I lurk around DA mostly following along with the HARPG, and recently I had a series of dreams about a rather demonic horse. I had decided to try to bring him to life, but seeing as I have very little artistic ability and even less time I contacted She very kindly agreed to take him on and use him in her stable because she is just that awesome <3 Here is the story that started it all.

Edit: Many thanks to for acting as Beta.

Ghost-eye's incredible rendition of Fencepost can be found here [link]

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The Smiling Dog Ranch had been plagued by a freak heat wave for weeks, making life miserable and working nigh impossible. The heat of the very air seared the lungs and burned the eyes.

Lightning arched and streaked through the sky in response to such heat, thunder booming ominously and promising ill tidings, and three days ago it had delivered. There had been a deafening roar, and the smell of brimstone assaulted the senses as the dry grass was set ablaze, the wind blowing in from the mountains helping the inferno along its deadly mission.

Firemen from the city on the other side of the mountain range flew in with helicopters, some dumping water, others a special mixture onto the blaze, and had managed to finally contain and dampen it ten hours after it started. The ranch had lost three mares, two of which had been with foal, and a gelding. The losses were felt strongly by the people there... they had been good working horses.

Shai had been riding the outer reaches of the ranch mending fences all day; sweat pouring off her brow and darkening the fur of her trusty companion. Some of the posts driven into the scorched earth were salvageable, but most were not.

As the redhead approached the very edge of the property where the shadow of the mountains caressed the edge of the blackened forest, her buckskin gelding balked, jerking her backwards a step and nearly yanking the reins from her hands. Shai turned quickly to observe him - she had raised Koda from a foal; he was her constant companion, and a loyal, bombproof horse. Nothing made him balk before, and yet he stood now with his ears flattened, his eyes wide and rolling, his flanks quivering, everything about his body language saying he would not take another step forward.

Shai spun back around to find the source of his distress... if something had frightened Koda that badly, she definitely didn't want her back unprotected. For a tense moment, her green eyes scanned the surroundings, finding nothing - until they finally lit upon a small movement. There, in the shadow of a leaning post about twenty feet ahead... a foal.

After making sure Koda wasn't going to bolt back to the ranch without her, Shai cautiously approached the small creature. The foal lay with its legs folded under, and turned its watery blue eyes up to the approaching human. They looked clouded, and at first Shai was concerned that the colt – for she saw now that the foal was male - may be blind, but it was clear that he was tracking her movements. She stopped beside the creature and slowly knelt beside him, but he didn't make any attempt to bolt - not one muscle twitched in the small body. Instead he simply stayed where he was, and calmly regarded the human who was staring at him.

Shai slowly reached out to run her hand along the foal's side to check for injures... but when she touched him, she quickly recoiled in horror. The colt was completely devoid of fur! The ashy grey skin she had just touched was leathery and crackled, like old parchment. Upon closer inspection she also realized that he had no mane, and while he had a tailbone and skin covering it, there was no tail hair either.

Had he been caught in the fire? Shai forced herself to reach back to the colt and cautiously laid her palm upon his strange skin. She ran her hands over every inch of him, slowly at first for fear of injuring the foal if he had indeed been burnt, and then more surely when she saw that the colt never flinched at her touch, but instead just continued to watch her with those cloudy eyes.

As she brushed her hands over him, the texture of his skin and the sounds it made against her fingers reminded Shai of a very old, rare book that nobody had opened in centuries. She found a row of small indentations running from the top of the colt's head, down his neck, and then branching into two rows on either side of his spine, before coming back into a single row again as it continued down his tail.

Running her hands over his face revealed two small bumps on his forehead, one spaced underneath the other. When pressing on them indicated neither heat nor tenderness, she moved on to check his hooves. These were unusually smooth, and the texture reminded Shai more of metal than a natural hoof. They were also coated in a clear, oily fluid that seemed to be secreted from pores around his coronet bands.

When she tried to lift the colt's lip to inspect his teeth, she caused the first active response she had seen from the small creature. The foal quickly jerked his head away, and a sound that was more natural to a feral cat than a horse rumbled from his chest.

Standing up again, Shai brushed the soot from her jeans and sighed as she watched the unnaturally calm foal. Blasting a sharp whistle provoked nothing but a startled chuff from the still quivering Koda. She hadn't really expected anything different… there was something wrong with this foal, and she was certain no wild mare would have raised it, but it had been at least worth a try.

Alarms were now going off in her head, instinctive warnings hammering in her chest. There was something very off about the little creature that was observing her with an eerie calm, but neither could she, in good conscience, leave it to die. It simply wasn't her way.

After another minute or two of mental debate, Shai carefully lifted the foal into her arms, draped him over the saddle of her nervously dancing gelding, and started the long journey back to the ranch house. The normally unflappable Koda snorted, shook and crow-hopped the entire way back.

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Nearly two years had passed since Shai, the owner of the Smiling Dog Ranch, had found an abandoned, hairless colt by a burnt-out fence. She would have loved to say that he was growing into a fine, handsome stallion, that he was making a speedy recovery and beloved by all. She would have been absolutely ecstatic to report that he had integrated into her herd flawlessly, and gotten along with every horse he saw. She would have loved to say that, but it simply wasn't true.

Five miles west of the main barn, deep in a heavily wooded area of the property, sat an old run-down barn. Attached to the barn was brand new wooden fencing that enclosed a large paddock, and it was here that Shai stood watching the colt she’d rescued.

Her staff wouldn't have anything to do with the colt, whom she’d dubbed Fencepost. He unnerved them, he wouldn't tolerate being kept in a stall, and any horse kept anywhere near him in the pastures turned into a lunatic. Even the most docile, herd-minded horse would start to shake and squeal in his presence.

Eyes wide and rolling, they would tense in panic until they would simply snap, and quickly jump, trample, run through anything that stood in their way of getting as far from the odd colt as possible. They would do anything to get away from him, even if it meant running straight through a fence - which unfortunately one of their other foals had done. To this day he bore a disfiguring scar that ran from his neck, through his chest and bisected his front legs. Finally Shai had to move Post out to the abandoned barn in the woods, much to the relief of her staff and the other horses.

Two years on, Post’s odd skin had darkened, and a slight dappling had appeared, but not a strand of fur or hair had grown. He was as bald as the day Shai had found him, though the skin had become rougher, and retained the texture of old leather. His hooves had hardened, but still kept their odd smoothness; the same color and texture of freshly made steel plating. The pores around his coronet bands had enlarged, and secreted more of the clear, oily fluid that coated the colt's hooves.

When Shai had first brought the colt up to the main barn she had wiped his hooves clean, and continued to do so for about a week, until she noticed that the hooves were actually starting to degrade, and - oddly enough - rust. She had left them alone after that, and they quickly returned to their normal state.

He had grown tall in his twenty-two months of life, already nearing sixteen hands. Shai thought he could be of a warmblood build, with his stocky frame and Roman nose, but unfortunately he wasn't filling it out very well. He was skinny, and for the life of her Shai had tried everything to get him to put on weight.

He didn't actively graze like normal horses did. He wouldn't touch any of the feed he was presented with, even the most sticky, sweet, and fattening mix she could find. He picked at warm mash and turned his nose from apples. Forcing vitamins into him was an impossible feat as he still refused to have his mouth handled. Every time she would try to pry his lips apart a deep, rumbling snarl would come from his barrel chest, and those milky eyes would stare right into her soul.

The raised areas Shai had found on Post’s face hadn't gone down either, far from it. Instead, they'd erupted into horns. At first it had been just a medium sized onyx protrusion in the middle of his forehead with a smaller one right below it, but now they had grown substantially, and in doing so had spiralled around each other until they formed into one mass that curved slightly backwards.

What had been mere indentations running from his poll down his tail had grown, and opened into vents that stunk of sulphur and occasionally released puffs of steam. God help her, she didn't know what to do with him; she had no experience with unicorns or otherworldly horses. Until she'd found Post, she hadn't even really let herself believe they existed.

A flash of movement from the paddock jerked Shai out of her reverie and she stared hard at the colt. What had just happened? Had something startled Fencepost? It was then that Shai noticed the complete lack of birdsong that had accompanied her musings. In fact, nothing stirred within the usually noisy treetops. Post turned his head in her direction, and Shai's blood ran cold. He had a black primary feather resting on the end of his nose... and he was chewing.

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Shai stood watching the now four-year-old stallion she had humorously dubbed Fencepost. He was pacing a secluded, overhung portion of his paddock, snorting, huffing, clearly agitated. A fresh blanket of snow buried everything nearby, and the towering stud had worked himself into a frenzy as he attempted to find a way around the glistening substance without actually having to set a hoof into it.

His skin was covered with fine, spiderwebbing cracks, but he wouldn't let Shai anywhere near him to treat them. In fact, as the stallion matured and thrived on a diet of cow meat - and any small rodent he could catch on his own - his normally calm demeanour had been turned on its head. The brute had topped off at seventeen hands, and it seemed his aggression had grown along with his body.

Strong electric fencing had been placed around his paddock, but it didn't stop him. He didn't even seem to feel the searing electric heat as he went through it in an attempt to cover one of the ranch mares that had come into season. God... there had been so much blood. There wasn't even enough left of the poor broodmare to bury... Post had eaten well that night.

The only thing that seemed to keep him at bay, oddly enough, was the snow that had blown in from the mountains. The stud loosed a scream of frustration that carried the stench of brimstone, and Shai gave a heavy sigh. It was time. She had to either find a way to put him down, or rehome him. The previous morning had seen her in town asking the locals about anyone they knew of that had the knowledge and facility to house demonic equines, and while she had mostly gotten stares that accused her of being crazy, a few names had popped up.

Grumbling in frustration herself, Shai checked her watch again. Two of the ranch hands were supposed to be making their way up here with a trailer so they could at least be ready to try to move the stud. Where were th --ah. Finally the sound of tires crunching through the snow reached her ears, and she turned to see the big black truck making its way through the trees. As she took a step toward it a breeze blew in from the direction of the mountains - she would later recall it to have smelled of honeysuckles and fresh rain – and all hell broke loose.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Shai had just taken a step toward the truck when an ungodly, inhuman scream rent the air. Sulphur assaulted her nostrils, and Post... ignited. There was no other word for it. Jets of flame shot from the vents running from his poll to his tail, dancing, thriving, screaming creatures all their own. Everywhere the flame touched the stud's skin was scorched and blackened. The fluid on his hooves ignited, flames licking up and scorching the stud's legs and belly.

The giant brute reared, his eyes now completely devoid of color or pupil wide as small flames danced from the corners of them. He loosed another scream, showing off a mouth full of sharp teeth more at home in the maw of a lion. His mouth was a furnace, lit and burning from within. The cracks racing along his skin acted as windows into the inferno within the stud's body.

Shai saw too that his joined horns had cracks running through them; smoke escaping from the pressure of the raging internal fires. The only reason she even noticed his horn was because she had just gotten an up close and personal view of it when Post charged in her direction.

Throwing herself to the side Shai rather hysterically realised that the stud no longer seemed to be afraid of the snow. In fact... he was melting it. Eric and Ivan the stable hands had been quick on their feet. While she was busy doing her damndest not to be trampled, they had grabbed the extra snow chains from the back of the truck and used them as lassos to halt Post from his wild charge. The stud was screaming and snapping, trying to free himself. The men were yelling and trying to keep a strong grip on chains that were rapidly heating to an unbearable level, even through their gloves.

Shai dug out her cell phone, punching in the first number she could remember from her trip to town, praying she could get her hands to stop shaking and save precious seconds. God help her, she needed someone... anyone... to take the brute off her hands.

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