Our comment: Mr Guthrie’s dream was undoubtedly as golden as the colour of the single malt whisky Mr Guthrie customarily drinks, as we learned, drinking often and in such quantities that would explain the seeing of white unicorns, white mice and monsters from lochs. And the question we would like to pose runs thusly: What did Mr Guthrie think he was doing with a fishing rod by Loch Glascarnoch four days before the [angling] season began?

The Inverness Weekly, 18 March 1906 [edition]

Along with the intensifying wind the sky darkened from the west, and the clouds, approaching in waves, extinguished the constellations one after the other. The Dragon went out, the Winter Maiden went out and the Seven Goats went out. The Eye, which shines brightest and longest, went out.

The edge of the horizon lit up with a short-lived flashes of lightning. Thunder rolled with a dull rumble. The wind abruptly intensified, blowing dust and dry leaves into their eyes.

The unicorn neighed and sent a mental signal. Ciri understood immediately what he wanted to say.

There’s no time to lose. Our only hope is in a quick escape. To the right place, and the right time. We must hurry, Star-Eye.

I am the Master of Worlds, she recalled. I am of the Elder Blood, I have power over time and place.

I am of Lara Dorren’s blood.

Ihuarraquax neighed, urged them on. Kelpie echoed him with a long-drawn-out snort. Ciri put on her gloves.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

A buzzing in her ears. A flash and brightness. And then darkness.

The water in the lake and the early-evening silence bore the curses of the Fisher King, who sat on his boat jerking and tugging the line, trying to free a lure caught on the lake bottom. A dropped oar thudded.

Nimue cleared her throat impatiently. Condwiramurs turned away from the window, and then bent over the etchings. One of the boards in particular caught her eye. A girl with windswept hair, riding a black mare rearing up. Beside her a white unicorn, also rampant, its mane blown around like the girl’s.

‘I think that’s the only fragment of the legend that historians have never quibbled about,’ commented the novice, ‘unanimously regarding it as a fabrication and a fairy-tale embellishment, or a delirious metaphor. And painters and illustrators, spiting the scholars, took a liking to the episode. Look, prithee: each picture is Ciri and the unicorn. What do we have here? Ciri and the unicorn on a cliff above a sea beach. And here, if you please: Ciri and the unicorn in a landscape like something from a drug-induced trance, at night, beneath two moons.’

Nimue said nothing.

‘In a word—’ Condwiramurs tossed the boards onto the table ‘—everywhere it’s Ciri and the unicorn. Ciri and the unicorn in the labyrinth of the worlds, Ciri and the unicorn in the abyss of times—’