Unicorn Sacrifices

  ***

  Shane tried to sleep and could not for a long time but, eventually, there came a time, in the early hours of morning, where the journey, the events, the tiredness, all caught up with him and he too fell into a very, very deep sleep. He dreams showed him pictures of his brothers, Arrow and Sha, and his sister, Root. He could see the oasis on Arrow’s coat and he tried to reach the oasis, to be with his brother, to be saved. His dreams became so intense that not even Flack’s wild thrashings could awaken him.

  Nor could he be awakened by the sounds of beasts being slaughtered and being butchered. The sounds were carried along the gully and washed into the cave where Shane slept but the noises did not wake him from his troubled slumber and, instead, they became the backdrop to his own fitful dreams. He could hear the sounds of beasts being slain deliberately and without sorrow, without pity, the human way, and the sounds continued for the hours he slept, his own legs twitching occasionally as he tried to run away from the sounds of human butchery.