the Mares of Thrace are the wives of the Loathsome Unicorn. they are like horses and big dogs and salamanders. their hearts are like hollow gourds and their teeth are like long needles that stick through their thick lips. their hooves are razorblades, and they sweat the spoiled remains of the blood they drink. they are not from Angbora's earth, though not even he knows it.
During his inspection of the earth, when he toured its high and low ways to determine the worth of what Babjo had given him, Angbora rode, alone for the last time, through the towns of his first people, and discovered ruin and starvation. People hid from their elderly, sick, and mad, whose bodies were ridden raw by the Hounds of Id (who even now marked the theft of their Master’s House). Angbora drove the dogs from the towns with smoking brands, but received no hero’s feast. With nothing for him and his horse to dine on, Angbora and his steed ate the insane, kept in camps beyond the borders of the towns, to insure a better reception next time.
In many towns he lived this story again, and on a diet of psychopaths and pedophiles, his horse’s hair grew into sheer shards of hateful glass, its bones sprouted painful pins, and its brow grew a horn like a hawthorn hanging tree. Everyone knows this creature; Angbora’s steed and sin-eater: the Loathsome Unicorn. The animal loved the Emperor, but it was lonely, with a heart full of hatreds not its own, and Angbora began to search for a companion.
When the Starving Emperor finally found wives for his horse, they were on the island Thrace. This stone was sister of Europa, both daughters of the world-river the Master had pulled through space to give his House life. On it, the Mares stood desiccated and bloodless, like lacy dry gourds. Angbora dismounted, plucked a pin, and pierced the Unicorn’s knotted neck. the Mares drank his blood greedily; in some mosaics, it is graceful, but any who have seen them know this cannot be true. Then, they were his.
These horses were the two gifts Angbora gave to each village when he settled into his rule. The first, the Horns of Plenty, ensured that the Emperor would always be fed in his travels; all fields and gardens were his, but the milk and fruited organs of these goats were endless, and all people ate well.
The second gift, the Mares, ate well too, but, in those days, ate only on those who would have become Hound-hosts, and for each birthed a son: the Centaurs. Now, the Mares still eat, and still birth sons, but they dine indiscriminately, and their hunger is as insatiable as his Majesty’s.
Centaurs are like their mothers from the waist down, and like the swallowed fathers from the waist up. They are huge, horribly strong, and their scarlet skin sweats an oily blood, pumped by a heart that beats so hot that this substance instantly ignites and burns with a thick black smoke that pours off of them.
Like their grandfather, they have huge manes of quill-hair that grow without ceasing. They fling these spines from their heads with the motions of their barrel-necks, or pull them out by the fistful to use as spears and arrows.
the Centaurs hunt only the Hounds; though they devour the host, and the swallowed blood pours out of their skin in rivulets of flame, it is the invisible evil that sustains them.
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