Sand and salt, gritty in his eyes.

Frigid winter air, sharp in his nostrils.

The sea crashing, lapping at his hooves.

These are the things Grim is first aware of as his mind struggles back into wakefulness. He heaves a ragged breath and coughs up sea water; the effort sends pain shooting through his ribs. His eyes are near-crusted shut, and they sting with what feel like the cuts of a thousand tiny knives as he forces them open. At first the world is out of focus, a grey blur that swims before his vision. As it sharpens into gloomy pre-dawn reality, it all comes flooding back.

Veigar, he thinks, and as if that name is a summoning spell, his best friend’s face appears in his mind’s eye with the same strange, cold and slightly sad stare that had been on his face in the last moments before it had all gone wrong. “Svikari,” he spits, his voice grating like gravel in his throat and his split lip pulling open to bleed afresh, filling his mouth with metallic warmth.

Then he tries to stand.

His body is stiff and numb from the cold, and moves as though he has aged twenty years overnight. His aching muscles and frozen joints tremble and resist as he pulls himself upright, and for a moment the dark beach before him spins. Licking at the ragged, bloody mess of his lip, Grim rubs the grit from his eyes against a foreleg, and cranes his head around to investigate the strange pulling sensation at his flank. As a seasoned warrior, Grim has become largely desensitized to blood and injury, but somehow it’s different seeing his own skin hanging like a flap from raw, red flesh.

Further investigation reveals no other major injuries, but there is a tenderness to his face that suggests another cut below his left eye, and a sore, strangely cold section of crest that suggests a patch of torn-out mane.

The gloom of the eastern horizon is giving way to pale lavender as Grim begins limping inland through the snow. His sodden roan coat is poor protection from the fierce wind, and violent shivers ripple through his body while ice crystallizes on his whiskers. He peers across the landscape, but there is little to see but a vast snowy plain in the dim light: certainly no hint of promising shelter.

He will die here, he suddenly realizes, and feels a stab of rage once more for Veigar and all the others who had betrayed him. After all he had been through - all he had accomplished - he will die here, in this frozen wasteland in the middle of nowhere, to be remembered as a failure by hundreds, if not thousands, of horses across the sea.

Grim has never been one to accept his fate lying down, however. Let the winter claim him not as a willing victim, but as a warrior to the very end.


And so he continues to walk, though with every step his strides grow slower and his head hangs lower.