Yayness

Go me! 1,600 words just tonight! Hurrah hurrah! Story currently called Innocence. It looks like it's supposed to be about Ceilyn. Tee hee hee, it's really about Gawain. Hurrah hurrah!

O for a Muse of Fire!

Mood: Mieux
Music: LOTR: TTT - le sigh
Prayer: Oh Lord, please still - amen!
The little inbetweener bits of the story: I'll post here. The frame of the story is pulling its old hither and backness of Story Proper A intersperced with little bits of lore, etc. Very Grapes of Wrath or Silver Wheel-y.

THIS IS THE LORE OF UNICORNS

They are born from the Sea of Memory and they return to the Mountains of Morning….

To drink from the alicorn is to drink purely. If a barren woman drinks wine mixed with the ground powder of its hooves, she will bear strong sons in due time. A man who wears a necklace of its mane will enjoy long life….

To engage a unicorn in combat is to battle death itself. For the unicorn is to the one it sees, a sort of mirror. So to the soldier, it is war. And to the maiden, it is gentleness itself.

~*~

Once, a man who would be king sent for his most trusted advisors and said to them:

“I am ill at heart, for that which I would have, I do not yet possess. Most wretched of men am I who should be king and yet have no crown. And yet more wretched am I, for this morning I saw a creature of such surpassing beauty that I thought I should rather die than never lay my eyes again upon this beauty. Had I my crown, I would give it to possess this other majesty. And yet had I this creature, all men would bow before me in wonder at my treasure. Therefore, the man who gets for me this creature will surely sit at my right hand when I am made king. Go, some of you, and return by harvest moon, and fetch for me that which I desire.”

And so the men went out, for though they did not love their lord, they feared him, and they sought day and night in every corner of the world for the creature their master had described. But as the days wore on, and the search grew fruitless, and men grew restless for their homes and the smiles of their wives and the laughter of their children, they abandoned the hunt, until at last only three young men still hunted.

Five and thirty days had passed when the squire of the first youth, Godric, returned, bearing his master’s broken sword. “My lord,” said he, “I beg you receive the shards of my master’s sword – all that remains in this mortal world of the man I have served faithfully. When we found your creature, lord, Godric drew this very sword and stood his ground as the creature came at him with dreadful horn lowered like a jouster towards his post. Although the creature’s horn was longer, my master was the fleeter and he thrust his sword straight at the monster’s heart. But the sword fell to shards, like driftwood against the stones. And so, unarmed, my master fell before the beast – pierced by its spiralling horn and trampled with its wicked hooves. Myself cowered in the bush, but though it saw me it snorted and flicked its tail and went away. I beg you, dread my lord, do not pursue this creature for there is no loveliness about it nor any majesty to crown you a goodly king.”

But the man who would be king only answered, with lust red in his eyes, “All the more this creature must be mine. My enemies will cower before the power of it, and they will cower before me who can tame such a monster to my will. Who still seeks for me?”

“Caedmon Greensword,” the squire answered him, “and the poet Riordan. But Caedmon will perish like my master, and Riordan travels in train and his vanity is sure to be his undoing.”

The man who would be king frowned at this, for Caedmon was his nephew and rival, and Riordan was no fighter. And so he asked, “Do none else still hunt?”

“None, dread my lord,” the squire answered, “but those unfortunate enough to be in their service. And they, like myself, may return whole so long as they draw no steel.”

“Then we must send out my best men,” the man who would be king declared. And summoning all the most ready blades to him, he sent them each one by one to their deaths.

~*~

There was once a scholar who boasted that he could lure a unicorn to himself without the aid of huntsman or maidenkind. And so he garbed himself in women’s clothes and he brought with him a harp and a girdle cut from his own hair, and he sat himself within the woods and waited hopefully for a full week. He placed honey in a circle about him, and made sure to trod on no mushrooms, and doubly sure to start at every cricket and bullfrog that sounded in the twilight, and so his spent his seven days. Then, on the morning of the eighth day, he took up his harp and in his highest voice sang the Lay of Summoning that he had learnt by dark and forbidden ways – and sure enough a vision of pure white approached him…

…and skewered the scholar through with its horn.

The scholar once boasted that his name would never be forgotten – nor has it. And to this day, wives and children laugh about William the Fool.

Fin for now