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The waves advance, and the waves recede. Unbounded motions; so joyfully unrestrained, the white wave-froth beating on the shore, for how can anything hold back the seas, or urge them on? Yet the ocean is a prisoner; owned by the pull of gravity, constrained to do naught else but to endlessly pound itself against the chalky sands.
Paradox.
The ocean is free, and nothing can hold it. The ocean is bound, and it can never escape.
Perhaps this, he thinks, is what sparks the rush inside his heart, as he watches the white-foam heads of his untamed prisoners toss and tumble in the surf. This delightful, agonising paradox, this wonder unakin to all else in the world: the majesty of holding a thing, grasping it tight, and yet knowing that it is forever escaping you.
Craving. All his life he had craved, to have, to cleave to, sealing himself off from the world more and more as time passed so that all within his domain he could truly know he owned. Blacken and blight the lands around you, make the ground unwalkable and the sky uncrackable, and nothing will ever dwell there but at your command. And at your command, alone, they will not leave, if your power is fierce enough, if your venom is true enough to paralyse their hearts.
Yet the miserable beings he had bent beneath his rule did not make him happy. The court magician, who performed everchanging miracles at the snap of his fingers: so dull. His servant crew, toiling endlessly for him in the bowels of his fort: pathetic. Even his own son, that creature who should bring the most light of all into the life of a grown man, was ineffectual and stricken with such disease of the heart as to make his words a chore to hear. A chore, but never a challenge. There was simply nothing to understand, nothing deeper beneath the milquetoast and sheepskin. It was as if his heart itself were a lie, all that poetry a spouting nonsense poured into the air from no place at all. There was no love in him. How could love dwell within a vessel so shallow?
But the unicorns! --the unicorns were different. He had known it from the first. And now, he thinks, he knows the reason, the reason he must own them all, the reason they satisfy, for brief moments, that constant need within his gut.
Because a part of him will always know, no matter how completely he owns them, that there is a part of them that can never be held. And a part of them would always know, no matter how vast they are, how they transcend his bounds and chains, that there is a part of them that cannot escape.
It is like trying to hold the stars. They burn, in his heart and mind, vast and illustrious and completely uncontainable; even to look upon them is to have your mind grasped in pincers and torn from you, piece by piece. Yet the stars are too remote to ever hold at all. The stars are dull, flickering in an empty heaven, meaningless as dots on a beetle's back. They are nothing like the unicorns, which are stars made flesh. For one painfully wondrous moment, he can hold them, and look upon them, and even though it is fleeting, even because it is fleeting, it is the most deeply gratifying feeling. To hold that which should not be held, and cannot be, for longer than a moment; that moment when you have it in your hands is the sheerest ecstasy, and he lives for that one moment, replayed again and again.
Mostly it is in his mind, just watching their heads rear against the shore. But sometimes, he will go down to the brittle coastline, and run his hands through their foamy manes. They can only catch the water for the briefest of times, and the water feels like sand, not like real water, abrasive and wrong. But the sting of those hard particles pierces his calloused skin, and makes it feel, as it has not felt for years; and when the fresh ocean water replaces it, the salty agony sets lights aflame in his head.
Even bound like this, is there nothing they cannot do? They seem infinite, for when he stares into their depths, he sees on and on, learning endlessly; yet he feels he knows not a fraction of what they are. They do not fly, but that they could not beat their wings against the heavens seems a ludicruous idea, as if they were held back by such foolish man-ideas. They are gentle, and of grace, yet he knows they have torn out the hearts of the greatest dragons; that such peace can settle in them now, quashing that warrior instinct so completely, is a feat beyond mortal grasp, or at least beyond his.
The warrior instinct... to rein, and to control. He looks sadly at the creatures now, for a moment regretting his own mortal heart, that could not love these beings but to chain them, that could not match their kindness but only swathe it in iron fetters. Seeing himself reflected in their glassy eyes, the waves, he wishes, for just the smallest fraction of time, he could be like them. Yet he knows this is not his role to play. This is not the story being told.
He is the chains that accentuate their greatness. They are the unbindable, deigning to struggle against his chains. He defines them, as they define him, he by his captivity, they by their majesty. It just would not be the same any other way. If he would let them go, and join their soaring hearts in oceans free, who would show, by contrast, what it is to be a unicorn? Who would hold them, for all the world to marvel at, and say, look at this wonder! Who would praise them as they need to be praised?
No... it is not his to join them, for he is unlike them. It is his, at long last, to be escaped by them, to have them tear themselves from his grasp by their own majesty, to leave his life crumpled and unadorned. He has courted them with his chains, and they have tarried for a time, but this courtship will end, and their horns will pierce his heart. He knows this, as surely as he knows that the sun rises with each day. He knows how stories go.
His greatest hope, in all of this, is that the last one, the very last, will have compassion enough to stay. To remain within his sight, until the sunlight fades to a last distant sparkle on the last receding tide, and all the world returns to the blackness deep within. A last, beautiful paradox; that the unchained would remain, that he would be looked back upon by she whose eyes he was unfit to meet. Yet he hopes for it; for the dying light is only lovely while it still fades away.
And then it is gone.
But if she stays, for that moment long enough for his thoughts to slip from mind... then he will know the story was properly told. A last, lingering look, telling of the unbound, yet bound. For as they will ever escape him, so, even in death, shall he ever own their hearts.