Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 38. Revenge Body

OK so... here are a few tips on killing someone in a unicorn grove.

1. Don't do it. Unicorns adore all life, they cherish any brief and bright rebellion against death, whom they consider to be their only true enemy. To unicorns, there's no such thing as an evil person, only someone who hasn't lived long enough to regret being a selfish piece of shit. They mourn the death of evil people deeply, because unicorns know that they weren't really evil. They just hadn't lived long enough to reform.

2. Don't kill anything that looks like a unicorn. Yes, unicorns technically are not horses due to their cloven hooves, which make them more like goats. But c'mon. That's why they made E.T. look like a big slimy human baby with wide blue eyes, instead of some sort of levitating silicon crystal or something. It's easier for unicorns to get way saltier about a horse's death than they would get over a non-ungulate, especially a horse as noble and beautiful as Destroyer had been.

3. Don't kill a virgin in a unicorn grove. I know. I'm as shocked as you are. But Destroyer had died a virgin. Every time the wizard had ridden into town, farmers would rush over to him. Aloe, annoyed, had assumed that these hayseeds had wanted him to perform some act of magic, like make it rain or telekinetically turn around a breached birth calf, whatever dumb shit these dirt poor rubes always moaned on and on about.

But no, they just wanted to know the stud fee for Destroyer. I mean, look at him! He puts the "stud" in "stud fee." But even if the wizard had agreed to loan Destroyer out to fuck prize winning fillies on demand, Destroyer would have politely declined, as he did that one night when a particularly ambitious farmer had led three fillies right to his paddock while the wizard slept in the inn.

"Oh wow a talking horse," the farmer had said, before turning around and leading his fillies back to the farm. Why did Destroyer so resolutely refuse to get his groove on? The desire was there, for sure. But he knew that at any moment he could be spirited back to the Horse God, leaving his children fatherless, as he had been when the wizard conjured him into existence.

Plus, Destroyer was disheartened by the fact that there were masters out there like Aloe, really cruel dudes who delighted in running living breathing beings into the ground. He couldn't bear the thought of any of his children living under a master like that.

So yeah, Aloe had really fucked up when he shot Destroyer to death in the grove. As soon as the wizard left the next morning, sitting crosslegged on the toasty warm heated seat left shoulder of his plodding lava golem, the high council of unicorns entered into the grove to clean it up.

A group of unicorns is called a blessing, and these eight unicorns certainly behaved like one. They used their horns like trash picker sticks, sighing resignedly as they stabbed up the eight cans of Busch Light the wizard had left scattered about the tinker's wagon. They dragged the tinker's body out of the grove and onto the prairie, where two unicorns diligently kicked out a grave for him in the root tangled sod.

The unicorns mourned the mules and buried them with full honors in a patch of honeysuckle at the back of the grove.

The wagon they would leave untouched, where it would rot to nothingness in a couple hundred years unless another humanoid came along to claim it. Regardless of how this busted ass wagon really lowered the tone of the grove, no unicorn could bear to pull a wagon like some common draft animal.

They gathered in a circle around Destroyer's corpse, which was lying on its side, with its left eye open and staring unblinking into a shaft of sunlight that had dripped down into the grove.

Destroyer had assumed that he would be sucked back into the pure equine ether from which he had been incarnated if he died.

But, SURPRISE SURPRISE, the Horse God had some pretty FUCKED UP ideas about loyalty. If Destroyer's master had wanted the horse dead and rotting, then dead and rotting the horse would remain. It made sense when you thought about it, this being the same god who let his incredibly muscular, 1200 pound supplicants be bitted and bridled and blindered by these weak, insane apes who would kick them in the sides and fart on their backs and hobble them for the night with just a bit of string and ride them to death in the desert or beat them to death in the stinking streets of their shitty cities.