Introduction

[the_unicorn]

I am a little uneasy among you. The last time I left my forest, I found that most men no longer knew my name; they looked at me and saw only a white mare with the road's dust caked in her hooves, a pretty domesticate whose tangled forelock they longed to trim. Not all of you here are men, of course, but that cannot comfort me. If men no longer

Comments

[the_unicorn]

The unicorn thinks she knows this young man, or at least his like; his eyes, full of worship and far too tired for his scant years, have gazed at her out of other faces in the past. It costs her nothing to be the things he wants her to be, and so she stands serene under his regard, content in the knowledge that he will remember her this way no matter where he travels.

And then he says a name -- not her name, but hers, and the unicorn wavers like a guttering flame. For half an instant it seems that she is covered by a whiteness not her own, a whiteness with outstretched fingers and a woman's mouth; but the unicorn lowers her horn, and the image melts away with a sigh.

A man may think a unicorn has stared into the barren bottom of his heart, when all she has done is spare him a cursory glance. This is because no man can really withstand the direct scrutiny of a unicorn, and unicorns know it. The unicorn now holds the young man's eyes with this directness, and though her gaze is as without malice as ever, it is almost as terrible as her silence.

[mistersmith_tm]

Her gaze is terrible and beautiful all at once, and he feels in his heart that he has perhaps offended her in some way. It was not his intent. Perhaps by his very presence, coming across her suddenly, or because the Voice -- that otherness that always seemed to be in the back of his mind -- had given him a name. He knows a lot of things that he shouldn't. Things about the future; about the depths of a person's soul. About pain and love and suffering. He's only an instrument, after all. His life has not been his own for a very long time.

He had not wanted anything other than to say hello, perhaps to welcome her to this strange world that he himself had only recently stumbled into. Instead, he feels as if he has asked too much; that he has intruded.

"I'm sorry," he says softly. It takes some effort but he can turn from her gaze; there is an odd ethereal presence about him. He would never wish harm or to impress his own loneliness on anyone or anything.

"I'm sorry," he says again, and sadly goes back the way he came.

[the_unicorn]

She looks deeply into the young man's own mirror of his mind, and what she sees there proves more difficult for her to bear than the sound of the name he spoke. It is not his transgression that pains her, nor the otherness which imposes upon his innermost thoughts; in and of themselves, these things are no more threatening to the unicorn than the workings of a very purposeful sort of magic (a magic she has been faced with many times before, as her mere presence does tend to aggravate it). She might even take him for a wandering wizard of Schmendrick's ilk, one to whom the wind tossed the name of Amalthea on a whim, and watch him go without being troubled by more than her own stirred regrets.

But he is so lonely, and she feels her seeming rejection of him has dealt him an ugly wound; not fatal by any means, but still one that she can never remedy. The fact that he does not cringe as he turns away from her only makes it worse. No, she thinks, guilt is not for me, not for any unicorn -- but she is not like any other unicorn. The name that has left her horn ringing with old sorcery dares her to deny it. When he disappears into the forest--for one trait the unicorn yet shares with her fellows is the absolute inability to call after a mortal--her head sways near the ground, like that of a weary, knock-kneed old workhorse.

She tries to forget the young man and his words, running back through the bright trees until she finds the shallow pool she likes to look into best. But her lilac wood feels too close, clinging against her flanks, and the pool's rippling surface is distracted by the sharper reflections in her memory. She sees not only the white face of the lady, but the lines in another woman's sun-browned skin; a magician's bewildered nose, a king's iron brow and a prince's stubby eyelashes. All long dead and gone, save one, and her ghost haunts the unicorn as the others' never have.

She knows then what she must do.