Trinket (Reverse Harem)

*Tink*

I tried to get up onto the ice to watch Ormiss' descent, but Itek stopped me, so I had to make do with watching Asund's reactions as Ormiss crawled down the extremely long vine-tube to the bottom. Asund clucked his tongue. "The horse-fish is making good time."

"The horse-fish is full of tricks," Itek agreed. "But he knows it."

"A King should be full of tricks," Asund said.

"He knows that too."

Asund chuckled.

I twiddled my thumbs.

"There, he's down," Asund said, leaning over the hole. "You're next, Korr."

Korr, in dragon form, crawled down the vines. He made much better time than Ormiss. I fidgeted until Asund shifted forms, and picked me up.

"We'll keep an eye on things," Itek said. Then he looked at Ethat. "No murder."

Ethat made a mmmrrp noise and hung his head. Itek shifted into gryphon form and made a cat/bird loaf on the ice. I crawled onto Asund's back and looped my arms around his neck.

He dropped into the shaft.

I closed my eyes and held on as Asund swung from vine to vine, easily making his way down the shaft, which got colder and darker the deeper we went. And then it became very quiet. Very quiet.

He stepped onto the frozen ground.

Korr and Ethat's combined magic had pushed the water back out of the main mine cavern, leaving it coated in a thin film of ice but otherwise accessible. The only light was from Ormiss' staff, which cast everything in its eerie white-magenta glow.

No, there was another light: faint blue, pure. The light from the pearls.

Just inside the mine tunnel, a small pile of the glowing blue pearls lay on the rocky ground. And above that, wedged into the dark stone, was a unicorn horn, attached to the remains of the top of an equine skull. The crack in the stone caused by the horn glowed the same blue as the pearls.

I approached the remains. The horn was a beautiful tapered spiral, as thick as my arm, and probably as long too. The color, even after centuries in the frigid water, was still a beautiful silvery white, with a sheen that looked gold, silver, or misty rainbow depending on the way the light hit it. The sheen caught on strings in my soul and tugged at my scars. The sheen was unlike anything else in the world. Pearlescent, sparkly, oily, glossy, reflective. Abalone and silk and the gloss of spring leaves and the shine of stars or the ring of frost around the moon in winter and the soft velvet of roses all at the same time. It was every type of shine and luminescence there was, all mingled into one unique patina. The horn still had its luster.

In their efforts to free the unicorn's horn from the stone, they'd cracked the horn and its thick skull plate from the rest of the skull, leaving just the ghoulish hardened plate of a unicorn's fore-skull. There were still the intact eye orbits, the forehead, the poll, and the upper jaw. But the skull had cracked along the less-armored mandible and lower jaw, leaving just a ghoulish partial skull.

I ran fingers along the scoop of the eye orbits. The bones tingled. My scars tugged and pulled.

The soul of this unicorn was gone. He'd thrown himself into the Churn. The tingling was just the lingering magic left behind.

But the grief. The grief still remained.

Even a thousand years later. All perfect echos of a pain my soul remembered, but my mind didn't.

There was nothing I could do for this unicorn. The unicorn didn't exist anymore. Not in spirit. Not in reality.

"And the worst thing?" I whispered to the bones, "is the dragons don't even drink the water."