relatively speaking, of course; the horror of Luna's fall was not exactly something I could ignore). Foremost amongst the waves of tiredness and myriad stabs of pain that sapped the strength from my numb limbs was an overwhelming desire for home. Of course, homesickness is something everypony in Their Highness' Armed Forces experiences when sent out on campaign, except those for whom the Royal Guard was an escape from home for one reason or another, but in my weakened state and with my imminent and violent death bearing down upon me with all of the subtlety and poise of Cannon Fodder attacking an all-you-can-eat buffet, all I could think of was how much I longed for the reassuring darkness and emptiness of the Sanguine Palace. I wanted the desolate halls and dusty, mouldering tapestries hanging from crumbling stone walls, I wanted my bed, my servants, my valet, my gardens, my gentlecolt's club, my courtesans, and even my shrill harridan of a mother and those conniving little sisters of mine. I wanted to go home.

"There's an awful lot of Changelings down there," said Cannon Fodder, interrupting my self-indulgent reverie.

I briskly rubbed my hooves on my face in a vain attempt to bring back some semblance of energy to my form, and followed my aide's blank, uncomprehending gaze out in the blank void beyond the walls. "The Changelings are still way over there," I said, nodding my head back towards the odd green smudge on the horizon.

"Begging your pardon, sir," he said, somewhat sheepishly and while pointing empathically at what I had hitherto believed was merely the ground. "But they're all down there."

With little else to do while those two ensigns carried out my orders I decided to humour Cannon Fodder, and though I knew that his complete and utter lack of imagination meant that he was unlikely to have made it up and that his exceedingly deferential nature meant that he was equally unlikely to have pointed it out to me unless he thought it was worthy enough of my attention, I prayed that he was wrong. He was not. What I had thought to be the seemingly endless plains of desolate wasteland surrounding our tiny fortress was in fact a vast horde of Changelings, so tightly packed together that in this darkness they had all appeared to be part of one amorphous mass, with their various limbs and layers of chitin interpreted by my tired eyes to be the dry cracks, clusters of rocks, and the small, craggy hills that scar the landscape like a tumultuous sea that has somehow solidified. As the realisation of what I was truly seeing hit me I felt sick, and when I belatedly came to the obvious conclusion that Princess Luna was down there amongst them, either dead or captured, it was all I could do to keep myself from vomiting the remains of my last meal over the Changelings below.

I stared into the swarm, my eyes running over the half-glimpsed and vague shadows cast by the multitude of limbs and concealed, darkened figures. Dear Faust, it was as if the entire Badlands had been emptied of all of its Changelings and they were all hurled against the fragile ramparts of our castle. Then, the clouds overhead parted, and the moon shone overhead to briefly illuminate the patch of the horde immediately below us, bringing the writhing mass of chitin into stark relief in the sickly yellow light. Amidst the glint of slick, black armoured chitin I saw the colder, more refined glint of glimmering mithril standing out from its dingy surroundings, like a ship of bright steel standing out against a stormy sea. The enemy around this flicker of light shifted and swarmed around it, and between the seemingly endless Changelings I could only catch furtive glimpses of a figure that was unmistakeably an alicorn princess. When I saw her fully it felt like my heart had skipped a beat, and then exploded into a tempo of frantic pumping as if to make up for that; Princess Luna, sprawled limp atop a pool of her own blood and her wings charred and twisted into grotesque angles like the branches of a long dead tree, was only a few dozen feet or so from where I stood. For a moment I feared the worst and that she might be dead, but presently I saw her head loll awkwardly to the side, and a single hoof, bloodied and singed, rose, as if grasping for the sky itself, and then fell.

"She's alive!" I shouted. I turned to look over my shoulder at the hastily assembled platoon of guardsponies. "The Princess is still alive!"

The guardsponies seemed cheered by the news, judging by the single, wordless roar that rose up from the crowd. Spears and swords, at least those that were still in one piece, were thrust to the night sky above, before the soldiers went about their business with renewed vigour. The news, too, emboldened me, inasmuch as I could be now knowing that we would have to go and rescue her somehow before the Changelings carried her away. That they had not already done so, and instead seemed content to merely swarm about her like corpse flies about a dead body, should have tipped me off that the enemy was up to their usual devious tricks. Aside from the itching in my hooves, which I had put down to my usual anxiety or a possible incoming heart attack, the thought that I was about to willingly walk straight into a trap was far from foremost in my mind; by comparison that thought was but a mere foal cowering in the shadow of the great looming giant that was the notion that the plan that I was hastily putting together in my mind offered only the slimmest chance of survival in the first place. My ancestor, Princess Hotblood, might have approved, I thought as I made my way back down the steps again.

Captain Red Coat and Lieutenant Southern Cross were waiting for me as I reached the bottom, the former had received a rather nasty gash on his cheek that, were the blow not deflected by the nose guard of his helmet, might have split his muzzle in two, and the latter's armour and fur was covered in what appeared to be fresh scorch marks from must have been very close explosions. As I approached, Red Coat looked up at me with exhausted, glazed eyes that seemed to plead with me to make this awful night just end. Southern Cross busied himself tinkering with a rather complicated piece of electronic equipment that was probably a detonator of some sort, and standing there close to him with his pouches full of sticks of dynamite and his false limb buzzing irritably made me feel much less safe than I did on the battlements looking over at the vast horde of drones, all of whom had a vested interest in seeing me very, very dead.

"Gentlecolts," I said. Red Coat offered a weary salute, despite me quietly dissuading him by waving a hoof at him, and Southern Cross simply nodded his head in my direction and resumed his tinkering. His tufted ears swivelled attentively in my direction, reassuring me that despite his complete lack of manners that he was paying attention to what I was saying. "I'll be blunt; Princess Luna is in trouble and needs our help."

Southern Cross snapped his head up, and the device in his hooves made a peculiar whirring noise. He fumbled frantically with his box, before dropping it on the soggy ground between us, where it exploded with a dull, wet 'crump' and a shower of mud all over my front. With a dejected sigh he muttered a quiet litany of curse words, and then looked up at me and said, "The Princess? What's the Princess doing way out here in a bloody warzone for?"

"I don't know," I lied, though I could hardly tell them and the small cluster of soldiers around us that their beloved Princess had tagged along with them in disguise just to satisfy some foalish need for acceptance and apparently out of sheer boredom. "But she's out there," I continued, pointing a hoof at the wall behind me, "surrounded by the enemy and she needs us. Now."

"How the bloody hell are we meant to do that?" Southern Cross snapped. I would have been well within my rights to have him flogged for that remark, but considering our situation and what we have just been through I was willing to let that outburst slide.

"Rescue her," said Captain Red Coat, his voice robotic and his timbre curiously devoid of emotion. The way that he appeared to be staring through me, rather than at me, felt quite disturbing. Faust almighty, he was far too young to have been put through this. "Obviously."

"Good; tonight is a night of action, not words," I said, and the strong, bitter taste of bile rose up my throat at yet another fatuous cliché, or that might have just been the sheer terror of what I was about to propose. By all accounts I was overstepping the mark here, as according to Princesses' Regulations, or at least the latest edition of that weighty doorstop of a book, a commissar's purpose was to evaluate officers' command decisions and offer advice or punishment as appropriate. I, however, was not prepared to wait while Captain Red Coat vacillated pathetically, as he was wont to do in times of stress. "We will have to charge in over the walls, grab her, and take her back here."

"I have an idea," said Red Coat before I had the chance to outline the details of my plan. Not wanting to offend him, I nodded my head gently to encourage him to continue. "Lieutenant Southern Cross' engineers can demolish a section of the wall just there, near where the Princess is. Before the dust clears, a platoon will charge in, seize the Princess, and carry her back to the fortress under the cover of artillery fire before the Changelings know what's happened."

The stony silence and wary looks I received from ponies around me made clear what they thought about Red Coat's rather dire little plan more than any words could, though I have to concede that what I had put together at such short notice was for the most part identical (although my plan involved me staying firmly out of this insane idea, probably on the pretext of 'awaiting Crimson Arrow's reinforcements', while I was all but certain that Red Coat expected me to lead the charge into the breach). Perhaps I was rubbing off on the young lad; a rather troubling thought. Though Red Coat had become quite sullen and withdrawn since his first blooding in that Faust-damned valley, except when the topic of his endearingly pathetic infatuation with Twilight Sparkle arose, it was quite unlike the chatty and blunt Lieutenant Southern Cross to suddenly turn quiet. Nevertheless, out of either fear or some sort of misguided trust in me (which is something I still cannot understand) he looked to me, as if waiting for my assent, before Captain Red Coat apparently remembered he was supposedly the most senior officer present aside from myself [Not quite, as though commissars indeed have the power to countermand and punish officers, they exist outside of the Royal Guard's hierarchy of command and therefore occupy a rather nebulous legal position. De facto, however, Blueblood is indeed correct in this case].

"Those are my orders," he said, renewed confidence strengthening his croaking voice.

Southern Cross sucked air through his teeth in a sharp hiss and regarded the walls behind me with a calculating look. "Alright," he said, at length, "one bloody great hole in the wall coming up for you."

The engineers proceeded with their work with a sense of quiet, almost sombre efficiency, while still at the crumbling gates over yonder the battle no longer raged, but had died down to a quiet simmer as the last of the Changelings were pushed from the courtyard. Explosives were measured out, prepared, and then fixed to the sheer walls by way of unicorns levitating the bundled sticks with their coiled wires onto the stone itself. [Unlike infantry regiments, which separate the three races of ponies out into three distinct and separate companies, engineer units tend towards mixed platoons for greater versatility in the field. This is due to their doctrine of assignment in small groups, usually just platoons, instead of deployed as large formations in the same manner as infantry regiments.] Their work was meticulous and slow, and strangely was devoid of the good-natured and often vulgar chatting that I had observed when they had lain the mine underneath the rubble of the breach. Perhaps the severity of the situation had revealed a level of professionalism that had lain hidden beneath their gruff, ill-disciplined exterior, or perhaps, as it did with many of the guardsponies in Black Venom Pass, their first experience of true battle, with all of its horror, had simply stripped their garrulous levity aside.

Red Coat and I spent the next few minutes detailing the specifics of his plan, which is to say that I filled in the specifics of his plan and he merely nodded along or made various noises indicating that he agreed with what I was saying. The engineers would demolish that section of the wall, preferably taking out a large number of Changelings in the process, and while the enemy were standing there surprised that we would blow up a part of our own fortress the unicorns would rush into the breach and unload a fusillade of magic missiles into the swarm. It would then be up to the earth ponies to take advantage of the confusion, charge into the enemy, rescue Princess Luna, and drag her away. At least, that was the theory behind what we were about to do, and the itching in my hooves did very little to fill me with hope that we would succeed, or that I would see the sun rise this morning.

Red Coat took a heavy gulp of water from his flask, and then stared at the wall where the engineers still worked. "Commissar, do you think this will work?" he said, doing his hardest to keep his voice under control.

I forced a warm smile to my face, in spite of the ice behind it. "If Faust wills it," I said, once more using that all-too-common verbal equivalent of a casual shrug. "In battle, doing nothing is often the very worst thing an officer can do."

Red Coat nodded. "I know, I know, that's what they all said in the Academy. But they didn't say anything about what having all of the responsibility of an officer is like, or how being in combat feels."

Of all the times for me to play therapist to this colt, who, for some peculiar reason, had seen fit to view me as some sort of father figure despite only five years separating us, this was hardly the most appropriate. Then again, it was not as if either of us had anything else productive to do while the engineers were still conducting their meticulous work.

"I don't think lectures and textbooks can ever make a good officer," I said, saying the first thing that popped into my head that sounded vaguely relevant (as opposed to just the frantic screaming of my subconscious). Strangely and against all reason, this teenager seemed very much interested in the useless drivel that issued forth from my lips. "It's only in the crucible of battle that we find the true measure of a soldier; and trust me, you're doing good."

I'll admit the last one was something of a white lie, but it worked and seemed to cheer him up a little. As I wanted to make sure that when we were hurled once more at the enemy that he was not going to boldly turn tail and flee, thus leaving me alone with a veritable flood of drones all wanting to tear my face off and wear it like a mask. At the very least, one more body, heavily armoured and probably in far better shape than mine I might add, to place between me and the Changelings couldn't hurt.

Thankfully there was no time for me to continue spouting this insipid nonsense, as from the crowd just behind me I heard a loud commotion, and in the dim light I saw soldiers assembled in a standard platoon square formation grumble and fidget awkwardly as if somepony small was trying to push his or her way through them. The platoon sergeant screamed his usual diatribe of verbal abuse at them, and from between the two soldiers standing in the front rank the very last pony I ever wanted to see emerged.

"Lady Sparkle?" Red Coat spluttered, his eyes bulging out of his head as an odd expression that was a mix between confusion and eagerness formed on his face.

The young mare almost ran straight into Red Coat's armoured chest, before she stopped with a mad flurry of her muddy hooves and splattered slime everywhere. She panted and heaved from exertion, her ill-fitting plate armour bounced and clattered against her small and somewhat pudgy frame, and her helmet once more dropped over her eyes to where a bruise a darker shade of purple tinged her muzzle. She collected herself quickly, and then stood to what somepony might charitably call 'attention' if they were blind, and offered a salute by way of bashing her hoof against her forehead.

"What are you doing here?" I snapped, pushing my way past the bewildered Captain Red Coat towards her. "I ordered you to stay in your quarters."

Instead of apologising meekly and turning away, as the Twilight Sparkle that I grew up with and terrorised would have done, she merely glowered back with a glint of newfound determination in her tear-soaked eyes. It was a rare pony that could withstand a well-practiced number four stare from a commissar, especially one inspired by the Mistress of Intimidation herself Princess Luna, but, and I'm not sure how, there was a new confidence within her that I had not seen before. Perhaps I had underestimated her, but confident or not this was no place for her.

"I'm still there," she said, with an insufferably smug smile on her lips that I wanted to remove by slamming her face into the ground with extreme force.

I was about to say something when another mare - another Twilight Sparkle identical in every possible way to the one that I had just spoken to - slipped out from between the serried ranks of soldiers. "I'm there too!" she said. Then another emerged just behind her, and then another and another until I was all but surrounded by what appeared to me to be a veritable army of these clones, these simulacra, all watching me with the same sort of quiet intensity as the first. Their movements, when they moved, for more often than not they remained as still as disturbingly life-like sculptures, were awkward and jerky, as if propelled by invisible cables manipulated by a mad puppeteer.

"I saw what happened to Princess Luna," said one of the Twilights, mercifully, for if they had all spoken at the same time I might have fled and taken my chances with the Changelings. "And I know you told me to stay in my room, and I'm still there. Well, the real me is at least. I figured you could use some help."

She had a point, and at that point I was willing to accept any help wherever it came from, especially if it meant even more bodies to place between myself and the enemy. However, the strain of maintaining all of these magic automatons must have been immense, even for an exceedingly powerful unicorn as Twilight herself. Don't think for a moment that I was the least bit concerned about her well-being, but rather her ability to maintain the extra numbers to bolster our ranks was most pressing on my mind. As the simulacra arranged themselves into a standard infantry section just in front of the soldiers, who were all understandably upset at having seen a number of identical ponies appear from seemingly out of nowhere, an idea, tentative and unformed, blossomed like a flower on the first day of Spring in my mind.

"Lady Sparkle," I said, having collected myself once more and decided which of the Twilights appeared to be the one in charge, "do you think you can teleport Princess Luna out of there?"

The Twilight Sparkle that addressed me shook her head. "If I thought I could I would have tried already," she said. "She's too far away, and I need an unobstructed view of the pony I'm trying to teleport, and I can't see Luna for all of the Changelings in the way. I don't know enough about alicorn meta-physiology to teleport a whole one; something could get scrambled or lost in the jump, or her soul could disappear into the void forever. I could try, but I don't want to risk it." [For the benefit of earth ponies, pegasi, and other races unable to manifest their magic directly as unicorns do, teleportation, particularly of another pony from some distance away from the caster, is an innately risky method that requires years of practice to perfect. Those readers with unicorn friends need not fear as accidents are exceedingly rare and not necessarily fatal, provided that the caster is close to whomever they are teleporting and has good knowledge of where they are teleporting to.]

I snorted in barely-concealed irritation; she's one of the most powerful unicorns alive today and the bearer of the Element of Magic and yet she can't teleport Princess Luna out of a sticky situation. "I should have known things are never quite as simple as I hope them to be," I remarked dryly.

"Sorry," said Twilight meekly. "But a botched teleport could cost the Princess one of her limbs or even turn her inside out, if she's lucky."

Frankly, it was a risk I was willing to take, and at the very least I could go back to Canterlot with the congealed bloody mess that was once an alicorn princess of Equestria and claim that I had made some attempt to help her. Even though Twilight was all but flat-out refusing to follow that order, and I was in no mind to cause a rift between us, or widen the already gaping chasm that separated us to put it more accurately, I relented. And although I was disappointed, I was already hastily altering that plan, and as I did so I found that I very much disliked where it was going.

"How many ponies can you teleport at once?" I asked.

Every single one of the Twilights cocked her head to one side and frowned slightly in perfect unison, which sent an involuntary shudder through the crooked, brittle remains of my spine. "I don't know," said one of them, a different one from the first this time.

"What do you mean you don't know?" I snapped.

"It's like asking a pegasus how high she can fly; you don't know until you try. I've teleported my friends out of danger before, so I guess I could manage a small group of five or maybe even ten. Why do you ask?"

I jabbed a hoof in the direction of the wall just behind me. "There's about a thousand Changelings out there between us and the Princess. If you can teleport yourself and perhaps an infantry section in to secure her and then bring them all back in less time than it takes for Professor Square Root to start hitting the valium every morning [This is a reference to Blueblood's and Twilight's former maths teacher at the School for Gifted Unicorns. Unfortunately, due the teenaged Prince Blueblood's complete inability to grasp the fundamentals of basic algebra and various behaviour incidents, as I believe schools tend to call 'being naughty' these days, Professor Square Root's mental state deteriorated until he was forced to retire early following a very public nervous breakdown during a parent-teacher conference] then it'll be a damn sight easier for all involved.” I paused for dramatic effect, and looked at Twilight with as much quiet, dignified determination as I could muster. “You could save lives.”

Twilight tapped her hoof to her chin and hummed thoughtfully. “I suppose it would be possible, but it won't be without its risks.”

“What kind of risks are we talking about?” I asked.

“Meadowbrook’s third law states that when an object or a pony is teleported into a space already occupied by something else then the obstructing object is displaced to make room. If it’s a living creature then the poor thing will be physically torn into pieces. It, uh, really isn't pleasant to see.”

“Good,” I said, to her evident surprise. “It means a few less Changelings to worry about.”

“I meant Princess Luna,” she said.

So did I, but I kept that to myself. “We’ll go in next to her then, and get her out.”

I looked to Captain Red Coat, who merely nodded along with this insane scheme. I didn't much like it either, but it was still our best shot at getting the Princess out alive and me with my reputation intact. Of course, I had oh-so-heroically agreed to help lead this allegedly dangerous mission knowing that it was for the most part relatively safe provided that Twilight knew what she was doing.

At that point Lieutenant Southern Cross came bounding back to me, inasmuch as he can with that clumsy, hissing prosthetic of his. He stopped, his hooves sticking in the mire, and indicated the wall behind him with a swift nod of his head in that direction.

"It's all ready for you," he said. He paid the Twilight simulacra only the slightest of bemused glances, before he apparently decided that whatever it was it wasn't worth the trouble.

The soldiers and engineers soon cleared the space around the charges. I watched with anxiety cloying in my guts as the last of the sappers made some last minute checks on the dynamite and the wiring, before he too scampered back to what we had hoped was a safe enough distance. By my side, our hastily assembled section of just five soldiers, plus myself and three of the Twilight clones, which was as many as Twilight would dare teleport at once, [Presumably, Cannon Fodder did not take part in this rescue attempt as, being a Blank, he would inadvertently disrupt the teleportation spells] watched as Lieutenant Southern Cross rested his hoof on the plunger, and with a single, firm movement, depressed it swiftly.

There was only the shortest of delays between depressing the plunger and the detonation of the charges, but it was enough to make me turn my head and open my mouth to start complaining. A series of dull crumps, as if softened by the water that ran down the crumbling walls, turned my attention back where it belonged. The charges had been positioned in a large semi-circle, around fifty feet across, and as each of the charges exploded in rapid succession deep cracks and fissures snaked their way across the face of the wall in sharp, jagged lines that followed the contours of the vast stone blocks and the mortar that cemented them together. A plume of acrid dust rose from the ancient cracked walls, but despite the obvious cracks that ravaged its surface the structure still held firm.

I was about to yell at Lieutenant Southern Cross with language that would have made Captain Blitzkrieg blush, but he fixed me with that easy grin he always wore when he had something else up his sleeve. "Wait for it," he said in a slightly sing-song sort of voice.

The deep but loud rumble of crumbling masonry turned my attention back to the wall, and sure enough the entire edifice where those explosive charges had been placed and detonated began to collapse inwards. The cracks and fissures deepened under the strain, and as more dust trickled down, the walls soon lost all semblance of structural integrity. As if pushed by an invisible titan the entire section of wall teetered away from us, before it simply disintegrated under its own ungainly mass. Stones, quarried from the dry earth around us from times before Equestria was but a mere dream for those long-dead idealistic ponies, rained down upon those Changelings unfortunate enough to be congregating just outside the walls. When the dust eventually settled, where a sturdy, if worn by time and the dry climate, wall once stood in defiance of untold armies that have laid siege to this ancient fortress aeons ago was now a large, gaping hole, around thirty feet wide, through which the murky darkness of pre-dawn could be seen.

“Good engineering,” said Southern Cross, acknowledging my slack-jawed expression by widening his grin, “is using precisely the right amount of material. No more, no less.”

There was no time for me to deliver the witticism I was swiftly formulating in my mind. The unicorns, reinforced by the remainder of the Twilights, swarmed forwards onto the still-settling pile of smashed debris, into the cloud of dust and smoke that lingered where the wall once stood. The corporal bellowed an order whose words were lost in the din of battle, and the unicorns fired a series of volleys at rapid fire, not even bothering to aim into the dense mass of Changelings below. With that going on I steeled myself for what was to come next.

I was never comfortable with the concept of teleportation; though I know statistically I am more likely to die walking down the streets of Canterlot and being hit on the head by a grapefruit dropped by some clumsy pegasus on the way back from the weekly shop than to suffer any form of accident being teleported, but the idea of having my constituent molecules disassembled, hurled through the void between realities, and then reassembled in hopefully the correct order simply didn't sit well with me. However, needs must as the Nightmare drives, and I looked to the Twilight clones and the soldiers with barely concealed trepidation crawling up my throat like half-digested brown stew after a night’s heavy drinking in the 1st Solar Guard’s officers’ mess.

In truth the entire experience was entirely painless; one second I was surrounded by soldiers advancing into the breach behind me, the next I was surrounded entirely by bewildered Changelings. The absence of any feeling at all, despite lasting less than a second, was most disconcerting. There was no warmth, no cold – nothing for a brief instance, as if my consciousness had simply ceased to be. Perhaps that’s what being dead feels like.

My hooves squelched in a fetlock-deep pile of strange green mush that oozed and leaked a foul reeking emerald liquid. The stench was one that was all-too familiar that to me, and in the flash of purple light that accompanied me I saw that the ichor around me was a large puddle from which great streaks of the sickly stuff emanated from where I stood like the rays of the sun. I soon realised that what I was standing in was the remains of the poor Changeling drone that was unfortunate to have been in my way when I teleported in, and that it had literally burst apart.

The other soldiers and the Twilight Sparkles emerged with greater alacrity than I did, and as they blinked into existence again with eight bright flashes of purple light and that distinct chiming sound of perfectly discharged residual energy, gruesomely displacing the Changelings in the way by reducing them to bloodied piles of offal and chitin and blood, they all lunged straight into the enemy. The Changelings shrieked, alerted to our presence now, and the swarm rippled and swelled around us as if it were an organic thing responding to an invasion by a malignant bacteria.

Driven by pure instinct and reflexes I parried the incoming jaws of a drone with my sword. Its slathering maw clenched tight around the blade, but I failed to slice through its flesh and chitin enough for me to free my weapon easily. Tugging on the grip only gouged at the edges of the beast's mouth, forming two imitations of Colonel Sunshine Smiles' horrid scar on either side. I pushed my foe forwards with my hooves, ducking under the grasping hooves of the drone's friend as they grabbed for my head, and toppled the shrieking, flailing Changeling backwards over its hind legs onto the ground. With the beast on the ground and beneath my hooves I wrenched my sword free from its maw, turning it bladed-down as it rose, and then plunged it into the creature's eye socket. That disgusting compound eye burst messily, and the beast's shrill cries and wild thrashing ceased when the blade point drove into its primitive drugged brain.

With that one dead I lashed out with my hind legs, catching the Changeling behind me square in the muzzle by chance more than design. There was a sickening, wet 'crack' as the force of the blow twisted its head violently to the side, snapping its neck in the process. It stumbled into my rump drunkenly with its head turned at an unnaturally steep angle, before it simply collapsed dead.

We soon regrouped, with the Twilights keeping the Changelings at safe enough distance from me by using an obscene amount of firepower discharged at a rate that I had hitherto thought impossible. From just beyond our tiny, myopic view of the battlefield, reduced to a few scant feet around this minute shell of Equestrian soil, shells erupted, blossoming great clouds of dust and viscera that were far too close for comfort, such that I was soon splattered in yet more mud and gore and felt the sting of ripped chitin upon my skin. I trusted in Sergeant Bramley Apple's superlative accuracy, but damnation, he was cutting it bloody fine.

As we fought, felling the drones too surprised by the sudden appearance of soldiers in their midst, I took the opportunity to step away from the fighting, and reared up on my hind legs to spot the glimmer of steel and gems amongst the amorphous mass of glistening slick chitin that had to be the Princess. “She's over there!" I cried out, pointing in her direction. "Forwards! For Equestria!"

The soldiers reacted to my order with the same efficiency expected of them, though the Twilights were a little slow and somewhat clumsy in responding. Nevertheless, Changeling after Changeling drone was felled under the withering firepower the three simulacra poured out, such that the field seemed bathed in a bright purple glow. I had noticed, however, that she was not shooting to kill, but merely stunning the beasts into a magically-induced state of unconsciousness instead. I expect that this all sounds very heroic, and judging by the huge oil painting depicting this fateful charge that hangs pride of place in the Royal Canterlot Public Gallery, next to the exquisite sculptures by the ancient unicorn masters and a rather ugly and more ‘modern’ painting of what appears to be two amoebas fornicating over turbot, it certainly did to war artists who never stepped hoof within a hundred miles of the Badlands. The painting seems to omit that little detail, along with the soldiers and me slaughtering the stunned and defenceless drones as they slept. More importantly, however, it neglected to show that the enemy seemed very reluctant to fight back, almost as if they were luring us towards the fallen Princess.

Reluctant or not we cleaved a bloody path through the enemy towards my Auntie. My hooves itched as we approached Luna, her broken figure lay sprawled on the ground in a gradually spreading pool of blood. Her limbs were splayed out to the side and her wings, once so proud and graceful, were snapped and shattered into grotesque, burnt mockeries of their former glory twisted into angles and shapes that should have been impossible. Despite her injuries, her armour blackened and cracked and her flesh beneath charred and torn, she was still alive. Her head lifted, and she winced in agony as she turned it to face us, and, for once, she smiled at me before slipping back into unconsciousness.

"She's alive!" one of the soldiers cried. "Faust be praised! The Princess lives!"

"Now, Twilight!" I cried, eager to be out of here. The Changelings had crept away from us, forming a ring of hissing, shrieking chitin and those abominable, soulless eyes staring at us as if restrained by whatever foul intelligence was commanding them. There was something wrong, and I wasn't about to sit around and wait to see what would happen. “Get us out now!”

The horn of one of the Twilights flickered, and then faltered in a useless shower of sparks and lavender smoke. A flash of panic was on her face as she tried again, once, twice, with the same results. When she looked at me with an expression of utmost dread I felt the same feeling of dawning horror of just how completely and utterly bucked we all were.

“I can't!” she cried desperately, on the verge of weeping. “I’m sorry. Between manifesting all of these simulacra and magic missiles, I don't have enough energy left in me to teleport us back."

I would have hit her, had nopony else been watching, but we were all going to die now anyway so really there was no reason for me not to. Though I had no compunction against hitting mares (despite what your father might have told you they are certainly not defenceless, in my personal experience), I nevertheless felt that striking Twilight, despite her clearly deserving it for having lured me out here to get myself and the rest of these soldiers killed, was somehow distasteful. At the very least I consoled myself with the fact that Twilight would continue to live with knowing she had sent me to my death, and the image of my body being disembowelled would be scarred into her memory.

"We're going to have to bloody hoof it then," I said, trying not to let my frustration show too much. If anything, I was doing my best to keep calm for the benefit of the guardsponies as much as trying to fool myself into thinking we could get out of here alive and with the Princess.

Carrying her proved tricky even with the benefit of telekinetic magic, especially with my current state of exhaustion and the alicorn’s weight. As I enveloped her in my aura and lifted her off the ground a few scant inches, a dull ache formed right at the base of my horn, which only increased when I tried to pull her closer to me. Her hooves dragged the ground as she was moved.

It was then, however, that the Changelings gave up on their curiously silent vigil and attacked. A guardspony was dead instantly; his throat ripped out by razor-sharp fangs. One of the Twilights fell under an onslaught of jagged hoofs, while the others frantically fired blindly into the oncoming mass of chitin of hooves, felling them by scores until they too succumbed to the sheer weight of numbers. I could only watch in futile despair, my ability to fight hampered by the great mass of partially-conscious alicorn weighing me down and draining my magic. My only hope was to fight my way back to the castle carrying the Princess with me, and thus I pushed onwards through the swarm that engulfed us – my slow, lethargic swings of the sword easily dodged by the drones in my way, or otherwise merely chipping the tough chitin, and any attempt at shooting resulted in pathetic sparks of magic that dissipated uselessly back into the ether.

Nevertheless I struggled on, determined that neither me or my illustrious line, such as it was, would end like this. I should have noticed that the drones seemed decidedly uninterested in attacking me, instead content to rip the poor soldiers and the Twilight simulacra to pieces instead. Damnation, I can't help but feel that their blood stains my hooves, and those faces, twisted in agony as they died thousands of miles from home and from the ponies they loved, haunt me still. I was alone with Luna; alive, but through the fog of exhaustion that clouded my mind I stumbled uselessly, my vision blurred and my horn stabbed with agony.

The Changelings parted to make way for something, and out from the gloom stepped a tall, gangly figure that I knew I had seen before, but failed to recognise instantly. It moved with a swift, shuddering movement that, despite its disturbingly insect-like gait, held a sort of imperious elegance that only an alicorn possesses. Indeed, the creature was as tall as one, rivalling Princess Celestia for size, though it was far skinnier and more disturbingly gangly, as if starved, than my Auntie. It was only when it moved into the weak, faltering glow of my aura still wrapped around my sword did I recognise it. I had seen that face before, staring at me from beyond a ring of green fire in the catacombs beneath Canterlot.

Queen Chrysalis laughed mockingly.

Honour and Blood (Part 8)

General McBridle, laird and clan chief of the mighty Clan Ponaidh [The title of chief of a Scoltish clan is largely a symbolic one, as the clan system had largely broken down in favour of Scoltland's political union with Trottingham and further centralisation and bureaucratisation of the developing Equestrian state following the end of the Nightmare Heresy. Ponaidh is one of the oldest of the highland clans, whose sons and daughters have often served in the 53rd Regiment of the Solar Guard more commonly known as 'The Highlanders'.], might be one of the better generals to have commanded Army Group Centre, or indeed any Royal Guard formation large or popular enough to have been mentioned in mainstream history books. We will never know, however, as just after the events I describe in this portion of this mess of amateur memoirs and just a year since taking over from the disgraced General Crimson Arrow he had taken the choice to retire for the final time, some say under coercion from both the Field Marshal and the Ministry of War over the events I will eventually get around to explaining here. It was a damned shame, as he was one of the very few that I had genuinely liked over the length of time spent running, hiding, and then lying that others called my 'career'. The General was a laid-back, elderly unicorn from the highlands of Scoltland whose well-stocked selection of fine single-malts was sorely missed after his retirement. He was cautious in his approach to war, having served as a commander for the better part of his adult life in Zebrica and Coltcutta; unlike just about everypony else in the Royal Guard aside from myself and a few other select ponies whose brains had not been replaced by chocolate pudding, he recognised that the forces he had been given [At that time, Army Group Centre consisted of the 1st Night Guards, 1st Solar Guards, the 5th Solar Guard, the remnants of the 3rd Solar Guard, the remnants of the 16th Artillery Regiment, a single platoon of Horsetralian Engineers, and the Dodge Junction militia] were simply not sufficient for the tasks that had been assigned to them, and thus he chose not to waste their lives in futile operations that he knew would not amount to anything other than mass graves. I must profess some personal bias in my assessment, for the aforementioned whisky and that he kept his 'opportunities' for me to present my supposed heroism to a bare minimum.

We had taken to spending the occasional 'liaison' meetings, as I had taken to calling them so as to keep up the pretence of actually doing my job, playing chess and sampling his whisky collection, which despite our best efforts never seemed to diminish in quantity. For a general he was quite poor at the game, and seemed to be quite incapable of the sort of planning and adaptation required to succeed, though I had the suspicion he simply didn't care overmuch about winning and simply enjoyed my company. The feeling was mutual, once I had learned to decipher his impenetrable accent and tolerate his tendency to refer to me and just about every stallion younger than him as 'son'.

He was a tough, grizzled old stallion; the sort whose appearance and personality only seemed to get rougher with age. Despite his advanced years of at least seventy, his mind was as sharp as ever; he had, after all, come to the same conclusion that I already had before I boarded the train that brought me here that this war was ill-planned from the start and doomed to a gruelling deadlock at best or defeat at worst. Or, perhaps, it was simply a symptom of that infamous Scoltish pessimism, which is an entirely understandable mindset to have if you've had the misfortune to live in that wet, cold, wild land and attacked constantly by midges. He had a face that had been weathered by years of hard campaigning; tanned, beaten, and scarred by sun, wind, spear, and claw. Despite the wrinkles on his face and the touch of grey marring his fuzzy orange mane, there seemed to be no weakness in the way that he carried himself, and this combined with his tendency to almost wrap himself up in tartan and carry a claymore as long as Princess Celestia is tall exemplified the sense of that rugged noble barbarism that the both the tourist board of Scoltland and romantic poets writing for the benefit of the rest of civilised Equestria have long promoted.

"Damn, son, hurry yourself up and take your bloody turn," he growled at me from across the chessboard. I had been considering my move for what seemed like a few minutes now; by sacrificing my pawns to lure out his knights, bishops, and rooks for easy destruction I had set myself up for a nice, comfortable win in but a few turns, yet somehow I had encountered a strange mental block that seemed to stop me from executing it fully. "While we're still young."

The General's tent lacked many of the extravagant luxuries that most commissioned officers liked to festoon their quarters with; indeed both the quality and quantity of accoutrements such as a chaise lounge, antique writing desk, liquor cabinets and wine racks filled to bursting, paintings, sculptures, assorted other objet d'art, and so forth seemed to be directly proportionate to one's rank. Twilight Sparkle could probably devise a formula for such a thing, were she present and not otherwise pre-occupied with whatever latest research project to investigate something ponies have been doing since the dawn of creation, making friends, had taken her fancy. Indeed, despite his aristocratic bearing his quarters here were positively spartan in terms of decoration; being a large-ish tent in the central courtyard of the fort he selected because of its proximity to the common bivouacs, rather than inside the castle's keep as one would expect. A military cot was in one corner, a wardrobe and a writing desk in another, and a small drinks table in the middle around which we sat in comfortably close proximity to the drinks cabinet. The tent flap was behind me, through which the yellow light of the desert moon mingled with the pale, flickering lights, smothered by the cloying infusion of cigar and pipe smoke from the tobacco that the both of us indulged in with far too great a frequency for supposed role models. The only extravagance allowed in this tent, its barrenness only accentuated by the use of this single item and of the extravagance of the uniform of the pony sitting opposite me, aside from the comfort afforded by the contents of austere wooden box sitting beside us, was an ornamental shield with two crossed claymores and a ragged strip of faded red, green, and blue tartan nailed to a tent pole.

I decided then that whatever plan I had probably wasn't worth it, since neither my heart nor my mind were truly invested in the game that night, and simply pushed forward a rook to check his king. The queen swooped in and took it like a hawk on a field mouse.

"Something on your mind?" he said. His voice had a reassuring, stentorian quality to it, which he had perfected in his youth in ensuring that his orders could be heard clearly above the din of battle. "On any other night ye would have beaten me by now."

"Or maybe you're improving," I retorted, taking a sip from my drink. It went down as smooth as silk, with the burn that accompanies lesser quality drinks replaced with a gentle warmth that seemed to emanate from the centre of my chest. The water of life indeed.

The General snorted and shook his head. "It'll be a cold, cold day in Tartarus before that happens," he said, apparently unaware of the fact that certain parts of that forsaken underworld were in fact cold and wintery, but for some reason that particular tautology persisted.

"I don't know," I said. "Only one of us here wears a sword and a baton on his epaulettes, General, and judging by your losing streak perhaps it should be me."

"Aye, aye, that's true. But when the Changelings are kind enough to arrange themselves out onto alternately coloured squares I'll be sure to call upon your services, but until then I think I'll be general and you continue looking over everypony's shoulders like a disapproving parent." He grinned; it was a rare pony who felt he had the wherewithal to insult me, however jovially, and know that he could get away with it. That he was the rare sort of military pony whose presence I could actually tolerate for some period of time certainly helped, as did the quality of libations that always accompanied our meetings.

"Be careful," I said, grinning inanely. The alcohol was already working its malignant influence on my mind, clouding my thoughts and loosening my lips to a degree that might have been quite disadvantageous to one such as I who lives behind a web of lies. By Faust, I thought, it had been far too long since I could truly relax in the presence of another, even if it was with a stallion old enough to be my grandfather. "We all know what happened with the last general I worked with. I might start making firing them a habit."

McBridle laughed, though it was more accurate to say that he contorted his face, wheezed as though he was suffocating, and writhed in his chair with his hooves gripped tightly onto the hoof-rests for support. As I waited for him to calm down, which he did eventually and seemingly with great difficulty, I could not help but wonder if he was in fact having a heart attack and whether or not I should call for a medic. My inadvertent reference to General Crimson Arrow, my former friend, of sorts, caused a pang of regret in my heart, and I wondered then and there if he still held my decision against me. He kept his rank, by dint of winning a victory of sorts in the siege here, and had been sent to command a small detachment in Zebrica. These thoughts, however, were quickly banished when the pony sitting opposite me had recovered enough for him to be able to speak coherently, at least for a Scoltspony.

"I'm seventy-three years old, son, with a big fat pension that'd make even yourself envious, so do ye think I'm the least bit worried about losing my job? If I'd known they'd send me to this barren shite-hole I'd have never come out of retirement." He arched an eyebrow and pointed a hoof at me, as if, somehow, I was directly responsible for this miserable old stallion's problems. In a manner of speaking, by virtue of the mass of symbols that decorated my uniform, I was at the very least the most visible representation of the authority of the Equestrian state, being a political officer, outside of the book of Princesses' Regulations itself. "I could be in bed with the Missus right now, under a warm electric blanket, and reading a book, to the sound of cows lowing in the fields beyond. Then I could wake up at a respectable time for a respectable breakfast and look forward to spending respectable time with the grand-foals."

"I thought you came here to get away from the 'Missus'?"

"Aye, but a year choking on dust and pouring sand out of my pockets has made me miss the daft old mare," he said, and nodded his glass in my direction in some sort of salute. The orange, bushy caterpillars that seemed to serve as his eyebrows came together to form a frown. "Your little problem, son, it's not a mare, is it?"

I shrugged my shoulders and leaned back in my chair, where the rough wood chafed irritatingly against my back. "Yes," I said, and then raised a hoof pointedly in his direction to halt the smug remark that was just about to leave his lips, "but not in the way you probably think. I hate to talk shop, but it's Commissar Gliding Moth and Rainbow Dash."

"Two mares?" he said, clearly unable to resist grinning inanely despite my warning. "Strictly professional, is it?"

"Yes," I said firmly, nodding my head once. "Strictly professional." General McBridle was one of the very few ponies around whom I felt I could lower my guard down around even by the tiniest of margins; perhaps an over-paid stallion in a white coat and glasses so thick they could deflect arrows could tell me that I was merely seeking some sort of father figure, and I suppose on reflection he would not be entirely wrong on that account, but his relaxed attitude to just about everything, even here, had encouraged me to believe that were I to say something that might reveal me to be the craven bastard that I am he would not tell anyone. If I had a problem, one that I felt I could share for there were things I knew I must keep to myself, I knew that he would listen. [Blueblood doesn't mention it, but throughout the latter part of McBridle's long career his nickname among the soldiers who served under him was 'Daddy', due to his genuine concern for their welfare. Historians note that it was this same concern that brought him into conflict with Field Marshal Iron Hoof, and that perhaps the slaughter that had occurred in Black Venom Pass might have been avoided were he in command of Army Group Centre.]

"I've got two stupid fillies here playing at soldiers," I said, after having downed the remainder of my drink a little too quickly for comfort. I inclined my head towards the cabinet next to the chessboard, whose doors had been opened and bottles contained therein arranged neatly on display like the 1st Solar Guard on parade, to which the General responded with a curt nod. Grateful, I set about pouring myself yet another drink as I explained my unfortunate predicament. "One of them has taken it upon herself to enforce the entirety of Princesses' Regulations and whatever high-minded wishful thinking the Commissariat has taught her on everything that she sees before her, while the other seems to believe that learning from the experience of veteran soldiers is somehow beneath her. Both, however, are going to get themselves and others martyred gloriously for Equestria unless they buck their ideas up."

His grin, however, faded, and he turned his nearly-empty tumbler in his hooves, and his narrowed, downcast eyes stared into the sloshing amber liquid. "Wars used to be such a simple affair, son," he continued, his voice hushed and reverent. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but I knew better than to interrupt an older pony when he's in the middle of reminiscing, so in an uncharacteristic display of unselfishness I indulged him. "A Coltcuttan prince gets all uppity or a band of missionaries upset the wrong Zebrican tribe or a governor of some colony in the arse-end of nowhere offends the natives and the Royal Guard is sent over to sort out the mess. We march in, shake our spears around, and if everypony stays all nice and calm and sensible nopony gets hurt and we all celebrate our victory with a little parade through Canterlot. The politics was handled by the politicians; no bloody commissars watching our every move and no Wonderbolts thinking the sun shines out of their arses. But now? Faust almighty, this time... this time, between you and me, we can't win, not quickly like before, unless something changes. Give me a regiment of Scoltish Highlanders and I promise ye, we'd have served Chrysalis' head to Princess Celestia on a plate with all the trimmings like a bloody Hearth's Warming Day feast. Instead I've got Canterlot fops and Trottinghamite slum-dwellers to contend with, and not nearly enough of them for the job."

I arched an eyebrow and nodded in understanding; the only campaign I had been on in my earlier career had been as part of an intervention force putting down some uprising in Neighpon, which I had largely spent indulging in the local culture in the pleasant company of geishas before it all blew over and I went home. [I would like to point out that the Bajutsu Restoration, which returned power in Neighpon from the isolationist Shogun to my sister and me, did not simply 'blow over', but came about as a result of a bloody civil war. Equestrian intervention came late, and had missed the worst of the fighting. Blueblood's regiment, the 1st Solar Guard, was garrisoning the capital.] Besides, the presence of a thousand angry stallions wearing plaid skirts and marching to the sound of a ghastly 'musical' instrument, and indeed I use that term in its most liberal sense, that sounds more like a chicken being strangled to death would do wonders in shattering the morale of the Changelings, albeit at the equal cost of our own.

"This politicking isn't helping matters either." Of course, I carefully ignored his blatant defeatism, knowing that under the diktats of the Commissariat even mentioning the idea that the Royal Guard suffer even the most minor of military setbacks would result in a stern talking-to at best and a summary execution at the very worst. That I fully agreed with the General's assessment on the overall prosecution of the war and that I felt that his experience meant that he was in a far better position to make such a judgement, coupled with the fact that I was tired and simply couldn't be bothered, disinclined me from confronting it.

"I thought that was your job," he said. "You deal with this shite and the rest of us can carry on with the proper job of soldiering."

"That's the theory," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves, the Royal Guard has always had this problem with its officers. I'm sure we've lost more to duels over petty insults than to enemy action."

"Aye, son, that's true." He bowed his head gravely and placed his now-empty glass on the table between us. I made an offer to refill his drink using the universally recognised gesture of pointing the bottle at him and wiggling it slightly to make the rare amber fluid within slosh about, but he raised a hoof and shook his head no. "Tell me, have the two of them ever been in combat?"

"No," I said, and then shook my head. "Though, I believe Rainbow Dash was present at the Battle of Canterlot with the other Bearers of the Elements of Harmony."

McBridle scoffed, rolling his eyes as he reclined back in his seat, hooves gripping onto the hoof-rests. "You weren't there, were you?"

"I was detained in Prance on matters of state importance," I said, hoping I didn't sound too defensive. I was, in fact, staying there partially because I was one of the very few ponies who recognised that proceeding with a royal marriage after a direct threat against Canterlot had been made was a very stupid idea but mostly out of an admittedly petulant strop that I had thrown when I learned that my cousin, who, despite being somewhat distant from my part of the sprawling mass that is our Royal Family, was nevertheless the blood of my blood, was to marry an upstart commoner with delusions of grandeur who once picked me up and threw me halfway across the playground when we were foals.

"I was. That wasn't a battle, son, it was an embarrassment. The bulk of the Royal Guard detachment defending Canterlot was off chasing metaphorical butterflies in the Everfree Forest, and without Shining Armour in charge the remainder guarding the marriage ceremony surrendered with barely a proper fight. Anyway, even if we're being generous and can call it a battle, it still doesn't count for Rainbow Dash. The lass never trained and fought as part of a cohesive military unit."

"Aside from the Wonderbolts," I said, "who still don't count."

"Oh, aye, if our new strategy is to dazzle the enemy into surrender with a bunch of pegasi spelling rude words in the sky with smoke then I dare say those show-ponies will be our strongest asset. Back in the real world, however, things aren't that simple. I don't envy ye, Blueblood, but I think I may have just the thing to help with your little predicament."

I tilted my head slightly and took a thoughtful sip of my drink. "Send them back home?" I posited.

McBridle bobbed his head like one of those ornamental nodding dogs some taxi drivers have to decorate their carriages, as though he was considering the issue. "If it were that easy ye'd have done that the second after they arrived. Now you're well and truly stuck, son. No, give them a taste of real battle, and then they'll either straighten up or run home with their tails between their legs."

An icy chill seized my innards, which I then tried in vain to soothe with a too-large gulp of my drink that only served to burn my throat and worsen the sudden wave of nausea that gripped my bowels. I should have known that this quiet honeymoon period wouldn't last, but I had hoped that at the very least the opportunity to make a more permanent exit from this war, preferably to an entirely separate continent where war is rare and mares and wine are plentiful, but alas none presented itself. Naturally, I relaxed my face into the well-practiced mask of quiet, patrician detachment, and despite every component part of my very being telling me that perhaps this old stallion should be put to bed with a glass of warm milk and a biscuit before he starts taking his insane ramblings too seriously, I politely asked him to continue. It would have been rather bad form, I thought, if I was to obey my body's natural instinct by vomiting profusely on the well-used chess set and then fleeing from the room never to return again.

"The Field Marshal is getting agitated again, son," he said, his voice taking on a conspiratorial tone as he leaned close enough for me to smell the whisky on his breath, or that might simply have been mine. "Keeps using that word he likes - 'offensive'. Now he knows as much as I that we're in no position to start sallying forth bravely into the Badlands, but Parliament wants results."

I snorted contemptuously and shook my head. "I take it it's election year again?" That's just what we needed; another batch of politicians through the revolving door of so-called democratic power, with all of the changes and confusion that a new batch of policies and priorities brings with it. Oh, but to return to the constancy of the firm, guiding hoof of Princess Celestia and her chosen hierarchy of nobles! I feared this experiment in self-rule would only serve to be the ruin of Equestria, and would undoubtedly be responsible for the artificial shortening of my natural life. History, of course, would judge me wrong, but in my personal experience historians were never a good arbiter of such things anyway; one only needs to read the numerous biographies about me to see why.

McBridle nodded thoughtfully, and said, "Aye, the Prime Minister and his cabinet have promised Equestria victory before Hearth's Warming, and I don't need to tell ye that's about as likely as an earth pony watchmaker. Luckily for us, and thanks in part to your efforts and Lady Twilight Sparkle's yet-to-be released report, most of the electorate's ire is directed at the War Ministry and the government's handling of the war and not us."

"Luckily," I echoed, and then masked the tense, awkward smirk that came to my mouth with my half-empty tumbler. "Do you really think the opposition would do things any better?"

"The ego of a politician is not worth the life of any soldier under my command." There was steel in his voice that was quite in contrast to the warm, welcoming, and generous tones of his usual Highland brogue, re-affirming that unique trait of the Scoltish accent that a speaker may switch from jovial and charming to threatening and, in cases, downright terrifying and back again all in the time it takes for me to tie a bow tie. My companion shrugged his shoulders, and bowed his head to poke around at the chess pieces still on the board between us. I think that, by some unspoken and mutual accord, we had together called an end to the night's hostilities. At any rate, I was happy to claim a moral victory.

"It's none of my business, son," he continued, "just so long as I get what I need to kill Changelings I don't care who's in power. Whatever it is that goes on over in Canterlot's got Iron Hoof worried; fears his neck will be next on the chopping block of redundancies when Lady Twilight Sparkle's report finally gets published. He wants a victory that'll give him a little stay of execution, even for a little bit."

"After the debacle at Black Venom Pass I think it's safe to say his neck's already well acquainted with the chopping block and is merely waiting for the axe to fall," I said dryly. My drink had finished, and though I wanted more (or needed, I should say, to appropriately brace myself for what the General had planned) I decided not to abuse my host's hospitality any more than I already had.

"Aye, son, but I'll not give him the glorious charge into the lungs of Tartarus he expects, but at least it'll be something the Ministry of Information use to make us look like we're taking the fight to the Changelings instead of sitting on our arses getting sunburn."

From what I presumed was a pocket in his tunic masked by the great swathe of tartan cloth that he inexplicably continued to wear despite the climate not being entirely conducive to wrapping oneself in wool, he produced a folded piece of yellowed paper, frayed and ripped at the edges and covered in scribbles on one side, and opened it up to reveal it to be a crudely drawn map of the Badlands. He dropped it over the board, with the chess pieces propping it up an inch or so above the chequered surface.

"If we were crazy enough to advance further into the Badlands, the sane choice would be to follow this gorge here," he said, pointing to a ragged line that ran from the Macintosh Hills and into the depths of enemy territory. "It would guard our right flank, which is one less flank for us to worry about, and then we can seize the high ground south of this fort to bring one of their hives into range of our artillery and, if we receive the reinforcements we need, force the Changelings to battle. There's one small problem - there's an old bridge crossing over the gorge that would expose our flank. I want it destroyed. Ye can take a few platoons to escort a section of those Horsetralian engineers to blow it up, to give them something to do before they get creative with our supply of dynamite, ye ken? Then Faust willing, we'll both get what we want."

What we want? All I ever wanted was to go home and hide under the generously padded covers of my bed until the help could tempt me out from its womb-like security by plying me with wine and gourmet confections, but here I suppose the opportunity to deflate Rainbow Dash's ego to the point where it might conceivably fit inside Canterlot Castle's main ballroom and drill some common sense back into Gliding Moth would have to suffice for now. As ever, it was not as though I had any choice in the matter, and I was simply resigned to my dismal fate once more.

"I expect you want me to babysit them on this little expedition?" I said, forcing that well-practiced grin to my face.

The grin was returned by its more genuine cousin forming on the face of the stallion opposite me. "That's your job," he said.

***

It was not until I had left the relative warmth of General McBridle's tent and into the sudden chill of the desert night that I realised just how inebriated I was, as though everything that I had just drunk in the past few hours or so had waited until that exact moment, when the breeze caressed my cheek like a wispy silk negligee, to take effect. The hour was quite late, as I had worked out once my vision cleared to the point where I could make out the numbers on my watch a little more clearly, and there was that strange, eerie calm that always accompanies the very dead of night. Indeed, at that exact moment, with the thousands upon thousands of stallions who call this miserable little outpost of Equestrian civilisation their temporary home wrapped up in bedrolls and asleep in a choir of snores and each dreadfully still, 'dead' was the most appropriate word one could use to describe it.

Still, it was a pleasant night at least, or would have been were I anywhere else but here. The fully glory of Princess Luna's night sky was unmarred by any clouds, and indeed it looked as though she had put extra effort into painting her canvas this night. The moon shone like a chandelier in some grand hall, and the stars themselves were diamonds glittering against the inky black and deepest blue of the infinite void beyond, arranged artfully into whatever designs that my Aunt's fickle whims demanded of her, making this the perfect sort of night for courting an attractive, well-bred mare. It might have been my lingering inebriation as much as the majesty of night undimmed by glare of public lighting, but for the first time in a while I felt a sense of peace and calmness. In my drunken stupor I fancied that Luna might have made this sky just for me, but later, when cold, hard sobriety was once more imposed upon me, I knew that I invariably had to share it with every single living thing on the whole of Equus. At the time, however, it was a pleasing thought.

I clumsily made my way back to the castle keep, which loomed above the courtyard like some kind of vast gravestone over freshly dug earth, picking my way around the bundles of sleeping soldiers. It was fortunate that my special talent, my 'homing instinct', as it were, was somehow not affected by my drunken state, and I reached the great, yawning gates without much difficulty. From there, I made my way through the meandering, illogically laid-out corridors and rooms. Once I'd passed the great hall, packed as the courtyard was with sleeping soldiers arranged neatly in rows, I chanced upon Gliding Moth's quarters. The door was open, and a column of warm candlelight spilled out into the corridor, and when I heard the sound of moans and exertions I could not resist the urge to peek through the gap.

Her room was sparse, as she apparently did not take any personal belongings with her; indeed, being an orphan, she had no such items to bring save that given to her by the Commissariat. There was a bed, a lit candelabra, a writing desk with a few books piled atop it, a couple of beaten old practice swords scattered haphazardly on the floor, and a small bundle of spare uniforms folded neatly in the corner. The mare in question stood in the centre of the room, clutching a thin rapier in her right hoof in a manner that suggested she hadn't had much experience wielding a weapon, and stood in an awkward approximation of the en garde position. I watched, leaning drunkenly against the door post for support, as she made a few experimental swings of her sword, paused for a moment to consult from a book that lay open by her hooves, and then attempt them again.

It was after a few rounds of that she noticed me peering through the door gap like some pervert spying on her, which is not an entirely unfair judgement of me. There was a brief flitter of surprise on her face, which was just as quickly replaced with the more appropriate response of a concerned frown and a slight tilting of her head.

"Sir?" she said, only slightly out of breath from her amateur sword practice. The sweat clinging to her slim, athletic body gave her fur a very pleasing sheen. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe," I said, suddenly aware of my words slurring slightly. "But I think I can help you more."

The frown on Gliding Moth's brow deepened, and she pursed her lips. "You are drunk, sir. I don't see how."

"You might be right about that," I said as I stumbled into her room and shut the door behind me with a small kick of my hind leg, "but I bet you still won't be able to strike me with your sword, even if I am somewhat inebriated."

"You want to spar with me? In that state?" Gliding Moth snorted and shook her head, and punctuated that gesture with a defiant flick of her rapier. Now that I was much closer, I could get a better look at the blade. It was certainly a finely crafted weapon; the point was needle-thin, yet certainly appeared strong and rigid enough to cope with the abuse that a sword must invariably go through, and the guard was decorated with intricate brass sweepings inlaid with delicately marked filigree. It was, as most rapiers are, a work of art as much as a lethal weapon. I wondered how a mere orphan filly could have acquired such a sword, as it certainly was not of the utilitarian design that was standard issue in the Commissariat, and thought perhaps that she had received it as a gift from some wealthy patron or that she had saved up a considerable amount of bits over a long time to afford it.

"I don't want to be responsible for running Commissar Prince Blueblood through with a sword based solely on a drunken bet," she said, sheathing her blade into a scabbard that hung from her dainty waist.

I laughed, which she seemed to be a little insulted by. "You don't need to worry about that," I said as I walked to the pile of practice swords. "Where did you get all of these from? Pencil Pusher is going to apoplectic if he sees you hoarding his equipment."

Gliding Moth hesitated, and chewed her lip slightly as she watched me pick up one of the swords with my hoof; it didn't seem fair to spar with her if I had the unfair advantage that telekinesis brought, and though I knew that a capable fencer would know how to appropriately confront a unicorn opponent [Most combat manuals advocate that earth ponies use their superior strength to swat the opponent's weapon out of the air with a shield or their own weapon, or for pegasi to bait the opponent into over-reaching with an attack and following up with a quick thrust before they have time to correct], judging by the way I had seen her handle her weapon I could be certain that she did not. The weight of the weapon, the slightly awkward construction that made the centre of balance a little too close to the hilt for my personal liking, and the feel of the cheap, rubberised grip around my hoof brought back memories of training with these clumsy things. I write 'training', but I was already familiar with swords and had been for quite some time when I went through what passed for basic training back when the Royal Guard was simply there to look pretty at official functions. If anything, sparring with these weapons with my fellow trainee officers under the tutelage of a half-blind and rather violent retired Germane officer had made me pick up a few bad habits that took longer to shake off than it did to learn them.

"He let me borrow them," she said, "for practice, I mean. I filled out all the forms he wanted. It took me two hours, though."

"I'm surprised he let them out of his sight." I picked up another of the swords with my magic and levitated it over to Gliding Moth, who hesitantly took the awkwardly wobbling weapon with her hoof. "Come on, I'm trying to teach you something so you don't get killed. Just try to hit me."

Gliding Moth looked at me, her expression still quizzical, but with a quiet sigh that she probably thought I couldn't hear she decided to humour me, and adopted her own clumsy imitation of the en garde position. I took up the same position, though my stance was probably closer to what the writers of the fencing manual still on the floor had envisaged. After a few further harmless swipes at the air with her weapon, my opponent made a half-hearted thrust, extending her foreleg and lunging forward one step with the apparent aim to lightly tickle my chest with the dull, rounded point of her practice sword.

I flicked my hoof, deflecting the oncoming thrust with my sword to the left. Surprised by this, Gliding Moth did not attempt to correct, and instead, propelled by her own inertia, stumbled forwards so that her sword struck the ground. I quickly reversed the direction of my sword with another flick of the hoof, which would have bit deep into the side of the mare's neck were I wielding a sharpened sword and had I put any degree of actual force behind it, and a slash to the right would have opened her throat and jugular. Instead, the blow would serve only to wound her pride and give her a rather nasty looking bruise. As I withdrew my sword, and allowed my opponent some time to recover her shock at finding that, despite being more inebriated than a grandmother at Hearth's Warming, my apparent in-born skill with the blade remained undimmed, I was reminded of the rather barbaric tradition popular with university students in Germaney of Mensur, and decided that though a permanent facial scar would be a perfect reminder to never underestimate an opponent it would be a horrid shame to damage her youthful beauty.

[Mensur is a style of fencing popular among student fraternities in Germaney and Horstria, though unlike conventional fencing it is not so much a sport or a duel but a means to build character and personality. The duellists stand more or less still and aim to strike at their opponents' face, with the goal less about avoiding injury and more to do with enduring pain. Facial scarring, therefore, is common and is seen as a sign of bravery.]

Gliding Moth hissed and flinched back from my sword. She seemed rather more embarrassed than in pain, and, after a moment of touching the long, thin bruise forming on her elegant, thin neck delicately with a hoof, she quickly raised her sword above her head and brought it down with the apparent aim of cleaving a great trench in my skull. I raised my blade, catching hers with a dull clatter of metal striking metal. Frozen in surprise she made the cardinal mistake of hesitation, which I quickly took advantage of; another flick of the hoof brought her sword harmlessly to the side, and before she could correct in time to deflect my riposte, I had touched my blade against her breast and then dragged its blunt edge over her tunic.

"If that was a real sword you'd be dead," I said, attempting to sound grave, though the slurring of my words combined with a drunk's tendency to over-enunciate probably ruined that effect. Placing my sword on the ground, I stepped beside Gliding Moth, and I couldn't help but notice her nose wrinkled as I approached, then held her sword-hoof in mine. She recoiled from my touch, and shot me a glare that would have withered a prize orchid within seconds.

"I'm trying to teach you to stay alive," I explained, and then took her hoof again, this time with as much care as my alcohol-addled nerves could manage, and adjusted her grip on her sword handle to one that would allow her finer control over her weapon. "In earth pony fencing it's all in the wrist, so you need to hold it like you're shaking somepony's hoof, not like you're wielding a hammer. See?"

I let go, and she hesitantly swung her sword a few times, then looked to me with the newfound eagerness of a pupil hoping to impress her teacher. I, however, was not overly impressed, but felt a certain pang of remorse when I saw her subdued reaction to the disapproving shake of my head. Once more, I took hold of her hoof, and guided it carefully in executing a few slashes and thrusts. To be so close to a mare after all this time without some sort of monetary transaction having taken place, our bodies all but touching, through the haze that clouded my mind and the grim, gothic touches of our environment, was all rather alluring in a sordid, somewhat creepy manner. "All in the wrist," I continued, "if you raise your sword like you did before, your opponent will work out exactly what you're going to do half a second before you do it. In a duel, that half a second is the thin dividing line between life and death. If you keep your strikes small and quick, like this, your opponent has far less time to react."

Gliding Moth hummed thoughtfully, and when I stepped away from her she attempted to imitate what I had just taught her, with some greater degree of success this time. There was an odd sense of satisfaction that warmed the withered, broken thing within me that some would call a soul as I saw her put the lessons into practice. After a few tries however, she stopped, looked to her weapon with a curious expression, and then back to me.

"It's harder to get any strength behind it like this," she said.

"That's true," I said, then nudged at the rapier hanging from her waist with a hoof. "But with a weapon like that, physical strength counts for very little. In fact, in almost all circumstances, speed wins. All the strength your earth pony physique can muster will be useless if your opponent skewers your heart like a toffee apple on Nightmare Night before you're even ready to strike. Usually, the first pony to be injured is the one who ends up losing the fight."

She nodded her head, and made a few further experimental slashes at the air with her sword. Her control over her weapon seemed to be improving, and she was certainly picking up on the basics of swordplay faster than most ponies I've seen who have not had the benefit of a lifetime of training as I have. Still, I took the necessary precaution of standing behind and what I hoped to be a safe distance away from her; I had seen a number of fencing tutors injured when their students' grip on their weapons was not as secure as they had thought and an errant swing had sent it flying with rather unpleasant consequences. Her sinewy physique, which I mused was likely a result of a lifetime of the orphanage gruel and unpleasant work that overseers seem to think is a fitting punishment for the crime of losing one's parents, also seemed to be perfect for the nimble hoofwork required for fencing with a rapier. Indeed, once I was satisfied that I was safely out of the way I let her practice with her own rapier, and between swigs of water from my canteen in a vain attempt to sober up I called out directions for her to follow as she duelled an imaginary shadow opponent - forward, backward, thrust, parry, riposte, and so on.

It was after a while, when the pleasant, hazy, but incoherent buzz of tipsiness started to give way to the sullen depression and fatigue that must inevitably follow, that she decided to stop. It was getting late, or early, depending upon how one views such things, and high time the both of us were in our separate beds, alone. Nevertheless, I lingered, probably longer than I should have done, as she used a towel to mop up the sweat that gave her lithe body a pleasing sheen. She considered her rapier in her hoof, then eyed the heavier, brutish sabre in the scabbard on my back.

"I don't see how any of this affects fighting Changelings," she said as she sheathed it in her scabbard. "They tend not to use weapons at all."

"True," I said, after a moment of consideration. "But with the Pattern '12 sabre I can afford to hack and slash like an axepony cutting down a tree; it'll tear through Changeling chitin like my father through a disobedient servant's self-esteem. Your dainty little rapier will run a pony through with ease, but against a Changeling you'll have to wield it less like a sword and more like a surgeon's scalpel. Aim for the vulnerable joints in the armour around the neck and the shoulders, and failing that, going for the eyes can be just as effective."

"Blind them?" Gliding Moth arched an eyebrow imperiously, and its more than passing resemblance to a certain facial tic used by Luna when she quietly disapproved of something sent a shudder through me. "That's a little unsporting, don't you think?"

"It depends," I said, shrugging my shoulders as though her protest actually had any sort of weight to it, it being the naive assumptions of a pony who has yet to have her life threatened in any meaningful way and was still under the misapprehension that war is or should be in any way fair. "Blinding your opponent in a professional fencing club is considered bad form, yes, but with Changelings it's just fair game. Get your sword right in there, and turn his brains into raspberry jelly, before he bites your pretty face off."

With that, I walked out of the door with as much gravitas as I could muster, and stumbled back to my room. That I used the word 'pretty' to describe Gliding Moth's face, which it was, I must admit, nagged at my mind, and, in spite of myself and the state I was in, I felt a considerable amount of personal embarrassment, which I had not experienced since my lower teenage years. I did not sleep that night, and it was not entirely the fault of either the alcohol or stress this time, but the last image of her surprised smile and the slight flush of her pale cheeks that I had caught just as I left continued to linger in my mind's eye as I stared up at the barren ceiling. Seemingly always just out of my grasp, this mental apparition taunted me with its misleading proximity. This war was just getting more and more complicated for me.

Author's Note

Welp, took me bloody long enough, but I've overcome the post-Christmas and New Year fugue and managed to write this. Of course, my New Year's Resolution is to write more quickly, and hopefully it won't go the same way as that gym membership last year...