The Phantom Pulse Issue #2 | November 2026
H. Marin
Thirteen boys line up single file beneath an arch of woven willow and pear, drooping blossoms and premature nubs of fruit adorning the twilit portal to the forest.
The village watches them giggle and tease, push each other toward the arch, draw back as quickly as they can, momentarily panicked smiles dissolving in the dusk. Each young face is adorned with the thick, stone-ground lichen paint of springtide, an inheritance lovingly applied to children who will return as men.
A bone horn splits the silence. The boys launch themselves through the arch and disperse like dust motes, blinking away into huddles of birch, packs of pine, and covens of alder.
The smallest of the party, Gilles—a full head shorter than the other sixteen-year-olds receiving the rite, a hereditary misfortune for which he is teased often and cruelly—crashes through the underbrush, his vision obscured instantly, a candle flame snuffed by unforgiving canopy. Diving into these woods at night is like diving headfirst into a well.
Gilles takes off at a cautious run, aware of trunks throwing themselves into his path, blindly changing direction every hundred paces as he was taught. Soon, all sense of direction leaves him. He is at the will of the land.
Gilles swivels his head, eyes adjusting to the darkness and wide with feverish desire. Tonight, he will find his gift from the forest; tonight, he will receive his gilded invitation to manhood.
For a long while, utter silence. Utter stillness. The forest leads him straight, turns him around. After some hours, his feet ache, his stomach hurts, he becomes dizzy.
Hoofbeats, then—just before dawn and just ahead, muted by downy ground.
Gilles’s heart flies into his chest. He has not been abandoned. He thinks of what the gift of a wild horse would do for his family. The hoofbeats sync to the rhythm of his racing heart and he pushes, silently, through a copse of silver birch. Their boughs rest warning needles on his shoulders, holding him in place.
A mare, pale and bright as a child of Pleiades tumbled down to earth, trots the perimeter of a mushroom-lined clearing. Her coat shimmers with dew and sweat; her mane flows against her neck like fresh milk pouring from a jug.
The horse circles the clearing several times, then stops. She whinnies, the end of the sound tapering into a strange, throaty sigh. Her legs fold in on themselves, hooves sloughing away to reveal tiny hands and feet; her muzzle shortens, becomes two pink lips between high, freckled cheekbones; her spine cracks and hunches, hair melting from her naked chest and hips; her tail floats away on the wind like gossamer.
Remade, she combs her long ivory hair with delicate fingers, lifts her dark eyes to meet Gilles’s dumbstruck stare, and smiles.
Gilles blinks, and she vanishes into the pink heather and broom. He stumbles forward, his body propelling him across the clearing before his mind has caught up. A white hair lingers, tangled in the mushrooms and underbrush. Gilles extracts it carefully and stuffs it into the pocket of his trousers.
The forest has blessed him with the most coveted gift of all.
A bride.
He scans the forest beyond, but she is gone.
Gilles brings back no gift, no evidence of manhood to his family. He keeps the hair deep in the crease of his pocket and says nothing of his horse-bride for fear that his brothers will go out to find her for themselves, or his mother will think she is nightkin and send a party out for her head. Gilles does not believe that a creature so luminous in her beauty could be nightkin.
His mother is disappointed that he will have to wait another year to become a man. What’s worse, he will be the oldest boy taking the rite. She expresses milk meant for his baby sister into a pot and boils it on the hearth for him to take before bed. It tastes like turned goat cheese and sawdust.
Gilles waits for the moon to rise again, milk curdling in his stomach, and steals out of his window when the sky blackens and the house quiets. He winds his way through the woods, weaving lengthy circles through the trees. He picks at his nailbeds until they are raw and bloody, swallowing waves of nausea. Gilles touches the strand of horsehair in his pocket to remind himself that it wasn’t a dream. He gives himself to the forest in the way the starlight catches on his grin, in the way the outpouring of relieved breath mingles with the night breeze. The forest accepts his gifts. The clearing isn’t there, and then it simply is. Gilles knows it has always been.
The mare is exactly as she was last night, and Gilles’s head swims with an uncanny déjà-vu. She trots the outside edge of the clearing, the tail of a shooting star kissing the earth. The length of rope stolen from his father’s workshop digs raw welts into Gilles’s palms. It will have to do for a bridle, for reins. He can hear the village cheering, taste the mulled wine that will erase the milk of boyhood from his tongue. He tenses, ready to push through the shrubs and into the mare’s path, when hoofbeats from behind cause him to start.
Perched atop a chestnut stallion, a small woman with pale skin and a long plait of spun flax rides up to him. She regards Gilles, black eyes twinkling with amusement. Something hides in her darkened sclera that makes the milk rise in Gilles’s throat. The stallion chuffs and stamps. He flashes Gilles his blunt, yellow teeth. Gilles cannot seem to look for long before nausea draws his eyes back to the rider.
“Are you nightkin?”
“What does it matter what I am?” she says, her accent thick and indeterminate. She nods her head in the direction of the clearing behind him, where his bride’s hooves carve a gentle rhythm into the night. “What we are.”
Bumps rise along Gilles’s arms. He swallows. “Nightkin are dangerous.”
Lips pursed, the rider gestures to the rope in Gilles’s hands. “It seems to me that you are the dangerous one.”
Gilles looks up at the shimmering woman, the rope suddenly heavy in his grip. “She is my cadeau de la forêt. She is to be my bride.”
The woman laughs. Her mirth rolls between the trees and the leaves stir. “Ah, bien sûr! A union. How wonderful.” Her chestnut gnashes his teeth and rolls his eyes. “Well, you cannot catch her with that.”
“Can’t I just wait and catch her as a girl?”
“She is much too quick for you.”
“Then how?”
The woman tilts her head as if considering, white grin cutting through the gloam. Gilles does not break her gaze, though he begins to feel as though his eyes are burning, sizzling, melting.
“A saddle of horse leather.” She adjusts herself on her saddle and pulls the reins of her stallion. “Baptize it in the stream that flows from under the mountain—the one that connects this forest with your world. Do so on the very last night of this moon. No sooner, no later.”
Gilles opens his mouth to question, but the woman rears her chestnut up and gallops away. In the clearing, his horse-bride has already gone. Gilles inspects the moon.
He has three nights.
Gilles asks Bertrand, a man for three years now and the stablemaster’s apprentice, if any of their saddles are made from horse leather. Bertrand gapes, then chuckles; he asks Gilles if his shoes are made from anyone they know.
Gilles asks to see all of his horses. Bertrand walks him from stall to stall, opening the occasional door with the keyring on his belt to let Gilles get a closer look.
Gilles stops at the smallest of the bunch. Not quite a foal, not quite grown.
“I’ll take this one.”
Bertrand’s eyebrows fly up, waiting for the joke to finish. “Him? You can’t yet ride him, can’t yet work him. What in all the hells would you want him for?”
“I’ll pay you whatever he’s worth,” he says, trying on the tone his father uses at market. It tastes metallic behind his teeth.
Bertrand crosses his arms and tilts his head forward, expectation dripping from his brown eyes, to state very plainly that Gilles will not be getting anything from him without answering his question.
Gilles reluctantly tells Bertrand about his horse-bride.
“A horse turning into a woman? Are you mad?”
“I’m not mad,” Gilles says, rummaging in his pocket to pull the long silver hair out for Bertrand to inspect.
Bertrand hisses between his teeth. “She’s nightkin, then.”
“Are you going to help me, ou non?”
A slow grin spills across Bertrand’s face.
“You want to be a man, don’t you, Gilles?” Bertrand’s eyes are fiery, set. “You don’t need a damn saddle.”
Another night slides into the sky. Bertrand waits outside Gilles’s window. He clutches leather straps, a bridle, a horsewhip.
Gilles leads him to the clearing. It takes longer to find this time—almost until dawn, as if the forest is trying to lose Bertrand along the way.
The bright smell of silver fir and she’s there, his bride, halfway to a gallop in her orbit, glowing with all the swallowed power of the constellations.
Gilles looks to Bertrand for his reaction. Bertrand is awed, inert; surely he has never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. Gilles feels a twist of fear that Bertrand will see her change; her horse-form is stunning, but her girl-form is destiny-diverting. Gilles elbows Bertrand gently, eagerly—jolting him from his reverie.
Bertrand grips the lasso and whip, then steps out through the arms of the firs and into the mare’s path. He swings the lasso in a languid, mesmerizing circle at his side, clamping the handle of the whip with white knuckles. The mare slows to a trot and Bertrand sends the lasso up in a perfect arc. His shoulders relax as the rope slips over her head, hangs loose around her muscular neck. She stops fully as Bertrand tightens the tension on the lasso. He approaches her deliberately, reverently, one hand out in front of him.
She swings her head and chuffs softly. He falls into her black eyes and raises his hand to touch the glittering velvet of her muzzle.
The mare swivels her head back gracefully, opens her mouth, and slides Bertrand’s arm down her throat to the elbow. She clamps her jaw shut over and over, teeth on bone and joint. Cartilage pops and flesh rends.
She pulls away, spits his still-twitching limb onto the silvery grass.
Bertrand stares at the empty space below his elbow and falls to his knees, paling rapidly. He reaches his remaining hand back for Gilles, a boy’s fear spilling from his eyes.
Then Bertrand is beneath Gilles’s horse-bride. She dances, manic, her heavy hooves driving into his soft body to the hidden songs of the forest: a cacophony of sodden thuds and dulled crunches, of insides turned out.
Gilles does not look away from the pulp of the stablemaster’s apprentice; he forces himself to revel in the loyalty of his bride.
When the mare has finished with her dance, she shrinks into her gleaming human silhouette and turns to Gilles, blood dripping from her mouth, her hands, her feet.
Her face is a perfect mask of judgment.
When she vanishes into the forest, Gilles steps into Bertrand’s remains and fishes the keyring from the steaming puddle.
Luring the young horse away from the stables is difficult, even with the key and stolen lead, but skinning him is even harder. Gilles is the son of a hemp farmer and a seamstress. He makes do with his pilfered kitchen knife.
He takes the deformed lump of flesh to the tanner, the coin his parents had hidden in a purse under the kitchen floorboards tucked into the band of his breeches. He asks if it can be made into a saddle. Gilles is much more comfortable using his father’s voice, now. He finds he enjoys the coppery taste.
Gilles informs the tanner that it must be done by the night following. There is more reward for him if it can be so. Gilles takes out the purse and shakes it. The coins release their golden jingle. The tanner thinks for a moment to ask about the hide—ill-fleshed often means ill-wrought—then shrugs, holds out a calloused hand. The purse is heavy, and he has not had good wine in a fortnight. He shoulders Gilles’s burden, then sets to his work as if Gilles is no longer there.
Later, Gilles lies in his bed, milk-drowsy and nauseous. He dreams of the village babes playing in the mountain stream. They squeal, splash, and soak each other in the icy water. The next splash is crimson, and the next. Viscera drips from their clothes, their hair. They scream laughter as they throw Bertrand’s purpling arm at one another. His baby sister catches a face-full of something chunky and yellowish. She giggles, wiping it out of her eyes, and turns to Gilles, leering, a bloody tooth stuck to her cheek.
Gilles does not go into the forest this night.
On the final night of the springtide moon, its face merely a knife’s thin puncture in the fabric of the cosmos, Gilles drags the saddle to the mountain stream. It runs clear, not red.
He tosses the hunk of leather, stiff and reeking of singed hair and flesh, into the weak current. The water takes days to travel from the peak of the mountain that overlooks the valley, through the forest, until it reaches the eager lips of their small village. The stream burbles around the saddle, too shallow to submerge it, so Gilles flips it over to baptize it fully. The gurgling sounds like laughter, bright and vitric. Gilles pulls it from the water and each droplet left behind sparkles like a precious stone. He vanishes into the trees.
The clearing unfolds itself before Gilles eagerly. It has been waiting.
His bride stands in the center, mane glowing, lambent eyes sharp. Gilles clutches the dripping saddle to his chest and steps out before her. The clearing has already consumed Bertrand, leaving nothing but a reddish-black smear.
Gilles’s legs shake as the mare regards him serenely. He does not offer her his hand; rather, he holds the saddle before him like a shield.
He is sure, in this moment, that all men must be so afraid of their soulmates.
There is a rustle of foliage as several white horse heads push through the brush to observe the ceremony.
The mare lowers her head, demure, and Gilles walks quickly to her side. He throws the saddle over her strong, opalescent back, tightens the strap beneath, and mounts her before she can show him her teeth. Gilles grips the pommel with sweating hands as more horse heads punctuate his peripherals.
His bride begins to trot around the clearing. She picks up speed, whinnying in delight. Gilles whoops, the world blurring into smudges of black and emerald and diamond. She does not wait for him to dismount but turns back into a girl underneath him, the saddle protecting her like a shell. He scrambles off and she stands, saddle draped over her shoulders like a mantle. Her skin and hair bottle what little moonlight there is.
Stars whinny and chuff and neigh and stamp their approval from all sides of the clearing.
“What shall I call you?” the girl asks. Her breath is the sharp burn of pine sap.
Gilles clears the nerves from his throat. “I am called Gilles.”
“I am Leni.” The girl steps forward, close enough for Gilles to touch. “Do you present yourself to me, cadeau de la forêt?”
Gilles completes the rite, as his father and mother did, as did centuries upon centuries of lovers before him. “I do.”
Leni, however, does not whisper the words back. In one fluid motion, she slides the saddle from her back and onto his shoulders.
The world dissolves.
All of the bones in his body snap and crack in rapid succession, stretching to fill the billowing lengths of dappled skin extending from his limbs. His legs and arms thrust outward, knees enlarging into thick knots, the flesh of his hands and feet withering like leaves thrown into kindling, leaving behind hard grey stumps. He grows too quickly for him to balance himself, the mass of his equine form shooting up into the night then falling, thrashing, now screaming, now braying.
The painted stallion struggles to right himself, hooves dragging trenches through the clearing’s grass. Before he can bolt, Leni secures his saddle and launches herself deftly onto his back. Her stallion whinnies, rolls his eyes, tosses his enormous head. Leni reaches down into his mane, drags her fingers through to calm him.
Her sisters prance out from the clearing’s outskirts, shedding their horse bodies to run their hands along Leni’s gift from the forest as he stamps, held in place by her thin fingers on the pommel.
Leni’s elder sisters enter the grove on horseback—buckskins, roans, duns, palominos. They ride up beside Leni, each kissing her in congratulations. Now partnered, she is ready for the hunt. The painted stallion shifts only slightly beneath her, his breathing calm.
How quickly they forget.
Leni lines up beside her sisters and their horsemen. The younglings explode back into a white flurry of limbs, tails, manes, and muzzles.
Leni gently digs her heels into her groom’s side. “Onward, Gilles.”
His pelt shudders in half-memory, but he crashes off into the night, the tails of one hundred nightkin stars in his wake, Leni glowing in the effulgence of womanhood.
About the Author
H. Marin (she/they) is a queer, disabled, neurodivergent author of dark speculative fiction and the Novelette Editor at Foofaraw Press. She holds an MFA from Fairfield University and lives in New England with her wife, her two children, and her two black cats. An active member of the SFWA, HWA, and Codex, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, If There’s Anyone Left, and Adventitious, among others.