The Tome of Exalted Ponies

Any soup hiding in trees is quickly found and devoured, while unsuspecting waiters with soup walking around on the ground quickly finds themselves ambushed from a Terrible Ascent-Driven Beast up in the trees.

…

Getting out of the sewers was easy enough, now that the circle had guides from Silken Laughter’s smuggling crews to see them through. They were led to an exit on the west side of what the guide called the Shroudwant district – a truly palatial district, replete with towering black marble monoliths topped with statues of the Mask, which was covered in a thick fog… but it wasn’t a natural one: It was a smog wrought of incense.

“They must be burning the stuff like firewood… good heavens” Cash said from under his disguise of dirty rags, his usual heavenly silks and golden collar of dawn’s cleansing packed away elsewhere for the time being.

Of course, the incense was being burned for a pretty obvious reason: It kept the smell of rot that wafted in from the harbour and the rest of the city out, allowing the ponies who lived in the district who worked as the Mask’s bureaucrats to live in relative luxury, even if it meant some difficulty breathing. The circle’s guide used much more coarse language to describe the traitors working for the mask. It didn’t help that the ponies who trotted around on the street all wore clearly forced smiles, regardless of whether they were clad in servant uniforms or bright purple and crimson silks and heavy golden jewellery – it made it all look so fake… which it arguably was – all of it clearly pageantry for the mask and his ghosts.

The circle was led through the district via back alleys, past hundreds of sleeping homeless and probably quite a few corpses among them, though they did have to cross a few squares to avoid certain heavily patrolled streets where important government ministries or bureaus were located. This included a square next to the recently built Twilight Amphitheatre, where government sycophants and foreign dignitaries wiling to deal with the Mask were gathering in the soft evening light. These crowds were easy enough to ignore, and considering how the circle was disguised and how they sculked along the periphery, so too were they ignored.

What couldn’t really be ignored was the shattered radiance from the skewered god-corpse proudly on display in the middle of the square square, impaled on a massive and very tall barbed soulsteel spike where it seemed that the corpse was still slowly sliding down its length. To Speaker’s great horror then his charms and insight told him that the poor god wasn’t even quite dead… but slowly being bled of life. Their guide agreed that it was horrible, but added to the horror of it all by explaining: “…about once per season the Mask will make a big show out of coming out and raising our city-father up the spike again, not wanting it to ever reach the ground where it would be allowed to die – he says it is important for the growth of his young empire”

It was difficult for Speaker to imagine how anything else in the city could worse… and yet… well… Shackle Maw Penitentiary. To Speaker’s absolute horror then it had once been a grand hospital… a house of healing. Now it was the polar opposite, a place where the innocent was tossed in and zombies and chained ghosts marched out.

Located in the north-eastern corner of the city, it was surrounded by a ring of quite thoroughly abandoned structures – because who would ever want to live near such a horrible place. The Mask had the hospital rebuilt into a prison, decorating its facade with grim sculptures that jut out from its corners instead of the previously warm and welcoming stone carvings that ushered the sick and ailing inside. Worse still were the grotesque ‘decorations’ of still-shivering corpses that decorated the black-iron barbs atop its fences. The dark bricks and thick mortar of the place stank with rot and fear, and you could actually see from within the prison a heady miasma of pain and tears appearing, made of sour yellow fumes, rising into the air.

The circle quickly agreed that a ‘mere’ prison break wouldn’t be enough – this whole place had to go. It would double as a great welcoming gift to the Mask, to announce that now a true force of freedom had arrived in Thorns.

This of course begged the question of how. Sully, with his ghostly disguise, could probably get in fairly easily – but the rest of the circle’s best option was likely as prisoners… and quite frankly, then that kind of waste of time just didn’t make sense.

“Well let’s be honest, we’re not here to stay hidden… we’re here to raise hell” Fire Orchid said, sounding quite enthusiastic as they peered out from inside one of the abandoned buildings near the torture-prison.

Speaker nodded, a little, but not quite: “Yes and no – I’ve been thinking. I looked at that impaled god back in the Shroudwant district… I looked at it with essence sight, and it looked like it was creating the central snarl of necrotic essence that’s causing the shadowland. I think that’s the place where we’ll have to perform the shadowland fixing spell. I think we should save our big reveal for that, because we won’t be able to hide that no matter what”

Of course, one thing is not revealing one self, but another was being subtle. A simple way of ensuring that your identity is not revealed was simply to kill all the witnesses… and the circle didn’t imagine that the ghosts in charge of the prison would be very cooperative, so that problem would solve itself. Their guide didn’t really look as if he knew what to expect, but he liked the circle’s attitude, bragging that he’d cut down at least a dozen zombie guards and whatnot during his own illustrious career as a smuggler.

Not terribly keen on listening to the braggard, the circle thanked him for his help but urged him to get going, reasoning that once the fighting started, he wouldn’t be safe. The guide didn’t need much urging beyond that, saying that he would take a longer route back to the seven-tiered sanctuary, to avoid anyone following them.

This left the circle with the challenge of dealing with the prison and the ghosts within. Shimmer wanted to turn into a seagull and circle the place, but Sunrise quickly pointed out that there weren’t really any seagulls in the city, despite the sizable port. Shimmer did a double take and confirmed this: “Ok… right, a lone seagull would stand out like a sore hoof. How about… an insect form? This place has no shortage of flies”

The rest of the circle waited patiently while Shimmer did her scouting, Sullen Hoof applying his disguise charm and using the power of his magical mask, to make him look like a pony ghost with a partially severed head, while everyone also kept a lookout for ghosts using their spirit interaction charms.

“Our priority has to be finding the resistance ponies, though if we’re clearing the whole place out it won’t matter much who we get out first” Fire Orchid mused.

Cash shook his head: “No, we need to find the prison’s messengers first and cut that off. We need to buy ourselves as much time as possible before the mask sends reinforcements – this place would have the means to call down hell on us if we don’t do that first”

“That… is not a bad idea. You and Sunrise can lead with some mind-control attacks at the guards at the gate, to get them to tell us everything” Fire Orchid said, appearing as if she was contemplating the exact wording they should use for such an attack.

When Shimmer returned, she was able to give the circle a solid count of the ghosts patrolling around the prison’s outer walls, courtyards, outer and inner gate. When quizzed on whether she had seen anything that looked like paths for messengers, she noted that there weren’t any obvious paths or tracks leading out of the place… so no dice on having spotted messenger routes to block.

“That‘s because they’re not up here. I can hear things moving around underground, we ‘ll need to check the local sewers under the place” Sullen Hoof noted, as he dissipated his sensory enhancement charms, because enhanced sense of smell near the prison was… less than nice.

Rooting around in the abandoned buildings revealed a sewer entrance in a cellar, and from there the circle was quickly able to confirm that a steady stream of messengers were going back and forth from the prison via underground passages. A surprising amount really.

Snatching one messenger and blasting the pale pony with mind control charms to ensure the poor emaciated colt didn’t scream or do anything stupid, resulted in the pony telling the circle everything he knew – like how the prison would dispatch messengers for even the most petty or useless notification to the Mask’s administration. He also told about the underground entrances in the prison used by messengers and cargo deliveries, and wept when asked why he worked as a messenger for the Mask, saying that it was the only way he could ensure that him and his family was given food and kept off the “Send them to Shackle Maw for zombification if we need more work crews” list. It wasn’t difficult to understand his plight, and Speaker confirmed that he wasn’t lying.

With his dream-based martial arts, Speaker put the pony to sleep so he could sleep out the oncoming battle in relative safety, instead of Fire Orchid’s idea of knocking him out.

“Why have underground messengers and deliveries? That doesn’t make sense” Speaker wondered, his mind boggled at how much it would have had to cost to build such secret tunnels leading out to the city, and making sure none of it conflicted with the sewers.

Fire Orchid was surprised that Speaker hadn’t figured that out: “This place was built to help defend against Lookshy… what’s Lookshy known for?”

“A lot of first age weapons?” Speaker quickly replied, unsure of where Fire Orchid was going with that line of reasoning.

Bobbing her head side to side, Fire Orchid gave Speaker a so-and-so expression: “Partially… but also its sky-fleet. Underground tunnels let you hide from skyreme bombardments a lot better – which is also why I’ll bet that the paths connecting to the prison down here will lead out to the city walls and other key locations for the… old government, so any wounded could quickly be moved here, or so this place could be resupplied from what I’m guessing is an underground warehouse somewhere”

Speaker’s expression said it all: He clearly felt rather silly that he hadn’t figured out that kind of strategic use of underground tunnels. Of course, one thing was puzzling this out, another was finding a way to exploit it all: “Well I be… but ok, we’ll need to check if there are messengers going out other routes than this – and we’d need to plug them all. I don’t think they’re using all of them, in fact I’d expect to find a lot of them blocked off to avoid prison escapes”

Shimmer turned into a small lizard and crawled into the tunnels, mapping them out in the relative darkness. While she was off, the rest of the circle conferred once more about how to exploit the tunnels, chiefly basing their plans on the idea that any tunnel blockage could be cleared pretty easily. Cash wanted to use the tunnels for the smugglers to easily access the city walls and have Speaker create some hidden doors out of the city for them. Fire Orchid wanted to use the tunnels to make a series of quick attacks on various government buildings. Sunrise suggested they use the tunnels to sneak the prisoners out.

“We can do all three sequentially, but we’ll need to scout and secure a route back to the sanctuary to make sure there’s no ghosts along the way who can report us to the Mask” Sullen Hoof cleverly pointed out.

Speaker nodded, pointing out that he could easily use his singing staff to make connections between the messenger tunnels and the sewers, but keeping ghostly spies away for gods knows how many prisoners would likely be a problem: “…of all the things we’ve seen in the city, salt isn’t one of them. It stands to reason that the Mask has basically made having more than a pinch of salt is probably illegal”

“True – if we ward the prisoner escape route with salt, it’ll raise the alarm. Do we have any alternatives?” Fire Orchid noted, not liking the idea of a running underground battle across the city.

Sunrise gestured for attention: “If you could mark the route out for me, I could place a series of wards that force dematerialized spirits and ghosts away – its basic sorcery. At worst the Mask will think that the sanctuary rebels have a unicorn sorcerer in their service”

“Not a bad idea. When did you learn how to do that?” Speaker wondered.

It turned out to have been one of the things Sunrise had learned to do while Speaker had been off traveling to find and bring back Shimmer. Speaking of lunar, Shimmer returned shortly thereafter in her form of a jewel-eyed lizard, reporting that under the prison there was indeed a messenger hub: “…but all but the one passage I came from was bricked up. Even the air vents looked closed off”

“Do they want their messengers choking down here?” Speaker wondered, confused about why it would be necessary to block air vents.

Shimmer had no answer to that question, but Cash instead had a brilliant plan: “Ok, here’s an idea. While you lot sneak into the prison via the messenger hub and raise hell, I can stay out here and intercept all the messengers coming in. I’ll have them return back to wherever they came from thinking they have new messages, to make sure nobody suspects the place has been compromised”

“Clever – I like it. But you should be disguised as a city bureaucrat first… can you do a quick supply run for that?” Fire Orchid said, sounding a little too much like a giddy young mare who had just been given the opportunity to give a friend a surprise makeover.

Well, it wasn’t as much a surprise a surprise makeover – and Cash gave a lot of feedback and suggestions himself, drawing on his extensive experience in dealing with vain bureaucrats on how to disguise him. The end result was a very convincing appearance for Cash in the form of a scarlet and purple-clad stallion, absolutely marinated in rich perfume and bits of smouldering incense hanging from his pockets in a silver burner.

While Cash had been dressed up, Speaker and Shimmer had scouted the tunnels for ghosts, finding none. This was rather odd at first, until Shimmer detected some kind of strange ghost-lure working from inside the prison. Speaker quickly figured out the idea behind that: “Of course – the ghosts of all the prisoners have to be kept locked up, so they can condition and brainwash them. Can’t hold ghosts back with brick walls – so they probably have something that forces ghosts to remain here, or draws them in. All the other ghosts in the city we’ve seen so far… no wonder they don’t want to be anywhere near here”

“Using ghost wards to trap ghosts. Hilarious Lord Bright” Shimmer quipped, as she used a sensory awareness charm to get a perfect understanding of the terrain around her, letting her guide Speaker and his singing staff on where to tunnel into for connecting to a passable sewer line. Sunrise arrived once done with Cash to ward the escape route, and with that done everyone took up positions and readied themselves to storm the prison.

“Should we have some kind of battle-cry?” Fire Orchid quietly wondered.

None of the others felt a need for one, but Cash said that if she could come up with something catchy then he was all ears – though he’d prefer they discuss that later.

The ghostly guards at the messenger station had no idea what hit them. The mortal messengers inside were quickly instructed/mind-controlled to temporarily shut up and cooperate, making them quite handy in preparing the messenger station for funnelling escapees out via.

The bricked off staircase up to the lowest levels of the prison was quickly smashed open. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but Shimmer had already snuck in through the cracks as a bug and come back confirming that the noise inside would cover everything… and indeed, the cacophony of screams was deafening.

Finally able to give in to his more compassionate urges, Speaker led the charge into what turned out to be gruesome operating theatres where they discovered a horrible serial production: Starved, tortured and beaten prisoners were strapped onto cold stone tables and were set up to have their souls straight up ripped from their bodies. The ghostly torturer-surgeons there were quickly slain, saving what few ponies they could – though in the case of a couple of the prisoners their souls had already been yanked from their now dead bodies via the use of absolutely horrible soulsteel hooks.

These poor souls were given peace by Sunrise, each of them crying spectral tears of joy as their fears of becoming the Mask’s new ghost minions were alleviated. The corpses of already soul-stripped prisoners were stacked high over in a corner of the blood-stained hall, clearly awaiting pickup to some processing facility within the prison. Sully quickly retrieved a little pouch, from which he retrieved a hoof-full of seeds that he tossed on the corpses. In seconds the seeds had burrowed into the decaying flesh, sprouting a dense web of roots that encased them. In mere minutes the whole pile had been reduced to mulch, the root-web dissolving in kind, leaving behind a set of sprouting flowers that each bore a new seed, which was quickly harvested before the circle moved on.

“Nice little trick there – good for covering up bodies” Fire Orchid noted.

Sullen Hoof shrugged as he stashed the pouch of strange seeds elsewhere: “It’s a new strain of bulbs of demise and renewal – faster acting seeds. They need a bit of essence to work this fast, but they work really quickly, and blossom just as fast, self-pollinating too”

“Ok that’s neat – I’ve only heard of them used by jungle barbarians as a torture device” Fire Orchid noted, having heard one too many stories of barbarians stuffing bulbs of the same magical plant into open wounds and seeing the rapidly growing roots spread out and drain living tissue… which of course would hurt an awful lot, hence the use of the things as a torture device.

Shimmer shot Sully a curious look as they approached what looked like a simple elevator of some sort: “Where did you get those seeds?”

“Crashing Wave gave them to me in exchange for a copy of my recipe book – he said he’d try to train his flower-servants to cook” Sully remarked as he stepped over the dissolving remains of the elevator’s ghost guards, just before ghosting through a door.

Looking at the tail-end of ghost-sully move through the door to the elevator; Cash had a ponder: “Does he have to be disguised as a ghost to do that?”

Fire Orchid shook her head: “I think he told me that it just has to be a real door – which is true, because I tricked him once by having a door installed on a wall that just had stone behind it. It was hilarious”

“Wait, so it was you who ordered that door put on the side of the foundry? I thought it was a sidereal pulling tricks on us” Speaker groaned, recalling the confusion he had gotten from the facility management of the place.

Sullen Hoof popped back out of the elevator: “We’ll have to climb up – the platform is kept topside when not in use, I’ve opened the service door to the left”

The climb up was surprisingly easy – there was a full-on staircase that ran up and around the shaft, clearly originally put there for when the place was a hospital, to permit messengers easy access.

As they got closer to the surface the true stink of the prison started to seep in. The lower levels had smelled of fresh blood and gore, but this was different. This was old blood, sweat, tears, shit and piss all mixed together in cells that probably hadn’t been cleaned since Thorns fell. It was a struggle not to retch, not at all aided by the clamour of thousands of poor wretches that hung out from the cells along the hallways, their skeleton-thin limbs hanging out to elicit pity or the mercy of a swift death.

Speaker could not think. This much suffering made his very soul cry out and his eyes go blind with tears – action had to be taken. He called Homage from elsewhere and ignited its essence-edge, the golden glow of the gyroscopic chakram’s special feature leaving a glowing trail of light as the solar healer broke into a gallop down the nearest hall, Homage slicing through the iron bars as if they weren’t there as he called for everyone else to join him.

The rest of the circle wasn’t entirely caught off guard by Speaker’s impulsive behaviour – they had expected something like that happening – but still…

Cash sighed and organized the rest of the circle: “Sully, find and detain the warden. Shimmer, follow Speaker and keep any guards off him. Fire Orchid, find what passes for an armory here and take stock – I’m sure the resistance would love some extra weapons. Sunrise, you’re on ghost patrol: Either talk or shout them down. I’ll start organizing the ponies Speaker is freeing. Let’s go!”

Everyone split up, heading in each their own direction. Cash and Shimmer headed in Speaker’s direction, while Sunrise and Fire Orchid started looking for their designated targets. Sullen Hoof had already disappeared, seeking the warden of the accursed place.

The hallways of the once-hospital were wide enough to make room for groups of doctors hovering around patients, so there was plenty of room for Shimmer in her warform, as long as she kept her wings folded up. Her silvery talons, enhanced further by spirit-slaying charms, tore prison guard ghosts apart left and right, splattering the walls with pale fading ichors, much to the cheering of the prison inmates.

Cash trailed after her, his words loaded with golden essence and gilded promises, giving new energy to starved prisoners who otherwise had none, making them stagger out into the wide halls and make their way towards the messenger station: “Those of you with the strength, help someone weaker than yourselves – this is make a friend day!”

So many of the prisoners wept. It was difficult to tell if it was tears of joy, or due to the torture they had received – likely both.

With Shimmer covering for him, Speaker was able to very quickly free multiple wings of the prison’s population, while Fire Orchid raided the armouries and took what she could carry, destroying what little she had to leave behind, which left the remaining ghost guards scrambling for weapons to defend themselves. This in turn rendered the guards quite vulnerable to Shimmer’s verbal assaults, resulting in quite a few of them trying to flee the prison… but as Shimmer had figured, then there was indeed something that kept all ghosts from actually leaving the place, leaving them nowhere to run.

Trying to hold their spectral hooves over their ears didn’t help, for Sunrise would simply blast them away with targeted warcries – then switch tone and pour honey in their ears of how easy and lovely it would be to seek a new life via reincarnation. So many swords, clubs and uniforms fell to the floor, clattering against filth-stained tiles that hadn’t been scrubbed for ages, as ghosts by the hundred faded into blissful reincarnation.

By cleverly sampling the ectoplasmic ichors left behind by the ghost guards she slew, Shimmer was able to briefly shapeshift into onethem. With this she would skip up to the barred windows and call to the guards patrolling the outside: “Hey, we’ve got a riot in here – come help beat up everyone!”

As giddy and manically enthusiastic guard patrols rushed inside, their ghostly eyes shining with mad malice, they were ambushed one after the other. It was either Fire Orchid falling upon them, her saddlebags loaded with weapons to the point that she looked a bit like a porcupine, or Sunrise pummelling them with words, or Shimmer webbing them and then enveloping them in long tentacles that let her crush them all at once.

Once Speaker had run through every prisoner wing, he joined Cash at the messenger station. Using his medical charms there, many of his newer charms having been developed at the Sunhill hospital to enable him to more efficiently treat large number of patients rapidly, he was able to restore starved and skeletonized pony prisoners, one after the other in no time at all. Once thusly restored, Cash sent them down the messenger stairs, where Cash had left instructions on how to find their way to the seventh tiered sanctum.

It took a bit over two additional long hours to have all of the prisoners funnelled down into the sewers. Once everyone arrived down there, they were met by three dozen messengers who looked very bored… oh right, the messengers…

A quick round of social charms bent the minds and memories of the messengers, convincing them that the reason for their hold-up was a petty conflict between the ghosts that had managed the messenger service. They all departed with new messages memorized for various random recipients, leaving the messenger tunnels open for the escapees to get into the sewers.

While the rest of the circle shepherded the escapees, Sunrise and Speaker prepared to bring down the prison: Sunrise sent a powerful prayer to the gods of ruin, offering them the dread prison as a sacrifice.

With his singing staff, Speaker forced cracks all throughout the foundation of the grand structure. Sound transmitted well through the dense stone, making his reach far as he wasn’t moving very much stone around – just separating some very discrete amounts… and thus the whole structure was physically disconnected from the ground around it.

“This is my gift to you. Roots severed, let this be your glorious ruin!” Sunrise finished her prayer, golden essence wrapped tightly around her words to all but guarantee that it would be heard.

Speaker quickly felt the tremors coming: “Alright, we’re leaving – let’s go!”

Sunrise didn’t object, but didn’t move back much either. She knew exactly what had been offered, and trusted the gods of ruins to not be greedy – especially considering her own well-earned reputation in heaven for brutally verbally abusing corrupt gods that stood in her way.

For the rest of Thorns the experience was far more confusing – at least initially: Streams of essence, the long fingers of various lesser gods and elemental minions of the gods of ruin, streamed down from the heavens and washed over the prison. Sure, you had to have essence sight to see any of it, thought the instant that the amount of essence wrapping around the prison reached critical mass it contracted: In a snap the whole structure imploded, collapsing into a spectacular ruin as its towers and walls fell out into its surrounding prison yards, splashing up against the prison walls that rimmed the cruel institution. The plume of dust that erupted from this whirled high up into the sky, many an air elemental dancing around in the cloud with irreverent glee.

In an instant hundreds of ghosts chained to high poles across the city that had been modified via necromancy to have grotesquely large mouths and tiny atrophied bodies, started to cry out into strange devices that amplified their screams, like a living weeping alarm system, as they saw the prison implode and the plume of dust rising.

Ghosts, being generally quite easily excitable – especially new and novel experiences – quickly gathered at the ruined prison to cheer and dance, simply because it was so different, so unexpected. It took roughly twenty minutes or so before the first deathknights showed up, bringing order to the scene – not that they could do much to restore the prison before the Mask would show up and be angry with them.

Down in the depth under the city, deep in the sewers of Thorns, the circle and just under three thousand escapees flooded the seven-tiered sanctuary.

“You were supposed to just bust out our missing operatives… not bring everyone – where are we even going to fit this many ponies? We don’t have food for this!” Silken Laughter cried out in a most distraught tone, looking on at the near endless stream of miserable ponies coming from the sewers.

Shimmer shrugged: “Oh we figured that food would be an issue here – so we brought some from home”

Sauntering up to the circle, looking rather angry– but still in a very dignified manner, Silken Laughter spoke through gritted teeth: “…and you lot didn’t screen the prisoners you brought here, did you?”

Cash instantly picked up what Silken Laughter was talking about, without the mystery dandy actually saying it, to which he quickly noted: “We did not – there are plenty of immaculates among these ponies, immaculates who know full well that their prayers to the dragons for salvation went unanswered, and that they have been rescued by golden anathema. I honestly suspect that all but the most zealous of them will be very open to reconsidering their dogma, and if you need help with those we can pitch in”

It was clear that the bandit king wished to continue the discussion, but a sudden spike in noise from a nearby hall grabbed everyone’s attention.

A lot of eyes went quite wide as Shimmer opened her elsewhere portal and started to retrieve crate after crate of densely pre-packaged rations, barrels of fresh water, and quite a lot of fresh fruit – for when there are no ponies in her elsewhere-den, then it was frozen in time. For pretty much all of the refugees and rebels in the sanctuary, this was the first fresh fruit any of them had tasted in years. Adding to that was what Shimmer had simply stored elsewhere, which turned out to be three yeddim-sized cargo wagons loaded with rice and other foodstuffs. A lot of furniture and a few ceilings had be ‘gently’ moved out of the way to properly fit these in, Speaker expediting the ceiling removal via his singing staff while Silken Laughter’s minions cleared away druggies and futons to make space to store the crates – though having some three thousand new residents didn’t exactly make that easy.

At a very newly made balcony that overlooked the unloading of one of the massive three-story yeddim-wagons loaded with rice, the circle and silken laughter celebrated the developments of the day, all the while looking down on the ant-hive of activity below as hundreds of ponies of ran around to distribute food and blankets for all the new arrivals.

“This… this is enough food to feed an army for months!” Silken Laughter said, sounding very much as if he didn’t quite believe his old eyes.

“I know, they’re making me look bad” a new voice said, coming from a young mare with a beautiful white coat and a long blond mane who sauntered up to the exalted gathering.

Silken Laughter, still looking somewhat near his wits end from the appearance of massive volume of everything and everyone who had showed up within the hour – all of which he in theory had to somehow manage, sighed deeply of relief: “Oh Anja thank heavens, finally – this place is turning into a mad-house… more so than usual”

Introductions were made, and Anja Silverclaws – a fellow lunar, chosen of the changing moon caste – was more than happy to see some proper celestial exalts showing up to help: “Oh finally… Giggles here, with all due respect - he never leaves this place, and his goons all smoke up after a run so it always takes them days to sober up”

The circle was a bit surprised at Silverclaws’ blunt and direct tone, but as it turned out then she was the daughter of a lesser noble house of Thorns who had escaped the shadowland leading a dozen foals away from the horror of the city. Following that hardship she had exalted, and after receiving her training she had set up shop in Thorns, smuggling ponies out, smuggling food in, and taking ‘swipes’ at the Mask’s forces to keep them from sleeping too easily.

“Sounds like fun” Shimmer said, nodding to Silverclaws’ story.

Shaking her head, her long blond mane going a little all over the place, Silverclaws frowned: “Not really. It’s been more like every time I come back more ponies were missing. I’m good at being sneaky and clever, not training others. When the escaped palace guards showed up, they helped a lot by training the smugglers that Giggles had, but the Mask just started catching them as fast as we could train them… we never had an advantage for more than a few days before we’d lose it again”

“Rough – but with our numbers now that shouldn’t be an issue” Fire Orchid noted.

The catty lunar groaned and face-hoof’d: “Oh sure, we’ll just marched a few thousand random ponies with no combat training against the Mask’s undead armies. That’s sure to end well”

Vanilla Bean agreed with this, arguing that with these bold moves it would be important to lock down the sanctuary and train everyone into competent fighters first, which of course would take months – but now they had the food to allow them to do that.

The lords of Sunhill found this far too slow, Speaker especially so: “We didn’t mean numbers like that… we meant just us exalts. We just took down the Mask’s zombie factory. Tomorrow we’ll find something else to hit. In a week he’ll have nothing else left and will be forced to retreat back into the underworld lest we take him out too”

Silken Laughter found this quite amusing for some reason: “They’re like you Vanilla Bean, when you had just exalted – wanting to save all of Creation and do it in a day!”

“Perhaps – except it’s pretty obvious that these ponies might actually have the power to actually do that” Vanilla Bean noted, sipping her mug of pineapple juice and relishing in finally having something other than her usual smuggler moonshine and sewer-water to drink.

Cash found this exchange amusing as well, but kept himself in check to maintain decorum: “Indeed – though we had our own teething issues. We learned a lot of things the hard way, and those experiences humbled us. Hell, if it wasn’t because the Mask having been sending barges loaded with hidden cargo holds full of zombies at us, then we probably wouldn’t even be here”

“Which he started doing after Sunhill worked with Lookshy to take down this Deep Rot place, right?” Said Anja, finally having pieced enough of the narrative together to see the big picture of why the circle was there.

Sunrise nodded: “The Mask used Deep Rot to process all the knowledge reports he gets from kidnapping and interrogating ghosts here in the east. Without it, he gets lots of reports, but has little capacity to read through them and find anything useful. Plus, at Deep Rot Lookshyan forces skirmished with Thornguard – this ruined the Mask’s diplomatic efforts here in the scavenger lands, because you can’t really sell the idea of you being a friend of the river provinces if you’re overtly picking a fight with their primary military protectors. We’ve also killed at least one of the Mask’s deathknights back then, plus the two today, so he has plenty of issue with us”

Everyone agreed that with a combination of all of that, then it made sense that the Mask had begun targeting Sunhill.

“Right, well the real question is what to do next – or better yet, how about an overall strategy for what should be dealt with first?” Vanilla Bean said, floating a notebook out of her worn and patched saddlebags.

Silverclaws shot the solars a miserable look: “See what I mean – they just sit and plan all day! They never actually do anything”

“Hey, plans are important. Now, let’s see what you have and then we’ll tell you our plans” Cash said, looking all kinds of eager to enter into a thrilling planning meeting.