The bonds of her magic are waning. They’re unraveling, they’re unwinding. This situation is bewildering, a hopeless maze that she is at a loss to navigate.
She doesn’t know what is happening.
The night seems like a distant, far off dream now. Everything grows stranger and more alien by each fleeting, passing second. Enchantment takes form from swirling dust, spectral force in which dreams and reality come together in woven threads made of starlight, and all slip away into the cloak of darkness night provides. The spell is feverish and strong, going to an ancient tune which has long been lost to human reckoning. Strains of its power float into the air, soundless and resounding all at once like thunder. All the animals recognize the language of that tune and tremble. All of them watch the unicorn fall like a helpless pawn into fate’s hand. There are no words here; nothing needs to be said, and nothing will be said.
She calls out, but she doesn’t make a sound. For she has been lost in the tides of magic, and is being buoyed along like a piece of driftwood, then cast out to sea. Sightless, she rides the sensations high brought on from the transformation, diving into a waltz of tangled, bewildering stimuli she cannot distinguish, and cannot even try. A glowing haze of fear and dark-sky fills the area just as soon as it formed, and when it goes out, it is as sudden as a candle being snuffed by the cold, unforgiving wind, and just as quick.
At last, she slowly awakens at the center. She is at the foot of a tree, huddled in a crumple of frail, white-washed limbs. Her gleaming hair, her marble eyes veiled underneath long lashes, her pearl-colored body, every part of her is a mockery of the life once immortal flame now encased in mortal flesh. Dream and reality come together, and even night cannot cloak what the unicorn knows.
She feels her flesh. It is cold to the touch, because she is naked and vulnerable, because she is living and dying all at once.
The wizard is with her, in her thoughts and in the glade. He sees her caught in the thin starlight, a shiver of moon-flesh that ethereally glows in the darkness. Her long, white hair swishes behind her, her dark eyes closed against her circumstances. She is light itself, illuminated even in the shadows, more bright than the sun, more reflective than the moon. A pale, slender creature, who seems so delicate, so fragile, but only seems as such because she has yet to rear her head and show the full extent of her grace. Underneath her translucent skin beats and pulses a heart that is pounding, vibrating with the intensity of a caged, wild animal that has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
While he is despairing, she can feel her wits shuddering. All seems gray in the moonlight, all seems lost.
Her brain is overcharged, humming electric, and she can’t make sense of anything. Her trembling lips part. She asks simply, ❝ Why? ❞
Her voice is haunted and indistinct, which soon then catches in her throat like a fly in the web. The white-haired girl overreaches herself in strides and steps and to near disastrous effects as she stumbles and falls. But even this does not spoil her beauty. Her purity gleams across pale, unlined flesh, and she slowly lifts her head, lithe and frail and breathtakingly lovely in a terrible way, in an inhuman way. In those final, frightening moments, she stares back at Schmendrick through a veil of thick, disoriented confusion. This is the man who has taken her from her forest and herself and has sent her reeling back into another world: Schmendrick the Great, her old friend, once bumbling fool turned fully realized wizard.
The man before her resembles nothing more than a ghost who cannot be penalized further. His damnation has already come and passed. But what of hers? What of the unicorn’s? Once, there was a time she chose this form over her true self, for the mortal woman became her, beyond breath and width and in mind, heart, soul. And she did not despair then. She did not fear then. She had been prepared to give up everything for her prince.
She dared to hope, dared to love, dared to dream — dream that she might find a happily ever with the kind-hearted Prince Lir and live out the rest of her days with him. Dared to think she would grow old and die with him.
Schmendrick took her choice away from her then, and he has done the same to her now.
And she doesn’t understand.
❝ Why have you unmade me? Why have you made me again? ❞
She can hear the sweet song singing in her head: the song of death. This dream is cold and wintry, and it is indeed a bitter refrain to her. She can't close her ears to the sounds she is exposed to, looming in all around her like a serpent, curling with its brooding wings. She shakes her head against it, helplessly.
The night is dark and crowding in close, and made worse by the forlorn notes of a rabbit crying.
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