A smart person is not one that knows the answers, but one who knows where to find them...

He knew what she wanted, and he wanted it, too; he was ready, but not, despite her gorgeousness, with Tiglah. Tiglah was not worth losing his ability to touch a unicorn.

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--My God, says a second man, I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn. At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... Look, look! recites the crowd. A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.

Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.

But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares.So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans.What a disappointment, I said. I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?

But it isn't a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.