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From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else.
Time had always passed her by in her forest, but now it was she who passed through time as she traveled.
“I’ve never really understood,” the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up, “what you dream of doing with me, once you’ve caught me.” The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. “I don’t think you know yourselves,” she said.
If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it.
“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose.
“Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”
stormy dreams sprung from a grain of truth.
Belief makes all the difference to magic
she accepted their hunger as her homage.
“Do not boast, old woman. Your death sits in that cage and hears you.”
“Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”
You’d do much better to stay with me and be false, for in this whole world only the Red Bull will know you when he sees you.”
“There has never been a world in which I was not known.”
“It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,” he said. “There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.
“Will you help me?” “If not you, no one,”
Arachne’s new web, which was like a fisherman’s net with the dripping moon in it.
The witch knows more than she knows she knows.
Unicorns know nought of need, or shame, or doubt, or debt—but mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.
“You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I’ll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams. I’ll set all your toenails growing inward. You mess with me.”
Only the spider paid no mind when the unicorn called softly to her through the open door. Arachne was busy with a web which looked to her as though the Milky Way had begun to fall like snow. The unicorn whispered, “Weaver, freedom is better, freedom is better,” but the spider fled unhearing up and down her iron loom. She never stopped for a moment, even when the unicorn cried, “It’s really very attractive, Arachne, but it’s not art.” The new web drifted down the bars like snow.
“I will kill you if you set me free,” the eyes said. “Set me free.”
But the harpy lifted her wings, and the four sides of the cage fell slowly away and down, like the petals of some great flower waking at night. And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled.
The moon was gone, but to the magician’s eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.
“You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”
“Never run,” she said. “Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks,
But another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road—the tiny, dry sound of a spider weeping.
“No,” she said, answering his eyes. “I can never regret.”
The unicorn waited, feeling the days of her life falling around her with the rain. “I can sorrow,” she offered gently, “but it’s not the same thing.”
“I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake.
When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.”
That’s why we always welcome strangers with tales to tell and songs to sing. They broaden our outlook…set us to looking inward….”
“The interesting thing,” said the Councilman who had spoken first, “is that they don’t seem to be afraid of her. They have an air of awe, as though they were doing her some sort of reverence.”
“They see what you have forgotten how to see.”
But the men had not yet reached the pasture gate when the white mare jumped the fence and was gone into the night like a falling star.
“Do as you will,” he whispered to the magic. “Do as you will.”
Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.
But he knew before he called on it that whatever had visited him for a moment was gone again, leaving only an ache where it had been. He felt like an abandoned chrysalis.
“Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness beyond any man’s deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree’s love.”
“Where have you been?” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down. “I am here now,” she said at last. Molly laughed with her lips flat. “And what good is it to me that you’re here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?” With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. “I wish you had never come, why do you come now?” The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.
the castle of Molly’s face lowered the drawbridge and threw wide even its deepest keep.
“The eyes are perjurers,
The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me.”
Never have I hungered, That I did not have.
The rain that renewed Molly did not fall on him, and he seemed ever more parched and deserted,
she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names.
She swore that one day it would sink into the sea with Haggard, when his greed caused the sea to overflow.
in our eagerness to make no enemies at all, we had now made two.”
“The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.
Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.
He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.
