Horses.

And then he saw horses. Half-glimpsed in the black white night, sheltered and hidden by the high hand of elder trees. They were black and sleek, steel and onyx as they weathered the world in quiet fright. But they were strong too, strong but scared, and they walked with one another, pausing occasionally to sniff the ground, to trace a picture of angels and gods in the wet dirt beneath gold-plated, fingered hooves. And he watched as they spoke to one another and ran and fled like ghosts through the trees so tall and old, so fallen and bold, that they stood like black and silver spines on the devil's backbone.

The horses remembered, oh yes they remembered, they remembered a time when the fields were an endless sprawl stopped only by the broad but gentle hand of the sea; they remembered when the sun was a beacon of painful joy, when the mountains kept moving upward with no peak in sight like sharp fingers reaching for heaven. They remembered when they had once walked like men and spoke like waves, when the noise and the tears were so far behind the skin of their faces that it hurt just to imagine them tearing free, so bloody and free, and pouring forth in great salted strands of cloudy mist for all to see. But those days were done, oh, those days were long dead and gone along with all the silent children who had once wept on swingsets and slept in amber grass while the horses watched over them.

And then he saw horses. He saw them run and wheel. Blinding through the trees, like sparks, like soldiers, like wheels of lights that sped and fled leaving arches traced behind them glowing in the inhuman night, twisting steel and speaking sparks in a wordless mumbling otherworldly choir.

They were everything he wanted to be, wild and carefree, but burdened with memory, pained by knowledge and by loss, but still gloriously alive, still running after all these years, still obscured by elder trees in the deep dark heart of the wood. Still happy, despite the sorrow. Still powerful and kind despite the age they now lived in. He saw through fogs, saw what they used to be and what they would one day become: pharaohs in monstrous chrome castles who ate the flesh of the weak and trod upon utopian graveyards with a bloodless stench of innocence lost. He saw them speak and he saw them walk on two legs, once again.

He knew them not as they wished to be seen but as they truly were.

And then he saw horses.