Who Clipped your Mane?

The easy answer would be fear.

A wolf appears in my bed. He watches me sleep. He guards the curve of my body as though there is a border there only he can see. He growls when I reach for my phone, follows me through the house, and then—because he is still somehow Wolfgang beneath all that fur—finds a way to make me swear at him from the shower.

Fear would be reasonable.

But it is not what remains once I strip away the first shock.

It is him. There is no use pretending otherwise. No other creature looks at me with that particular mixture of intelligence, aggravation, humour, and unbearable attention. No ordinary beast carries itself like a man who has been forced into silence.

Wolfgang was fire horse: force, movement, heat, a presence that did not ask permission before entering a room. Now he is a pitch-black wolf with amber eyes, appearing when the house is quiet and pressing his weight against a question neither of us can yet speak aloud.

So, fire horse—who clipped your mane?

The questions arrange themselves with the calm brutality of files on Mrs H.’s desk. Who bound him into fur? Why has it happened now, when London is finally beginning to obey the structures I have put in place? What does he see in this shape that he cannot, or will not, say with a human mouth?

And why me?

Drina named him. Drina pointed him toward me. If someone has twisted his form into a curse, a warning, or an instrument, then the message is aimed at both of us.

I am no longer a passage, I remind myself. Not for souls. Not for other people’s plans. Not even for your curse, if that is what this is.

But truth has teeth too.

“So, fire horse—who clipped your mane?”

If he is trapped, I will not leave him there.

London can offer meetings, operations, phones that will not stop vibrating, and enough noise to postpone a reckoning. Overton offers something else: land under my feet, the old manor’s silence, and the space to let the fold open fully.

That is where I will go when the lines in London hold.

Not because I am surrendering to the omen.

Because I intend to ask it what it wants.

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© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.