In the great hall of the palace, at the centre of a circle of polished stone, stood what the kingdom called the Last Unicorn.

No one had ever seen it.
No one was permitted to try.

The Founders had decreed that direct observation would profane the creature’s ‘purity’. To see it was to diminish it; to touch it was to collapse its ‘essential nature’ into some accidental form. Thus, the unicorn could be approached only through instruments – never through hands, eyes, or unmediated judgement.

It was the Last not because others had died, but because it remained the final remnant of an age that still believed truths stood on stone.

The Instruments

To preserve the unicorn’s nature, the Keepers constructed an evolving array of devices.

The Spiral Gauge, oldest and most revered, hung from silk threads above the empty circle. It detected one possible configuration of the horn’s curvature – never the horn itself.

The Echo Clock measured hoofbeats. The hall was silent, yet the wires vibrated all the same, yielding intervals that corresponded (according to the ledgers) to modes of unicornic motion: walking, standing, contemplative stillness.

The Mane Spectrometer mapped disturbances in candlelight to infer the density of a mane that existed only in theory.

The Temperament Dial synthesised these readings into a single number – currently 1.618: serene alertness.

The instruments never disagreed; they could not disagree, because each was calibrated against the others.

‘Truth is coherence’, the Master Keeper taught.

The Scaffolding Expands

Over centuries, ledgers multiplied into an archive wing. Scholars journeyed from distant kingdoms to admire the rigour of the data.

A visiting philosopher once said,
‘Your measurements form the most complete record of unicornic behaviour ever assembled’.

The apprentices beamed. No one asked why no other kingdom kept such records.

Schools taught the unicorn’s anatomy. Artists painted its likeness. The quarterly update of the Temperament Dial was read aloud in public squares. Children traced the golden spiral, believed to mirror the creature’s horn.

When dissidents questioned the absence of hoofprints, they were told what everyone knew:

‘The Last Unicorn is beyond crude contact. Only refined instruments can reveal its truth’.

Consensus deepened. With it grew the need for further instruments.

A Quiet Realisation

Sometimes, on night watch, a Keeper would stand above the empty stone. The Spiral Gauge quivered. The Echo Clock murmured. The Proportion Engine hummed, harmonising the system.

And in that stillness, the Keeper would feel a thought rise and evaporate instantly:

that the instruments described one another
more faithfully than anything else.

That their perfect coherence reflected the architecture of the scaffolding, not any creature the scaffolding purported to measure.

Such thoughts were structural, not heretical – and no less dangerous.

The Last Unicorn

The Minister liked to call it the Last Unicorn. He never explained why it was last or what fate had befallen the others. He did not need to. The title served its purpose:

If it is the Last, no comparison is possible.
No contradiction can emerge.
No counterexample can survive.

Its uniqueness proved its necessity.

What else could unify a kingdom but a creature no one could touch, see, or disbelieve?

The Closing Line

And so the unicorn remained –
in measurements, in ratios, in ledgers, in rhetoric.

A fiction made coherent by instruments, maintained by tradition, sanctified by those who needed it to be real.

The Last Unicorn was not the final creature of its kind.
It was the last foundation still standing.
And in that sense – it was more real than anything that had ever lived.

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Critical analysis to follow…