The days had grown short, darkness tightening like the slip of a noose overhead. With dull eyes, I watched the sunlight disappear. It crowned the distant mountains for a moment before slipping down, and my shadow spread long and thin and hungry from my hooves. The sight of it stirred unhappy memories.

I had never been afraid of the dark. What lay waiting within unsettled the mind, now and then, but predators can be outsmarted – even killed. I had always thought that way. In my youth, I made a game of taunting them, and called myself victorious the longer I lived. But that was youth; with age had come a terror more absolute than the starlight, or the moonlight, or the cool kiss of winter’s air on my skin. With age had come the grief of loss; I bore it like a martyr, crushed under the weight of its burden, and yet refusing to cry out. Everywhere I looked I saw red eyes gleaming in the dark – there and not there, present and gone again. I called them ghosts, and I knew they would find me eventually, when all other hunters had failed.

But a more certain death had latched onto my trail as well, and that I welcomed, even as I bowed my head under the branches of another forest far from the one I dreamed of. My steps had grown slow and lethargic, muscle trembling over bone. I stumbled now and then, weak as a newborn foal. Any glory, any grandeur which I might have possessed, had all been shed like an old skin in the preceding months, and I looked half ghost myself, trembling in the darkness of the trees. It was illness; it grew from somewhere deep in my lungs and rattled as I breathed. Warmth perhaps – fire – might have cured it, but I had not seen fire in a long, long time. Perhaps I had not even the power to conjure it, anymore… I did not wish to know. I did not wish to learn so thoroughly how I had been abandoned by my god. Where once hope and warmth had bloomed, there was now only the raking cough shaking my sides, squeezing my ribs.

I was far too exhausted to be afraid.

When my thoughts were able to stir, I noticed distantly the smell of others on the bark and the snow. They were all strange to me; even if I had known them, they would still be strange. I no longer kept names close to heart; what was the use? The others of my kind – myself, even – were little more than walking skeletons and meat, all fit only to be devoured, defiled, destroyed. What was a soul? Where did it live? Why did it cut like knives when –

But I’m getting carried away.

I was alone in the forest that night, at first. I expected no company, but I did entertain the thought of happening upon it. I was not sure how much life I still possessed – another night? A day? A season? I did not hope to see spring, with my every other breath railing into cacophony, scaring the crows which had become my constant retinue. Mucus spilled onto my upper lip, wet and salty; I had given up thinking about it. No way I could cut myself open and see the extent of the damage – at least not in this state. I could only think and record it, perhaps keeping the facts for whoever I met at my last, to pass them on. It would be useful information, if the disease proved contagious...

Deep in the forest I stopped, ears twisting to catch the muted crack of someone, somewhere, sneaking around. I could not run; I drew a wheezing breath and stared into the dark, my horn a useless sword glinting above my brow. Perhaps it would be deterrent enough; I knew I presented an easy target. And a quick death seemed so much worse than the slow… I cleared my throat once, let my tail twitch, anxiously, at my back. ”Who’s there?” The sound was hoarse and rotten, vibrating against my strangled vocal cords.