Birds scattered as the constant thunk-thud of her feet passed far below them, under the sweep of spiked branches and deep within the well of shadows on the earth. After a while Valka wondered if her steps spelled out some kind of pattern – a secret, unknown to her, but announcing bad news for all other life. She watched dark wings sweep across the sky and watched the sun fall slowly down. I am alone, she thought. The truth of it provoked a hollow feeling somewhere deep within the smooth cage of her ribs – not sadness, not quite, but… empty. Familiar.

Valka paused the loud noise of her progress as the sun began its slow bleed into night: red fanning out behind the trees and spreading into purple at the very edges of the sky. Muffled heat soaked through the forest, fanned the hardened streaks of salt along her flanks. Her lungs sucked in air but the heave of her ribs proved brittle – uncomfortable. With an agitated flick of one ear, she recalled the lighter forest behind her and the chuckle of conversation. ”Why am I unlucky?” she inquired of no one in particular. Only the forest answered with its quiet shuffling of small feet and the unchecked spread of hungry shadows. Valka snorted, unimpressed, and flattened her ears at the dark. I am of blood bred from the wild lands like these, she told herself. I do not fear the dark, or loneliness, or anything… yet she shuddered when a crow quarked out hoarse warning just behind her. Perhaps that was the secret from which all the birds and squirrels fled: she was bad luck, made for one world and yet raised in quite another. She longed to rise on her hind legs and puncture the sky with that curl of horn on her brow, but the earth caged her down and history made her complacent. She had only the dream of great things – the noise of her feet in a dark place, the rush of her heart as she ran.

Weary with more than just the strain of many days walking, she eased herself below the branches of a spreading pine and leaned her hip into its corrugated bark. Just above her head, a deep scar in the trunk warned of an unknown danger: big, old, likely past. Valka sniffed the bark in idle curiosity, filling her lungs with the acidic scent of pine resin. This place is old, she thought, and wondered how old – how many things had it seen? How many darknesses danced in its embrace every night? She ought to feel welcome within such a place, she told herself. Perhaps things like her would rise with the moon and laugh when they found their daughter here from so far away… Perhaps.

In the fading heat, in this tired body, Valka found it difficult to believe much of anything. Perhaps a wolf would leap at her throat and she would die where she stood. It seemed just as likely. With a huff, she lowered her head and watched the sun set, watched the shadows grow, watched yet another strange land change around her without any notice of the unicorn it harbored.