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She came to herself not in the picturesque forests of stories, but in the desert. Her hide was the color of sand and the horn on her head was blunt bone worn and shaped into jagged points by the howling, sand-laden winds. The world had barely awakened. The earth burned with heat and flared with fire, and she stalked the endless sands in search of water to quench her thirst but found none. The dust-and-desert color of her skin tore away to leave nothing but bleached bone-white. There were other creatures awoken in the desert, but she was the only one of her kind. She screamed into the storms with a voice the wind ripped away and transformed into a howl. Her wails echoed, and her ears heard the sound of her own agony threaded through with the thousand-thousand voices of the old ones' other children, all crying through pain that was the same as her own.
The old ones shaped great and fathomless depths of water into the world, and her endless desert grew edges, some of her sands became shores. They gave her no water to drink, but she waded into the coolness of the seas and washed the grit from her body. She walked the edges of the oceans and paced where sand became grass and back again, waiting for water without salt. She learned the language of the water-things and they spoke to her of hunger the deep cold of their world could not satisfy while she cried with her thirst. They could give each other no comfort, and she left the shores at last, though their voices carried still to her ears.
She traveled in, away from the salt-sting water and into the land. Where water blocked her path, the old ones set stone beneath her hooves to let her wander where she would. Her teeth tore at the green of new grass, but she took no comfort in the taste of it, and the water trapped inside the blades was not enough to quench her.
Centuries after she came to be, she found sweet water gathered in lakes at last. But when she drank, it tasted of the sands she had been birthed from. It gave no relief. She watched as new things, things without pain, drank from the water and pulled at the grasses. From afar the voices of the old ones' other children carried on the breezes, naming the new things man. They cried with rage at all that men were given without the agony of hunger to harry their steps. The man-things cowered at the sounds and whispered stories. Through the mists beside the lakes they would see her, and run.
She grew to hate them. She drank and drank but felt never sated. She saw a man-thing with skin un-flayed and richly, beautifully brown - as if he had never felt the pain of wind-driven sand scouring it from his bones - drink and make a sound of joy, as if the water had been all he'd wanted.
She charged him. The bone-white of her horn sprouted from the center of his chest with a fountain of red. All she was suddenly made sense as she felt the wetness of his blood on her horn, splattered against her muzzle. This was what her thirst had demanded. In the moment of his death, she was at last at peace.
It did not sustain her long. The feeling passed, and she stalked the villages the men gathered in, hunting them in the quiet spaces of time just before the dawn. They learned to fear her. They left offerings of their dead and their harvests to ward her from their homes. She learned to silence her cries and hunt in silence. She gave no warnings and no mercy.
From their blood she began to be reborn. The jagged bone of her horn became a smooth spiral that pierced easily through their fragile flesh. The ragged bone-white of her hide covered over again in smooth skin and hair colored in white to mimic the mist and fog she hunted from within. Ages passed and she grew to look as their beasts of burden did, passing amongst them unnoticed until she was close enough to kill.
The old ones whispered their praise, and she knew she had found her place. The cries of their other children grew less as they too found their calling as the bearers of the old ones' malevolence. Her thirst was ever there, but grew less demanding. Her kills became careful, the blood she needed more specific. The youngest of men's children began to forget to fear her. When she passed, they reached with their muddied hands and stroked her, called her beautiful. Their blood did not call to her, so she let them live. She killed their fathers, their mothers, their sisters and brothers. She killed their warriors, who sometimes thought to hunt her. She killed their fools, who lacked the sense to fear her. She killed their impure, who thought only of pleasure, and she killed their learned ones, who sought to reason with her as if she could be given some other purpose than the one she had been made for. The untouched among them had blood too clean to quench her, and she let them live. When she was new and flush with blood, she bathed in the foulest waters and they turned clear and fresh around her.
The world of men grew and her hunting grounds shrank. Men no longer saw her, much of the time, as if they'd forgotten something such as she had existed long before they were born into this world. Her need to hunt grew less, until she killed only once a year. The villages of men became great sprawling cities where blood ran through their streets and no one questioned a death in the woods outside their limits. They remembered her stark white hide, the clear waters she'd left behind. Their children told stories and hoped she was real. They remembered her as a protector of their pure, instead of one who fed on all those who were not.
She was, still, the only one of her kind. She held no home and no kinship. She cared only for her thirst and for the will of the old ones. But the old ones slept, and their voices were barely there, even to her who once had heard all the voices of the world carried on the wind. The children of men dreamed of her gleaming horn and deep eyes, of magic and beauty. Their parents dreamed of blood drinkers and death far older than them. They were the same dreams, but they never knew.
The voices of the old ones grew ever-quieter. She traveled in search of them. The faint whispers led her to a wood she had never seen. It smelled of men and electricity, and it was only because she was alone, save for the whispers, that she did not kill the men she smelled and leave. Instead she walked into a cage with sides she could look through. The doors closed behind her. She gathered her legs beneath her and sank down, bowing her head until the tip of her horn rested against the transparent floor beneath her. The old ones went silent, and only the voices of men - jabbering and multitude, never alone as she had been, never knowing pain as she had - carried to her. Her hatred festered in her chest as her thirst began to grow. The cages around her began to fill, voices of the first children drifting to her ears, more immediate than the shrillness of men. They learned one another's languages, and shared their hatred, feeding it between them. Together, they waited for the whispers of the old ones and the cages to open again.