Horse

You won’t find horses in Owtdare...

Folk don’t ride horses in Owtdare. Some small folk ride goats, or foxes if they’re nimble.

Bigger folks ride in carts pulled by oxen, if they’ve got time.

Tiny folk hitch carts to beetles, harness sleds to swamp-lizards, and let small dragons pull their barges by heat and whim.

But not horses.

Horses are a myth. Made up creatures that are conveniently built so that you can sit on one, and docile enough that they can be ridden for hours without getting tired and eat only grass.

A creature so fantastically useful and easy to look after, it could only have been a legend created by human wishful thinking!.

Once, they say, there were some. The oldest carvings show four-legged creatures with long manes and long faces, sometimes saddled, sometimes not.

But even the Elders will only shrug and say:

“They were for a different sort of land.”

Some say they were too proud for the crooked paths and winding roads.

Others claim they vanished after the Great Shrinking of the Forests, when meadows of soft grass gave way to brambles and dustbowls.

One tale insists they all strode into the Maelstrom, straight-backed and unafraid, and never came down again.

But most simply don’t speak of them.

Or don't believe in them!

There’s no real word for “horse” in the common tongue. Instead, you’ll hear:

“too fast to catch,”

or

“the beast from dreams,”

or

“the one the painters get wrong.”

or

“the hornless unicorn.”

And so, in their place, Owtdare grew other ways to travel.

Sure-footed goats for cliff paths.

Sturdy oxen for heavy loads.

And clever, whisper-taught creatures that don’t mind the mud or the marsh or the long, dark roads.

If you're really lucky, you may even have a mount that can fly!

You won’t find horses in Owtdare. Not in this age, at least. But you might still think you hear them, if you walk alone in the fog, just where the old road fades…

or silhouetted against the sky cresting the farthest hill on a moonlit light hidden by reflected starlight

If someone did turn up riding a horse… well, they’d likely be followed.

By the whisper of the wind.

By the ache of their story.

Or by silence that smells of somewhere not meant to be reached...