The Horse That Watches at Night

I was 14 summers old that summer when my uncle packed me off to his farm. Fresh air and quiet hills, my parents hoped, would fix it. The farm groaned old, embraced by woods, a hundred years behind the times.

One command only was I issued by my uncle:

"Stay away from the black stallion. Don't feed him. Don't ride him. And if you hear something at midnight. don't answer."

He put the horse in the rear one — a black, tall beast with too-human eyes, like it knew everything.

It was named Asar.

Which, I later found out, meant "void" in some ancient language.

I avoided it at first. But couldn't help but hear the noise.

Each night — roughly 3 AM — I'd hear hooves. Heavy. Slow. Circling my window.

Clop. Clop. Clop.

When I looked once through the blinds, the stallion just stood there… staring up at me. Unblinking. Misting his breath in the hot summer air.

His eyes shone softly red.

The following morning, I asked my cousin, Mariam, about it.

She didn't glance up. Merely whispered:

"He comes when you're hollow inside."

I woke up one evening with a gasp, having a nightmare. Asar was running in flames, his body of bone and smoke. I could hear my mother screaming for help, caught in his mouth.

The hooves stopped outside.

Quiet.

And then I heard the soft whinny… right outside my door.

Something scraped against the wood.

I did not open it.

But on the morning, there were hoof prints right up to the door. Black ash where the mud would have been.

I finally visited my uncle. He looked tired… older than he'd been a week before.

He told me that Asar had appeared in a storm 15 years earlier. No one had brought him. No one had sold him. He had just. existed, in the paddock one morning. And things had been strange ever since.

Crops dried up. Laborers vanished. Each winter, an animal would die in unnatural ways — depleted, as if something drained all the air from their lungs.

But no one was strong enough to dispose of the horse.

"He's not ours," my uncle said to me. "He just waits."

Waits for what?

He refused to say.

But I found out.

It was my last night there.

Mariam had vanished. We looked everywhere — woods, stream, the old barn. Nothing.

Then, from the distant stable, we heard it.

Crying.

I went first.

The black stallion did not stir. Not tied. Not imprisoned. Its eyes locked onto mine. Then it stepped aside.

Behind it. Mariam.

Eyes wide, body taut, mouth open in soundless scream. Her hands gripping the wall as if she were trying to claw free. But her shadow.

Her shadow moved on its own.

It curled upward — like it was running.

Before I could get away, Asar shrieked — not a whinny, not a neigh, but a high, long scream that shook the walls.

I fainted.

I woke up outside the barn. Alone.

Mariam was gone.

No track. No fight.

Only a single word scrawled on the stable door:

"TAKEN."

We never saw her again.

My uncle sold the farm the next year.

Nobody would buy the horse.

So he turned it loose into the woods.

Every now and then, at midnight, people report seeing hoofprints made of ash along the old riverbed. Sometimes they hear crying. then the stomping of one lone horse approaching them.

And the ones that it comes toward?

They do not vanish in an instant.

First… they stop sleeping.

Then, they start to listen for horses' hooves.

Then, one day… they answer the knock on their door.

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