Are you my mother?

Her voice sounds so beautiful to the young equinox foal, calling out to him, the sweet sound of comfort, of safety. He would know it anywhere. She just left a short time ago... but maybe she came back early with food for him. After just a minute's uncertainty, he replies to his mother's whinnying call with a plaintive bleat, and for a few moments, the forest's edge seems eerily quiet. No bird chirps, no wind blows the grass on this warm spring morning in the clearing where his mother bedded him down to hide while she went to graze. He was still too young to follow her, too weak to walk for long. So he'd spend his days resting, and she would return a few times each day to move him to a new place, to make sure he was okay. Soon, he would be able to spend all day, every day with her. He was almost ready.

And then, closer now, he hears her again. All around, nothing else moves, nothing speaks. Yet that same loving song is calling out to him, louder now. He turns to face her direction, into the forest, and cries out again, more excited at her return. He thinks of eating, of being safe, of her gentle nuzzles upon his face that tell him he is okay.

And soon, out of the darkness of the woods, he sees her approach. 

He is caught off guard. She doesn't smell like herself... and as she steps into the sunlight, she doesn't look like he recalls her, either. Her movement is slow and methodical, each step silent and strange, and she stares at him in a way that makes him instinctively cringe. Something is wrong. Yet all the while she speaks to him in sweet murmurs of reassurance, telling him that all will be okay, that he is safe, not to worry, so he lies still, and doesn't listen to that small part inside him that screams to run. A mother would never lie.

As she at last comes to stand above him, she reaches down to nuzzle his neck. A tight and uncomfortable feeling instantly overcomes him, causing him to panic, but he finds himself unable to cry out to tell his mother that she is hurting him. Soon, it doesn't matter, as he finds all around him growing dark and peaceful. He drifts away as the whispering liar of the woods, its fangs closed around the foal's neck, quietly claims another victim.

~~~

The kelpie is a large forest unicorn closest related to the nightmare, which shares its predatory nature and highly carnivorous diet. It is a denizen of the open glades of the the southern nightforest, also venturing into the upland woods of the upperglades, and rarely into the soglands. Kelpies are the only true unicorns to lack crests, but make up for this lack of adornment in being one of the most behaviorally complex and intelligent thorngrazers. It has learned to use the musical vocal abilities it shares with all the crested thorngrazers to a sinister end; it can emulate sounds it hears in its environment and use them to manipulate others for its benefit. And one of its most favored tricks is to lure the young of other animals, including its close relatives, into a false sense of security by imitating the calls of their mothers, so that they reveal themselves from their hiding places and into its waiting jaws. Like a storybook villain, the kelpie lures naive children into the forest and snatches them away. Its repertoire of calls is learned, their applications wide and versatile, and the list of sounds the hunter knows is always growing as it wanders through the forest, watching and listening to the comings and goings of other animals around it. 

 It will use its tricks in other ways, too, to scatter scavengers off of carrion by imitating a much more fearsome beast, or to lure a mother animal into a trap by imitating the distressed cry of its baby. It is one of the only thorngrazers capable of social cooperation, and the only one which forms pair bonds; mated individuals will work together to trick prey, with one drawing it toward the other so that they can corner it and kill it. Less maliciously, parents will lure potential predators away from their own young by circling around and crying out like a distressed foal to confuse their enemy as to where their baby actually is hidden, so that it follows the adult further and further away on a chase to nowhere.  The kelpie even has the capacity for foresight and planning to try to get rid of other, less clever predators in its territory, such as vultrorcs, that would compete with it by pitting them against one another. Figuring out where territorial boundaries lie, it will stand along the edges of its rival's home ranges and call out defiantly in imitation of their voices so that both landowners feel that their rival is encroaching on their territory. As the kelpie slips away unnoticed, the other predators come face to face and battle. If it is lucky, one might kill the other, and so the kelpie will have less competition to worry over later. Not only that, but it may even keep the territory vacated by continuing to roar like the original territory holder, making it seem like a far larger and fiercer creature is still living there, and discourage encroachment by a new individual so that the kelpie can claim the territory as its own. 

With the hothouse now at its climax, discoveries such an intelligent thorngrazer, a member of group once specifically known for their dim-witted nature, indicate that there are still surprises to be discovered before the era concludes.