Unicorns have never known how to bend, and fold, and gentle the tips of their horns into the shape of gentleness. She is soft where I am hard, stuttering where I have only ever been a knife fast and slick into butter-soft skin. In her eyes, both those on her face and those flickering like dying stars at the point of my horn, I can see all the things that I saw roving through the hospitals of war like a wolf through the rabbit thicket.
I do not know how to be like this, how to smile instead of gnash my teeth at the begging pulse beneath her neck. If I have ever known it I have forgotten it somewhere around my first and second step beyond the church-tree.
Hollowed is the sound of my steps as I move close enough to shift my horn from one face to the other. I wonder if she will hear the warning or if she will see it. Or will she be like a dreaming lamb curled up in the snake pit? “If I was a kid I am no longer one.” And for a moment I wonder at the strangeness by which she must see the world. I did not think it possible to look at my legs, and my made-in-war sinew, and think that I am anything resembling childhood.
I want to ask her pulse, do I look gentle?
Part of me thinks I should tear out her eye for the insult alone.
But maybe she’ll learn a lesson when I move around her, side to side and hip to hip. Maybe she’ll see the warning when I curl my neck above her own and press down. Maybe she’ll learn all the ways the world devours gentle little things (and all the way that it hardly ever spits them back out).
“When you speak it should be with certainty.” I can feel the hair protecting her ears when I whisper into them. “The world devours uncertain things.” My tail lashes at her side, gentle enough to only sting if it falls against innocent skin, just like one of the whips my mother taught me how to wield. Perhaps I should be crueler to teach her well enough that she will remember even when she closes her eyes to die.
I am hungry enough to be very, very cruel.
“And you might call me the world, little Elliana.” In my smile, when I lift my neck from her own, there is a mouthful of aching, hollow teeth. But I did not tear out her eye, and perhaps that is the only kind thing I have done in so very long.
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