For ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here.

Terebina had thought, when she had first heard of unicorns, that they would be beautiful, majestic creatures.

She had thought that they would be proud, shining, pure beings, glittering white things, above dirt, above eating.

She had thought they would be like angels in her storybooks. That is, after all, what the whispers sounded like. “Pure,” she had been told, “So pure they clean water with their touch. So proud they won’t be seen by the unclean.”

But Terebina was clean, chaste, cloistered, or, at least, she had been cloistered, Back Home, back before her father took a position here. Before he had signed up to help run the Factory, and dragged her and her mother out to this tiny town which, at the very least, could boast of unicorns, since it could boast of very little else. There was no need to keep her cloistered here, she’d complained in frustration to her father, and he had agreed smugly. There was no one to cloister her from.

She dutifully took her lessons in the mornings with the other children, the daughters of the bureaucrats, and the sons too young to work, the daughters and sons of factory workers either too young for working or whose parents’ wages paid for this education for them. She studied, too, mostly from boredom, diving into her books in a way she never had back home.

And when all that became too boring, she enjoyed the fact that, here in this small Town, she could walk around unescorted, unprotected, unchaperoned, because there was nothing to protect her from and no-one to make her need a chaperon. There was the foreman’s son… but she avoided him, lest her father get ideas.

With time on her hands and an urge to explore, and a pressing need to avoid young men of her own age, to keep from being locked up again, and thus ending up avoiding the few other young women her age, Terebina ended up quickly an expert on the Town’s geography, on its small but well-tended yards and gardens, on its tall and snooty front facades and very practical, plain back walls. And, soon, she began to encounter Unicorns.

She saw her first one in Goodwife Jorie’s back yard, chewing on the roses, thorns and all. It looked up at her, its wicked-looking horn pointing in her direction, whickered, and went back to eating as if she wasn’t even there.

That was long enough for her to notice that its horn was not, indeed, shining white, but a coral pink, as if with blood flowing through it. And that, while standing in mud, it seemed to shed the dirt, a trick, she thought impertinently, that their horses would do well to learn.

She saw what she thought was another one – they looked rather similar – a few days later, eating the boots the foreman had left out on his back stoop (and never mind what she was doing in the foreman’s back yard); and a third – this one’s horn was almost entirely red – girdling a tree in her neighbor’s front yard. The adults couldn’t see them, she soon discovered, which make it even more entertaining to watch the creatures gleefully nibbling at everything they could reach.

“Aren’t you supposed to be pure?” she asked a small one, as, wobbling a little, it stood on two legs to eat the leaves off of a newly-planted tree.

In response, it looked at her, eyes clear and amused-seeming, and dipped its horn into a bucket of rainwater, turning the murky stuff clear as crystal. Its meaning, too, was clear: unicorns purified. Giggling, Terebina left it a sugar cube she’d meant for their horses, and left it to its lunch.

Unicorns, she was discovering, were a lot more fun than angels.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/275708.html. You can comment here or there.

For skjam‘s prompt

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

There was one road, between the villages and the Town.

There were paths, and cart routes, and packed-dirt trails wending back and forth through the areas that was called, by the townsfolk, “the villages,” and by the villagers a hundred different names, depending in which particular clump of houses you were standing. There were small streets going crosswise through the bigger villages, and the well-beaten paths that went down to the River.

But there was one road, one thing smoothed and graded and wide, and it made its way through the Town and out to the Villages, one long chain holding them all together, and it was called Silver Road.

Newcomers to the town, those from bigger towns and cities further down the mountains, perhaps, or those from other areas, thought, generally, that the road was called that, poetically, because of the greyish silver color of the stone used to pave the more-traveled areas, or because it had cost, as some of the Townsfolk joked, buckets and buckets of silver to build it. But the villagers, the older ones, at least, the ones who told tales by the fireside, they remembered the truth.

“There was no Town,” they would say. “Not in my grandmother’s time. There was a village there, of course; it’s a prime spot, by the place that the River splits, and the road comes up around the pass. But then they built the factory, and the workshops. And when that happened, they needed…”

They never wanted to say it, so they said other things, and their children and grandchildren didn’t like those either, so that what the Town and the workshops had needed originally was lost in generations of guilt and squeamishness.

“…they needed stuff from the Villages. Food. Labor. But the small farmers and the small craftsmen didn’t want to give up their lives to go into the Town. They didn’t want to deal with the smoke and the dirtiness of the factories. So they kept destroying the road, flooding it out, digging ditches through it.

“It got so every month, the Town people would have to rebuild the road, and they were getting really, really irritated. And when you irritate the Town, they make you pay, they do.”

Everyone knew that. Everyone knew the prices paid when the Town was too irritated.

“So they built their road again, with…”

Nobody wanted to say it. But they all said it, because it was the truth.

“…with blood, unicorn and human. The blood ran silver, the way it does, you know.”

They all knew, or they’d all heard. When Unicorn and human touched that way… yes. It ran like moonlight, like mercury. Like silver.

“and it stained the road, and the land under it. It stained all of us, Town and Villages alike, and still does, to this day.

“And it chained us together, villages and towns. It’s silver with blood, the Silver road, and silver like a chain, because that’s what it is – our lifeblood, and our prison.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/266129.html. You can comment here or there.

For ysabetwordsmith‘s Prompt.

Unicorn Factory has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

There weren’t supposed to be unicorns in the Town.

There weren’t supposed to be unicorns at all, of course – they were a myth, a superstition. But inside the Town? Such things should not even be thought of. Not in the Town, with its rationality, its science, its straight streets and straight walls and rational protections against the myth and credulity of the common Village folk. Not in the Town, with its upright people who worked hard for a day’s living in the Factory, who struggled to live in the faint miasma of Progress. There was no space nor time for unicorns in the Town. They did not belong.

And certainly not in the Factory, the heart of all those things the Town stood for, with its soot-blackened stone and its towering stacks, with its tired but proud workers, with its managers and thinkers and planners who understood how the world was supposed to work. A unicorn, if such things existed, could not survive in the Town, much less in the factory.

But Harah who worked at Gear Station One whispered to Jik, who worked the same station, that she’d seen something out of the corner of her eye. And Jik muttered about it to Tonor, who worked at Gear Station Two, and confirmed that he, too, had seen a glitter of horn, a suggestion of malice.

And Tonor mentioned both sightings to Ura, who passed it on to Pallas at the Inspection Booth, who had the sharpest eyes on the floor. And Pallas kept those eyes peeled, and told Rodder, who carried the big stick, when she’d seen the tell-tale streak of white. And Rodder chased the faintest flash through the factory floor, overturning trays and disrupting the whole processes, only to be told by Infe’s daughter, who was visiting, that she’d seen the thing leave by the shipping dock.

Infe’s daughter went home giggling, remembering the horn glimmering, and the happy face of the Unicorn munching the begonias in the Factory courtyard.

Next: Unicorn-Chased (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/231980.html. You can comment here or there.

For YsabetWordsmith‘s prompt.

This is in the Unicorn/Factory setting, which has a landing page now here (and on LJ)

“You’re not old enough,” her father protested weakly. They all knew it wasn’t true. They all knew it didn’t matter if it was true.

“You’re not well enough,” her mother protested, more strongly. They all knew that, too, was not true enough to matter.

“It should be me,” her brother muttered softly. “Tisa, it’s not safe.”

“It’s never safe, Farold. It’s never safe for any of us.”

She slapped her hand over her mouth the moment the words were out, but it was too late. All of them – her parents, her older brother, her younger sisters, her maiden aunt, especially her maiden aunt – reeled as if she’d hit them.

She supposed she had, in a way. She only had to bear it, and die, or not. They had to live with sending her, and live with whether or not she came back. Watching her friends’ families, she wasn’t sure, truly, which was worse. Watching her friends who had come back, she wasn’t sure which she wanted.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and hugged them all, first Farold, who was the most stung, Farold who had always protected her from everything, then her parents, and then, and perhaps most importantly, Aunt Eunice, who had come back… who had, at least, come back in body. “I’m sorry, all of you,” she said, more loudly this time, as she hugged her little sisters. “I’m just scared.”

“We’re scared, too,” her mother admitted. “We’re frightened for you, Tisa.”

“I know.” She rubbed her wrists under the tooo-short sleeves of the ritual robe. “But there’s no use in it. I’m scared, you’re scared, we’re all scared and angry. And…”

“And there’s nothing we can do but talk,” her father agreed. “So let us talk.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/172044.html. You can comment here or there.