Chapter 4 - Starborn

One of her jobs was to cleanse the magic of the world of the emotions that often came to pollute it, slowly making it drift away from its original purpose. Each cleansed emotion left a mark of color on two of her horns, dyeing them so deeply they bordered on black. The two horns in question grew at an odd angle that swept up and back towards her ears like a tiara. The three strands that formed each of them also twirled in a strangely lazy helix, leaving a gap of air in their center instead of forming a solid object like her main horn.

She shook herself slightly and stepped back with a slight stomp of a hoof before shifting to her two-legged form though she kept the horns for the moment. She turned her gaze towards the image of herself, the unicorn that stood proudly before her with new growth where her secondary horns would be. Luna cut them off regularly for her as they regrew at the same rate as her mane. The cut pieces could be used for various alchemical purposes. For a moment she remained silent, reminded of the fact that she should have belonged to a whole herd, that she would become matriarch of the herd when the next of her kind awoke.

Her mane was the same opalescent white that she preferred to keep her hair while her eyes slowly shifted through every color, resulting in her changing the color often. Her coat was the pale ivory that had eventually translated to her skin tone. Her hooves were cloven, made for traveling in forests and up mountains rather than stampeding swiftly across plains. Her tail was odd and whip-like, the bottom half of it coated in the long hairs one might expect of a horse's tail and perfect for swatting anything that annoyed her.

It was a form she did not often take anymore. The psychological burden of all the work she had to do made her exhausted any time she took to her true form regardless of her actual condition. It was fine, though, as Sidus had made her race to be perfectly comfortable living among the creations of other gods as well as his other races.

"Lord Sidus," she said at length as she looked at herself, as she remembered all the lives that had been lost, "I do not hate what I am."

The god knew that but also understood how heavy her burden had become when the rest of her herd had been wiped out. Poached as beasts, their hides sold and everything else eventually used in the grand ritual magic that sealed not just himself but all of the gods from interfering in the world.

The Starborn Unicorns were a species on the verge of extinction as they were not birthed. Ash was relatively newborn for one of her race, only just over a thousand years old. The pool that Ash's sleeping areas overlooked was the place of her birth, magic coalescing into the young foal that had grown into a fine adult of her kind. It could be up to two thousand years before another of her kind was born.

She sighed slightly, feeling the unease radiating from him and glanced towards him after looking herself over. His head hung slightly as if the horns sprouting from it suddenly, no longer hidden by magic, were very heavy to bear. She knew from experience that they could be so and that he served a similar purpose but for far greater magics than a single world.

His main horn was like her own, an opalescent thing crafted of part of the mane that naturally absorbed and manipulated magic and hardened as a result of that magic. The main horn would only take in pure magic and needed trimming much less often than the secondary horns. She'd know if her main horn needed a trim because the magic in it would begin to feel itchy, at which point she'd go to Luna or snap it off on a rock if Luna was entirely unavailable.

His secondary horns were far more plentiful, forming what must have been a very heavy crown that showed the residue left behind by tainted magics. He had someone that cared for him well but his was a heavy burden and his horns grew far faster than her own. They wove above and around each other, some making a lower circlet structure while others created the upper portions.

"Given the option to change myself, lord Sidus, to truly become something else and serve someone else, I would not accept," she said, startling him out of his reverie, "It would be nice if the rest of my herd were alive and well. My burden would be much less. But it was not you who hunted them. It was not you who passed their materials down as heirlooms, as possessions. It was not you who decided to forsake the world but a small group of people that decided for us all to forsake what you and all the other gods brought to it using those materials and the ones belonging to the children of other gods."

The ritual that truly drained her was one that required her to use magic heavily and travel throughout the entire world. Purification spells were cast at every nexus where power built up that drained her severely. The spells removed the emotion tainting magic far more efficiently than just her horns could but shattered her magic ever so slowly in the process. It was magic only the Starborn could cast.

She was dying, trying to do the work of an entire herd of Starborn all by herself and he was forbidden from interfering even enough to guide her to the singular existence that could repair her magic and save her life.

He caught hold of the young one again, running his fingers along her horns. Each of the Starborn had different horns and a different number, though never less than three. Ash's odd growth of her horns turned what should have been only three horns into seven and allowed them to absorb more magic to cleanse in the process. Her horns had been changed by the deaths of countless others that had begun before she'd even woken and she was showing signs of growing yet another set.

It was not unprecedented as the first Starborn had also been alone and had also grown more horns as needed. Even if it was her purpose, he did not want Ash to have to bear the burden of a crown of horns marked forever by cleansing the magic of the world.

He had hoped that by her generation, some of the young Starborn would have beautiful opalescent horns that barely had to take in tainted magic. He had hoped that the whole race would slowly even the burden out between them so that none bore it too heavily. All of his hopes had been shattered when the beautiful creatures he'd crafted to keep the world safe had been slaughtered.

With a light sigh, he went over the ever so slight script he had to follow for her introduction to the game world to see where he'd left off though he'd rather spend all the time in the world nurturing the young life in front of him. He leaned close, letting his own horn touch hers for a brief moment, an acknowledgement of the burden she bore and his gratitude that she did so with such dignity, before straightening and speaking once more, "We should move on, young one, to choosing your class."