The Flower Children & The Unicorn Hunters - Part 2

The baby unicorn was deep in the forest but even so the mother could smell it and hear its anguished cries.

“I must go to it”, she said, going over and scraping her horn against the door, “Let me out!”.

Rose opened the door for the unicorn, “You go and I’ll follow you”, she said as she put on the pendant of invisibility once more, vanishing from sight, “They won’t see me”.

Unfortunately for Rose and the unicorn, however, there were certain things that they couldn’t see
like a deep trap dug underfoot and covered over with twigs and earth and dead leaves and, wandering far into the forest, following the infant unicorns cries, they both fell into it and, as they lay at the bottom of the pit, they saw the face of the vile Finnegan Fee, smirking and looking down at them from above, “Ha!”, he said, “I’ve caught you atlast”.

And, pointing a finger at Rose he added, “And don’t think that I can’t see you, little miss thunderbolt. For, with the last wish upon my left leg, I wished that I could see all that was invisible!”.

But then Rose replied to him, “Well then, if you can see all invisible things, Mr Fee, then perhaps you can see the devil on your back that makes you do such wicked, terrible things to poor innocent animals”.

At first the one eyed hunter just laughed at this and said, “Ha! You can’t fool me. I’m Finnegan Fee”.

But then, the hunter caught sight of something vile, like a giant black, spider with jagged, leathery bat-like wings and a scorpion tail, from the corner of his eye. Something terrible was indeed latched upon the hunters back.

“No! It can’t be!”, said the old man, hurling himself onto the ground and rolling in the dirt, trying to remove the horrid devil.

And all the other hunters who had looked up to Finnegan Fee now, seeing their leader rolling in the dirt like a madman but unable to see the devil on his back, thought that the unicorn had bewitched him.

“Help me!”, cried Finnegan, desperately taking off his waistcoat and tunic and rubbing his back against the rough bark of a tree but only managing to scratch himself.

“There’s only one way to shake off one of those, Mr Fee”, said Rose, “Be kind. Let the Unicorn and her child go”.

And so, the one eyed old hunter ordered his men to let the child of the unicorn free and his men, afraid of the power of whatever had driven their leader mad, agreed. Then Rose and the mother Unicorn were helped up out of the pit.

As soon as the mother unicorn saw her infant she ran over to it happily and, their horns glowing brightly, they rubbed them together and the old hunter saw something that he had never seen, or at least had never noticed before; the beauty of a mother's love for her child.