piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-fourth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Unicorn/Factory

How and why were the unicorns chained?

There is a bit of an answer in this story.

The Silver Road is a major magical artifact, created by the application of a great deal of very dark and horrible magic, most of it fueled by blood and by lives.

The creators of the Factories knew from previous experiments that they needed a way to clean the air and the water; their current scrubbing technology was pretty much non-existent, and their first factories sickened the nearby villages and poisoned the food, thus denying them of a source of workers, people to buy their products, or a reason to exist at all.

The unicorns were there. They were, before the Factories, before the Silver Road, far more wilds, and their attacks were far much more… attacks, and less an unwritten contract with villagers. They were much like tigers or bears, living where they would and venturing out when they needed or desired prey.

(In that time, unicorns often left their seed in other creatures, which led to some truly horrifying beastlike beings.)

The makers of the Factory tried other solutions first, bribery (leaving virgins on stakes), hunting, domesticating, but, just as their normal stone roads were ripped up and destroyed, every attempt they made to bring the unicorns over to their side failed.

(There are many who believe that even then, the unicorns were too tied to the villages, and vice-versa. If one was against the Factories, both would be.)

The Silver Road, paved with the blood of unicorns and villagers alike, ended the rebellion, at least for the time being. It chained not just the unicorns, but the towns, the villages, and the factories – as well as those who made the factories.

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