During the funeral, a horse emerged out of the bushes and raced straight to the coffin. People there were shocked to find out why the horse did this.
At a funeral on the fringe of the village, a polished wooden casket was next to a recently dug grave. The earth was still wet, and you could hear the wind and the sound of silent crying.
Some men prayed, while others stood still with their heads down, and the air was thick with melancholy.
Everyone was shocked when the sound of galloping horses broke the silence.
A pretty horse with bright chestnut fur and a white blaze on its forehead rushed out of the deep woods and reached the coffin.
That made them panic. Some people yelled, and others fled away because they were scared that the monster was wild or mad and could hurt people or trample the grave as it rushed away.
The horse, on the other hand, kept going and didn’t care about the noise or the people yelling. It halted all of a sudden, just inches from the coffin, and stayed still.
It didn’t move or blink; it just looked at the casket.
People were scared to come too close since it was acting weird.
They screamed and waved their arms to scare it away, but the horse didn’t seem to care and wouldn’t leave.
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When it was time to say farewell for real, the horse did something that stunned everyone.
It slowly lowered its head in a wonderful way till its muzzle touched the top of the casket.
After that, it uttered a faint, weak whinny. Not loud. Not insane.
It sounded melancholy.
The priest took a break for a moment.
A whisper passed through the mourners, like wind through the leaves.
Elias, the stable master for the village, walked up from the back.
He glanced at the horse, and his eyes, which were already full of tears, got wider.
He said, “That’s Orion,” under his breath.
“She looked after him.”
The crowd turned in shock.
“When she was a little girl, she found him alone and starving in the woods,” Elias added, his voice breaking. Took care of him until he got better. That horse never forgot her. “Not once.”
People startled and quietly grieved as they learned what had happened.
Everyone remembered the stories about Lenora, the woman in the coffin, who used to love animals like they were her own. That horse, Orion, in particular. She took care of him as a foal, taught him to trust her, and rode him every day until he was too wild to be safe around people. She had let him out into the woods years ago, crying, trusting he could take care of himself.
It seems like he did.
And somehow, he had gotten back to her.
The priest stepped back in a polite way.
No one wanted to get in the path.
Orion made another soft sound, like a gasp and a whine, and gently pawed at the earth as the casket was lowered.
After that, he turned around without saying a word.
He didn’t even look at the crowd as he ran back toward the woods, where he vanished between the trees.
Nobody was behind.
No one said anything for a long time.
They didn’t need to say anything to describe what they had just seen.
Love doesn’t die.
Not even for a horse.
