The magic on you is only magic and will vanish a soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your ey… - Peter S. Beagle

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

...but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.

Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.

But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.

"I am the only unicorn there is." They were the first words she had spoken, even to herself, in more than a hundred years.

That can't be, she thought. She had never minded being alone, never seeing another unicorn, because she had always known that there were others like her in the world, and a unicorn needs no more than that for company. "But I would know if all the others were gone. I'd be gone too. Nothing can happen to them that does not happen to me."

Her own voice frightened her and made her want to be running.