The cellar? He had found my lab! My first impulse was of him walking past its door. Maybe I had meant to close it, but some arbitrary piece of rubbish kept it open just enough? Maybe he had, for some uncharacteristic reason, developed a brief curiosity about where I spent most of my days? I snuck around the side of the house, constantly examining the windows, thief-like, for any signs of life. As I approached the back, I heard a faint monotonous ring coming from his favorite barn.

“Shoeing,” I said, relieved. An image I had of him hovering over my cellar door began to dissolve.

I scurried there anyway. A quick inspection revealed that all was as I’d left it. I decided to go at least take a look at Father. Not for any reason one could readily ascribe, but I couldn’t place a sensation that still lingered, and I now felt wrapped in some lurid investigation.

The farrier hammer, making the usual tinks and tanks, echoed from the other side of the barn. I approached in a timid walk. Talking to him wasn’t something that happened all that often, and I was already formulating my rebuttal for his most probable, stern request for some laboring assistance.

Turning the corner, I stopped at the sight before me. In a pool of his own blood lay Celly. His coal black fur was so much darker than the white skull and pinkish brain.

A wave of emotions pummeled me. He wasn’t dead…and I had enough tools to repair the wound. This creature, my friend, lay in torment unattended. Sickness, yes. Guilt, that too. I felt the world spin, and some chorus of nameless mocking things sang their pale and dead incantations as I tried to breathe.

Most of all, I felt hatred. A hatred that made the world turn cold.

I was not a young man who was naïve to the presence and yields of hate. I had dwelled in a sort of darkness my whole life, and wrestled with my disconnected family at an early age and left that hope abandoned, dead in some field. The hate upon the sight this day was a treachery. When I saw that the corral gate was ajar, I put together what happened.

Celly had managed to break out. With my increased time away, he had most likely made the mistake of wandering up to Father for something as simple as a head rub. Father, busy with his stable duties, turned out to be in no mood for such troublesome interruptions. He killed Celly with one hammer blow to the head.

Behind a stable wall, sounds of work resumed. I couldn’t see him, but he was close. Tools hung about me.

I snatched a hefty pick and gripped its handle. I fought the urge to look over at Celly, knowing I’d weep uncontrollably if I did. I crept to the edge of the wall, then I could fight that urge no longer. My spine bent and jerked as I wept, vomiting violent and uncontrollable little meeps.