{"sf1_id":null,"sf2_id":"eRbKDpAe","title":"~ Dark Horseman ~","author":"Cederwyn Whitefurr","words":8812,"posted_at":"2026-06-28T11:06:56.000Z","tags":["Anti-Hero","Fantasy","Fiction","Finding Oneself","Furry","Ghosts","Guilt","Horse","Human","Memory Loss","Metaphysical","Posession","Redemption","Series","Trauma","Undead","Undead Protagonist","Western"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/eRbKDpAe-dark-horseman","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/eRbKDpAe","image_url":"https://www.sofurryfiles.com/std/thumb?page=\u0026ext=.jpg","description":"A revenant horseman rides the badlands collecting debts from the dead—spirits bound by guilt, obsession, and memory.  \n But every soul he frees is another fragment of something he once was… and Elias Crowe is far from whole.","content":"Dark Horseman\n\nJune, 2026\n\n© Cederwyn Whitefurr\n\nAll Rights Reserved.\n\n**Prologue: Death Does Not Become Me**\n\n_They shouldn't have buried me. I'm not dead._\n\nThe words scraped from a throat long silenced by lead — low and wrong, like wind clawing through dry reeds. Under a fat, copper-bleeding moon, the badlands waited. A shallow grave in a dry wash outside the forgotten speck called Bitter Wells: rocks heaped loose, a broken wagon spoke driven crooked into the dirt like a mocking cross.\n\nThey had dragged Elias Crowe there after the ambush. Three bullets in the back. One through the throat for certainty. Blood drank deep into the red earth. Horse stolen. Hat trampled into the dust. They walked away believing the frontier had finally claimed its due.\n\nThey were wrong.\n\nThe ground twitched. A heartbeat no living thing should feel.\n\nA gloved hand burst through — black leather split at the knuckles, white bone gleaming beneath. Rocks scattered like frightened rats. The equine skull rose next, jaws frozen in a permanent snarl, eye sockets flaring with cold emerald fire. A wild white mane spilled out like smoke from a guttering blaze.\n\nHis torn hat still clung to his skull at that stubborn angle. Then the long duster, heavy with grave dirt and old blood, tails dragging as Elias hauled the rest of himself free.\n\nHe stood. Tall. Too tall. Joints cracked like dry branches giving way.\n\nThe bandoleer across his chest clinked softly, cartridges glinting with runes carved by no living hand. One revolver rode low on his hip. The other was already in his grip, hammer back, cylinder turning slow.\n\nHe tilted his head. Horse ears flicked once, listening to something far beyond the wind.\n\nOut there in the dark, the lingerers felt the shift. A miner’s ghost stopped mid-wail. A widow’s shade let her poison bottle fall.\n\n“Time to collect,” Elias Crowe rasped, soft as an unwanted prayer.\n\nHe stepped from the grave. Frost crept across the nearest rocks despite the desert heat. His breath — shallow, unnecessary — clouded the air in faint ghostly plumes.\n\nIn the shadowed rocks waited the horse: bone and smoke and bad memory, eyes burning the same unnatural emerald. It stamped once, scattering green sparks. Elias swung up without looking. The duster flared like black wings.\n\nA single shot cracked the night.\n\nNot a warning for the living.\n\nA signal.\n\nElias Crowe was back on the trail.\n\nAnd the dead who refused to stay buried had just run out of time.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter One — She Still Kneels There**\n\nBitter Well's didn’t hate Abigail Mercer with torches and rope. That kind of fury burned hot and died fast.\n\nThis town hated her the way stone hates bone — slow, grinding, eternal.\n\nMothers clutched their children tighter when they passed the northern hill. Old men crossed themselves at dusk. Even the meanest drunk in the territory refused to walk the road to the ruined schoolhouse after dark.\n\nThe schoolhouse still stood. Mostly. Blackened timbers clawed at the sky like the ribs of some long-dead beast. The roof had caved in years ago. Empty windows stared across the valley like sockets picked clean. Every spring the grass tried to swallow the hill. Every winter the wind stripped it bare again.\n\nAnd every night, without fail, Abigail Mercer returned.\n\nShe knelt among the twelve small graves beneath the twisted cottonwood and wept.\n\nTwelve children. Burned alive.\n\nThe thirteenth grave was hers. No flowers. No prayers. No visitors. The town had made sure of that. Some debts, they said, should never be forgiven.\n\nTwenty years dead. Twenty years haunting the same patch of scorched earth. Twenty years of sobbing carried on the midnight wind. Twenty years of children waking screaming. Twenty years of doors slamming in empty houses. Twenty years of the dead schoolteacher begging forgiveness from the ghosts she had murdered.\n\nNow the Horseman had come to collect.\n\nHe rode into Bitter Wells just before sundown, a lone silhouette against a bleeding sky. The horse beneath him was gaunt and wrong, moving too quietly, leaving hoofprints that steamed in the dust. The rider was worse.\n\nA long black duster hung from broad shoulders. Twin revolvers rode low on his hips. A white mane — pale as moonlight on bone — spilled from beneath a battered hat. As he passed down the main street, the blistering desert heat bled away. Folk rubbed their arms. Breath fogged. Dogs tucked their tails and whimpered. Horses shied hard enough to nearly throw their riders.\n\nHe didn’t seem to notice.\n\nHe dismounted outside the saloon and tied the skeletal horse to the rail. The creature stamped once, scattering faint green sparks that died before they hit the dirt.\n\nInside, every conversation died the moment he crossed the threshold.\n\nThe broad-shouldered elk behind the bar set down a glass with a shaky hand. “Passing through, stranger?”\n\nThe rider studied the whiskey but didn’t touch it. His voice came out like dry leaves dragged across a gravestone. “Maybe.”\n\n“You the fella they sent for?”\n\nThe stranger finally lifted his head. One cold emerald eye caught the lantern light — too bright, too alive for something that smelled of grave dirt and old blood. For a heartbeat the bartender felt like he was staring straight down into an open coffin.\n\n“Depends,” the rider rasped. His gaze drifted toward the north window, toward the blackened hill. “Depends if she’s still kneeling there.”\n\nSilence swallowed the saloon whole.\n\nThe elk swallowed hard. “How… how’d you know about that?”\n\nThe stranger’s lips peeled back in a smile that had nothing to do with kindness. It was the smile of something that had crawled out of the ground and decided the world still owed it.\n\n“Because she ain’t stopped crying.”\n\nOutside, faint on the wind, a woman’s broken sob drifted down from the hill.\n\nHalf the patrons flinched.\n\nThe stranger rose, dropped two silver coins on the bar, and turned for the door. The elk found his voice one last time.\n\n“Careful up there, mister. She’s dangerous.”\n\nThe rider paused at the threshold, gloved hand resting on the butt of his revolver. That wolfish smile returned, colder this time.\n\n“Son,” he said, voice low and rough, “that ain’t what worries me.”\n\nHe stepped out, swung into the saddle, and rode toward the hill as the sun bled out behind him.\n\nOn the blackened ridge, among the twelve small white markers, Abigail Mercer slowly raised her head.\n\nFor the first time in twenty years.\n\nElias was was coming.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Two — Among the Little Graves**\n\nBitter Well's cemetery sat atop the hill like an old wound that refused to heal. Moonlight silvered the twelve small headstones beneath the twisted cottonwood. A thirteenth grave lay apart — forgotten, untended, unloved.\n\nElias Crowe reined in his horse at the crest and sat motionless for a long moment, watching.\n\nThe doe hadn’t seen him yet.\n\nShe knelt exactly as the townsfolk had described: head bowed, shoulders trembling, hands clasped so tightly her knuckles glowed white through translucent skin. Twenty years of the same broken prayer.\n\nHe swung down, tied the skeletal horse to the cottonwood, and rested both gloved hands on his revolvers.\n\nThe sight irritated him.\n\nNot pity. Not rage. Just the same stubborn, self-serving lie he’d seen a thousand times before.\n\nThe dead clung hardest when they believed their suffering still meant something.\n\n“I’m sorry…” Abigail whispered into the dry grass.\n\nSilence.\n\n“I’m sorry.”\n\nAgain.\n\nAnd again.\n\nThe words scraped like a dull blade. Elias’s hoof steps crunched across the dead ground as he approached. His horse remained behind, his black, soulless eyes burning low and patient.\n\nShe froze mid-breath. Slowly, fearfully, she turned.\n\nNot fear of pain. Fear of being truly seen.\n\nElias stopped beside the nearest marker, crouched, and brushed moss from the stone. Jacob Whitetail, Age 8. Fresh flowers lay at its base — someone still cared.\n\nThe doe dropped her gaze. “You’re him.”\n\nElias touched two bony fingers to the brim of his hat. “Ma’am.” He swept the hat off, letting the wild white mane spill across his shoulders, and fixed her with one cold emerald eye. “Him who?”\n\nAbigail swallowed. “The Horseman.”\n\nHe gave a low snort. “Folks keep inventing names.”\n\nWind hissed through the cottonwood. Below, Bitter Wells pretended to sleep.\n\nShe broke first. They always did.\n\n“Have you come for me?”\n\n“Maybe.”\n\nThe word cut deeper than any bullet. Elias rose, drew a revolver, spun the cylinder with a deliberate click-click-click, then holstered it again.\n\nAbigail made a sound that might once have been laughter — jagged, broken, closer to a sob.\n\n“Twenty years,” she whispered.\n\nElias said nothing.\n\n“I thought you’d come sooner.”\n\n“Been busy.”\n\nThat earned a short, disbelieving bark before grief swallowed it. “I killed them.”\n\n“Yeah,” Elias said flatly. “You did.”\n\nShe stared up at him, desperate for condemnation, for rage, for anything. He gave her nothing but cold green light and silence.\n\n“That’s all you’re going to say?” Her voice cracked.\n\n“What else is there?”\n\n“I murdered children!”\n\nElias shrugged. “Your point?”\n\n“You don’t understand—”\n\n“Lady.” His voice dropped, dangerously calm. “I understand exactly what you did.”\n\nAbigail flinched.\n\nHe settled onto a nearby headstone, ignoring the horrified look that crossed her face. “You keep telling me what happened. You ain’t told me why.”\n\nThe doe looked away.\n\nThere it was. The lie. Buried deep.\n\n“I lit the fire,” she said.\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“I burned them alive.”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nTears slid down her cheeks. “What more do you want from me?”\n\nElias leaned forward. Frost bloomed across the nearest graves. “The truth, Abigail Mercer.”\n\n“I am telling the truth!”\n\n“Bullshit.”\n\nThe word cracked across the hill like a gunshot. Even the wind died.\n\nAbigail stared at him, shocked and terrified.\n\n“You’ve spent twenty years kneeling here,” Elias continued, voice low and rough as grave dirt. “Apologising. Punishing yourself. Clinging to this patch of scorched earth like it’ll balance the scales.” He rose slowly and brushed dust from his duster. “Good. You should feel every second of it.”\n\nHer eyes widened.\n\n“But feeling it ain’t the same as facing it.” He pointed one gloved finger at the twelve small graves. “Who put the match in your hand?”\n\nFor the first time all night, real terror flooded her face. Not of him — of memory.\n\nElias’s lips curled into a thin, joyless smile that never touched his eyes.\n\n“You think you’re a monster,” he said quietly. “Maybe you are. Ain’t what interests me.”\n\n“I am a monster!” Abigail wailed. She surged to her hooves and slammed both hands against his chest again and again, desperate and useless. “I killed them! I killed them all!”\n\nElias didn’t flinch. The blows passed through him like smoke. He waited until her frenzy broke, then caught her wrists with cold, immovable hands.\n\n“Start from the beginning, Miss Mercer.”\n\nFar below the hill, the church bell tolled midnight.\n\nThe Horseman had all the time in the world.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Three — The Match**\n\nThe church bell faded into silence. The cemetery waited.\n\nAbigail stood motionless, paws clutched tight before her. Elias leaned against her lonely headstone, arms folded, giving her all the time in the world.\n\nHe had eternity. The dead usually did.\n\n“I don’t want to remember,” she whispered.\n\nElias snorted. “That’s unfortunate.”\n\nShe closed her eyes. The wind stirred her hair. “I tried to forget.”\n\n“Everybody does.” He leaned harder into the stone. “How’d that work out for you?”\n\nAbigail looked back at the twelve small graves. “You’re still here. They’re still dead. Your point?”\n\nElias’s hands drifted to his revolvers. “Miss Mercer, I don’t have endless patience. You talk, I listen. Or we do this the hard way.”\n\nShe wrung her paws, glancing over one shoulder as if the past might creep up behind her. Finally, her voice came small and bitter.\n\n“Silas Blackwood. He owned the bank. Everybody owed him.”\n\nElias flicked one ear forward, expression unchanging.\n\n“My father borrowed to save our ranch,” she continued. “It didn’t work. It never does with men like him. He took the land. The cattle. The house.”\n\nEach loss landed with a flat “Mm” from Elias.\n\nThen her tone shifted.\n\n“He came for my brother. He was twelve.”\n\nElias’s gaze sharpened.\n\nAbigail wrapped her arms around herself. “Our debt could never be paid. He threatened to send men. Threatened prison. Said he’d make an example of the boy.”\n\nThe wind turned colder.\n\n“What did he want?” Elias asked quietly.\n\nAbigail looked away. Shame twisted her face.\n\n“Me.”\n\nThe word hung between them like a noose.\n\n“He threatened the boy until I said yes,” she whispered. “At first I thought… once he had what he wanted, it would stop.” Her voice cracked. “It never stopped. He kept taking. Kept threatening. My father. My brother. Everything.”\n\nShe sank slowly to her knees, burying her face in her paws.\n\n“And eventually… I stopped caring.”\n\nThe cottonwood creaked overhead like a hangman’s rope.\n\nElias studied her for a long moment. Not with pity. With recognition — the same hollowed-out exhaustion he knew too well. The kind that left only rot behind.\n\nHe pushed off the gravestone. “Alright.”\n\nAbigail looked up, eyes wide and desperate.\n\nElias met her gaze, his single visible emerald eye glowing cold and steady. “Now tell me about the fire.”\n\nFor the first time in twenty years, Abigail Mercer looked genuinely terrified.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Four — The Weight of Matches**\n\nThe wind died. The hill itself seemed to press closer, listening.\n\nElias remained leaning against her neglected headstone, arms folded. That single cold emerald eye bored into her, but for a heartbeat something older flickered behind it — a memory not his own, or perhaps too much his own. He crushed it down like a spent casing.\n\n“Tell me about the fire, Miss Mercer.”\n\nAbigail’s breath hitched. Her paws twisted together until the knuckles showed white through her fur.\n\n“Silas Blackwood,” she whispered. “He owned everything. My father owed him after the drought. He offered a deal… my body for the ranch. For my brother’s safety. I was young. I thought if I gave myself to him just once, it would stop. The farm would be saved.”\n\nFrost crept across the graves.\n\n“It didn’t stop,” she continued, voice cracking. “He took me again and again. Months of it. Threats about my father, about my little brother. I let him use me because I was terrified.”\n\nTears slipped down her muzzle.\n\n“Then he started looking at my brother. Fourteen. The things he said…” She shuddered violently. “That broke me. I couldn’t take it anymore. I just wanted the pain to end. I wanted to die. I thought… I thought burning it all was the only way out.”\n\nShe stared at the twelve small markers, eyes distant.\n\nFor a moment the memory cut through her like a hot knife — the sound of their voices after lunch, bright and chaotic. They had been hers. Her life. Her purpose. Those children had looked at her with such trust, such open love, even on the worst days. She would have walked through fire for any one of them. Instead…\n\n“I remember them singing,” she said, voice hollow. “They always sang after lunch. Little Alice… she sang off-key and the others teased her. I made them stop. I told them she was perfect the way she was.” Her throat worked. “Gods, they loved me. And they trusted me.”\n\nThe sliver of warmth vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving only ash.\n\n“I don’t remember striking the match. I swear it. One moment I was inside… the next I was standing in the grass. The heat. The smoke. Then the screaming. I ran back in — I tried to save them. I got Alice halfway out before the floor gave way and my ankle—”\n\nElias slipped his hands off his revolver and crossed his arms over his chest, his gaze unblinking, just watching and listening.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Five — The Only Forgiveness**\n\n“You lit the fire,” Elias said. Quiet. Unyielding.\n\nAbigail recoiled like he’d slapped her.\n\n“I tried!” she cried. “I ran back inside! I tried to save them—”\n\n“You lit it first.” His voice was low and rough as grave dirt. “Stop hiding behind the smoke and the screams and the floorboards. You did it. Say it.”\n\nShe collapsed forward, forehead pressed into the cold dirt between the graves, body wracked with silent sobs that finally tore free.\n\n“I lit the fire,” she sobbed. The words ripped out of her. “I killed them. All twelve of them. Because I was broken and desperate and I thought suicide was my only escape. I murdered those children because I was too much of a coward to die alone.”\n\nThe confession hung raw in the frozen air.\n\nAbigail lifted her tear-streaked face, voice hoarse and pleading.\n\n“That’s everything. All of it. I’m a monster. I deserve damnation. Shoot me. End this. Please…”\n\nElias straightened slowly. He dusted off his long black duster with calm, deliberate motions, but his gloved hand lingered a second too long on the revolver at his hip. Then he turned and began walking toward the skeletal horse.\n\nBehind him, Abigail’s wailing rose into the night.\n\n“Please! I deserve it! I killed them! I’m irredeemable! Don’t leave me here!”\n\nThe Horseman paused at the horse’s side. He looked back over his shoulder, white mane pale in the moonlight, emerald eye cold.\n\n“No,” he said quietly. “I will not.”\n\nAbigail’s sobs choked off in confusion.\n\n“The fire was unforgivable,” Elias continued, voice low and rough. “But you’ve spent twenty years kneeling here because you can’t forgive the broken doe who did it. That’s what’s keeping you chained to this hill.”\n\nHe swung up into the saddle. The horse stamped once, scattering faint green sparks that died too quickly.\n\n“You’ve admitted your crime, Miss Mercer. Now live with it… or don’t. Ain’t my concern anymore.”\n\nThe skeletal horse turned. Hoof beats faded down the hill, but the air on the ridge stayed wrong — heavier, colder, as if the truth had only made the wound bleed slower. Abigail Mercer remained on her knees among the twelve small graves, the sound of her broken weeping chasing the Dark Horseman into the night. No absolution. No peace. Only the long weight of what she had finally named.\n\n**\\* \\* \\***\n\n**Chapter Six — Darkness Within and Without**\n\nElias rode on. He had eternity, or it sure as hell felt like it. Bitter Wells lay behind him in the dust. Abigail would forgive herself… or she wouldn’t. Only she could grant herself the release of true death.\n\nWithout warning, his undead gelding reared. Elias snarled and yanked the reins hard, nearly getting dumped in the dirt.\n\nThe skeletal horse smelled it first.\n\n_Damn bastard,_ Elias thought bitterly. _Always knows before I do._\n\nThey were still half a mile out when the gelding spooked completely. Bone hooves slashed at the air, green embers spraying from its nostrils. It screamed — a sound like rusted metal being torn apart — and refused to take another step.\n\nElias dismounted, keeping a iron grip on the reins.\n\n“Easy,” he rasped.\n\nThe horse didn’t listen. It pawed the dirt violently, ears pinned flat, eyes blazing with unmistakable fear. Even in death, some instincts refused to die.\n\nElias felt it too.\n\nA slow, crawling prickle across his exposed bone. An unholy chill that slid down his spine like melting grave ice. He had ridden through battlefields soaked in blood. He had left towns burning behind him in life. He had done things that would make most men beg for Hell.\n\nThis place still made his skin want to crawl right off his bones.\n\nThe town ahead squatted in a narrow valley like a festering wound. Smoke curled from chimneys that shouldn’t have been lit. Windows were shuttered tight even though it was barely dusk. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked itself hoarse, then choked off with a wet yelp.\n\nBrother turning on brother. Wives poisoning husbands. Children hiding under beds with knives in their small hands.\n\nElias could feel it in the air — pure, gleeful malice. Not the heavy, weeping grief of Bitter Wells. This thing _enjoyed_ what it was doing. It laughed while it broke people, growing stronger with every scream, every betrayal, every drop of blood it could wring from broken hearts.\n\nHe swung down from the saddle and gave the horse’s neck a rough pat. The skeletal creature was still trembling.\n\n“Stay here,” Elias muttered. “I ain’t blaming you.”\n\nThe horse snorted once — a clear “fuck that, and fuck you for even thinking about it” — but stayed put as Elias started walking toward the town alone. His long duster whispered against the dry grass. Both revolvers rode low on his hips, and his right hand never strayed far from their grips.\n\nThe closer he got, the worse it became.\n\nA man was nailing his own front door shut from the inside. Another wept openly in the street while clutching a bloody shirt that clearly didn’t belong to him. A woman watched Elias from an upstairs window with eyes too wide, too black, and far too amused.\n\nElias stopped at the edge of the main street. The wind carried the faint sound of laughter — childish, playful, and utterly wrong.\n\nHe exhaled a slow, unnecessary breath.\n\n“Alright, you malignant little shit,” he growled under his breath. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Seven — You're Not Welcome Here**\n\nSherrif Dalis, the first living soul to confront him stepped out of the sheriff’s office, hand hovering near the pistol at his hip.\n\nElias merely stopped dead and touched a finger to his hat, one ear flicking. He could feel the wrongness in his very bones. This town wasn't a town anymore, and this human standing thirty paces away...was not what it appeared to be.\n\nOr what used to be the sheriff.\n\nHis eyes were wrong — too wide, too bright, swimming with raw terror and sick, gleeful insanity. A human was still screaming somewhere behind the mask, but the thing wearing him was very much in control.\n\n“Be off, stranger,” the possessed lawman growled, voice layered like two people speaking at once. “We don’t need your kind here.”\n\nElias stopped in the middle of the dusty street. He touched two bony fingers to the brim of his hat, tilting it back just enough for the emerald glow to catch the dying light.\n\n“Sheriff,” he rasped, “you got a problem with me, that’s between you and me. Me? I’m the solution.”\n\nThe possessed man’s lips peeled back in a smile that didn’t belong on any human face.\n\nThen he drew.\n\nHe was fast.\n\nThree shots slammed into Elias’s chest and gut like sledgehammer blows. The impact drove him down onto one knee. Pain, sharp and ugly, flared through dead nerves. Even death didn’t stop lead from hurting like a bastard.\n\nThe sheriff laughed — a wet, bubbling, demonic chuckle — and started walking forward while reloading.\n\nElias snarled through his teeth. Black rotten blood dripped from his duster.\n\nIn a blur of fury he drew his main revolver and emptied all six rounds into the sheriff’s chest at point-blank range. The heavy slugs punched through with wet thuds. The possessed man staggered but didn’t fall.\n\nThe spirit inside threw its head back and laughed louder, delighted.\n\n“You think you can kill me, Horseman?”\n\nElias stared at the empty revolver in his hand for half a second.\n\n_Stupid. Fucking stupid._\n\nRage had gotten the better of him again. He should have known better.\n\nWith a low growl of self-disgust he holstered the spent gun and drew the offhand revolver — the one loaded with silver.\n\n**Boom.**\n\nOne clean shot. Straight through the forehead.\n\nThe laughter cut off mid-chuckle.\n\nThe body dropped like a sack of meat, eyes wide and empty, the malicious red-black aura flickering once… then vanishing into nothing.\n\nElias stayed on one knee, breathing hard through his ruined throat, wincing as he pressed a gloved hand to the smoking holes in his chest. The pain throbbed like fire in dead meat.\n\n“…Yeah,” he rasped, voice rough with pain and dark satisfaction. “I can.”\n\nHe pushed himself up slowly, revolvers sliding back into their holsters. The street was deathly silent except for the wind.\n\nSomewhere in the distance, something far less human than the dead sheriff began to laugh again.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Eight — Mercy in Lead**\n\nElias moved down the main street like a storm wearing a duster.\n\nThe town had gone completely mad.\n\nA woman came screaming out of a boarding house with a kitchen knife, eyes wild with unnatural glee. She stabbed him in the back five times before he turned and put two rounds through her heart. She died laughing.\n\nA young man — barely more than a boy — levelled a rifle from a rooftop. Elias took two bullets to the shoulder and thigh before he returned fire. The boy’s laughter turned into sobbing as he fell.\n\nEach time he was hit, the pain flared hot and ugly through dead flesh. It didn’t kill him. It just reminded him he could still suffer.\n\n“Fucking hate this town,” he growled, pressing a gloved hand to a fresh hole in his side.\n\nHe wasn’t killing for sport. Some of them were too far gone — minds shattered, bodies no longer their own. For those, he granted the only mercy he could: a clean bullet. Others still fought the possession, weeping, begging him to end it.\n\nHe obliged.\n\nThe trail of bodies grew behind him as he followed the sick, red-black thread of malice toward the centre of town. This wasn’t simple corruption or a restless ghost. The whole stinking place had surrendered to every imaginable depravity and evil.\n\nThis was possession. Pure, gleeful malice that fed on the suffering it created. Where Abigail Mercer had destroyed herself with guilt, this thing gorged itself on the guilt and pain of others and laughed while it did so.\n\nElias inhaled through his broad nostrils, tasting smoke, blood, and something far worse on the wind. A rotten heartbeat pulsed somewhere ahead.\n\nBy the time the saloon came into view, he was bleeding from half a dozen wounds that would have killed any living man twice over. His white mane was streaked with dust and old blood. His eyes burned with cold fury.\n\nHe was through playing games.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Nine — Last Call**\n\nHe stomped the dust off his boots, then shoved his way through two swinging saloon doors. They hadn't even finished moving when the shotgun roared.\n\nThe blast caught Elias square in the chest and hurled him backward into the street in a spray of buckshot and black duster. He hit the dirt hard, skidding several feet before stopping on his back.\n\nFor a few long seconds he just lay there, staring up at the bruised sky, smoke curling from the ragged holes in his torso.\n\n“…Son of a bitch,” he rasped.\n\nPain throbbed through him like fire in his veins. He hated how much it still hurt.\n\nSlowly, deliberately, Elias pushed himself up — first to one knee, then to his hooves. Buckshot rattled out of his wounds and fell into the dirt as he straightened. His baleful glare locked onto the barkeep standing behind the bar, still holding the smoking shotgun with a manic grin.\n\nLike the other townsfolk, the man’s eyes swirled with that same red-black corruption.\n\nElias walked back through the doors. What was left of them hung by one hinge, then fell to the floorboards with a dry rattle.\n\nThe barkeep tried to reload. He wasn’t fast enough.\n\nElias drew and fired once. The silver-loaded round punched through the man’s skull and out the back. The body dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, the malicious aura flickering out.\n\nSilence fell over the saloon.\n\nA dozen patrons — some alive, some already dead, some dying in pools of their own blood. They stared at him. A few still wore that sick, gleeful smile. Most just looked broken.\n\nElias holstered his revolver with a click. Blood dripped from his coat onto the sawdust floor.\n\n“You’re not worth wasting bullets on,” he said flatly, voice like gravel dragged across bone. “None of you.”\n\nHis eyes swept across the room.\n\n“I’m hunting something worse than you sorry bastards.”\n\nHe turned and started walking deeper into the saloon, boots crunching on broken glass and shell casings. Somewhere in the back — behind the bar or upstairs — the malignant, rotten pulse grew stronger.\n\nA woman’s laughter drifted down from the second floor. Sultry. Cruel. Ancient.\n\nElias’s grip tightened on his revolvers.\n\n“Come on out, you malignant cunt,” he growled. “I’ve had a real bad day.”\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Ten — All That Glitters**\n\nElias followed the rotten pulse like a bloodhound. It pulled him up the stairs, one gloved hand resting on the butt of his off-hand revolver. He would not be caught flat-hoofed again.\n\nHe stopped outside the door. The heartbeat behind it was wrong — too strong, too hungry, and no longer belonging to anything that lived.\n\nHe kicked the door open.\n\nThe scent hit him like a hammer: cheap perfume, spilled whiskey, and something darker underneath. A memory tried to surface and shattered before he could grasp it.\n\nOn the bed waited a rabbit doe. Small, soft grey fur, dangerous curves wrapped in the kind of attire that once would have tempted weaker men. Harlot, his mind supplied coldly.\n\nShe smiled slow and sultry, eyes gleaming with wicked promise.\n\n“Well now, Horseman… ain’t you a tall, dark drink of sin.” Her voice dripped honeyed venom. “Come here, stallion. Let me take care of you.”\n\nElias let her.\n\nNot because he wanted her. Not because he needed comfort. The rage and pain still boiled under his skin, and sometimes the fastest way to bleed the pressure off was to bury himself in warm flesh and go through the motions.\n\nShe climbed on top with desperate, filthy enthusiasm, moaning like she meant every sound. Elias lay back, gloved hands resting loose on her hips. He moved when she needed him to. Nothing more. Mechanical. Detached. Dead flesh performing an old, ugly routine.\n\nNo heat. No hunger. Just the clinical rhythm of something that had once enjoyed this far too much.\n\nHer paws roamed over fresh bullet wounds and torn meat, claws teasing. She laughed low and throaty, grinding down harder.\n\n“You stallions really do know how to—”\n\nElias’s emerald eye stayed flat. Somewhere behind her words he felt it slithering — that red-black hunger reaching for the cracks in his skull, waiting for him to slip, to _feel_ something. To lose control for even a second.\n\nHe let her keep believing she was winning.\n\nA flicker came then. Not memory. Just the ghost of one: a different room, a different doe, different screams. He’d enjoyed that one. Or the thing wearing his skin had.\n\nThe spirit leaned in, panting, lips brushing his ear, voice layered with something ancient and greedy. “Let me in, Horseman…”\n\nElias’s grip tightened once — almost gentle.\n\n“Wrong.”\n\nThe revolver barrel kissed the soft fur beneath her chin. The silver round took the top of her skull off before the echo even started.\n\nThe rabbit’s body collapsed sideways, twitching once before going still, her blood mixing with his on the sheets.\n\nFor a moment, nothing happened.\n\nThen the air thickened. A red-black smoky shadow tore itself violently out of the corpse, coalescing into a writhing, hateful shape above the bed. For the first time, the spirit showed something other than glee.\n\nFear.\n\n“No—no, wait!” it hissed, voice shifting between a dozen terrified tones. “I can give you anything! Power. Women. Revenge on every bastard who ever put a bullet in you. Just name it!”\n\nElias stood up slowly, blood and other fluids still dripping down his thighs. He started tearing the room apart — ripping open drawers, smashing the nightstand, flipping the mattress with a crash.\n\nThe spirit’s voice grew more desperate.\n\n“Please! I’ll serve you! I’ll kill whoever you want! I’ll make them suffer for eternity! Just don’t—”\n\nElias’s gloved hand closed around something cold and heavy under a loose floorboard. He pulled out a tarnished silver pendant pulsing with malignant red-black light.\n\nThe spirit froze.\n\n“You promise everything,” Elias rasped, voice cold as grave dirt. “But a spirit like you? It’s all false.”\n\nHe levelled the revolver.\n\nAnother silver round punched straight through the pendant. It shattered with a piercing scream that rattled the windows. The spirit convulsed, shrieking, clawing at the air as it unraveled into nothing.\n\nThen… silence.\n\nElias stood there for a long moment, still half-hard and covered in blood and fluids. He looked down at the dead rabbit, then at the broken pendant in his hand.\n\nFor another fractured instant he felt… something. Not guilt. Not quite. Just the sour aftertaste of recognition, like looking at an old wanted poster with his own face on it.\n\n“Some debts,” he muttered, “are paid in full.”\n\nDownstairs, the unnatural laughter that had haunted the town finally died, and the town with it.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Eleven — Old Gold**\n\nElias Crowe spotted it from a ridge overlooking the valley — a scattering of weathered buildings clinging stubbornly to the earth. Smoke rose lazily from chimneys. Wagons crawled through muddy streets. Somewhere a church bell rang.\n\nThe sort of place that had survived more bad decisions than prosperity.\n\nHis skeletal horse snorted.\n\n“Yeah,” Elias muttered. “I noticed.”\n\nThe gelding flicked an ear.\n\nNeither of them had breathed in decades. It still didn’t stop them talking.\n\nThey rode down the rutted road until the town swallowed them. Elias passed beneath a faded welcome sign whose paint had long surrendered to wind and sun.\n\nHe didn’t notice the bank.\n\nHis horse did. The skeletal gelding stopped dead.\n\nElias frowned and followed its gaze. Across the street stood a squat brick building with iron bars on the windows. _The First Territorial Bank._\n\nSomething stirred in the broken shards of his mind. _Gunpowder. Horses. Men laughing. The weight of stolen gold._\n\n“Huh.”\n\nHis horse continued staring.\n\n“We robbed that bank,” Elias said slowly.\n\nThe horse flicked an ear.\n\nMore fragments surfaced. _Masks. Rifles. Shouting. A saddlebag so heavy with coin it nearly tore loose._\n\nA grin spread across his skull. “That was a good haul.”\n\nThe horse turned and bit him. Hard.\n\n“SON OF A—!”\n\nElias jerked his arm away. The horse kept staring, unimpressed.\n\nElias rubbed the bite mark. “Alright.”\n\nThe horse's glare turned into something akin to pure hatred, its tail swished savagely.\n\nAnother broken piece drifted up. _Gunfire. Screaming. The horse collapsing beneath him. Blood. Lots of blood._\n\nElias sighed. “Okay.”\n\nThe horse flicked an ear.\n\n“You got shot.” Elias admitted grudgingly, you nearly died...\"\n\nWith a squeal, the gelding curled his lips and bared his teeth at Elias. That look it gave him said more than words ever could.\n\nElias grimaced. “Right. Maybe it wasn’t all good times.”\n\nHe muttered darkly as he dismounted. “Judgemental bastard.”\n\nSnapping its head around, the horse barely missed biting Elias again, the teeth clacking like old tombstones being slapped together.\n\nElias wisely retreated.\n\nA saloon sat directly across the street — two stories of weathered timber and poor life choices.\n\n_Perfect._\n\nHe pushed through the swinging doors. The familiar reek hit him: whiskey, sweat, cigars, regret, unwashed bodies, and underneath it all, the sharp scent of sex. Every saloon west of the Mississippi smelled the same.\n\nA few patrons glanced his way before quickly looking elsewhere. People tended to react strangely to seven feet of horse skull wrapped in a black duster.\n\nHe approached the bar. The bartender looked up, frowned, then squinted.\n\nElias immediately disliked him. He disliked most people.\n\n“What’ll it be?”\n\n“What you got?” Elias grunted, slumping onto a stool.\n\n“Whisky.”\n\nElias’s eyebrow lifted. “Then why ask?”\n\nWith a shrug, the one armed bartender poured. It smelled like it could strip paint. Elias tossed it back anyway. It burned like fire all the way down. His ruined throat still found ways to suffer.\n\nHe slammed the glass down. “That’s awful.”\n\n“Proud of it.”\n\nElias tapped the bar. “Another.”\n\nThe bartender squinted harder. “You look familiar, stranger.”\n\n_There it is,_ Elias thought darkly.\n\n“I get that a lot,” he snorted. “I’m a horse. We’re not exactly uncommon.”\n\nLeaning closer, the bartender's eyes narrowed in suspicion. “That white mane… your pale muzzle…”\n\nElias ignored him, but something ugly stirred in the shards. _Old man Stepherson. Lackseen. A kangaroo doe. Kessica. And himself — half-breed colt with more balls than brains._\n\n_A posse._\n\n_That bank across the street…_\n\nHis gaze drifted to the window. In the foothills, the broken mine headframe rose like a rotten tooth.\n\nElias tapped the bar again. “What happened to the gold mine?”\n\nWith a grunt, the bartender merely rolled his shoulders, then spat onto the floor behind the bar. His expression grew pensive.\n\nThe whole saloon seemed to hold its breath, coversations stopped, bodies stilled, like someone walked over the taprooms grave.\n\n“Depends who you ask.” Answered the barman quietly. \"Information ain't free horse...\"\n\nElias sighed and started stacking coins, his eyes not leaving the bartender, whose own never left the growing pile of currency. With a digusted snort, Elias added more. A small tower of silver and one gold piece he’d probably stolen from this very town decades ago.\n\nLike a sidewinder's strike, the barman snatched the money.\n\n“You looking to reopen old wounds, stranger? You looking for trouble?”\n\nElias upended the bottle, letting the rotgut burn all the way down.\n\n“Trouble’s why I’m here.”\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Twelve — Confrontation With Consequence**\n\nElias reined in outside the mine. The moment his boots touched the ground, his skeletal gelding stepped back. Ears pinned. Nostrils flared. Tail rigid. The horse wanted absolutely nothing to do with the place.\n\n“Christ,” Elias rolled one shoulder. “Place smells worse than you did.”\n\nHis gelding glared.\n\n“Your rotting corpse was five feet from my grave. You have any idea how long it took for the scavengers to pick your mouldering bones clean?”\n\nThe gelding squealed and stamped a hoof, striking green sparks off the stones.\n\n“Go fuck yourself,” Elias growled. “Keep it up. You’re still only half the bastard your mother was.”\n\nHis gelding snorted and snapped its teeth mere inches from Elias’s nostrils. If he wasn’t already dead, that look would have left him cold on the ground.\n\nElias ignored him. He frowned, ears twisting, nostrils flaring, sensing the utter quiet.\n\nThe mine sat silent.\n\nNot abandoned.\n\nSilent.\n\nThere was a difference.\n\nBroken equipment littered the hillside. Rusted carts rested where they’d been left. Coils of half-rotted rope hung from collapsed timbers. The skeletal remains of old machinery protruded from the earth like broken ribs.\n\nAbove the entrance hung a weather-beaten sign. Time had erased the name. Only splinters remained.\n\nElias unstrapped the Winchester from the saddle scabbard. The lever dropped.\n\n_Click-clack._\n\nOne round chambered. Eight in reserve.\n\nHe glanced back at his horse. “Colder than your mother’s tit.”\n\nThe gelding gave him a look of pure malevolence.\n\nElias tuned him out and approached the mine entrance. Oil, rust, rot, kerosene, old wood — all ordinary, yet all wrong.\n\nHe stopped, knelt, and pressed his gloved palm to the earth. His frayed duster pooled around his hooves. The living world vanished.\n\nDust exploded into his lungs. Darkness swallowed everything. Screams echoed through stone. Timbers snapped. Rock groaned. The mountain itself shuddered.\n\nMiners running. Lanterns falling. A tunnel collapsing. Bodies crushed. Men trapped. Men buried alive. Men screaming for help that never came.\n\nDust. Darkness. Pain. Endless pain.\n\nAnd beneath it all — hatred.\n\nRaw. Blistering. Undying.\n\nElias jerked upright, eyes snapping open. Something was standing behind him.\n\nOne second too late.\n\nAgony erupted through his shoulder as the pickax punched clean through. He hit the ground hard. Teeth snapped. Stone cracked beneath his muzzle.\n\n“SON OF A BITCH!” Elias roared.\n\nThe pickax tore free. The second swing came immediately.\n\nElias rolled. Sparks exploded where his skull had been.\n\nHe came up on one knee, revolver already in hand, hammer back.\n\nThe figure standing before him was no longer alive.\n\nA wolf. Or what remained of one. Torn overalls hung from a skeletal frame. A dented mining helmet sat crooked on his head, a cold green flame still burning in the lamp.\n\nThe wolf tightened both paws around the pickax, dead eyes fixed on Elias.\n\n“Thief.”\n\nThe word sounded like it had crawled from beneath a landslide. Dirt. Stone. Broken teeth. A throat full of gravel.\n\nElias levelled the revolver. The barrel stopped inches from the wolf’s chest.\n\nFor a heartbeat, neither moved.\n\n“Thief,” the wolf repeated.\n\nElias spat dust and black blood. “Son… you bury a pickax in my shoulder…”\n\nHis finger tightened on the trigger.\n\n“…you best put that damn thing down.”\n\nThe wolf’s grip only tightened.\n\n“Thief.”\n\nElias’s eyes narrowed, a cold smile spreading across his muzzle.\n\n“Oh,” he rasped. “I reckon this is gonna be one of those conversations.”\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Thirteen — The Thief**\n\nThose dead wolf’s eyes never left him. “Thief.”\n\nElias sighed. “Yeah. We’ve established that.”\n\nThe pickax stayed raised. Elias’s finger rested on the half-pulled trigger. Neither moved.\n\nFor several long seconds the ruined mine was silent except for the slow drip of water somewhere deep in the dark.\n\nThen the wolf attacked.\n\nThe pickax came down like a thunderbolt. Elias fired twice. Spectral ichor sprayed, but the wolf barely slowed. It slammed into him with unnatural strength, teeth sinking deep into his wounded shoulder.\n\nElias screamed — raw and equine. Pain exploded down his arm. He dropped the revolver as his fingers went numb. The wolf bore him down, jaws locked, shaking him like a rag doll. Bone cracked.\n\n“Get—off me!” Elias snarled, driving a knee into the ghost’s gut. The ghost staggered but didn’t release. They crashed into a pile of rotting timbers in an explosion of dust and splinters.\n\nFor the first time in a long while, real fear licked at the edges of his mind. This thing wasn’t just angry. It was obsessed.\n\nHe was reaching for his second revolver when a rotted, half-wet equine squeal split the air.\n\nHis gelding came out of nowhere like a bony avalanche, slamming into the wolf’s side. The ghost went tumbling. The horse reared and brought both iron-shod hooves down again and again, pounding the wolf into the dirt.\n\nElias rolled to his knees, black rotten blood pouring from his shoulder.\n\n“Enough!” he roared.\n\nBoth the wolf and the gelding froze mid-motion, staring at him like guilty children caught fighting.\n\nElias pushed himself upright, wincing hard, and holstered his revolver with a sharp click. His left arm hung useless at his side.\n\nHe looked down at the broken, still-defiant ghost.\n\nHis boot kicked something that clattered in the dust.\n\nA rusted lunch tin. Something small and metallic rattled inside.\n\nThe wolf’s eyes locked onto it instantly.\n\n“Thief…” The word came out weaker this time. Almost desperate.\n\nElias bent down and picked up the tin. A faded name was scratched into the metal: THOMAS REED.\n\nHe crouched, elbows on his knees, and looked the ghost in the eyes.\n\n“You remember the gold,” he said quietly. “But you don’t remember him, do you? Or you choose not to.”\n\nThe wolf’s paws kept reaching, passing through the tin again and again. A low, anxious whine escaped his throat.\n\nElias tapped the side of the tin. _Clink._\n\n“You remember someone stole from you.”\n\n_Clink._\n\n“You remember someone wronged you.”\n\nThe wolf’s ears flattened.\n\nElias lowered the tin, his glowing eyes steady.\n\n“But you don’t remember the people you loved.”\n\nThe hatred in the ghost’s gaze wavered. For the first time, something like doubt — even fear — flickered across the wolf’s face.\n\nElias rose slowly, still holding the tin.\n\n“Thomas Reed. A forgotten name. A remembered nugget. Somewhere between the two… is the truth.”\n\nThe wolf did not follow when Elias turned toward the mine entrance.\n\nThat bothered him more than the attack had.\n\nMost ghosts followed their obsession like bloodhounds. This one stayed behind, staring at the lunch tin as though it were the only thing left in the world.\n\n“Well,” Elias muttered, adjusting his duster. “That ain’t concerning at all.”\n\nHis gelding waited outside the fence line. It took one look at the mine entrance, flattened its ears, and backed up three more steps.\n\n“Coward,” Elias growled.\n\nThe gelding glared back and tossed its head.\n\nElias ignored him and stepped into the darkness.\n\nThe tunnel beyond yawned like the throat of some enormous beast. Rotten support beams creaked overhead. Rusted tracks vanished into the dark. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back. His nape prickled. This place felt unalive — the same cold emptiness that lived inside him.\n\n_Leave us,_ the stagnant air seemed to whisper.\n\nElias ignored it, as he always did.\n\nDarkness swallowed him. The temperature dropped sharply. His lantern carved long, wavering shadows across damp stone. Water dripped endlessly somewhere deeper in the earth.\n\n_Tap… tap… tap…_\n\nHe moved cautiously, stepping over collapsed timbers and broken carts. The silence was heavier than any ghost he’d ever met.\n\nIn a wider chamber that might once have been a lunch room, he found a crude carving on a support beam: T. REED.\n\nElias brushed his fingers over the letters. The wood crumbled to powder.\n\n“At least you existed,” he muttered.\n\nDeeper still, the air grew colder and heavier. Mould made the floor slick. Rounding a corner, his hoof crunched on something brittle.\n\nHe looked down.\n\nA skeleton lay half-buried beneath tons of collapsed rock — ribs shattered, spine twisted, skull split. A broken miner’s helmet rested beside it.\n\nIn the skeleton’s grasp was a faded photograph.\n\nElias knelt slowly and eased it free. The paper was yellowed and cracked, but the image remained clear: a wolf, a doe, and four pups. The youngest sat proudly on his father’s shoulders. All of them smiling. Alive.\n\nElias stared at it for a long moment.\n\nThen he looked back toward the tunnel entrance, where the ghost of Thomas Reed still waited, obsessing over a nugget of gold he could never touch.\n\nFor the first time since arriving at the mine, something cold settled deep in Elias’s chest.\n\nNot fear. Not anger.\n\nPity.\n\nThomas had died staring at this photograph… but as a ghost, he had forgotten them. All that remained was the gold.\n\nThe realization struck harder than the pickax had.\n\nElias carefully slipped the photograph into his duster.\n\n“Yeah…” he whispered, voice stripped of its usual sarcasm. “I reckon I know where this is going.”\n\nBehind him, deep in the darkness, stone groaned.\n\nAnd for just a moment, he could have sworn he heard the distant laughter of children and a doe.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Fourteen — What Was Lost**\n\nElias stepped out of the mine with the photograph clutched carefully in one gloved hand.\n\nThe wolf ghost waited exactly where he had left him — crouched among the shattered timbers, eyes fixed on the rusted lunch tin. The small nugget of gold still rattled inside whenever the wind stirred it. Thomas Reed reached for it again and again, paws passing through the metal like smoke.\n\nElias stopped a few paces away.\n\nFor a long moment, neither spoke.\n\nThen Elias held up the faded photograph.\n\nThe wolf’s head snapped toward it with a crack of bone. The image was cracked and yellowed, but the faces were still clear: a tired but smiling doe, four pups, the youngest sitting proudly on his father’s shoulders.\n\nThomas made a small, broken sound.\n\n“…Mine.”\n\nElias’s voice stayed low and steady.\n\n“Not the gold. Them. You died with this in your hand. You were looking at them while the mountain came down on you.”\n\nThe wolf’s paws trembled. He reached desperately for the photo, but his fingers passed through it just as they did the gold. A low, keening whine escaped his throat.\n\nElias took one slow step closer.\n\n“Why steal the gold, Thomas? It wasn’t just greed. That don’t explain this. So tell me. Why?”\n\nThe wolf’s whole body shook. The words finally tore out of him, hoarse and broken.\n\n“…Blackwood. He owned the mine. Owned the whole damn town. Paid us pennies… threatened to throw our families into the dust. My Sarah… my boys… I was gonna get them out. One last haul. Enough to run far away. I rigged the charges to bring the whole cursed place down behind us. One big ‘fuck you’ to that bastard…”\n\nThomas’s voice cracked.\n\n“But it went wrong. I killed them. Good men. Friends. I killed myself. And for what? A handful of gold I can’t even touch?”\n\nThe obsession with the gold shattered. Real horror flooded the ghost’s face as the full weight of what he had done crashed down on him.\n\nElias watched without blinking.\n\n“Accept what you did, Thomas.”\n\nThe wolf collapsed to his knees, staring at the photograph with dawning, crushing grief.\n\n“I… I killed them…”\n\n“Yeah,” Elias said. “You did.”\n\nHe set the photograph gently on the ground in front of the broken ghost.\n\n“Now the question is… are you going to keep punishing yourself for the next hundred years? Or are you finally going to let them go?”\n\nThomas reached out one last time. This time his paw didn’t pass through.\n\nHe held the photograph to his chest like a dying man.\n\nFor a long moment, he simply knelt there.\n\nThen the tremor in his hands stopped.\n\nThe gold in the tin went still.\n\nThe obsession — the hunger — the name Thief — all of it loosened like rope finally cut.\n\nHe looked down at the image, really looked.\n\n“Sarah…” His voice broke. “My boys…”\n\nA sound like a breath leaving a collapsed tunnel.\n\n“I remember…”\n\nElias watched in silence.\n\nThomas exhaled once, slow and final. Then his ghost began to fade.\n\nJust… release.\n\n“Thank you,” he whispered.\n\nAnd then he was gone.\n\nElias stood still for a long moment. The photograph remained on the ground where it had fallen. He did not pick it up. He simply listened to the new silence left behind.\n\nWith a snort, he ground his teeth.\n\n“Of course he gets to move on… either willingly, or at the end of my silver .45 bullet.”\n\nA pause.\n\n“Everyone does.”\n\nHe spat into the dust.\n\n“Fuck my unlife.”\n\nBehind him, his gelding shifted and pinned its ears, teeth bared at Elias before snapping closed a half-inch from his left boot.\n\nElias turned to his horse without looking back at the mine.\n\n“Fuck you too.”\n\nHe mounted up.\n\nAnd rode on.\n\n\\* \\* \\*\n\n**Chapter Fifteen — Some Wounds Never Heal**\n\nThe fire crackled low in the dry wash, throwing long, jagged shadows across the badlands. Elias sat on a flat rock, elbows on his knees, staring into the flames.\n\nHis left hand had been idly poking at a half-burned branch for some time. He didn’t notice until the smell of scorched bone finally reached him.\n\n“Fuck—”\n\nHe jerked the hand back. The tips of his fingers glowed dull orange. Thick, black, rotten blood welled from cracks in the charred flesh. The pain arrived a second later, like his body had to remember it was supposed to hurt.\n\nElias hissed through his teeth and shook the hand hard, then blew on it like some idiot colt. The glow faded, but the deep, ugly throb remained. It would linger for days. The charred pieces would flake off and something worse would grow back underneath. He’d heal. He always did.\n\nAcross the fire, the gelding watched him with flat, souless eyes. The horse snorted once — short, sharp, unimpressed — and turned its bony rump to the flames.\n\nElias flexed the burned fingers, wincing.\n\nFragments kept drifting through the holes in his head tonight. Gunpowder. The weight of stolen gold. A woman’s voice saying his name like it mattered. Rain on his face. Something heavy lying across his legs. A horse screaming.\n\nHe glanced at the gelding again. The animal refused to look at him.\n\nElias let out a low, humourless snort and leaned back against the rock, staring up at the cold desert stars.\n\n“Whole damn ledger against me,” he muttered, “and I can’t even read half the pages.”\n\nThe gelding stamped a hoof, sending up a small burst of green sparks.\n\nElias closed his eyes.\n\nSomewhere out there, more ghosts were waiting.\n\nTo Be Continued..."}