I vote Blondbraid for this line alone even though the rest of the story is also wonderful: "Strange, how every time he thought he had lost everything, it always turned out that he had one more thing left to lose." Damn, that's good writing!
And I vote Baron for his amazing story and the abrupt shift in main character from the rider to the horse. That's incredible writing right there! I even had to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure I had understood what Baron had done with the direction of the story. Pure inspiration! Also, I always feel worse for animals in stories than humans when things go bad, so the feels-count was through the roof for me on this one.
