SpringtimeBat

Once, Velm was a unicorn of the First Choir; horned, radiant, engineered for childhood. His horn was a filament of sanctified bone, calibrated to extract sorrow and leave behind silence. He was deployed to sanctuaries, orphanages, warzones. Wherever grief bloomed, Velm was sent to prune it. 

He was not allowed to feel, to choose. He was purity incarnate.

Her name was Lisse. She was born without memory. The priests call her “pure”. Her blood was untainted, her mind unburdened. Kept in a glass monastery, Lisse was studied, revered, and left untouched. 

One day, once upon a time, Velm was sent to perform the Ceremony of Grace, a ritual where a unicorn’s horn would hover above the human’s heart, drawing out invisible sorrow. It was symbolic. It was a sacred to-do list.

On this ceremony day, something went wrong.

Velm approached. Lisse smiled. The horn trembled. And then- contact. 

Not a graze. Not a touch. Impaled. 

The horn pierced her chest, clean through. Her blood was not red. It was white, the colour of memory denied. She did not scream. Instead, she whispered,

“Now I remember.”

She died. Velm stood frozen, horn slick with purity.

The priests declared Velm defiled. His horn was removed, his mane burned. He was cast into some forgotten pasture, where disfigured unicorns learn to read, to write, to bleed. 

But Velm did not forget. He began to dream. 

He carved Lisse’s final whisper into the earth with his hooves. The soil absorbed it. The wind recited it. Other hornless unicorns gathered. They sang, not to mourn Lisse, but to remember her. 

Thus, Velm became the first unicorn to memorialise a human’s death as truth, not tragedy. He was no longer a healer; he was a woundkeeper.

An age crawled by before a child wandered into Velm’s frozen pasture. She approached and touched Velm’s scar with fleshhand. Lisse’s memory flashed like lightning across her mind, her body. The impalement, the purity. Most of all, the choice. 

The human whispered, 

“She wanted it.”

And Velm wept. Not because he was forgiven. But because he understood.

Velm leads no one nowadays. He sings gruffly with scars straining his vocal cords and a dark maw of a face. He archives slowly in silence.

And every year, on the anniversary of Lisse’s death, he performs the ancient ceremony again, alone, hornless, bleeding memory into the giant oaks. 

One or twice

The old count married

And set his wife upon the ice

Until she miscarried, slipped upon the snow 

Towards her open tomb 

For all she was 

Was an empty womb 

Exeunt 

The lady lived with her father and her brother in a sprawling manor-house, out in the country where only the grass and the trees could hear her sorrowful tears. Once upon a time, her mother had been there, although she could not remember anything about the woman. Her father, once pressed, said she had been old and careworn, and should never have had children. The words stung his daughter, but they only made her wish she remembered more of the little details. The colour of her mother’s eyes, the way she used to smile, even the chair she preferred to sit in. Instead, she was just empty space, a speck in her daughter’s mind that greeted her when she was especially lonely but needed to hurt more. The lady did remember her father’s second wife, her brother’s mother, and, she supposed, loosely, her own mother too. For a time that was far too short, she used to lie on the old chaise in the public study, as the man often locked himself away in his own private wing, away from his family. Her hair had been golden, and that made her stepdaughter envious, curling effortlessly down her back to her waist, unlike the lady’s eerie straight locks. 

He arrived on a dreary afternoon in October, as the leaves of golden wine fell. She watched his carriage, swollen like a leech-fly, weighted down with the heavy pounds of silver that decorated its wheels and hinges. His coach, his rider, and his footmen were sorrowfully melancholy or sorrowfully drunk, their eyes ringed with dried blood. The road outside her parents' manor was rickety, full of bumps and humps. Whenever the carriage hit one, the rider fell apart on his perch. The master himself could not be seen, for the windows were tinted, black like the abyss. Therefore, the only characteristics she could imagine were the hidden wealth on display and the dragon who curled around it. From the excessive amounts of jewellery gilded upon the coach door, he seemed to be the type of man to hoard. Luckily, he managed to have enough to hoard in the first place. 

“It’s a pumpkin!” The lady’s brother squealed, making her feel sick to her stomach. Of course, he had to remind her of mice, balls, and wedding vows. Meaningful things she had already dreamed of for most of her life. None of which would come true. Except…maybe the glass, spewed across the floor, intent on scarring her feet. 

“No. It’s just a carriage.” 

“It’s your carriage.” He grinned. His sister gave a disheartened chuckle.

“It’s here to drag me away.”

“To where?”

“Someplace lost and hollow.”

“Why would father let it take you someplace like that?”

“Because he has done the same. He has done the same thing almost four times over.”

“Almost?”

“The last one got away. They lost themselves in the woods, in the grass, and the breeze before they found themselves lost in brick. They are now a sister of the air.”

“The air doesn’t talk much,” And the boy looked oddly morose. “Don’t they get lonely?”

The lady smiled, finally beginning to understand her brother just before being snatched away from him.

“She’s not as lonely as she could have been.”

“Children!” The thunder roared impatiently outside the drawing-room door, “Come sit! Have tea with me!”

Turned inside out

Herded through fields 

Twisted in and out of brick shithouses 

Overflowing with painful ignorance

The eye’s are going lazy

My mouth is starting to slobber

My guts lie scattered on the floor

My ears flap on a wooden plank beside my head

I’m done for

A swollen, bloated corpse

Thrown out onto the slab

Side to side with concrete

Trying to fly away

She wonders how many wives he has taken. His beard is long, untameable, and he makes no effort to display it attractively. One moment, it's black, filled with stars like a late night sky. Another moment, it's blood red, reminding her of the man with a particularly brutish countenance she read about once; the pirate who blew his face up to strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. A man thick with his own smoke. 

Disregarding this still, the man’s eyes are bulbous and greyed over, even as he sneaks glances at her. For all the ribbons and lace upon his dinner jacket, his rough fists clench and unclench as he listens to her father’s dreary lecture and reprimands. His clumsy feet twist into knots when she is told to use the dessert fork instead of the butter knife to cut her carrot cake apart. It’s odd to contemplate him being annoyed or angry at another man, at a kindred spirit. Is he mad at him for wasting their, and therefore his, time with silly trivialities? Or is he mad simply because another is ordering his property around? The ring sits in his open pocket, purposefully catching the light within the small glass conservatory. His intentions are more than clear, and they are unbearable. 

He is ugly, yet he does not provoke the disgust she believes she should feel. Maybe his overwhelmingly grotesque appearance endears him to her? Or, perhaps she feels sympathy for the irritation scrawled across his face as her father continues, on…and on…and on. Not that all this matters. She will end up where all the rest are left; spilled across the floor, hung upon the hook, maybe even buried in the ground if she’s a lucky girl. He will grow tired of her soon and rid himself of the burden she represents. She hopes he will keep her bones as decorations. 

“How’s the tea, my dear?” The visitor asks, and her father’s talk slows, his words dying in a poisonous mouth. The man of the house turns to her, his eyes pinpoint red. 

The lady clears her throat, “Exceptional. The tea leaves are fresh from across the sea. A fresh cartel arrived just last week. Am I correct, Father?” 

He smirks, proud. The beast is tamed for now. 

Her husband doesn’t know how to kiss. Whenever he leans in, it's like he is opening up his chest, waiting for her to strike him between his aging ribs. His beard bristles when he is near her, transforming into a sunset red, a strawberry pink. It endears him to her so much that she has started calling him her husband before the important vows are exchanged. The eyes, once cracked glass, are now an ocean blue, reflecting harsh storms rather than calm waters. She nuzzles his cheeks when he is called away from her. She awaits in dark and dusty corners for him to find her and embrace her. 

A fog of twilight and discord began its slow descent upon the manor as the day’s last brittle light vanished behind barren hedgerows. The lady, caught between the allure of sorrow and the hope of escape, found herself staring at a reflection distorted in the silvered glass of the conservatory. There, she saw not the pale, forlorn visage of a woman resigned to her fate, but rather an echo of forbidden possibility; a quiet, insistent defiance that promised revolution in the silence. A whispered promise, like the fading echo of an old lullaby, wove itself through the corridors of her mind.

In the deep interstice where poetry met nightmare, the old count’s monstrous bride turned inward. The clamor of a thousand muted regrets surmounted her as she recalled the half-remembered touch of a vanished mother's love, a warmth that had once stirred life from desolation. With every pulse of her aching heart, she stitched together a tapestry of loss and hope, determined to reclaim the fragments of her identity, even as they lay dismembered upon the rough-hewn floors of memory. The air around her thickened with the weight of unsung secrets and buried truths, and somewhere beyond the grasp of her despair, the silent figure of the man, her husband, hovered like an omen.

That man, with eyes like ocean storms and a beard that shifted like a chimeric twilight, stood as a living allegory of impermanence and decay. His awkward, clumsy affections, the painful gestures that danced along the razor’s edge of intimacy, all spoke of a love cursed by trembling imperfection. And so, in the obscure corners of that vast, foreboding household, as the tea cooled and the conversation wilted into trivialities, she began to see the beauty in the broken. Her heart, an arena of relentless, warring passions, pounded with the clarity of a newfound purpose: to unravel the twisted skein of her inherited misery and to craft, from each shard of sorrow, a portrait of liberation.

Outside, the relentless October rain tapped a staccato rhythm on ancient stone, echoing the relentless march of time that granted no reprieve. In that moment, when the mundane and the macabre merged into one symphony, the lady resolved to step beyond the confines of her mourning. She would no longer be the silent quarry of others' ambitions nor the fragile heirloom of tragedies past. Instead, she envisioned a metamorphosis as radical and surreal as the shifting hues of her husband’s beard, a rebirth sculpted in the raw crucible of agony and ecstasy. Like a solemn incantation whispered into the void, her desire to reclaim her lost self surged forth, defiant and insistent.

When the old count’s voice finally faded into the distance, a lingering echo in a forsaken hall, the lady rose. Footsteps soft and resolute, she walked toward the shadowed corridor where remnants of gold and lace trembled under the weight of abandonment. With every measured step, she shed the layers of imposed grief, embracing instead the uncertain splendor of what might lie ahead. Fate, she mused, rarely offered a second sunrise, yet here she sensed that her own light awaited its rebirth. A light that might one day transform tears into a mosaic of art, an anthology of impossible dreams.

And as the night claimed the remnants of day, she whispered to the silent spaces around her an oath, a promise to search for that elusive spark of truth hidden deep within the darkness, where even the most tattered souls might rise again, buoyed by the resilient grace of forgotten hope.