A slow wind coughs and brushes through the grasses on the hills of Khangai. The sun is like a jolly slumbering beast in the sky – by way is painted in soft reds and quivering violets. Clouds in dark grey coats float sparingly above. A scene of blue rhythm, of gentle movement, of massiveness in the kinship of a happy giant.
Khangai Mountains, modern day Mongolia, 1603.
And suddenly, three figures appear rumbling over one of the hills. Three stoic and plain faced men suited in traditional Mongolian cloth, riding muscular steeds. Their eyes collectively hone and scan across the fields below. They are searching for any sign of wild – horses, a group of about seven grazing some four miles away. The men charge down with the swiftness and noiselessness of a breeze.
Later that afternoon the same three men strut back to their yurt village, smirking, proud and wrangling a few of the newly caught wild horses. The smaller men, women, and children cheer. The three men are welcomed back with open arms and a steaming feast – afternoon becomes evening, evening to dusk, dusk cascades into a roaring nighttime.
Wind as soulful as loving nature, coldness etched on each blade of grass; the crew of proud horse-wranglers, their closest friends and families, all gather in the warmth of arkhi liquor. They run the night away, laughing and drinking for hours.
But, sometime around 3AM, as the last droplets of drink are drunk, and the last sleepy jittering subsides, a wild horse wakes up. It’s tied by the hooves to the other four wild horses, who all sleep nervously in the confines of capture. This particular horse is a deep black with scattered white spots. He glances around in an almost sentient or human-like fashion. Looking at the slumbering men, the ropes around his body, and the distant airy void.
Then the horse closes his eyes. His coat and limbs begin to crack soundlessly. His flesh turns into a gaseous liquid, melting and oozing with a vague spirituality around the horse’s binds. Suddenly, the horse is whole again, but free. He struts up to a sleeping drunken man on the ground. The horse’s face and jaws open as wide as a whale shark, again morphing into a deathly shape, a spiral of teeth and bones and blood. He lunges onto the man and eats him up in an instant.
That night, over many hours as sunbreak rubbed her eyes, screams were heard in every yurt. No one escaped. No one could overpower the specter horse. Not the strongest men, not the fastest children. In the end, dawn drew and the black horse with white spots doddled out into the fields.