Nice trick, says a male voice, crashing into my ears like glass tidbits pulled across the flesh by a surging current. Rather than becoming the blood that swirls in rivulets through the water, I become the steady flow of water. I let my own unseen weight press and glide against his surfaces, denying my veins the opportunity to strike out at him for daring to be a lowly man in my presence.

It is even worse when I turn to view him, the dual horns rising from her brow, the slack and lazy rounding of his eyes that hint to the objects nestled in that bag we wears on his shoulder. He is male and he is unicorn, and while I had mentally prepared myself for such unwelcome encounters, though I had repeated most constantly that things could not be so outside the slick, hedonistic walls of Elysia…

I feel my heart roar against his wrongness.

The poison is deepest here, and while I find my mind forcing my lightly dished face in a nod of acknowledgement towards his compliment, I feel the racing of the disfigured organ in my pores. That small voice, the after effect of the splendid bell of my mother’s twisted fantasies, tells me I should kill him for being so insolent. I should pull his sleepy eyes from his face and smash them between my teeth, their gooey pop symbolic of the sinful nature of his over eager stare.

I stamp out the sound of the perverse lyric with the gentle hum of the Moon’s light above me, look to this stranger with a solidly blue gaze that bores into his flesh; it is all I have to not insult him, to not write my hoof poem across his dark and massive body.

Still, my face is rarely changing – I wear a mask of wisdom, an emotionless and blank gaze that would see his soul. Is that not why I have come here, to escape the unbidden pulls and assaults of the wrongness of assumption? Perhaps he is strong. Perhaps he is high because he needs the drugs to not feel pain with each stride, bow, and bend. Perhaps I am right, and he is a simple, unicorn man.

I do not know.

”Do you need a home?” he asks me, and my brows heighten but slightly in response. A waspish remark is bit back, literally, as I hold the edge of my tongue between my front teeth, wanting to curse him for assuming such things of a lady such as myself. I am not here for a home. I am here for a family – and unless he or they of his kin know of Hespera, Brighid, Selene, Persephone, Iris, or Antiope, I want none of his company.

He might as well go fuck a tree, or babble nonsense into a brook. Such a question is useless to me.


"I seek my sisters," I answer bluntly, my voice haunting and full of unnatural cadence – he is not of the same origins as I, this is to be sure. I am a gypsy queen, a lady with lips of moon beams and star shadow, and he is simply a man of this place that is so accepting of his wrongness. There is no lilt of a tender accent to his words that I can define, as there is with mine, the easy flow of Grecian hymns a silken cover to wrap each of my offerings of air to his ears. "for they have come to this land. Tell me…" I tuck my broad and beautiful wings more to my sides as I step closer to him, their arch rising above my ears and casting long shadows across my features from where the Moon has hung her face behind me. I focus on his eyes – they are the same on all of the equine varieties, and his are of an earthy brown, hazy from the toxins that he feeds himself. I can smell the stench of their leaves on him as I grow closer. I know what it is that he does to his mind.

Perhaps he cannot answer any of my questions.

Locoweed is quite dangerous, indeed. Inanna, my bitch mother, used it often to disorient her men before…

Those sort of images are exactly the ones I don’t need right now.


"This is the land of Helovia, is it not?"