This is a place for ghosts.

It is something like a prowl that carries Indra into the mist-riddled east, something sleek and savage that has her hunting deeper and deeper between the amber monoliths which rise like blunted teeth above the fog. If this is the mouth of some dread monster, she is ready for the snapping jaws. Grief has honed her to a reckless edge. She is hungry for diversion, and she is out for blood tonightâ€"little matter if it be another's or her own.

All noise is dampened by the fog: there is no clicking of iron hooves, no whisper of muscle and sinew, flesh and bone. She could as well be a ghost herself, silver and soundless in the gloom, but the illusion is no comfort to her here. The shade she seeks is beyond the ken of shadow-play and sleight of hand, beyond the reach of conjury and wishesâ€"beyond, perhaps, even the boundaries of time. There will be no midnight apparitions, not for her. There will be no satisfaction for her furious heart.

There is only the mist, limitless and smothering, and the unrippling pool that shimmers black as a devil's eye into view before her. With a cool, detached sort of curiosity Indra arcs her neck toward the surface, touching the tip of her iron horn to the place where her reflection ought to be. The horn passes without so much as a trembling of resistance, effortless as a sword through smoke.

For a moment the unicorn wonders what would happen if she were to wade inâ€"if the pool would rise about her hocks, her hips, her withers, seeping like ink along her skin, swallowing her under. But she lifts her golden eyes from the shadow waters and turns instead to the shape coalescing on the opposite bank.

She is too shrewd to delude herself even into hoping it is that specter, and the words that drop from her tongue are bright and hard as jewels, jagged to the touch. "You look rather solid, for a phantom." The glint in her eye is a feral one. "Comeâ€"prove to me you're real."

✴ indra astor