A Touch of Magic

She had heard of unicorns the way you hear of things that exist at the edge of the world, in stories told by people who weren't quite sure they believed them, in old paintings where the light always fell just so. Then one night, following nothing more than a feeling through a forest she had no name for, she found him. He was everything the stories said and nothing like them at all. He lowered his great head slowly, not in submission, not in greeting exactly, but in the way that ancient things acknowledge each other across the impossible distances of scale and time. She reached out her hand. He let her. Some meetings don't need explanation. They just need to happen, quietly, in the moonlight, while the rest of the world is looking somewhere else.