PROLOGUEThe first thing that he sees is the mountain: a vast edifice of black rock embalmed in hoarfrost. It stands like a grim edifice, and it is so immense that it penetrates the pale sky like a blade. Ice winter clouds float across its onyx face; silver mist rolls across the ground, and hovers just above the sluggish crystal waters that flow through the heart of a silver marsh.
Four women sit on the brittle grass, their bare feet in the ice-laden stream. They are fair and pale, skin the color of milk and moon. They are bound in a prison of sleeping trees whose branches lay across the ground like lovers. The jet mountain looms over them, a silhouette that eclipses the clearing they sit in. A gentle wind blows through and ripples their plain brown dresses and long hair; they are caressed as if by a lover’s hands. When they speak he can’t hear them, but he can see their words, like platinum in the dark.
Somehow, he sees their memories: memories of empire. They recall dark buildings slick with black rainfall and streets thick with armor and smoke. Statues of tall men eclipse the dark city in their shadows, and the air they breathed there was heavy with fear.
But this is a better place for them. They sit near the waters and laugh, quietly, knowing that they must keep their presence here a secret. They dream of the present, and though he knows they must be freezing they look at ease. Gossamer branches sway in the distance, and beyond the lavender trees they can see the rising moon, cold and empty, a portal in the clouds.
A sound like a distant roll of thunder approaches, but he knows it is not thunder: it is the unicorns. The girls look at each other, frightened, disbelieving. They knew this day would come, but none of them thought it would be this soon. The unicorn's hooves splash in the water, and their whinnies fade through the mists in an inhuman dirge.
The women run. Their thick wool dresses are heavy with moisture, and the marshy forest conspires against them with sodden earth and thick tendrils of silver smoke.
He tries to help them, but he can only watch. He isn’t really there.
The unicorns emerge from the silver fog in a chain of nightmares. Their skin is black and coarse, and thick jet blood oozes from their eyes, nostrils and hooves. Their eyes are crimson, and their horns are pale and jagged, covered in black scratches that look like wounds. When they whinny their teeth are revealed to be fangs.
They descend on the girls. Only one of them falls, but the unicorns are patient, and they know that they can take the others whenever they want. She is young and thin, with wheat-colored hair that turns red as she is trampled beneath their hooves. Her terrified face is reflected back in their eyes before their horns rend her fragile body apart.
Like in a dream, he sees her fall away from the unicorns, up into the sky, where she is swallowed by rain that falls like tears and into a bed of clouds.
The other women run. They scream and struggle through the marsh, caught after every few feet by thick vines and walls of foliage. Fog cages them.
Again, he sees their memories of empire. Black rain falls onto the steep stone steps that ascend to a grim palace: the heart of the black city they once called home. Silhouettes of soldiers surround them, held upright by their determination to keep their home safe from the faceless advance of a distant enemy. White fires burn in the distance in great pits at the outskirts of the city: dank beacons to light their return. Armor grinds against stone as they march, out of the city and onto fields wet with blood and rain.
He cannot see their enemy: he can only see them die. Men fall in waves, face down in the mud, where they swallow earth and grime before their lives are painfully crushed from their bodies. The women cry for these men in their memory, and he realizes that those dead soldiers are why they are here, or why they will be here, for it has not yet happened.
He tries to reach out, but he can’t. A memory of white nags at him and tries to pull him away, but he stays. He cannot leave them, even though there is nothing he can do.
One by one, they fall. The unicorns are persistent hunters, and they know no mercy. The next of the women is taken when they race across a flat field, hoping to reach safety in a thick copse of trees that they think the unicorns can’t enter because of their great size, but it doesn’t matter. The horn punches through the next woman's back, and blood pours from her mouth.
The third woman is taken in the dark, when she and the last survivor hide in the shadows. They are exhausted, covered in silver ice; their hair and dresses have been soaked through with water, and they huddle together in the dark, in the shadow of tall rocks shaped like broken fingers. They neither hear nor see the unicorns appear, but the last of them – she is tall and older than the others, with bone white hair and high cheekbones and azure eyes – smells the brimstone and blood, the miasma that follows them wherever they go. The unicorns' horns are now brown with blood, and their manes have gone white, a result of their feeding on the sacrifices that have been sent to them. They break through the old stones and trample the third woman underfoot, and the last can only stagger away, empty and lost. She is alone.
He reaches for her, and for a moment he thinks she sees him, and that she wants to reach back.
Her mind goes back to the creeping shadows that hover over the fields of war. Her memories of empire bleed to more recent recollections of that better place, her small paradise filled with silver haze and girls with white skin. In her mind – in his mind – she falls up, into the sky. Even as the unicorns come for her, all that she can think of is how the worst days are behind her, and she falls upward into a world of tears and leaves.
The sky freezes as she falls into its embrace, and there she stays, held in gray stasis: the last victim of a lost age, forever frozen at the edge of her own death.
© 2007 Steven Montano
