Unicorn
By Stephen Tigner

Rois woke up with nature around her. She loved the outdoors and spent as much time as she could outside. This time she had decided to go to the mountains. They always seemed to calm her, and the exercise from climbing them was terrific for her body.

She had climbed this mountain the previous night, and so headed back down the mountain. As she climbed down, she thought she heard distant whinnying, but dismissed it. When she reached the bottom though, she heard the whinnying again, and decided to investigate it.

The noise led her to a clearing, where what looked like a horse was badly injured. Now, Rois had a thing for horses and couldn't bear to see one suffer, so she walked over to it to see what she could do. The animal appeared to have been attacked by a predator, but the predator was nowhere in sight, so Rois assumed that the horse had fought it off.

She approached the horse and it panicked. "Whoa, there, whoa, I'm not going to hurt you," Rois said. The horse calmed down, and watched her intently. Rois kneeled next to the animal to bandage its wounds and then changed to a sitting position to finish the procedure. Rois then helped the animal up and sent it on its way. She then looked down at her pants, which were soaked with the animal's blood, and her hands were bloody too. "Well," she said, "these pants are ruined, but at least I was able to patch up that horse. What she hadn't noticed was that the "horse" actually had a spiral horn, and as such was a unicorn.

She cleaned up her hands and changed to another pair of pants, then proceeded to hike back to civilization. After about five minutes, though, her pants felt tight and her legs were getting warm. She ignored it and continued walking. After a couple more minutes, she could no longer ignore it, as her pants were cutting of her circulation. She was about to try and take them off, when they ripped open and she saw that she was growing horse legs.

"Oh no! That was no ordinary horse! It must have been a unicorn!" But she had realized the truth too late, and had been blooded. She sat down on the ground to await the rest of her transformation. She didn't have long to wait, as a long horse tail sprang from her new horse rear. Then she felt a painful pressure in her forehead and watched as a spiral horn grew from the middle of her forehead. As she looked at her new horn, she felt her ears stretch, reshape, and move upwards on her head.

Then the next part of the transformation began. She felt, and saw, a swelling in her belly area, as if she was pregnant. All of a sudden, with so much pain that she almost passed out, two horse forelegs burst out. Rois then felt the area between her forelegs and her rear legs lengthen, until it was as long as a normal unicorn's. Rois then felt her insides rearrange, to fit her new physiology.

Rois shakily stood up on all four legs and looked herself over. She appeared to be a centaur with the horn and horse half of a unicorn, and her hair was now the same color as her horse half, pure white with sky blue highlights. She picked up her pack, and noticed how much stronger she was.

Rois was scared and unsure of what to do. She liked horses, but never actually wanted to be one. She folded her legs under her and sat down. She then cried for about 20 minutes. After she was done crying, she decided that it was best not to go back to the village. She found a small cave at the base of the mountain and set up a little shelter there for herself. She then went to sleep, drained both physically and emotionally. "Tomorrow is another day," she thought, "I'll just have to take things one day at a time..."

And with that, she drifted off to dreamland.