Bram's Last Ride

The letter Sir Korax received from Duke Wellington that afternoon was as short and blunt as the man himself:

Bram is past service. See to it.

No condolences. No sentiment. Not even the courtesy of a signature.

Just: See to it.

Korax stared at the words a moment longer than they deserved, then folded the scrap of parchment with care and slipped it into his pocket. The stone corridors of the keep were cool and dim as he made his way down to the stables, boots echoing on old flagstones that had heard too many orders like this one.

The stables smelled of hay, sweat, and the faint sting of iron from horseshoes cooling in water. Grooms moved back and forth, brushing younger mounts, checking hooves, muttering to one another about feed and weather. No one stopped him; an old knight in worn mail passing down the long aisle was a common enough sight.

Bram stood in the last stall, as he always had.

Once, he’d been a mountain of muscle and fire, a thunderclap of hooves and fury. He was the kind of warhorse ballads pretended were common: broad-chested, impossible to unseat, eyes like coals. Three different knights had ridden him into battle; two of them had lived to thank him.

Now his coat was freckled with grey and white. An old break had twisted his left hind leg so that he rested on it carefully, never quite trusting it. The straw beneath him was clean but damp with the smell of liniment. The scent clung to him like the inevitability of winter.

“Afternoon, old boy,” Korax said.

He rested his hand on the horse’s thick neck and felt the warmth there, the faint tremor of age in the muscle.

Bram flicked an ear, turned his head, and found him with cloudy eyes that still held their stubborn intelligence. The horse snorted, soft and accusing.

You’re late.

“I had to argue with a Duke,” Korax murmured. “He usually wins. Not today.”

From his cloak, he drew a small apple, slightly bruised. Bram’s lips quested for it, teeth finally closing around the fruit with slow, deliberate satisfaction. He chewed as if he had earned this apple specifically which, Korax conceded, he had.

A young stable boy hovered near the stall door, shifting his weight, fingers worrying at the hem of his tunic.

“Sir?” the boy ventured. “The Duke’s man said… he said to use the back paddock. Said it’s… less of a fuss.”

Korax didn’t miss the unspoken words: less noise, fewer tears, no audience. A bolt to the skull or a blade at the throat, somewhere convenient for the men with shovels.

“I won’t need the paddock,” Korax said.

The boy blinked. “Sir, the Duke—”

“Has had his say.” Korax kept his voice mild. “I’ve had mine. Halter him.”

The boy swallowed. “Sir, he can’t—”

“Gently,” Korax added. “We’re going for a walk, not a charge.”

Between them, they eased the halter over Bram’s head. The old horse tolerated the leather and buckle with a long-suffering sigh, shifting his weight to accommodate the pull on his mane. He had worn heavier tack in worse moments.

When Korax led him from the stall, the horse limped, but he walked. Pride still straightened his neck, set his ears forward. A warhorse would not be carried.

They passed younger mounts snorting and stamping, tossing their heads as grooms clicked tongues and tugged at reins. None of them paid much mind to the old knight and the older horse moving toward the side gate with the slow inevitability of dusk.

In the courtyard, the usual shuffle of the day continued: clatter of buckets, distant clang of practice steel, the murmur of kitchen girls crossing with baskets of bread. No one stopped them. No one asked.

Korax did not mount Bram. He walked beside him, hand wrapped loosely around the reins, keeping pace with the horse’s shortened stride. They had both taken many roads before, in the name of their Realm, to battlefields and places where the Veil thinned and things slipped through. This was different; this was the first time Korax had been sent to escort an old comrade off the map entirely.

“You remember this path?” he asked quietly as they stepped through the gate and onto the narrow road that wound away from the castle. “I took you down here before, when I was barely more than a stable boy. A squire with straw in his hair.”

Bram’s ears flicked back, then forward again. Of course he remembered.

The road snaked through scrub and stone, then curved toward the east. Out there lay the Eastern Shattered Marches. The old killing grounds where human and orc banners had once snapped in the same bitter wind. The skies had been thick with smoke and shrieking iron. The ground had swallowed blood until it could drink no more.

Time had moved on, but not kindly. Weeds grew between the ruts of abandoned carts. Birds nested on rusted spearheads. Grass had crept down into trenches that had once been teeth in the earth.

As they walked, Korax glanced back at the castle, at its towers shrinking behind them. The Duke wanted it quick. Clean. Forgettable.

The Duke didn’t get everything.

By the time they reached the ridge, the sun hung low, bleeding deep reds and bruised purples into the sky. Below them, the hollow of the battlefield opened like an old wound. At the farthest edge, a dark smear of trees marked the beginning of the Ghostwood.

The Ghostwood sat where the Human Realm frayed. Old stories said its roots tangled with other places, other Realms, and that sometimes things slipped through. The woodland creatures whispered of horse spirits there, hooves that never tired, manes that never dulled, eyes that saw every path between worlds.

Korax had come to this ridge before, alone, to listen. To feel where the Veil stretched thin and murmured.

Today, he led Bram down.

The earth hummed with memory. It showed itself in flickers at the corner of his vision: shadows charging, falling, rising to charge again. Echoes of banners snapping in a wind that did not blow. Men and orcs, dead for decades, swung their final blades over and over in silence.

Bram’s ears twitched, tracking things Korax could not see clearly.

He did not shy.

He had lived these ghosts once. Their secondhand rage did not frighten him.

At the heart of the field, clustered near the rusted carcass of a shattered siege engine, Korax stopped. The air tasted faintly of old iron and colder things, like the edge of snow. Here, the Veil had been worn thin by centuries of fear and fury. Realms rubbed against each other like stones.

“We just move north from here,” Korax murmured, half out of habit. His voice died quickly in the hollow, swallowed by ancient quiet.

They angled toward the Ghostwood, moving perpendicular to the wind until even that faded. Under the trees, the air grew still and heavy, thick with the scent of damp earth and old sap. Twilight settled into the branches like ash.

Korax unhooked the reins from Bram’s bridle.

The horse blinked slowly at him, then lowered his head to tug at the sparse grass growing in the patchy light, lips working the blades with stubborn patience.

“They wanted it quick,” Korax said. “In a paddock. With a bolt or a blade.” His hand moved along Bram’s neck, fingers tracing dips and scars he knew better than his own. “You’ve carried enough terror. You’re not meat, you’re a war hero. At least to me.”

He took a few paces away, giving Bram space. The battlefield behind them lay in shadow; the Ghostwood ahead watched with its quiet, many-eyed darkness.

“The Mystic Greybeard always told me most horses see more Realms than we do,” he said conversationally, as if there were still an evening’s chores waiting back home. “When they shy at empty air, it’s only because something walked in front of them that we’re too blind to notice.”

He let out a breath that might have been a laugh.

“If he’s right, then this place is probably a bit crowded for you.”

Bram lifted his head. For a heartbeat, his ears pricked forward the way they had in his youth, nostrils flaring, as if he scented distant thunder.

“I’m not here to make you fight again,” Korax said softly. “Just to open a gate.”

He knelt in the cold grass, the joints in his knees complaining, and pulled from an inner pocket a small charm: a horse’s head etched crudely into a sliver of bone, threaded on a worn leather thong. Cracks spidered from its edges, but the carving still held the suggestion of life, flared nostrils, a flowing mane.

Arcturin, Greybeard’s only known student, had pressed it into his palm years ago on the slopes of Mount Llywelyn. Apollo, Korax’s younger steed, had stood beside him then, tossing his head impatiently.

“For four hooves that have earned a gentle road,” the young wizard had said. “When the time comes. For them, not for you.”

Korax closed his fingers around the charm now, feeling the familiar grooves bite into his palm. He bowed his head.

“Yewah conudah ugraphi polis,” he whispered.

No dramatic flare of magic answered. No crackling blue fire or thunder splitting the sky. Instead, the change came like a held breath suddenly taken. The air thickened, pressure shifting so that his ears rang faintly.

When he opened his eyes, he and Bram were no longer alone.

Shapes moved between the trees at the edge of sight. Pale forms, half-smoke, half-bone. Horses, dozens of them, sliding in and out of the trunks like mist given weight. Some bore the faint trace of tack, ghost-leather and shadow-iron; others ran bare, manes streaming in a wind Korax could not feel.

They flickered between being presence and afterimage, as if they were both memory and light.

Bram’s ears snapped forward. A low, uncertain snort rumbled out of him.

“There, boy,” Korax said softly. “Company.”

One of the spirits broke from the others and stepped closer. As it drew near, its outline sharpened, becoming more than suggestion. It was thin from long running, ribs like curved branches, eyes deep pools of strange, steady light. Its mane flowed as if underwater.

It circled Bram once, hooves making no sound on the leaves. Then it nudged his shoulder with a careful, familiar insistence.

Bram answered with a whicker higher and clearer than anything that should have come from an old throat. A young horse’s sound.

Korax swallowed against the tightness in his chest.

“You know each other,” he murmured. “Of course you do.”

He stepped close enough to rest his hand against Bram’s muzzle. The horse’s breath was warm against his skin, the exhale tinged with the sweetness of crushed grass.

“I could have argued to keep you at the castle,” Korax said. “Leave you standing in a stall until your legs gave out. Let the squires whisper, ‘That one carried Sir So-and-So at the Battle of Who-and-What.’”

He shook his head slowly.

“You deserve more than a story in someone else’s mouth. You deserve a herd.”

Bram snorted, pressing into his palm.

Korax unclasped the bridle. Leather slid over the greying mane with a soft hiss, the sound of years unfastening. He held the bridle a moment, then let it fall to the grass where it lay like the shed skin of some smaller life.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved.

Bram stood with ears flicking between Korax, the spirit horse he remembered, and the pale figures waiting in the trees. His crooked leg trembled once.

“Go on,” Korax whispered. “They’ve been circling us long enough.”

Bram took the first step toward the Ghostwood.

The limp was there, but less.

Another step, and the stiffness eased, as if he were walking out of a heavy cloak.

A third step, and his hind leg moved nearly true. Color seemed to seep back into his coat, enough at least to hint at the rich brown he had once been. Light skated along his shoulders the way it did on young muscle.

By the time he reached the nearest of the spectral herd, his gait had smoothed into the strong, rolling stride Korax remembered from his boyhood: a thunder in the ground, a promise in motion.

The herd closed around him, bumping him with spectral shoulders, nipping playfully at his flank. One tossed its head near his, mane whipping; Bram answered in kind, tail swishing. His eyes shone clear now, no cloudiness, only a fierce gladness.

Korax realized he was smiling. It hurt, but he let it stay.

The spirit horses broke into a canter, hooves stirring no dust, only a faint shimmer in the air. They circled once around the nearest stand of trees, a ring of ghostly motion, and then, as one, they turned toward a point that wasn’t quite in the world.

Lightning flashed bright enough to stain the air silver. Thunder rolled beneath their hooves, a sound that seemed to come from beneath the earth and above the sky at once.

The herd surged upward. Together.

Korax raised an arm to shield his eyes. The shapes blurred into streaks of light, then into nothing at all.

Silence fell.

The Ghostwood stood as it always had: trees breathing slowly, shadows pooling in their roots. No hoofprints marked the ground. No mist clung to the branches.

At Korax’s feet, Bram’s bridle lay where he had dropped it. Nothing else remained.

He crouched and picked it up. The leather felt heavier now.

“Run well, old boy,” he said quietly.

He did not expect an answer.

The walk back across the hollow battlefield felt different in reverse, as if he were stepping backward out of a dream. The phantoms at the edges of his vision still swung their final blades, still fell in their final sprawls, but they seemed smaller, somehow. Less important.

At the rusting siege engine, he reached out and brushed his fingers across the corroded metal. The touch anchored him in the ordinary world of rust and chill and callused skin.

He turned southwest instead of retracing his exact path, climbing the ridge by a different line. The wind had risen; it sighed across the low grass and rattled the brittle stems of last season’s weeds.

For a moment, as he climbed, sound shaped itself into something else. Into the drumming of hooves far away. Not the desperate pounding of a charge, but the free, unhurried rhythm of a horse running because it wanted to.

Korax paused at the top of the ridge and looked back.

From here, the battlefield was just another scar on the land. Grass. Stone. A dark smudge where the Ghostwood began. No one who didn’t know would have guessed what had happened there in the last hour, or in the last war.

Empty. Ordinary. Unremarkable.

He let his gaze linger on the edge of the trees until his eyes blurred.

If he listened very closely, past the wind and the lonely rattle of dead grass, he could almost hear it: a familiar snort, dry and amused, as if some stubborn warhorse were wondering what took him so long to head home.

You’re late.

Korax huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh or might have been the start of a sob. He turned toward the distant outline of the castle.

When he returned, the Duke would ask a simple question: “Is it done?”

Korax would answer yes. He would say he took Bram out to the old battlefields, as the Knight requested. He would not mention phantom herds or charms or the Ghostwood. The Duke liked his stories neat, magicless, and bloodless.

Some stories belonged to men like that.

Others belonged to quieter things.

This one belonged to a horse named Bram, who had carried three knights into hell and, at the end of all things, had finally been allowed to choose his own road.

Korax walked on, the bridle hanging from his hand, the faint echo of hoofbeats keeping pace with his shadow until the ridge fell away behind him.