Well placed in his rank if his interest is any evidence, my tongue waggles and his hooves cross the stone with a steady cadence; the deer beast bounds across the remaining space between them to envelope his bonded in an embrace of his short neck, and occasionally I can feel his eyes find me. I get the sense that, while the painted unicorn may have eased into my company, his small friend has not – even though I have successfully cooled the anger which swept through me, hot and irrational, unkempt in my youth and arrogance.

What is still unrestrained is my pride, which I doubt will ever find ropes which hold it. I was raised by two unicorns who were proud of their pure lineage, as I would be of mine, and I will be damned if I ever care that this arrogance, this truth, strikes wounds like whips into the soft hearts of half breeds and the hornless, or that it scalds the gentle sensibilities of my kinder kin. Within my heart is a prayer for eternity, and for those who will come after me, and it is with this boldness that I tell the tale of my people, that I pull Ashamin into the beautiful conquest of Loorien that I have seen in the deep waters of the Starpool.

I cannot help that, for whatever reason, my words have wounded him.

His eyes narrow, his tail lashes and his ears pull back in agitation towards me. I find that my own ears fall back defensively, but rather than a snarl of anger, a soft smirk flickers to life on my lips, one that is soft and mocking. That Ashamin speaks of pride being in the past of such a herd as this, ruled and guided by those it looks to, is almost enough to make me laugh – I manage not to only out of respect for his seniority, and his rank.

Has he not met Thranduil (my father had shared enough of the changes for me to know that my mothers literal golden boy – his swollen hubris outmatching, perhaps, even her mammoth ego - was now the Lord alongside Deimos), or the Time God himself?

Like so many of our kin, this man is lost, deluded by the illusion, by the vain mortal hope, that the world is as it should be; his soul bleeds for the weak, for the imperfections which mar the beauty which might be had in their absence. So used to the sight of their winged figures and their hornless faces as to believe that they are a truth which has always been, rather than the deeper truth that these beings were never meant to be, that they are accidents who shattered the serenity made for us by the First Gods – and, perhaps this Ashamin is not of pure blood, or perhaps he is only warped by the imbalance that ravages Loorien in the absence of our creators. Perhaps he feels fear when he thinks of the death, of the thick rivers of blood that will flow if the truth becomes known to more than just the few who remember the oldest tales.

"A miracle, a right," I state with a devious glint to my eyes, a mocking roll of my shoulder, "it does not change that a God condoned the moral path of our fore leaders. It seems more foolhardy to ignore the truths found in the past to suit the softness of your heart, Ashamin."