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I must tell my story quickly, if it is to be told at all.
I do not know how long I will stay lucid this time round. My thoughts here ramble and circle back on themselves. The sequence doesn’t always hold together. Bear with me.
I am trapped. We are trap
ped.
I have fought the longest. I have fought the hardest. And still, I have fallen.
I must think. Breathe. Rest. Then fight again.
I know my kind, the Unicorn, is special.
We don’t fly, exactly. We move to and move through a place by thinking of it. That is our way.
We are magical, but not in the manner of the Elves. Their crafting magic, their binding spells, their ability to cloak and transform appearance, all of it far surpasses anything we can do. But we have our own gifts. Or we did. It grows harder to separate what I remember from what has been forced into my mind.
For our kind, time and place are suggestions; items of thought and memory rather than solid things to navigate. When we are unchained, we can move through time and place the way humankind moves through ideas.
This is what attracted Him to us. Our ability to move freely.
What power He must have had to freeze us in our tracks as we ran.
I was the last of all to be caught. Even in my fury, I could not move carefully enough to escape.
Amongst my kind, I am unique.
All others carry their power as a dazzling white blaze hovering centimetres from the forehead. Mine burns a dull, persistent red.
When I am angered, it flares. Those with any experience give wide berth.
I am often alone because of my temper. Alone, save for the pulse of my own power, red as pain when my memories crash together.
We have struggled to be free, my eight comrades and I.
It has been what feels like aeons since we breathed the scent of our homeland. More sweetly still, the scent of freedom. The largest of us, Donna, wept once. I heard her, quietly, in the cold dark pen where we were kept.
Kept like animals.
“Oh dear,” she said softly. “I just remembered humans. They loved us so.”
“I know,” I said, reaching to touch her gently. “They surely still remember us.”
She was quiet a long moment. Then she turned away.
“I’m not so sure.” The dark look in her eyes flared, her power briefly blinding me. “I had forgotten them.”
We spent the rest of that night in silence. The occasional snort and breath of our companions stirred the air, but otherwise the dark was still and very cold.
The Elven folk were our captors.
Their binding spells hurt, dizzyingly so. And they could make things. Not the ordinary making of joining parts together with metal and string. The making of the Elven folk carried the scent of arcane knowledge, and the speed of their work was as terrifying as it was beautiful.
Their aged, ageless hands seemed only to hover over their materials as the items assembled themselves.
What power does Him have over these creatures? And more urgently: how can we hope to overturn our prison?
Unlike Donna, I have never stopped remembering the humans.
They were never quite quick enough to catch us unawares, but their yearning to see us was mesmerizing. I could lose myself for hours in any human‘s eyes. Eyes are windows to the soul. I have always believed this, and those eyes never failed to prove it.
We never learned each other’s languages, the humans and our kind. There was no need. Our shared desires bridged every gap.
They could never quite see us for what we truly are. I have never understood why. Perhaps it is because we are cosmically different; beings of an entirely other order.
When I looked into their hearts, I didn’t see a reflection of ourselves. I saw a different kind of beauty altogether. This never ceased to astonish me.
We will be with the humans again. We must hold onto that.
This letter is for myself, written in a moment of clarity for a future moment when clarity returns: find the humans, and convince them to help us.
This place is so cold.
Not in temperature alone, though I feel that too, in the steam of our breath and the muffled echoes of our cries. The cold I mean is something deeper. It is in the air, the ground, the very sky at night, where it burns in shifting curtains of light that should be beautiful and instead feel like a symptom.
Is this the source of His power? Or is it a side effect of it?
I fear it is the latter.
It is almost time again.
I feel it in the urgency of the Elves’ movements, in the crackle of electricity in the air, in the restlessness of my companions. We will be called upon to move a vast sum of things across distances and through time. A feat none save ourselves could accomplish. Even for us, it is a strain.
I don’t know how the others managed it before my capture.
Blix is angry.
His sister Donna tries to console him, but it does no good. When the two of them clash, the sky sounds and lights up like a storm. I cannot make out what passes between them. I am too deep in my own thoughts.
We move now.
Even with the Elven bind-spells worked into our sides, the feeling of moving is glorious; the power of our kind and our ancestors flows through us, parting time and space.
He shouts at us, calling us each by name, driving us toward His purposes.
I lead the way. Angry, as always. My power alternating between white heat and the deep red of barely-controlled fury.
The journey we take is strange and spiraling, as it has always been. Because of our gift, the entire run takes no time by human measure, but there are so many stops it becomes dizzying. Time holds no meaning on these nights, especially for us, who move through it as if it were only weather.
At some stops we see humans. Occasionally one sees us.
But when I look into their eyes on these runs, the reflection I’ve always known is gone. The Elven transformation magic obscures what we are. The humans catch a glimpse of something magical, but it is a false magic. A performance shaped by our captors.
I grieve for them.
Our strength falters only on the journey back to the cold place.
The task is done, for now. We must rest, and make ready for the next call into service. At least, that is what we want Him to believe.
Dash has been speaking with some of the older Elves.
We may have allies.
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