"Hellbent 1" by Aubra Penner

            The low, grassy hills seethed. They had been gray and green and purple in the dusky light, but now they shifted and writhed under the advancing armies. The view was distant- from another hill, from a mountaintop- but Jamik could see as from the nearest trampled knoll as a black horse, huge and deliberate and somehow wrong strode forward and crested a hill. His rider paused him, and they stood. The hill streamed by them, a huge mottled deluge that he knew were men: men on foot and on horses and wagons and chariots, and they all stank of blood. The great, shadowed mount stirred, and its rider shouted something. The words were poisinous with anger and a saturating malice that never left the rider's mouth; the horse twitched and pawed at the ground, but held its place. Its sooty muzzle was red with foam that held more blood than saliva or sweat, and it champed at an iron bit with long, pointed spikes protruding three inches beyond the horse's bloody muzzle. And, further up the long, heavy head, something was wrong with the great black eyes that were ringed in white.

            On the horse's back, the tall rider stared out at the army flooding the low grasslands before him. It was here, always here, that Jamik saw the smaller, straighter line of men along the grassy horizon. They were all mounted, and stood in a long, straight line. One or two proud, ragged standards flew above their shifting rank, but there should have been more. There were... too few. Something was wrong, so undeniably wrong.

            Then screams errupted. They weren't real screams, somehow. They carried on, and on, and on, and he could never tell whether they were in sorrow or warning or for victory, but as his eyes turned back to the wrong-seeming mount on the hill's crest and his rider that seemed to be half man, half shadow, he knew what they screamed of. The shadow jerked, then with a roar that was half shout and half extrasensory, like the high screams, he struck the ashblack horse with a thin whip and leaned forward in his high-pommeled jet black saddle. The horse tore down the hillside, seeming to sweep more soldiers down with them, but as they reached the flats and the horse caught its stride and settled into a panicked but long-accustomed leaping stride, the shadowman was left behind. He went somehow limp, as though he fought too hard to control his body to remain on his horse. Seconds later, the last of the great splotched army swept past the space where he had fallen. There his body lay, greasy mail askew and face frozen into a death expression of... hatred. Hatred in so pure a form that no one had seen its like. A short spire rose impossibly from the mail- the crossbow's bolt had found its mark. The last sound of the dream was the pounding of thousands of crazed feet and the high scream and then low bellow of the black horse as it met the enemy's scant ranks, riderless.