To Touch the Fabled Horn, Part 1 (rough draft)

We'd been hunting for the last surviving unicorn for 7 years before we finally found him; following every tip, listening to every drunken old-timer in every deep-valley village all the way up Scandanavia, smelling every pile of dung for traces of ivory, checking every footprint for flakes of gold. Every day brought a new promise, something new to be disillusioned by, but every night brought disappointment, a fresh cold to chill us as we slept. The years passed slowly; glaciers made more progress melting than we did finding the unicorn, it seemed. The last 2 years had hit us the hardest; after Gulliver fell the rest of the camp seemed to grow slimmer with each sunrise. Nightly disappearances and reconnaissance escapes were regular; people we'd been travelling with for years too ashamed to acknowledge defeat or fear, slipping away soundlessly into the hostile night. What was once 15 soon became just 3: me, Lancelot, and Ahab-- the only 3 with nothing left on earth but our survivalist wits, a few supplies, and, of course, our crossbows.

But I should begin in the beginning.

It was well past the middle of the journey of my life when I was first contacted for the mission. Had you asked me at the time, however, I would have told you it was well past the end of my life's journey. But resurection on the written page came, eventually (though I honestly can't tell how I feel about that now), in the form of a comission by ________ to hunt the last surviving unicorn. My instructions were simple: with the crossbow and paltry supply of arrows ("dipped in the devil's blood," he told me) he supplied me with, along with a hand-picked party of "similar spirits" (another coinage of his), track down and kill the unicorn. When it was dead, or, hell, just lying on the ground blinking, stunned, perhaps even futilely kicking and neighing out the last ounces of its thousand-year existence, I was to saw its horn off without actually touching it. Put a bag beneath it, hold onto the head and saw till it fell safely into the bag. Once the horn was touched, he told me, the magic became perverted. I was never told what magic the horn contained, but, at the time, I cared little. Anything to save me from the dry fate of high school English classes.

All I ever found out about ________ was that he was a master-- had actually made a fortune-- at creating secret passageways through bookshelves and into elaborate fantasies; sometimes, he told me, he set trap doors in the paths of the pacing contemplative for them to stumble into and awake lost in an enchanted forest. Some form of extraterrestial technology, I supposed. His lust for the unicorn's horn remained a mystery, but we were all intelligent enough to assume it had something to do with his fantasies. I would later be the only one to whom this presumption was confirmed.

Uhh... to be continued. Perhaps.