From publisher blurb:
The earth before you cracks wide open, and this awkward hooved worm emerges, bearing two mouths and two types of ears upon what passes for ts head. It breathes fire from its mouths but cannot see, for it has no eyes. From afar, in the dark, one might think this would make it an easy target. Shoot it full of pellets and arrows before it can get to you, one might think. But this horse is no fool. It cares nothing for your puny weapons. If it wanted only to kill you, it would come at you quickly, by surprise, and overwhelm you. But no, it does not.
The fire horse wants to taste your fear. It comes for you when your defences are weak, but it will never ambush you. It will come at you underground, in caves and other constraining environments, where there’s no room to shoot at it, the way you wanted to. The way you thought you’d be able to. But it will never come upon you by surprise. It wants to devour your still-warm palpitating heart and all your other terrorized organs like the delicious morsels they are.
It seethes with hate. It burns with it. Some say the fire horse has the souls of a thousand crippled horses, or that it was created by distilling and compressing the souls of abandoned and slaughtered horses. But they are wrong. It is not even from this world.
No, it is the all-consuming soul of fire — not horses — transubstantiated into this terrestrial meat-form. The devouring hunger of an ifrit, bound in skin and bone, dazed and pained by the weird, unfriendly sensations of these mammalian organs. The living fire has but a single sense. They experience the entirety of creation through sight, via the light they project. They have no need for ears and tongues — and their fingers, already all ablaze, can “feel” through the light of the fires falling out of them. They have no eyeballs, of course, because every part of them is an eye. They see with every piece of their fiery selves.
But the meat of the fire horse does not come with any eyes. Nor does its skin care much where light may fall. In this body, the ifrit has — much to its horror — all the other senses. Now it can taste the earth, the air, the flesh of its foes. Now it can hear the shuddering, the shaking palpitations, or all creation. No longer must mages translate the sound of their words into pictures made of light to converse with this ifrit, for now it can hear.
But now it cannot listen. Now this creature is mad. It has no ability to comprehend this new state of being, like some savage bag of nails it has been stuck inside. It rages. It burns. It turns back to its essential nature, and it consumes — or tries to. And what it hungers for the most, is your fear.