[P] fragile as a flower

[Sarkan]

Sarkan The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.   And what about animals, the king says, and Sarkan almost misses it for how dead-leaf quiet it is, how paper-birch thin. And anyway, it doesn’t make sense, because critters are animals, and- Or unicorns? Now Sarkan was the prey that froze. Or maybe he was still the wolf, or just the woodcutter, because after a slow blink he straightened, eyebrows arching, looking at this man of rose and white and seeing only gold. Not of birch leaves but of an alicorn, and then the rich-earth brown of a unicorn before that, and all of a sudden all the skeletons in his closet seem awfully close to the door. Leaning on it, even, with the tapping of bone on wood. Or maybe that was just the wind, knocking bare limbs together. He has always been comfortable with the sounds of the woods. “Pardon?” he asked, though Sarkan knew he’d misheard nothing. Neither of them are smiling now, or even trying. The cut snare lay between them, a circle broken open. His thoughts glide like a palm against the scabbard of his knife. He doesn’t want to leave another body bleeding in the woods, but he’s a cornered thing now, and he knows what happens to cornered things. “I never said-“ He didn’t need to finish. Ipomoea finished for him, and then all hell broke loose. If it hadn’t been for the island (another unicorn) and the magic there, he would have been caught at once, another animal in a trap it didn’t see coming. But he’d had experience with magic like this, now, and even as his mouth curled into a snarl his knife was drawn once more, and it was long and ugly in the light beneath the canopy. And there was more work for it to do. Sarkan twisted first away from the tree nearest him, hacking a long wound into it, then kicked out one huge hoof to splinter another root to bits. But they were in a forest, and there was no shortage of trees here; even as they kept reaching for him and the knife kept up its work Sarkan’s eyes fell to the king, and there was nothing pleasant in their deep blue now. One more, then, he thought. And then he’d have to run, and not stop running until he was on a ship, and even then - The Percheron lunged for the paint, tearing a thin stream of roots that had seized one if his legs behind him. His knife swung high, and poised to plunge. @Ipomoea