#YES I remembered that I'd written about that specifically before... call me a nerd; you'd be correct.

[jorvikpov]

Greendale, it is said, is a place for the lost, the lonely, and the wandering.

The woods are quiet around you as you make your way deeper, silence only interrupted by the gentle crunching and springing back of frozen moss that your horse’s hooves push down with every heavy step forward, occasional rustling in the frozen leaves as silent, ice-cold winds blow in from the ocean, and the slow, quiet sound of your own breathing. Thick, grey mist fills up every gap between the trees, reducing your line of sight to but a fraction of what it could have been and slowly but surely soaking you with the kind of dampness that is unnoticeable until your clothes weigh twice as much as normal and your skin is beginning to itch and goosebump from the cold, wet fabric of your undershirt. Above the tree crowns, the day is bright and clear—somewhere far above, perhaps nested in the deceivingly warm sunlight, a lone bird sings, already calling for spring even though winter is little more than halfway done—but here, under the thick blanket of leaves, only a few sunbeams light up the bare ground, filtering through the mist on their way down and leaving long, swirling trails of gold behind.

The woods deepen and deepen and deepen, mist growing thicker and sunlight becoming impossibly rarer as you go along. The trees themselves, too, seem to be growing thicker and nestling closer together in more and more of a labyrinth, and as you with increasing difficulty navigate the shrubbery and the ever steeper cliffs, you become less and less sure that you could make it back out of here without help. In the back of your mind, slowly sneaking up on you, is the thought that maybe, you were wrong to follow your gut feeling here—that maybe, recently, you have grown too used to trusting it.

Your horse stops and stands as if frozen to the spot, only ears moving but moving wildly, back and forth and side to side; someone is here. Between two trees, you catch a glimpse of something blue shifting in the mist, and you know with sudden certainty that you have seen this before.

(Somewhere deep in an evergreen forest wanders a lonely horse, eyes as blue as its mane and its heart aching with loneliness in the absence of something important, though it no longer knows what. Perhaps, once, it was reaching out to find that something again; these days, it barely knows how to reach.)

For a moment, you remain there, only the sound of somebody else’s soft hoof steps echoing through the woods as you wait to feel the tension slowly seep from your horse’s body beneath the saddle. The hoof steps grow closer, a little further, a little closer, and stop.

From behind a large, mossy rock, an icy blue eye peeks out, beckoning you to follow, and you do as it asks.