How Not to Poach a Unicorn

Ten

Prag had been having a very nice journey since his separation from his fellow fugitives. The best he could remember, in fact. He reflected that his enjoyment was likely in part due to how unlike a leisurely walk through a forest was to the incarceration and daily torture that had filled his previous week.

It was difficult to leave, at first. He tried to tell himself that his reluctance was due to a sense of loss, a failed opportunity for business. Unfortunately he didn't believe himself. He was too good at telling when someone was lying. There were a couple of real reasons that had made it difficult for him to leave. For one, there were too many questions about that group that were left unanswered for him and the inquisitive little boy inside him wouldn't stop asking them no matter how he threatened, ignored or beat it. Another was the kid. He couldn't help but like the idiot and he had developed an unpleasant affection for him. He couldn't decide if the kid felt like a baby brother or a lost puppy. Either way he pulled at Prag's sense of humanity in dangerous ways. A sense of humanity isn't highly valued in his line of work and he'd lost good business before because of it.

Once he had left, however, he was glad that he did. He had traveled at his own pace. He covered his tracks by Crossing streams and occasionally climbing trees and moving through branches to make it difficult to track him. He set camp in safe places and slept peacefully through the night.

On the second day of his travels, he happened across an ancient looking stag of a unicorn. His fur was shaggy and had started to grey, but his horn was enormous. He had ended the overextended life of the beast and enjoyed the meal it provided as well as the prospect of selling the horn once he got back to civilization. He moved along happily. He had even started thinking that the whole bout of bad luck that had got him jailed in the first place was actually a blessing in disguise.

He had been thinking that—not now, though. At this moment, all of Prag's thoughts were fixed on Kish: her sensuous curves, her ample bosom, her striking eyes, her flawless dark skin. He was thinking about how she looked scantily clad and soaked in water as he had seen her in the prison. He was thinking about the cries of pleasure she might make as he rolled in the hay with her. There was very good reason for Prag's line of thought. It's not at all that he was lonely or in need of the comforts of a lady. Quite the opposite, he was in a fierce battle... and he was winning.

Prag had stumbled across a strange clearing at the river's edge. It looked as though something large and heavy had come flying northward from the sky, smashed through a stand of trees and created a wide pit in the dirt where it landed. There was no sign of what had made the crater except, possibly, a pile of rock that might have once been the arm of a large statue. He had stumbled across the strange clearing and was suddenly frozen in his tracks. Out from the forest's edge had emerged an elderly gentleman accompanied by a much younger man, both dressed as wizards. The elder wasn't tall, but he stood as though he was. His well kept silver hair framed an aged face that was creased from years of concentration.

The young man with him looked almost like the walking dead. He was pale and his eyes were unfocused. His brown hair was fashionably cut, but a number of leaves and twigs had gotten caught up in it and he showed no signs of trying to remedy that. His shoulders were slumped and he stared forward with all of the interest and enthusiasm of a grazing cow.

The wizard had gotten the drop on Prag and had ensorceled him. Prag's whole body was locked up. He couldn't do much more than breathe and shift his eyes. Prag counted himself lucky on one count: if the wizard had wanted to, he could have just killed Prag outright. Instead, he had decided to poke around inside his head.

The process of digging through an untrained mind is a relatively trivial task for wizards. The idea is to lock their subject's consciousness inside their body and then to seed ideas to them and observe memories as they appear in reaction to those seeds. It can be a lengthy process if a wizard doesn't know exactly what he's looking for, but it is effective.

Prag's mind, however, wasn't untrained. Those who know of the methods of magical interrogation train their mind to be entirely blank, to meditate on emptiness and to separate themselves from their past and present. Those who know a bit more about the process do the opposite. They focus on something all-consuming and unrelated to the subject the wizard is trying to seed. If one fills their mind completely, it's too noisy

for the wizard to work effectively. For most humans, the easiest subject on which to focus their attention is sex.

That's what Prag was doing now. He was imagining himself and Kish in every position he'd ever heard of, and some that he hadn't in order to drown out the suggestions of the invading wizard. He was aware that there were a few foreign ideas floating through his head. There were some unfamiliar voices saying uninteresting things which were easily dealt with by changing the implications of they were talking about and having them involve themselves inappropriately with each other. The strange kid walked by a couple of times, but Prag just buried his head between Kish's legs and ignored him.

Then something very unexpected happened. Amidst the raucous orgy of strangers, he heard Kish's voice. He turned in surprise to see that the wizard had conjured a much more accurate version of Kish than he, himself, had. In fact, looking back at his imagined partner on her knees in front of him, he noticed that she didn't really have ears or toes to speak of.

There was a moment where he almost thought about how the wizard could know Kish well enough to produce such a sharp image, but instead he just pulled the new and improved version into his increasingly enjoyable fantasy. He now had a pair of exotic and willing twins doing things with him that he'd only heard of being possible at the most expensive brothels.

There is a little known danger in exploring the mind of another. Should the subject create a fantasy compelling enough and closely related to a fantasy of the wizard, it is possible to be drawn into it. Once there, a wizard would be at mercy of the mind he was invading.

Apparently the wizard in question had a few ideas as to how he'd like to treat the young dark skinned handmaiden himself and his consciousness was pulled in the middle of the fray along with two Kishes of his own, though they were dressed in fur loincloths and crawling towards him like cats. Prag, having no real idea what was going on, hijacked the two extra Kish figments and conjured up another two of himself and set about creating a physically impossible five body knot of sweat, moans and limbs.

The wizard was mortified and fought hard to free himself from the mind he'd gotten trapped in. Unfortunately he was too distracted by the shameless scene going on all around him to focus. On one side of him were two Prags pleasuring one Kish, on the other there were three Kishes pleasuring one Prag. He screamed and shouted and tried to deconstruct the insanity in which he'd been entangled, but Prags mind was far too engrossed in the symphony of flesh to notice at all.

The other bodies in the room, those unknown to Prag, had taken notice of the wizardly invader and had begun to advance on him. They weren't menacing, but they were very eager and extremely dangerous to the wizard. If he lost himself in this fantasy, he would cease to have a consciousness of his own and he would become a stray thought in this mind, leaving his own body an empty shell. With every ounce of will, the flustered old mage tore himself back into his own mind just in time to see a large black wolf bearing down on him across the clearing.