The hunter does not feel confidence swell within his breast as his hooves make purchase and hit their target with deadly accuracy. He is not proud of himself, he is not pleased with his work. He watches as she falls, feels a pounding behind his eyes as the blinding magic rushes from her dying body and into the depths of his being. His blood rushes through him as hers rushes out of her. He watches her still clinging to life. He wants to tell himself he has done the right thing, and wants to listen to the ancestors that tell him the same thing in different voices.

His ears are perked forward, cupped perfectly so that they catch the dying words of the mare. She has thanked him, he realizes with a sudden dread. He balks at the thought of it at first. He has killed her to put her out of her misery and free her from insanity, but... if she retains the understanding that she needed saving, if she can understand the generosity of his powerful kick, what else does she understand? How, then, is she truly insane?

Is she?

Manhattan whines and pushes her head comfortingly into her master's knees, but it is no use. He falls like a lighthouse to the final wave that breaks its lasting vigilant watch over the sea. He crumbles with remorse he has never before felt. He cries out into the night, creates a low and mournful sound akin to the aching groans of the marsh's dead.

He lays a bridled head over her back. She seems small now, pitiful. He listens as the last breath leaves her body; he kicks out in pain as he imagines the aching within her dead soul. Is she freed? Has he done right by this poor creature, or has he acted in haste?

The voices assure him. Manhattan assures him. Everyone and thing in the marsh that night tells him has has done the best he can, but they are too eager for his mourning heart. He mourns the loss of his own morality; finds himself at last deplorable and considers for the first time how wretched his upbringing must have been for him to kill.

To kill at any age, certainly, but especially now. He knows he is so young; he felt it in the meadow with Delinne, surrounded by stallions of superior girth and advanced maturity. Certainly he is strong (are not all killers strong?) but so many surpass him. He is modest and understanding. He is humbled by the death of a mare whose name he never even learned.

Manhattan makes the mistake of parting her achingly starved jaws to grasp the flesh of the fallen. It is not her insensitivity that drives her to so blatantly disregard her master's emotions, it is her failure to hear his thoughts lost among the mess of the ancestors. No matter- her lips touch the thickening coat of the dead and her teeth scrape the flesh for an instant. It is a stupid instant, an instant lived in immediate regret. Knox lifts himself on two shaking front legs and pushes forward into the night mist that has settled gently over her body. He bares his teeth and emits a crazed neigh; he threatens the one he loves the most. His eyes are wide and blackened by shadow, his body is tense and charged to kill. He is a machine, he is a monster. But Manhattan understands her mistake. Manhattan yelps and flits away to rest in shadow. Manhattan understands.

Into the lamenting, deepening night, the murderer lays by her side as if awaiting her awakening- as if at any moment she may open her eyes and turn upwards to return the gentle caress of her lips to his neck. He rests his head gently over her ribs and waits for the sound of a heartbeat. He hates himself and what he has been made to be. He hates the enlightenment sent to him by these stallions of old, even as they at last come to agreement and lead him forward; even as the ceaseless conflict within his mind settles into silence.

Into the sinking, darkening night, he dreams of his own death.