They say it walks in soft hooves.

That it means no harm. That it chooses its visits carefully — to those who are touched by shadow, gifted with sensitivity. That it only lingers in the stillness, and if you keep your body calm and your eyes shut, it will pass through without incident.

They say all this.

But they don’t see what she sees.

It comes to her door each night after the village fire dims — when the frost creeps up the windowpanes and the world exhales into silence. First the scratching, faint and deliberate, like a claw tracing letters into wood. Then the hinge creaks. The air shifts.

And it enters.

Long-limbed. Pale-skinned. Joints too many. Head too low. A thing that walks like it was never taught how to walk properly. Its breath smells of damp straw and charred teeth. Its back pulses as if something inside is still crawling, trying to get out.

She calls it the Mare.
Not aloud. Never aloud.

Its arrival is slow. It does not chase. It waits. Stalking in circles at the edge of her room. Peering from corners. Its mouth does not open until she flinches — then it unhinges, impossibly wide, and inside there is only dark — no tongue, no voice, just a long tunnel of wind and pulling.

The villagers think it’s a blessing.
They speak of it like a superstition.
“It visits those with deeper minds.”
"It stays only if you resist her.”

They light blue candles in thanks.

She doesn’t light anything anymore.

One morning, after a night that felt like a lifetime, she walks — barefoot, sleepless, shivering — to the edge of the Black Thicket, where the moss hangs like drowned cloth and the birds forget how to sing.

There lives the Bonewort, a crooked sorcerer with glassy eyes and nails like bark.

“I want it gone,” she tells him.

He peers at her a long time, lips pressed, then moves wordlessly through his shelves. Hands her a small vial. The liquid is gray. It trembles inside the glass like it’s trying to escape.

“Drink this at dusk,” he rasps, “and hold still. If it speaks, do not answer. If it touches you, do not follow.”

She drinks it. That night, the Mare arrives as always — but slower. It watches her from a distance. For the first time, it hesitates. She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t speak. It lingers for hours, its chest moving like a bellows, the ceiling bending slightly above it — then slips back into the wall.

It returns the next night. And the next.
It is never gone.

Some nights, she builds traps of sound — tapping rhythms into her ribs, counting silently in loops. The Mare paces, disoriented.
Other nights, she draws runes under her tongue — symbols she found in Bonewort’s grimoires. They flicker briefly before fading.

But mostly, she endures.

She cannot kill it.
She cannot banish it.

She can only outlast it.

The others think she’s mad.
She looks pale. She walks like her bones are too heavy.

“She’s lucky,” they say.
“To be visited so often.”

They don’t see the claw-marks at her windowsill.
They don’t hear the creaking.
They don’t smell the rot that seeps into the floorboards.

The Mare still comes.
It always will.

But she meets it now with open eyes and a blade beneath her pillow, even though she knows the blade will do nothing.

And when the villagers sleep soundly in their candlelit homes,
she sits upright in her room, spine locked, eyes wide —
watching the Mare watching her.