Devil-horse! DEVIL-HORSE!
Turns out about a third of the crew got nightmares that night; all of the so-called ‘magical’ species, and anybody with a touch of either spell-crafting or spirit-talking abilities. We started getting the rest up soon after. Hank runs a tight expedition: you get none of that ‘it’s probably nothing’ or ‘let’s not scare people’ nonsense when he’s in charge. Giant blue devil-horses rampaging through people’s dreams? That’s an ‘all hands on deck’ kind of moment.
Yuri did have whiskey, or at least bourbon, and he was administering it in careful doses to the more excitable members of the team. He hadn’t gotten the nightmare, but he seemed fine with being woken up in the middle of the night to listen to the rest of us tell about ours. And he asked good questions. “Did anybody with the nightmare not dream of a blue horse with fiery eyes?” was one of them. And “Were any of you talking about blue horses this evening?”
That one got a raised hand from Hank himself. “Not talking, no,” he said. “But local folklore did have legends of a Devil-Horse, once. It supposedly ran through the streets of Old Denver; if you raced it, and won, good fortune would be yours. But if you lost, well, it took your soul.”
“As per the usual,” said Barbara. “Well, then: nobody get in any horse races, then. I wonder how it survived the Dominion?”
Hank shrugged. “Honestly? I assumed it wasn’t a real spirit to begin with. The stories about the Devil-Horse predated the Discovery by at least a century. Sometimes the folktales are just that: tales.”