Mari

A Christmas Tale of Ancient Dread in the Monmouthshire Snow.

For a tired Abergavenny solicitor, whose life is dictated by the precise, comforting logic of precedent and statute, the supernatural is little more than quaint parlour entertainment. He is a disciple of the rational, a man who believes the shadows have long since fled before the lamp of empirical thought.

Seeking festive cheer on Christmas Eve 1901, the solicitor travels into the snow-bound Welsh uplands of Monmouthshire. It is a world of ancient, uncompromising stone and deep winter cold, but his spirit is warm with good cheer and the prospect of a hearty drink at a remote, local hostelry.

Nestled within the stone walls of The Whistle Inn, the solicitor indulges in the local Christmas Eve tradition: the telling of ghost stories. But when a veteran farmer speaks, his tale is not of spirit lights, phantom carriages or conventional spirits, but of the Mari Lwyd: the spectral grey mare, a hideous skeletal survival from a time before scientific reasoning. This is a story of the earth itself, of a relentless, primal entity that tests the unwary traveller.

The solicitor dismisses the tale as mere superstition, delivering a lawyerly scoff that silences the room and earns him the wary, chilling gaze of the locals. His arrogance—his steadfast refusal to acknowledge the deep, unmapped territory just beyond the rational—has, perhaps, opened a door.

As he departs The Whistle Inn for his lonely walk home through the intensifying snow and oppressive fog, the solicitor finds his certainty beginning to dissolve. A sound follows him in the darkness—a thudding, then a galloping—that logic cannot explain away.

Trapped on the desolate mountain road, with every footstep leading toward an inevitable confrontation, the solicitor is forced to face a truth more profound and terrifying than any legal scripture.

This Christmas, the spectral horse comes calling.