The decimated ranks of unicorns groaned. Half looked as though they would not survive till spring—much less make war. Appalled, the dreamer recoiled. If only these dying unicorns had possessed fire, he realized, they could at least have combatted the cold!

Though the fearful images still faded rapidly upon waking, their foreboding lingered. By night, Tai-shan grew increasingly restive, and soon became too restless to doze the day away. Gripped by a vague yet mounting anxiety, he paced his stall for hours, ignoring queries from Ryhenna, whose concern now clearly verged upon alarm. Then, very near the start of spring, a vision came to him: he saw the unicorns’ mad ruler ramping before the starving herd.

“By Alma’s divine will, I command you—speak! Who among you aided the wych?”

His bullies nipped and harried the silent, sullen crowd. The black unicorn stamped, snorting. Impatiently, he reared—and suddenly his torso began to flatten, shrink. His lower limbs rapidly thickened and changed. For an instant, he stood with the body of a two-foot, moon-blaze white upon the breast, his hornless unicorn’s head glaring wildly, teeth bared, hot breath smoking in the cold. Then the head, too, abruptly altered and shrank, becoming the dark-bearded face of the chon.

The bullying pack had all sprouted violet plumes from their brows. In another moment, they, too, had transformed into two-foots. The unicorns before them grew bonier, coats colorless drab, manes thinned to bristles, horns broken and falling away—until they had assumed the shape of flatbrowed, beardless daya, flinching beneath the bite of the purple-plumes’ flails. The dreamer tried to cry out, “Apnor, ‘pnor!” Enough, enough! in the two-foots’ tongue—but coils of vine were strangling his voice.

Without warning, two-foots and daya melted from view. The dreamer found himself high on a peak overlooking the Vale. A great storm brewed overhead, black thunderheads churning and roiling. Merciless strokes of lightning flashed like the hooves of an angry god. Before their fury, tiny figures fled—but whether unicorns or hornless daya, the dreaming stallion could not say.

The stormclouds swept on, topping the snow-bound crags bordering the Vale and gusting out over the wild southeast hills. Winter snows melted, clearing a frozen pass through the crags. Suddenly, it was spring. Still spilling torrential rains, the storm clouds battered the wilderness, loosing mudslides and flash floods.

Wolves coursed the hinterlands, catching hares, foxes, ptarmigan, deer—even hapless pans foraging the verges of their Woods. The dreamer twitched. The dream wolves shifted, turned into bony haunts hunting down some unseen quarry, crying out above the stormwind in long wailing harks that sounded more like the belling of hounds than the voices of unicorns:

“Where is she hiding? Where can she be? We must track her down at the king’s command!”

Still the dreamer had no notion about whom they spoke. On a cliffside above, watching as they pounded by, stood a roan da mare. The moon lay like a pool of silver at her feet. She bent to sip from it, and her color darkened, intensified to true cherry mallow. A black horn thrust like a skewer from her brow. Lifting her head, she faced the dreamer, gazing at him with her black-green eyes.

“Little did my former masters guess,” she said, “that the fare whereby they sought to tame thee would only open thy dreams to my warnings at last. Behold.”

The red mare vanished into the rain. Beside where she had stood, the perfect disk of the moon lay flat upon the ground. It tipped upright, balanced erect on its edge and became a mare. Mottled like the moon, her color deepened from ash and silver to black and rose. Heavy in foal, her sides hugely swollen, she trotted restlessly, her labor pains begun.

Below her, the circling haunts raised their muzzles, turned. Baying and whinnying, bones rattling like hail, they bounded across the meadow toward her. Alarmed, the dreamer thrashed, struggling to vault down from his mountain fastness and stand between the bloodthirsty haunts and this unknown mare. But walls of timber sprang up around him; vines suddenly ensnared him.

“Where is the midwife?” the dark unicorn shouted.

With a mighty effort, he burst the vines and vaulted the wall, clipping one hind pastern painfully against its rough upper edge. Plunging down the mountain’s side, he found himself running with ghostlike slowness, floating almost, as though he were swimming. Then he realized he was swimming: stormrains had risen in a furious floodtide. An ocean now parted him from the pied moon mare.

“Too soon,” she moaned, gasping, unmistakably in travail. “Before my time…”

“Summon the midwife!” he cried out again. The pied mare snorted hoarsely, in grave distress. The red one could have aided her—but was nowhere to be seen. Frantically, the dreamer struggled across the endless watery gulf. In the distance before him, the moon mare shuddered, collapsing to her knees. Bounding up the sheer cliffside, her skeletal pursuers closed around her.

“The time of the Mare of the World betides!” the dark unicorn thundered—and wrenched awake as one hoof struck the near wall of his wooden stall with a report like a thundercrack.

The warm enclosure around him was all dimness and shadow. Little white tongues of fire within the lampshells by the distant egress burned low, fizzing in the silent air. Tai-shan struggled to his feet, heart racing, the clear memory of his dream hurtling through him still. Who were the figures he had seen there? He knew them all somehow—though he could no more recall who and what they were to him than he could recount his own true name. Ryhenna, shaken from sleep, peered at him across the darkness from her own stall.

“Moonbrow!” she exclaimed. “My lord, what aileth thee?”

“I must get home!” he cried, staring about him.

He scarcely recognized his present surroundings, the vision still coursing through his mind. The dream of that faraway Vale and the unknown mare seemed so vivid, so real, it was the chon’s comfortable stable that felt unfamiliar—unnatural—to him now. Surely no unicorn was ever meant to be housed in such a place: fed, groomed, and tended by sorcerous two-foots; head compassed in silver; mind, will, and energy sapped by luxury.

Across from him, the coppery mare murmured, “Home? My lord, this is thy home!”

Tai-shan shook his head. The adornment slapped against his muzzle, jingling.

“It isn’t,” he answered. “My home lies far away from here. It is a great Vale, I think, nearly surrounded by woods. I must find it! My people are unicorns, not daya. I have stayed too long.”

Ryhenna gasped. “Nay, my lord,” she protested. “thou must remain! Thy presence among us is the will of Dai’chon.”

The dark unicorn stopped short. That baffling word again. “Dai’chon,” he muttered, cocking his head. “What is this Dai’chon of which you speak?”

Ryhenna gazed at him blankly a moment, uncomprehending, then gave a nervous nicker. “Dai’chon is the one true god, of course! Master of the celestial fire, all-knowing and all-powerful—it was he that made our keepers and gave them dominion over daya and all the world. Why didst thou reck the chon keepeth this vast stable? We bluebloods here are sacred to Dai’chon.”

The dark unicorn stared at her. “The two-foot’s god—‘Dai’chon’ is a name?”

Ryhenna nodded. The dark unicorn’s mind buzzed. Until this moment, he had thought it merely another indecipherable word.

“Dai’chon…,” he mused, tasting the syllables on his tongue. Dai’chon had been the first word the daïcha had ever spoken to him. “It sounds very close to the name the daïcha gave me—Tai-shan.” The dark unicorn shifted, suddenly remembering: “That morning in the square—half the crowd cried out ‘Dai’chon!’ to me instead of ‘Tai-shan.’ ”