Down From the Mountains (Prompt: From Far Away)
x-posted to linebyline.
Some days I really would like to figure out where the hell my brain dredges up shining writing-treasures and images among all the morass that accumulates in my head on a regular basis under the stimulus of only a few words taken out of context from something larger.
And the king and his horses came riding,
Riding, down from the darkening hills...
It was only fluke that Madelyne was out scrambling over the rocks tumbled among the scrubby gorse and heather the night the white riders came down from the mountains. She saw them coming from far away, gleaming in the dying light of the sun like seagulls on the face of an ocean wave, white specks against a dark sea. She stopped her climbing, and stood still and alert on top of a craggy, moss-worn boulder, facing east towards the mountains and the rising night, and watched them come. They were a long ways off. The evening grew chill, and Madelyne began to shiver, but her eyes were bright and wide, shining like two tiny fragments of stars had come to rest in them, and she watched, and at last it became clear what she was seeing.
A frisson ran up her spine at the long mournful notes of the horn that was blowing, and it rolled across the hills like thunder. Not brash or bright enough for a hunting tune, not urgent enough for alarm, the echoing sound of the horn filled her, casting her breath away from her like a line cast out to a drowning man. A lonely sound.
Evening flew across the land like the clatter of horse-hooves over rock, and now Madelyne could see that they were riders, clothed all in flying white, their steeds beneath them all colours of shadow and smoke as they flew down the moors. Voices, Madelyne could hear now as well, hoarse and faint, rising in proud and determined tones up into the purpling sky.
Madelyne's boulder lay direct in their path, and when they came they split and surged around her like a cataract, seeing but not seeing, and Madelyne stood as a white marble statue on her rock, cold and suddenly afraid. She caught glimpses of faces, solemn and white under pale cowls and gleaming silver helmets, the jingle and clank of hidden metal. Were they human? It seemed to her that she had never seen faces such as these before, fell and strange, so unswerving in purpose. Their cloaks billowed about them like sails, like wings, brilliant even against the falling light.
She turned as they passed by, and just before the last of the long ranks galloped by, she cried out, almost involuntarily: "Oh! Who are you? Where are you going?"
But the riders streamed by like so much water in a river, and did not reply. The horn sounded again, from far away, towards the edge of the sea seen as steel and fading gold from here in the hills, and the riders went passing through the village below in a flood. She leapt down from the rock, stumbled and tripped her way over obstacles unseen until she struck the road again at last, and ran towards the butter-yellow lights burning behind the windows of homes like welcoming eyes.
She ran into her father on his way out of the village, and he didn't say a word, merely swept her in and held her close when she was near enough, and she could feel his heart pounding in his chest from worry followed so swiftly by relief.
"Where were you? You know you are not supposed to leave the village so close to sundown! You could have wandered lost in those hills all night."
"Did you see the riders?" Madelyne said, and her father, releasing her to grip her shoulders as though to reassure himself she was really there and perfectly safe, frowned.
"What riders, daughter?"
"They came down from the mountains," Madelyne said. "They came right through the village," she added, a little more insistently at her father's look of cautious disbelief. "There were so many, all in white, so strange. Didn't you see them?"
"You must have been dreaming," her father said, shaking his head to clear it as though from a dream of his own. "The streets have been silent as they are now for the whole evening."
"But I saw them," she cried. "I did."
"I think it is time you were in bed, my dear," her father said, and began pushing, guiding her back towards their home. "You have been a victim of faerie stories and night fancies, I can see that."
"But I saw them," she whispered, and bowed her head. "I know I did."
From the window of her room, she could see the ocean, a broad, dim expanse under a black sky streaked with stars. For a second, looking out before she lay down, she thought she saw at the water's edge white gathered in lines for battle, but it was gone in a moment, nothing but a roller foaming up over the stony beach.
She dreamed of a horn crying like an elegy for the dead, but when she woke up, it was gone, the sun burning away the mists gathered over the heath, and the world was silent but for birdsong and calls from the market square.
And into the sea they went riding,
Riding, and were lost forever more.
EDIT ==> I just noticed this got tagged with 'mod's favourites' on the writing comm. o.0 I think I feel special now. =D