The Unicorn

Author's note: this is another snippet from the sort-of fantasy novel I'm trying to get written. Once again, this is up here primarily to showcase the prose and narrative style I'm using and which I'm trying to make sure is right, so any sort of critique is enormously appreciated.



My arms, by now, are hanging limply by my sides, my legs sprawled motionlessly across the clammy, tangled grass beneath me, my broad torso leaning heavily against the gnarled tree trunk, my head lolling languidly forward. The whiskey bottle lies among the grass beside me, long since emptied, but the taste of its contest still burning my eyes and gullet with its oily, fiery acridity. And though my gut is still angrily churning, my head still violently reeling, and the scene of wide, grassy clearing bathed in silvery moonlight stretched out before me is still swaying back and forth, I can still, somehow, clearly make out the creature reclining upon the grass just a few feet before me; that great, hulking mass of sinewy torso, gangling limbs, gawky neck, long tumbling mess of silvery mane. Its pearly, shimmering coat is glaring back at me in the moonlight. And it’s staring. Motionlessly, soundlessly, unblinkingly staring, like the great witless brute it really is beneath all that glossy sheen...

I blink stiffly, take a moment to steady my quivering gaze, and, lifting up my lolling head, meet the creature’s stare. Bright eyes be damned, it’s still just a beast.

‘What was I thinking, hm?’ I bur thickly, my tongue bloated and numb in my mouth. ‘What was I thinking, bringing some dumb beasts into this? Into politics? As if...as if you had the capacity to understand any of it...’

The beast stares back, motionless. A tremulous stirring within my gut writhes its way up to my throat, and I hiccup violently. Tomorrow morning will most assuredly be a wretched one.

‘Do you...do you understand what your dear compatriot’s done? No...no, of course you don’t...’ I affectedly slam my palm into my chest. ‘Me...I was...I was the last hope...the last hope for that...bastion of imbeciles.’

The beast stares. From above me, a dead leaf flutters down to the grass, scratching my naked scalp on its way.

‘Five years. Five miserable, selfless years I put into trying to tear down that numbskull. Five years, all undone in one night.’

The beast stares. Above my head, the foliage rustles sharply in the breeze.

‘I didn’t have to come to you, you know. I was desperate, but it never had to be you.’ Another violent hiccup bursts its way through my gullet. ‘Our farmers are good men, you know. That dying breed of honest, hardworking prole. You ever tried that, hm, beast? Have you ever worked?’ I fling out an arm and gauchely gesture at nothing in particular. ‘I took food out of their mouths by trying to save this little fairy circle of yours. I could’ve let them plough their way through this. And I should’ve, damn it. Creatures with no survival instinct don’t deserve to...’

The beast stares. The breeze stirs again, and the beast’s flowing mane flutters about its neck. And though my body remains all but paralysed by indolence, I can nonetheless feel the fiery, impotent anger swelling up within my chest.

‘You know why most humans think your kind is a myth nowadays, beast? We can’t wrap our heads around the idea of you anymore – the idea of rational creatures that choose to spend their lives prancing around meadows.’ I hiccup again, and an ominous growling emits from within my gut. ‘Well, let me tell you, beast – I’ve seen that damn near everything the old scholars wrote about you is true, and I’m repulsed. You hear me? Repulsed.’

The beast stares. From somewhere off in the distance sounds the grating shriek of a red owl.

‘You know, there’s this little, uh, faction, you might say, floating around the city. Drifter lot that live in communal houses or camp around the forest. Anarcho-primitivist lot, you know, sort of pseudo-druidic. Essentially a bunch of young idiots who think being a useless layabout is a political standpoint. Their logo is a unicorn head.’

The beast stares. The breeze picks up again, and flings a handful of grainy topsoil against my cheek.

‘And I can see why they just lap the idea of you up, the little numbskulls. Because you’ve clearly got everything they dream of – a life of doing sod-all that begins in nothing and leads into nothing. Because after all these years of living under a fat-arsed despot, that’s the conception of freedom they’ve put together, beast – a culture of lifelong indolence – drifting, directionless indolence. Marvellous, you’ll agree.’

The beast stares. A lean black sliver of cloud wafts its way across the glower of the moon.

‘I, beast, have never sunk to that. It’ll take time, but I’ll get back up there. I’ll see Sternosse dead, and without your assistance, either. And I’ll see that those brats learn that their ancestors didn’t spend generation after generation building up the privileges of civilisation so they could whinge about how terrible it is. And I’ll see that your kind, beast, are given direction. You’ll learn what it is to be civilised, damn you. And if that means having all of you pull plows for the rest of your lives...’

The beast stares. The anger now positively boiling within my indolent body, I find myself grasping at the neck of the empty whiskey bottle, lifting it up, and, with the last few fragments of my strength, flinging it toward the beast. It bounces off the creature’s flank and thuds back onto the grass; the creature does not even blink.

‘You understand me, beast?’ I grunt, doing my very best to push some degree of severity out through my parched gullet. ‘You understand, hm? I would sooner live my entire life in the pits of the filthiest slum than your little fairy circle. Because when you’re civilised, beast, you have some sense of life sometimes amounting to more than surviving until your next meal.’