...if you made the courser a unicorn I'd love you forever...
Reidi was no novice woodsman. Ever since he was a boy, he had possessed a gift for reading the earth; following the signs and signals left ringing in the wake of a creature’s passing. Indeed, given time, he could follow a pack of wolves clear across their range, coming to know each hound by the unique rhythm of its gait alone. But there, in spite of his skill, at the reaches of the season’s turn, his quarry and the land that harbored it, together they were proving a challenge unlike any he had ever faced. Somehow, for all of his gifts, all of the deep winters and breathless summers he had spent hunting and tracking across the merciless wilds, there beneath the shade of a strange woodland’s trees, he felt like a child once again. Unsure; even empty. Somehow new.
Perhaps it was the nature of the land itself that rattled him so? Such a strange place – so musical, so filled with light - it took all of the focus he could muster to simply stay true to his task, there, his mind constantly called off by the teasing melody of fairy flutes elsewhere in the wood, or his eyes wandering after lily petals caught dancing on the breeze. But if Reidi was anything, he was persistent. A hunter at his core, even before he had become a warrior. And lo, though for days he seemed countless strides behind that which he tracked, reading the signs of its passing across the dells and fields, the forests and rolling hills of that enchanted land, in time he knew that he would find it. That he would meet it, face to face. That mythical fauna; something no wise-man or singer of tales had ever before attested in earnest. A creature out of legend. A creature said not to exist.
The signs of its passing, so subtle, so gentle, they could only lend credence to its story. Crouching by its footprints, even to Reidi’s expert eye, it were as if the beast’s very step were the dew of morning, gently kissing the grass and then vanishing, leaving the sod more lush and alive than it had been before it was trod. He couldn’t explain it – the lightness of it. Not a twig was broken. Not a leaf was upturned. Before its coming, it were as if the woodland simply opened up, like a curtain gently drawn aside.
But Reidi would not be so easily swept. And so he did not rest, pressing on for days yet, until, halted in majesty beside a crystal stream, he came upon it at last.
Could it be?
It was. Here before him, the Unicorn, bathing in the purity of gentle daylight, its white mane shimmering like diamonds, its strong breath rumbling in its mighty chest. For a moment, Reidi could only stand stunned before the sight of it; a youth witnessing their first sunrise; a new parent finding proof of goodness, unabashed, in the eyes of their newborn child. And just as quickly as he had found the magnificent creature – just as quickly as he had set his sight upon it, he felt his soul open to it as had the woodlands. They belonged to one another, then, he and the steed. They were one.
With the first glance of its emerald gaze, Reidi felt the Unicorn sense in him the clarity of a genuine heart, not bidden by the pulls and pressures of the world, but bound instead to its own compass; its own simple truth. And so it came to him as a friend, and he climbed upon it, racing off to prance and frolic beneath the warmth of noon-day, two hearts united in the simple joy of living. Nothing had ever felt so simple. So free. But there was something within his heart that the magical steed could not have seen. A vicious ambition, cold and violent. And though he did not carry his axe that day, the foe-splitter he had wrought against more able bodies than even he could count, the spirit of the thing was not far from his anxious grip. For he was true of heart, yes, just as the Unicorn had seen, but his was a truth forged of glory, brutal and honest; a kind of truth the white-horned steed had never before witnessed. A kind of truth it could never understand.
Reidi would guide the animal back to Nara, the hall of his brothers in arms, where he would bind it, shackled in a paddock like an unbroken stallion. There it would wait, miserable and terrified, longing for the clear streams of its native weald, the soft mosses that had once been its bedding, the flowers that had once stood to greet it like old friends. There it would wait, until Reidi found a bidder with an offer worthy of his prize. Or else, he boasted to his brothers, he would simply butcher the ugly sow, the same brutal axe that had slain his foes now severing its spine like any ordinary man’s. To feast upon its flesh, roasted and seasoned, would be a rare pleasure that he would only too gladly share with his brave brothers. They deserved a flavor so rich, he would swear aloud. And aye, its horn? Could there be a more worthy trophy to hang about his neck?
In the end, no matter how, he would profit from his hunt. His capture of a creature of myth, thought dead, or never to have lived at all. The proud heart in his chest, if not the gods themselves, demanded as much.
"Now make your offer!" he screamed from the castle's turrets. "We're getting hungry!"
