ren’s Reviews > The Last Unicorn > Status Update

"Things happened both swiftly and slowly as they do in dreams, where it is really the same thing. The unicorn stood very still, looking at them all out of lost, elsewhere eyes. She seemed even more beautiful than Schmendrick remembered, for no one can keep a unicorn in his head for long; as yet she was not as she had been, no more than he was."

"It would have been if Prince Lír had not turned until she was gone, but he turned. He saw the unicorn, and she shone in him as in a glass, but it was to the other that he called--to the castaway, to the Lady Amalthea. His voice was the end of her: she vanished when he cried her name, as though he had crowed for day."

"Yet even when the wonder blossomed where she had been--sea-white, sea-white, as boundlessly beautiful as the Bull was mighty--still the Lady Amalthea clung to herself for a moment more. She was no longer there, and yet her face hovered like a breath in the cold, reeky light."

"This time, there was too much of it for him to hold: it spilled through his skin, sprang from his fingers and toes, welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his shoulders. There was too much to hold, too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang: I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full."

"Prince Lír stood between her body and the Bull, weaponless, but with his hands up as though they still help a sword and shield. Once more in that endless night, the prince said, 'No.'
He looked very foolish, and he was about to be trampled flat. The Red Bull could not see him, and would kill him without ever knowing that he had been in the way. Wonder and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then."

"The stench of his sleeping hung so thick and old here that it had a loathly sweetness about it; and the cave brooded gullet-red, as though his light had rubbed off on the walls and crusted in the cracks and crevices. Beyond lay the tunnel again, and the dim gleam of breaking water.
The Lady Amalthea fell as irrevocably as a flower breaks."

"Supple as fire, he turned where there was no room to turn and met them again, his muzzle almost touching the ground, his neck swelling like a wave.
They fled and he followed: not as swiftly as he had charged, but quickly enough to keep each one alone, friendless in the wild dark. The ground tore under their feet, and they cried out, but they could not even hear themselves."

"Molly saw the horns first. The light made her cover her face, but the pale horns struck bitterly through hands and eyelids to the back of her mind. She saw Prince Lír and Lady Amalthea standing before the horns, while the fire flourished on the walls of the cavern and soared up into the roofless dark. Lír had drawn his sword, but it blazed up in his hand, and he let it fall, and it broke like ice."

"'That's right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would heighten my power by half a hair. It's true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. I have only magic.' His voice was hard and sad.
'Really?' she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. 'Are you really like that?'
'No,' he said, then or later. 'No, it's not true.'"

"The light and the smell had become a sticky sea in which she floundered like the unicorns, hopeless and eternal. The path was beginning to tilt downward, into the deepening light; and far ahead Prince Lír and the Lady Amalthea went marching along to disaster as calmly as candles burning down."