Shadow Rider, Forest of Dean

circa CE 689

We were a day into the forest, riding the ancient trail away from Mercia. All sounds deadened in the damp earth, thickly carpeted by the season’s leaves. The creak of leather and the clink of a metal piece, a sword or buckle, came occasionally from our group, shapeless forms in the mist-filled air.

When I first saw it, I believed my eyes tricked me — perhaps my reflection in a pool of water lost in the trees. Then I saw it again at twilight, just before we camped. A rider on a horse three times the size of my own, in a cloak that covered the haunches of his steed, hooded and with no apparent weapons. The rider gripped the reins with a gauntleted hand, with what seemed like iron horns at the knuckles. He never looked our way, but kept pace with us as we rode. I saw this before the vision disappeared into the shadows that breed in the forest.

I kept it to myself. I did not want to alarm my companions, hardened men who did not take to visions and auguries. We ate our cold meat in silence, seasoned with some hard cheese looted from a farm across the Severn. The clouds cleared away, and the stars appeared, Loki’s Torch clear in its accustomed location, Dain and Dvalin riding through the thickets of the World Tree. We slept in our coats and on thin bedding, curled as in our mothers’ bellies, on cold ground and rimed with frost, bodies sparkling in the moonlight. I was uneasy, and felt a doubled guard should have been posted. Yet nothing came for us. The shadow rider kept his distance or went riding with his companions in the trails amidst the stars.

In fact, he was not far. We rode on next day through clearings where the western Celts still dug for ore, and then carefully crossed the river out of eyesight from the fort. He came back to me then as we rode again into the deep forest, always pacing me, though keeping a distance. It was hard to believe that only I could see him. My companions said nothing, each man keeping to his thoughts, faces obscured by their steaming breath, weary heads lowered.

Now I saw the giant rider’s cloak - edged with leaves, stitched from the hides of many animals, though I could not tell if it was more bear or boar, the patterns mixing and indistinct. His horse, if it was one, made no sound, nor the rider. His gaze never wavered from the front and he never looked at me. His breath did not steam. Perhaps he did not breathe like us. He rode alongside for some time. Through all this, I never felt fear. This was one of the immortals who rode with us, and perhaps we were riding to our deaths. If so, it had to be heroic.

That night, I could not sleep. We camped on the side of a small hill, and on the other side, the river had cut a valley which opened into the land of the Celts. Once my companions were motionless and the fire had died to embers, I walked to the top of the hill, where a small outcropping of rock allowed a view down the valley. I felt a stilling of time, the air held in abeyance, the breeze gone. Nothing moved except the half moon edging along the sky. I felt a stirring in my heart like I had never felt before, a deep closeness to the land and my ancestors.

Then he was there, at the edge of the forest, looking the same way as me. He was like carved rock on his steed, which I saw as a horse with red eyes glowing like a dying fire, horns at his fetlocks and tusked, like a boar. I could not see the face of the rider, whether demon or god — his face was a dark void within his hood.

How long we stood there, companionably, I do not know. The mists moved slowly through the valley floor or crept down the side of the hill.

My joints ached from crouching but then I forgot this. The shadow rider’s arm rose, as I looked at him, and he pointed down the valley, away from us. I looked this way and my vision swam, as if I rode through a summer waterfall.
The forests were cut back, ancient oaks and sweet chestnuts falling like hay, the land laid bare. The meadow burned, the boar and stag disappeared, and the earth was cut open to disgorge its metals. Over the country the old trails were now encased in black flow, and streams of metallic demonic forms ran at great speed down them, with lamp-like eyes in front and red glowing eyes at back. These roads led to great cities, which began even as I saw in humble towns, grew large, soon to fill with castles in the air of shining steel and stone, edifices far too large to comprehend.

Truly, a vision from hell.

The rider’s arm fell, and he was still. The vision in the valley faded, shrank back from vast distance to the here and now. I looked at the rider, and I felt that he held back a great and indistinct army, now visible in the trees, moving slowly forward. Great aurochs, tusked boars, stags with antlers spread in a fan around their heads, grey wolves as large as my horse. They moved through the forest silently and off the cliff. Their bodies were both massive and insubstantial, stars visible through them. They walked into the air, and out of time, mists swallowing all.

Then the stream of beasts had ended and I let my breath out. The moment was ending. The rider turned his demon horse around and paused, as if waiting for me to speak. I could say nothing. He still had not looked at me. Then he walked his massive steed into a break in the trees. I would never see him again.

I walked back to camp. No one was awake. No one had stirred. The guard slept against a tree. There was no sound except the lonely, far-away hoot of an owl. I unsheathed my sword and felt a moment of hatred for man, and all the destruction to come. My companions would never know what their sons, and the sons of their sons, would wreak on this land. Of what would be lost.

Yet I put my weapon away and lay down to sleep, though sleep wouldn’t come. Perhaps I had not seen far enough. Perhaps man would die out, and walk the road to the other lands, and the forests would return. Maybe one day, we would follow the shadow rider as wraiths through the mist-filled silent forests of the night.

Author unknown. Translated from the Old English by Arin D.