FFMS031

The first night on the road, as the Order slept in the hay-fields along the market-lanes under the brilliant stars of the late-summer night skies, my dreams were crowded by petitioners and emissaries. The Filly brought them one by one to the entry-chambers of my fortified palace, where ghosts of myself directed them to seats here and there in the adjoining sitting-rooms. I forwarded a request via the Princess, asking her to contact Cherie, and bring that thestral's attention to my state of siege, the investing crowd of Order ponies besetting every sally-port and gate of myself – and in the meantime, I hurriedly expanded my reception-facilities to deal with those demanding a word with me.

I have barely in my life had any experience with the finer things, and I'm afraid to report that the chambers of reception I generated for my visitors were hardly suitable for the occasion or the crowds. I fear they resembled rather the under-furnished farmers' parlors I have seen in my short life, covers hastily removed from the threadbare chairs and side-tables, a portrait hung here or there to no particular aesthetic effect. I never came along with Sawbones and his escorts to see how the Duchesse and her peers organized things – all I could do was to imagine how one might generalize from the experience of a farming jenny to that of a leader of ponies.

The problems they brought me were all simply variations on a theme, the same problem, in innumerable fragmentary slivers, split among the disorganized horde of ponies which was the Order as it had set off from its cages onto its march from captivity into slavery. The mayors had been creatures of the camps, the cages. They reflected no command authority beyond those facilities' fences or gates. The mayors were not leaders of ponies, they were appointees of Cherie, administrators. Most of them felt rather strongly that their experience – or lack thereof – utterly unfit them for command in the field. All officers of the extinguished White Rose Army of Expedition had been exterminated – those few who had survived into captivity had not survived the after-effects, of which I shall write no more. Some half of the mayors had been non-commissioned officers – which is to say, corporals and sergeants. All good non-coms know enough to know that they aren't officers, aren't commanders. They exist to take the ideas of the officers and implement them as orders. It is not the function of a sergeant to give orders; all their training and experience tends towards the unfitting of such ponies for command.

The Order, thus, was a mob of veterans and sergeants, leaderless, unorganized in a technical sense. They could march, and they could train, but the only reason they were not a mob on the road at this very moment, was because the Company-pony guards accompanying the columns were providing the Order some semblance of order.

Cherie flew into my dream-fortress's highest-most turret, and met my restlessly pacing self there, awaiting her arrival.

"Damn you, why are they coming to me? You're the promised one, the one promising them their prophesied salvations! Here, down there – tell them what it is they are to do, who they are to have them lead them. I'm not leadership any more than any of they are! See this! Warlock's badge, Annalist understudy. I'm less than even a sergeant in the scheme of things. Do your job, Messiah!"

"Oh, Feufollet, don't be that way. You need to loosen up, have fun with this! By the way, I love what you've done with yourself. Looks like Dance Hall, only stretched vertically! What's this stone made of? It's all scintillant, remous glissant – glittery-swirly-noir!"

"A geode I saw in le salon de la tante de ma mère when we went visiting once. Damnit! Now you've got me doing it. Stop dropping random Prench into your speech, it's confusing me!"

"Non, non, incluez-vous, lean into it. Being a little exotic, it helps them relate to you. C'est vrai! They know you're not from around here, not their neighbor's filly. Trying to pretend otherwise, it sets off the wrong alarms. Be different, fille! And that brings us to why I'm here. Time to give them their reins, n'est-ce pas?"

"You're not going to appoint more of them to command again, are you?"

"Oh, rien de brutal. They're going to make their own officers, bien sûr!"

She said this last as we burst into one of my oversized parlors, crowded with the dream-shadows of dozens of anxious Order ponies. Cherie had gained a hoof-span of height and stature with every stride down that long imaginary staircase, and as she did, the room itself unfolded around us all. Her intent permeated my dream-palace, and the walls merged into the floors as the low, dark ceilings vaulted above us on wings of architectural whimsy. The long string of greeting-rooms dissolved into a grand chamber, with a pair of bars defining a debating-pit between two raised stands within which the dreaming ponies found themselves seated.

"Salutations, mes chevaliers du futur vivant!" boomed Cherie as she trotted across the center of the court and up the steps of a dais with an empty, elaborate chair. She sat down at the foot of the empty throne, and continued her exhortation of the crowd. "Welcome, mes amies! I see so many of you have come to discuss your self-governance. It is une bonne chose! You lack only un souverain ceremonial, to make of the occasion a proper États généraux. Princesse, if you would?"

And, stepping into the dream, strode the proper Spirit for the occasion, blue-furred Luna, modest and shy as she took her seat at the head of the chamber. The Filly would have been too much like a self-crowning, and the Nightmare, overwhelming and domineering. The Princess faded into her cushions, and allowed Cherie to play her courtier in front of the crowd. Speakers were summoned to one of the two podia that appeared to either side of the throne, facing the Princess. Each speaker addressed their concerns, their fears, to the Princess and to the crowd in front and behind them. The wide, empty court between the stands and the throne established a distance between Cherie and the Princess, and the ponies of the Order.

Was it intentional? I do not know, but it led the conversations to become, increasingly, arguments between the speakers called to each of the two podia, only ceremonially addressed to the Princess in her Court. Apparently arbitrarily selected speakers argued back and forth over the empty pavement of the court in between, and their debate defined the extent of the new Order's problems, their concerns, their expectations.
They knew that they had been 'enslaved', and trusted in Cherie and the Company to see them through this unnerving beginning of their service to themselves, and to the future. They had been set loose from one captivity, and invited to set foot upon another sort of captivity entire. One where they hid their personal weapons under the glamours of others, accepted the semblance of halters and hobbles, and the pretense and reality of the ultimate in humbling subjugation. All for a future which they could not see, could not be told of, could only trust in some unknown Plan.

These concerns distracted them for long dream-hours of venting, of fury and terror and uncertainty. The actual issues which they had brought to the door of the Princess's Court had been left, tumbled and forgotten, tucked beneath their chairs to cool and await their due turn. Emotions had to be vented before organization could be considered.

And there was a great deal of emotion to be vented. It was well, that the dreamworld had little concern for time and tide, because we spent a very long stretch of dream-time working through the anxieties of thousands of unorganized, traumatized ponies being led once again into the crucible. They were not yet ready to go back under the iron-smith's hammer, and the Court gave them that respite, that pause.

Finally, a moment came when all the ponies who needed to yell at each other had had their opportunity to bellow to their hearts' content, and there was silence in the Court.

"How then," asked Cherie for the Princess, at the foot of the throne, "Are we to deal with each other? How shall the Order conduct itself in the field and in the World? Who should lead you? How shall you in your hundreds, in your thousands, be ranked and directed?"

And then, began another series of debates – passionless, practical debates between exhausted ponies, too tired from their long venting to place unnecessary emotion into something too important for ego and excitement.

The Order spent the rest of that long, restless night, sleeping in the fields upon their halters and their hobbles, while in a Parliament of Dreams they ordered themselves, and found their leaders, and each pony found his or her fellow-rankers. The Order found its spontaneous order in that exhaustion that was the release of the dreaming self.

The Order laid down as a rabble of trained ponies. It awoke to the morning's road a small army of secret battalions properly brigaded, under officers chosen by giddy play-combat and the choice of their commands.

The combat-trials had been overseen by a laughing Nightmare, still wearing her Cherie-colours and her thestral semblance, overjoyed to sit once more in judgment of a tournament of champions. The elections among the victors had been conducted by a prancing Filly, cheering on the casting of stone-ballots in this basket or that at the end of a very, very long night.

I found myself, somehow, in command of one of those battalions. I argued futilely against my inclusion in the trials, in the elections – that I was a member of the Company, that I was a warlock and no part of command structures. I appealed three times, once to the Nightmare, once to the Filly, and one last time to the Princess. The last refused to even open her mouth to deny my request, that was done for her by her courtier, Cherie, that thestral's green slit-pupil eyes dancing at my disgust and confusion.

The Third Cohort dissolved within the new battalions of the Order. Stomper became field-commandant of the Order by overwhelming vote and by her strength in the lists. Almost all of the covert brigadiers were sergeants or corporals drawn from what had been the Third Cohort, whose existence was in a night, retired to that of historical record. The Company lost a cohort – and the Order claimed a command structure.

During the day, and the days that followed, the columns appeared to the world like slaves being driven to their fate by a remorseless guard. Unseen by the world, those guards walked among their haltered and hobbled fellows, leading their followers down into the future and their part in the Plan.

The placement of this and the preceding Feufollet manuscript was the occasion of some debate between myself and my peers in the Archives. They appear somewhat contradictory, and I am at a loss to explain the contradictions contained within both manuscripts. Was one of them a draft, somehow collated with the rest of the materials delivered to the Royal Archives by our unnamed benefactors? Are both of them? The effect of both together makes me wonder if these even belong together in a continuous history of the Black Company. It is worsened by the apparent absence of at least several Sawbones manuscripts in this section of the reconstructed narrative. Can we not appeal to our unnamed benefactors for some sort of update? - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

Need to know. You don't. And no. - Dusty Shelves, Royal Archivist