we're hardly ever what we dream;

[Charlemagne]

It’s a long journey to make, from the meadows of the Dusk Court to the lake that Camdis Lohir had told him of.  Not for the first time, Charlemagne wishes for wings; how easy it would be, to dive among the clouds and soar over the peaks. There would be no world closed off to him. Even the desert would be escapable in a few wingbeats with a favorable wind, and what could Bexley threaten him with then? Wings were freedom, but the unicorn had only his feet.  Those, at least, were less clumsy than they had been at home. His time here had changed him, made him stronger in the places that had once just been lean. The scorched places on his coat and tail where the maze’s wyvern had caught him were almost indistinguishable from the rest of him, now, though the shaman still dogged his dreams with his laughter like the closing of a crypt.  There was another wiseman he wished to see, one who had been far kinder.  He isn’t sure how many days have passed by the time he finally spots the lake ahead, calm and bright as a mirror. It’s another hour or two by the time he finally reaches it, the pebbles on the shore crunching beneath his hooves, and the long summer day is giving way to evening as he stands and stares out across the glasslike expanse. It is so very different than the sea, and perhaps this shouldn’t give him comfort, but it does. It is peace he seeks, after all, not the feral beauty of the crashing waves.  “It is called the Vitreus and it is something out of the heavens. I will find you there and we can talk more of what you wish to be, my boy.” The words are as clear in his mind as the words of the Shaman - Wrong, in that papery voice of a skull - and Charlemagne cannot quite suppress the hope that rises in him as he watches the reflection of the clouds drift by in the surface of the water.  All there was now was to wait, and rest, and hope, and so the young unicorn dozes off, like a sentinel on the shore who can’t quite manage his job.  @Camdis  charlemagne*