Memories of a time when she had no name are hard to grasp now, like half-remembered dreams. If she had parents or siblings, she can't recall them. Before the spell, her life was untroubled and simple. There were no thoughts of greed or covetousness, no concerns for beauty, lust, material possessions or wealth beyond the richness of her surroundings. She was an embodiment of magic and purity. The only one of her kind in her territory, she ran with deer, kept counsel with owls, sang with the crickets, played hide and seek with the fireflies. It was idyllic ... and childish, and lost to her once he came to her forest.

She knows now that the year was 1764, in the provence of Gevaudan in the south of France. First she was drawn by the sound of his horse, knickering plaintiffly when lost in a thicket. The noise was so like sounds she herself would make that she thought, perhaps, that another of her kind had finally shown. Atop a chestnut mare was a fine looking creature -a great nobleman- dressed in a rich riding kit, separated from his hunting party. She startled. The deer had told her terrible stories of these creatures. Her movement caught his eye. He stared. She stared back. Rather than draw his musket, he calmed his horse and climbed down, careful not to move too suddenly. It must have been his smell that kept her still. He smelled like the foxes and the jackals did, not like the monster the deer had told her humans were. Beneath the bright fabrics, he smelled familiar. Trustworthy. Perhaps there was even a little magic in him, a kinship.

She should have known better. When he reached for her nose, that percieved familiarity was her undoing. She let him touch her. Immediately the terrible mistake became clear. This creature was not like the foxes. He was a shifter, merely a carrier of a trustworthy scent. His nature was far more self-serving and wicked than she could understand then. Perhaps he was only drawn by her magic, fascinated by another supernatural being enough that he had not yet decided to try to take her as a trophy. She should never have allowed her hide to be touched by such foulness. The shifter twisted in pain, tore through his clothes, shed his human body, forced to show his monstrous shape. She tried to speak to him, to apologize, to reason with him as he raged. It was no use. The shifter could not change back. He couldn't withstand contact with so much untainted magic. Spiralling into panic and madness, the creature took off into the woods.

For three years she and the beast shared the forest in Gevaudan, circling and avoiding each other in turn. Unceasingly, she sought him out in an attempt to calm and help him. He did his utmost to dodge her. A few times they clashed, scarring one another's hide like their opposing natures tormented the other's heart. On full moons and his most mindless days he would stalk the farms and homesteads bordering their woods. A swineherd's daughter was the first human victim. It might have been an accident. The unicorn didn't know. She only knew that as months passed and the body count mounted, human visitors to their forest became increasingly common. The number of weapons they brought began to rise as well. The humans started to whisper of the Beast of Gevaudan. They brought traps for predators that instead killed the rabbits and the deer, and starved the owls. Her home was no longer safe. Her foolishness had made it so. She was despondent.

The night the Roma came for them was both and end and a beginning. The maddened nobleman had slaughtered a Romani Witch's son and four of her caravaners. She had divined the reason and cause of her peoples' deaths, and was determined to punish the both of them for their actions. There was a brilliant spire of searing light. The next morning, the Unicorn woke at the side of a carriage road beneath signs for nearby villages. Two skinny human legs stuck out from the pile of dirty rags that covered her. The Roma has decreed that she no longer deserved to be what she was - she'd been cursed to life as a human. A scroll of paper was crunched in her fist.

There were basic truths about humans that she understood. They wore cloth. They walked on two legs. They made noises at each other with their faces that meant things and made sense of ink scratchings on signs they stuck in the ground. They had special noises to name each other. These were things she'd have to learn, once she dried her tears. Another pile of rags by the roadside moved. Frightened, she kicked it, fearing whatever it was would make her situation worse. She was both right and wrong. The pile groaned; it was the nobleman, finally a human again. The two tried to make sense of each other like this. She was so mad at him, made furious by all the violence he'd wrought she almost saw double. And now this! But it was partly her fault, wasn't it? Her naivete. He asked what to call her when she'd calmed down. She understood enough to point at one of the road signs they'd slept under. THIS WAY TO FREYCENET. He argued that this wasn't appropriate for a name, but she wouldn't hear it. Those ink scratches were good enough for her. For weeks while she learned French, she called him whatever suited her. "Hairy" was most common. He knew letters well enough to read the note she'd been left. It was a detailing of the curse they now shared. As she learned, he explained it bit by bit. She did a lot of crying.

The unicorn and the nobleman have been together for nearly three centuries now. They have a couple human lifetimes left to go before the curse is spent. The details of their travels are mostly insignificant. After a certain length of time has passed, so much of life becomes redundant. There have been stretches of company kept with others, but by the design of their curse and the circumstance of their agelessness, they've mostly had only each other. Friends, enemies, family, inescapable antagonists. They've been different things to one another over time. Two years ago, they came to the cirque. They needed no funding, but the collection of supernaturals with long lives in the cirque's employ meant that here, there was a possibility for companionship without the looming expiration date of human life expectancy. They've shown no interest in leaving yet.