Anaíretēs 

Not much ram, not many mule. Horse-bit, rat-bit, cat-bit, bird-bit. A buzzard. Feathery wings of silver, yet in the sun, white, gesso-white, ceruse-white, white, white, silvery though, to be sure. And my feet, just hooves. Vantablack, each hoof, eight hooves all, the image of Sleipnir, without the gallows-god rider. And buzzard part, really just beak, no snap, no hunger, more jowl. Few teeth. And a hairsbreadth, if that, of whiskers, vibrissae, et cetera, mystacial rows, not quite.

Mmm.

How to say.

How to say this all.

I am...

Let me gather thoughts, and the many lessons of Mankind. Such eloquent tongues.

A moment.

***

"Clarity, concerning the tongue," my master taught me. I shook my two hands at the sky and cried, "Oh, the pain of it!"

I remember: the height of my throat, the lack of labial consonants, a cure for both, the stringing sounds into words into sentences, naming a pretty plant I discovered, then the songs, the prayers, the charm I put on a rabbit.

Language was something strange and wonderful and it was mine to keep.

And now that my mouth knows its shape, listen.

To be plain, I am rather conversant in matters of the circus biology that constitutes my inner bodily mechanicals. A nervous system with twice the paths and thrice the alleys and every alley an entirely new dimension: that is mine.

Picture a centaur. Your classic estranged equine, the colour of sea-froth. His heart is gold. Eight legs, all black-hoofed. Two arms, hairy as a bear's pelt. His hands are claws. His tail blushing pink and swish-smooth as water moving over stone. Sometimes short. Sometimes long. Across his hindquarters, there are scant feathers.

Now see feathers starting upon his humanly back, silver, green. He is brilliant in matters of aura, sparkling, like… like a… atop his head, the… Christ. The sediment-shaved smoothness of an elongation cut short. A spike. His horn. No longer indexed to the fluffy blue heavens. A plateau for the sparrows, a landing strip for the flies. A panoramic view for whichever, for he is nine feet tall.

I know. I am more than can be pictured, and too much for you to imagine clearly (I do try). For mankind's many tongues are not mine to blabber and butcher, other than this southern speech, which, you may have noticed, I am not too shabby for. I mean, I get by. But here, here, you have loosely pictured me now, I think, however you have, chimeric monstrosity with but one true nomenclature: unicorn.

***

And but one true name: Lucifer.

And but one chance to utter my truth and the truth of the unicorn, for we are not just some children's fairy book creature, but rather misaligned beasts of humanly disorientation in our pursuit for alicorn distinction.

Fundamentally, we are born of cloth, spun from the drop spindle of the Virgin. We are pure, for she is. And in her lap, our heads know peace, and we are home.

When I was made, there were already three dozen of my kind, satiated by peaceful nights upon a hill beneath a moon in a lonely country. By day, we hid in a nearby forest, and gave shape to each shade, and tracked the odd wandering human by each shape.

"Human passed by Grief's Hallow. Human approaching Dim Kim," our horn-tracings went.

Shade by shade, our chain of sentries.

Our slender signing language.

The Virgin, our creator, a woman owed nine months of good-time lovemaking and never courted—not once. Miracle as they come. She had the saviour instead. She had the little kicker. The Virgin, so cross with the whole biblically affair, made me one ancient night and soon whispered in my ear and my ear alone of her plan to speak with God personally, or so help her Him. She said, That horny son of a no one or nothing in the sky we call Our Father. And I asked, well, of whom do you speak? And she whispered, very carefully, a dainty whisper: God. And I said, Oh boy, that's just asking for trouble. And she said, It is not a thing given you to understand. And I said, Well, explain to me this, at least, Our Lady. What is it about calling Our Father a horny so and so. Our Father is explicitly non-sexual. And she said, I mean horny as in horn-having, you damned fool creature, like you, but two, upon his head. If one horn is pure, the one truth, then what should be two, I wonder? A truth so true it is a lie?

And "Oh," I said. "I've thought about it."

And, resting her hands flat over her gravid belly, she said, "Let it be unto to me. Those were my consenting words, but consent to a divine act isn't the same as desire, courtship, or being chosen by someone who loves you for you. The difference between being selected and being wanted. Do you see? My purity is a void, a negation. The child in me, born of not two people wanting. Just as I have made you."

"So, why did you make me?" I said, aggrieved and not yet knowing it. "Am I not wanted?"

"Loneliness," was all she said.

And so began the first year of my idiotic odyssey for love.

***

So, there I was, born. Not once a baby. Just a skein or knot unspooled into shape. My physical appearance as I have explained it: an entanglement, but I gave it no second thought. It was night. The moon was low, and the stars beyond sprent like winks of ice. I knew they were stars too, for there was a little knowledge in me, the images of things, though nothing I could put into words, for I had no words, though could easily understand them. And I knew smells, and songs.

At least three dozen like me were scattered across a high tableland, overlooking the many scullery, street, and sylvan fires that bathed aglow the town and fields beyond in a molten orange, as if cast from a heavenly chandelier.

Not one of us spoke to each other, for we could not. We had no language. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so does it last in the voice of the talker. In other words, the comely win, but poets keep.

A sad affair, for I had fallen in love that night and could not confess it.

This unicorn was different, unlike the others. A simple horse with a horn and that is all. A sparkle. White as a swan's neck, and I shudder to remember my despair looking at her. I told myself it isn't fair, for it took her beauty to fathom my lack of. She did not look at me that way, for she did not look at me at all. If I had speech, I would've been speechless. But I had none, so, instead, I was voiceless.

And then she spoke.

"Come," she told me.

She did not look at me.

I followed her to the highest touch of a small, grassy knoll, our horns near enough to nick the moon. Her glow turned silver, and the shape of her became clear.

She spoke.

"I learnt to speak from a man living in the woods. A lonely man, in a modest hut of wood and straw. He is my master."

Quiet for a moment. Still, she did not look at me. She said, "Learn to speak. Only then will you earn my gaze. And know that I will tell this to many unicorns tonight, and whichever of you finds the man first, and gathers words like grain, I shall look upon and see thee anew."

***

Only when Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness were they fully made. Like children who care not for their own, then grow aware of the fact of their bodies. Bareness and vulnerability. The birth of self-consciousness. Mortal. Eve made a choice: to face vulnerability head on. Then she dragged Adam along, for what woman could stand an underdeveloped man so utterly naive?

Now if this story wasn't true, it was about to be.

For I had set forth into the forest, to learn, to gain wisdom, to grow. To become, how to put it, mildly: awakened.

At first, there were the others. Each in their pursuit, some quick and reckless. Others, patient as stone, also reckless (a wise unicorn knows not to betray its native pace). We each forded through the night-green dappled with moonlit hints of tracks, human, which led most of my kind to occupied outskirts where many a hunter made camp, drinking themselves dizzy and sharpening their silvery cutters with whetstone and war-wanting.

But not me. I was smart. Led only by small changes, where man had walked, yes, though leaving only the slightest trace: a broken leaf, a slantwise shroom.

I pursued these small signs, and battled one of my kind, who, in a scheming flank, rammed my side and scraped me, spilling my blood a silver soup upon the earth. I was wounded, distraught, for I had never experienced pain beyond an iron sting from one of the Virgin's sewing needles, and once a mattock blade, and a pothook (we unicorns detest iron in all things forged, see), and once, a pain I discovered in contact with rot. A furry mould among a woodpile, and a stale slice of bread I once found by an old, abandoned camp in the forest, and looked at for a while, and sniffed at for a while, when my stomach grew growly, and boy what a pain hunger is.

But corruption. There is no pain like it. For one of your own to stoop to such rapine. Such a seizure of violence, imagine. I fought, aggrieved, with a buried trace of wildness. The way the drowning fight death.

Thrashing.

Then not.

I fought well, battered beyond hearing and furious, but could not bring myself to kill one of my own. And then he struck, his final blow, or what would've been had something in me ancient wise and desperate not thrust with all its might and gored him like a boar cornered, and there I let him lay, moonlight upon his corpse, though he did not die but assumed, echoing the Assumption (our understanding of death rather than death itself), and whose apparition seemed to not want to go as I watched his body's silver blood stream for a rivulet across the forest and form a tiny puddle, and then a lake, and forever his blood poured and slimed and slithered like some sterling serpent and so the lake grew and grew, and until this day I haven't the slightest clue if it has stopped, though I suspect if I am mad enough to look into this lake I shall see naught but myself as though that were mercy.

***

I met a fox who tricked me thrice. A witch who ensorcelled me with incantations of lowly respect. I fought again a quartet of hunters who ambushed me with nets for fish (the stupidity). Days and nights I spent searching. No hut. No master. I followed the signs, but soon, even those faded away like foxfire.

And then.

"Stroke my greying whiskers in the thicket thousands, not since my sweet Suri. How you gleam, how you soar, lucent as all the moon and pearls and cousin constellations and orbital daughter-fire, to curse the night for hiding her face as it must hide thee!" Then came his touch, two dangling rods of flesh wrapped about my side with enough pressure to squeeze my ghost and turn it blue. He rubbed his cheek along my hide, his protruding nose like a massaging mace. How very tall he was, how very asymmetrical, warty of face, and how it dribbled with hair. "Pulchritudinous, bonny, bejewelling. There is simply not enough verbal currency, no logos, no glossolalia, no speech-species! Simply not enough in my astronomical vernacular, but indeed, I must express how the wings of my heart soar and the moths that live there flutter and flap and floss their imaginary teeth to please thee with moony breath and melodise their own metamorphosis, for really, are we all not transformed beholding thee?"

I think he fancied me.

But that's beside the point.

***

"Sit," he said, pointing to a wooden chair.

How? I would've asked.

He brought me tea. "Can you talk?"

I didn't.

"Can you understand me?"

I did.

And nodded my horn.

"And you want me to teach you to talk?"

I nodded my horn again.

"Makes sense. Very well!" He said with a loud clap of his cartographical palms. "We'll need a year."

***

And not for a year did I return home, to Our Mother, and found an empty house upon an empty plateau overlooking the distant drinking houses, steadier lamp flames, braziers and cookfires, plump smoke in the dark mass like low clouds, this small murder of orange-gold points a banquet of fireflies caught in my eyes, like some soothing migraine of amber eye floaters, how long in that forest I'd been dealt but a single flame from my master's candlestick and the image of the candle flame as it fluttered in all its acquaintance and there beyond.

How a thing will tell you everything if you listen.

"You've come back," said Suri from behind me.

Still, she did not look at me.

"I have," I said.

"No one else has returned."

"I know."

She spoke at length of the Virgin's birth-giving. Herod the Great, the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents. I spoke of my many lessons and thoughts of her.

"You will not look at me," I said.

"No."

"But you have seen me."

"I won't look."

"But you have seen me."

"Yes."

"So you have looked."

"Only to steal your name."

"What is my name?"

"Lucifer."

"Why won't you look at me?"

"You have learnt the language."

"Yes."

"You have grown wiser."

"Yes."

"But you have learnt too far the way of things. In my time learning from the Master, I found clues and stalked the forest by the shadows we had named, and when the shadows ran out beneath me, for I had gone too far and too deep, I was lost. But still, my journey was sacred, untouched by the callous hand of men, and my horn had no red on it. I walked a path of hidden flowers and air so pure it had been locked away for centuries, unalloyed with the steel of men's breathing. I was at peace, and so Master found me: at peace. And so, I loved myself only as much as I needed, and nothing more, and nothing outside of me for it, until my form slowly gave way to what you see now. Something caught between two creatures. A pure unicorn, dreaming the alicorn. Unlike you and Master, who speak a language too deep, and thus take a form too far." She looked up towards the star-sandy heavens. "My transformation is nigh."

"All I ever wanted," I said. "Was your heart. To love, and be loved, deeply."

"You have learnt as I have, as I asked, it is true. But the—"

"And you speak of naivety," I interrupted her. "To believe in something is to die for it. I fought for you, and in the process—"

"You murdered one of your own for me."

"He attacked me."

"Did he?"

In my pale mind the image of my horn striking. My molten blood seizing.

She said, "Look down."

I did. My eight legs, gone. Nothing but two legs, two hands. How I have lied to myself indeed.

She said, "Feel here," as the tip of her horn touched my face, and I felt naught but a stretchy gap of slick, white bones standing as a broken fence. Then up top, no horn, only a tiny plain of rugged skin, and strands of hair, coarse, wavy.

She then scratched my cheek and revealed to me the tip of her horn wet with ruby fluid.

"What have I become?" I cried.

"Look upon the silver lake," she said, "spilled from your friend. And you will see what I can no longer bear to remember."

And suddenly I hit her. The ancient temptation, all history present in that moment, man's cruelty, man's savagery, hit her with a sharp length of iron I found in the long unkept grass. Punctured her side, her heart. She fell and silver blood pooled about her and formed a puddle, which would form into a lake, I knew, to swallow the earth, in older times and new, then and to come, and it was cold as I sat there, overlooking the myriad golden eyes of town blink more rapidly by the second until they closed and dreamt of ordinary things, and nothing but darkness, but the moon over the puddle. And then, without mercy, I searched the puddle, and it looked back, and I saw but a man, which is to say, capable of this.