Did the others think her odd? No doubt they did. She saw them infrequently these days, their flashing white bodies glancing through the world, partaking of life. She partook of death. Or, more precisely, she bore witness to the skimming of life, the final throes, blunting the pain that so often accompanied them. If that was odd, then odd she was and proud to be so.

Her aches made the world seem smaller than it was. Distances, once easy to judge, tended these days to deceive her. As she hastened onward, a hard-packed roadway drove spike after spike into her striking hooves. Her heart, a surging red fury, pounded out of control in her breast. Even so, she pressed at top speed toward the woodcutter's cottage, praying she'd arrive on time.

The wood she entered seemed familiar. That wasn't surprising. By now, all the world seemed--indeed was--so. Beside the cottage's shadowed east wall, an unassuming grave marker belonging to the woodcutter's wife brought to mind her death years before, a gray sigh in his huddled arms. Without a moment to spare, she burst silently through the thick oak door as a last ray of sunlight faded on his face. Their eyes met. The dying man was a worn husk of wrinkle and bone, his axe idle by the fireplace. Plump misshapen pillows angled him up. Tattered blankets, gray as dust, clung to him. Through one last exhalation, he shivered, his lips thin and dark.

His eyes melted upon hers.

Eons before, when she and the world were young, this witnessing, this absorption of pain, had made her feel superior. She, of all her kind, lived deeper, felt more profoundly, probed life to its roots--or so she had imagined. The others? They drank from far shallower waters, their fluff-white manes tossed carelessly in the wind. They scattered their attention hither and yon, squandering it. Ah, but she--and one other, the one who witnessed births--had chosen, more wisely, to fix on one thing only. For too many millennia, that had been her view. But since her disorders had begun to gather and spread, she'd grown to honor, to envy, the others. Depth, she understood finally, could be gained through sidewise means, glances at experience that seemed superficial but weren't. So they in their way had mined life's riches, and she in hers.

The dying man's eyes widened.

The air about him refused to be drawn into his nostrils, into his gaping mouth. "Accept it," she said, her ribs hurting from how swiftly she'd arrived. Her words took the edge off his panic, softened him, even as lances of pain shot through her, heightening the misery of founder and strangles, the botfly larvae and tapeworms that infested her tract, the colic, the arthritis, the disorders ravaging her lungs. Her coat glowed with the light of immortality. But inside, she harbored accretions of death.