by Sean Platt
“Not entirely.” He rubbed Edward’s side.
“Entirely,” said Kold, more forcefully. “You don’t even remember your exile, do you?”
“I remember enough.”
“Not enough,” Kold countered. “You don’t know that you were exiled because of Edward. Because he chose you.”
Clint looked up. He searched Kold’s surprisingly compassionate eyes for truth. Mai, still inside him, told Clint that he’d found it.
“You’ve heard the prophecy,” Kold continued. “They’ve known about Edward for as long as The Realm has existed — possibly for as long as unicorns existed. They believe that if he dies, the world will end. Not much to have on your head, eh? And so The Realm protected him and then loved him, but they also feared him. They didn’t know how to feel about him, just as you don’t know how to feel about me. And eventually, they did what they always do with magical things they don’t understand: they ignored the issue. Just as they’ve done from the start, from when they first began hoarding white magic. The early guardians warned The Realm about imbalance — that separating light and dark too much would violate the natural order of entropy. The guardians told them that braid by braid, they would tie their own noose. But it didn’t matter. Roasts had to be cooked and flicker talkies had to be watched. People had to be able to get lost in bliss, no matter the cost. So fractures began, and grew, and then the Great Cataclysm occurred. And still they kept on, now separated from the rest of the world, repairing damaged veins, fixing the symptoms of the disease and ignoring the cause. And so it was only natural that when they thought on the problem of the unicorn that might end it all, they finally got tired of thinking on it and cast him out. Him and the marshal he’d chosen.”
“You’re saying…”
“You weren’t exiled, Clint. Edward was.”
Clint continued to stare into Kold’s green eyes. Then he looked back at Edward, stroking his neck in a way the unicorn would loathe if he were well, unsure what to say.
“In a way, I pity you,” Kold said. “To be so clouded with emotion. It must be terrible. It’s liberating to feel mostly blackness. I understand why Cerberus chose surrender rather than keeping his magic and remaining white. It’s unpleasant to feel responsibility as you do. It’s hard to not be able to see past emotion, to see what’s for the greater good.”
“Magick him out of the cell,” Clint repeated, looking down at the unicorn.
“I can’t,” said Kold.
Clint looked up at him. “Please.”
Kold shook his head. “It’s as you said outside. We can’t win. Our army is too small. If we magick Edward out and away and try for retreat, the best that might happen would be that their superior armies and technology and magic will let us flee, and the fractures will continue to widen and spread while they rob us blind. What’s far more likely, though, is that they won’t let us leave. The wall has fallen. They can all cross the bridge to the Sands, just as we can now cross to them. The Realm will eradicate us all, gunslinger. One by one. Every man, woman, and child — until they are all that’s left. There is only one way to get out. Only one way to escape.”
“Please,” Clint repeated.
“Only one way,” he repeated, then sighed and extended a hand.
Blue light shot from his palm.
And Edward was at peace.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
THE FAMILY STONE
Kold was gone. Clint sat beside Edward’s body, his big, callused hand resting on the unicorn’s side. Morph and Z had stayed with him, but neither had spoken. It had only been thirty seconds, but it felt like an eternity. The sounds of battle were still raging outside, and a strangely calculating part of Clint’s mind wondered how long it would take for a world to end.
He felt a hand on top of his and looked up, half expecting to see Mai. Instead, he saw Z. The opaque visor faced him, inscrutable as always.
Then a voice came from beneath the helmet, saying, “Sorry.”
The word shocked Clint. He’d assumed Z was mute, or possibly mangled beneath the helmet with no ability to speak. Z watched him, letting the word hang in the air, then reached back and pulled the helmet from his head. And instead of a monster, Clint saw a tumbling cascade of long red hair, then the smooth face of a woman with soft features, pale skin, and wide lips.
“I’m Emma,” she said.
She looked down, took off her glove, and replaced her hand atop Clint’s on Edward’s inert form. Her hand was small but tough, like a fighter’s. Which, of course, she was.
“I’m sorry too,” said the old gunslinger.
“Of all my line, I’ve accessed the most of what’s in me,” she said. “The process is complicated, and it’s painful to rouse things that were supposed to remain sleeping. But ever since Sly found his secret trove and got his message to Oliver, we began to search for information on how to recover the information locked within us. We’ve tried all the family we have with some success, but I have uncovered the most.”
It took Clint a moment to figure out what she was talking about, but then he remembered Oliver referring to Z as “family.”
“You’re a Stone,” he said.
“Yes. Oliver was my brother.”
“I’m sorry about your brother.”
She looked down at the white form on the straw. “I’m sorry too.”
A moment of silence fluttered between them. Then Emma looked at the gunslinger and said, “A lot of what happened, as far as I understand it, was fated in a way. But most of fate doesn’t have to happen, and things can go wrong. The best way to think about prophecies are as things that always work out correctly in the end. But only in the end.”
Inside his head, Clint heard Mai — not as she was now, but as a memory: It will all work out.
“You needed to wind up here, but you didn’t need to go through the cities you went through. You could have gone round across the Sands. You could have not faced the enemies you faced. You could have gotten married six times along the way. Your journey could have taken six months or six hundred years, if you lived that long. Magic and prophecy seem to be very adaptable, able to course-correct as events unfold, because at the finish, all that matters is what happens at the end.”
Clint looked down at Edward’s body. “The end,” he said.
“But what I don’t understand is a glitch in the scriptures,” Emma continued. “The Orb was said to require evolution.” Clint thought of Mai, the way she’d died, then how she’d come back. “And the word that’s used, when talking about the Benevolence Orb, is the verb yersae, for ‘die’ or ‘evolve.’ There are other places where the word used is brevae, for ‘die.’ ”
Clint breathed as he listened, knowing he had nothing left. Nothing to live for. He wasn’t interested in The Realm. He wasn’t interested in how the war turned out. He wasn’t interested in whether Realm troops would walk through the Sands and exterminate anything breathing. He wasn’t interested in Kold, or the apocalypse, or prophecies, or magic. He’d had enough magic to last an eternity.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“Because the verb used for the very end of the prophecy — for the death that heralds the apocalypse and hence the last of all we consider predestined — is the same used for the Benevolence Orb. Yersae, not brevae.”
Clint looked up.
“When the king and queen let you in, did they think you controlled the Triangulum Enchantem, rather than Kold?”
“Yar. Why?”
“Because you control it in the scriptures, too.”
A second hand settled on Clint’s shoulder. He turned to see Mai’s ghostly form beside him, holding a vial.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
THE VIAL
“Mai,” he said.
“Yar.”
“Are you here this time true?”
She smiled. “I’m always here.”
“But I mean, are you really here? Actually, physically, here?” He turned to Z, then to Mo
rph. “Do you see her?”
They shook their heads side to side.
“I’m here in every way that matters,” Mai said.
“But not to stay?”
She shrugged. “A question for another day.”
“Are you holding that vial? For real, are you holding it?”
“In a way. Rigo brought it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a scent bottle from my dresser.”
Clint looked at the bottle. It was purple, nearly opaque, with a high-end Sands brand name written in white scrawl across its front. He’d seen the bottle and many like it on Mai’s old dresser in his shack outside Meadowlands and had thought hundreds of times of throwing them away, same as he’d thought every morning about tossing out his loathed multicolored mirror. But like the mirror, he hadn’t been able to throw away the bottles of scent, or Mai’s clothing, or her trinkets. It felt like tossing a bit of her soul to the dirt.
“Rigo brought a scent bottle?”
“Yar.”
“And how did you get it, if you’re not here?”
Mai put her ghostly hands on her ghostly hips and gave him her most common expression — exasperation with the stoic, tough-as-leather man she’d hitched. “All the things you’ve seen with magic, and the transportation of a bottle from one person to another is what has you perplexed?”
“But why would Rigo bring scent?”
“Because I told him to.”
Clint watched her still-exasperated look and thought of Rigo handing him his guns back at the citadel. They were in the magic, he’d said. He’d been in the field. A spirit animal told him something. Rigo was a kid when Clint had first met him, and he’d been in touch with something behind the wall. It was how he’d learned to fight like a superhuman, or mayhap a wizard. Edward had once said that Rigo’s people were saturated with magic. So something inside the magic had told Rigo about the guns — and apparently the scent — and he’d listened.
“Why scent?” he said, taking the bottle.
“It’s not scent.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something I found in your gear after you returned from meeting Kold that first time, after we settled down in Meadowlands — after it made sense, finally, to unpack your dusty bags. It was in an old waterskin. I was about to pour it out along with an ancient, ancient slice of turkey pie that had gone green and fuzzy with mold. But as I stood above the basin with the waterskin in my hands, the magic inside me started to protest. It wasn’t bad then, the magic, and I still thought of it as a gift, before it consumed me and outstripped the capacities of Doctor Barlowe’s elixirs of suppression. But I knew enough to hear the magic speaking to me, so instead of pouring out the contents of that waterskin, I cleaned a mostly-empty scent bottle and poured the water into it, just in case.”
Clint opened the vial and sniffed. She’d either cleaned the bottle faultlessly before filling it or the years had leached the last of the scent, because all the gunslinger could smell was water true.
It had come from his old pack. A waterskin, filled with ancient water.
“This is the Orb of Malevolence,” he said.
“Yar. I knew that’s what it was after I moved out of my body and could finally see clearly. It’s the Orb that counterpoints mine, that represents darkness. But of course, malevolence can also be light… the same as benevolence can be twisted to do the work of the dark.”
Clint thought of Mai, left depleted and ruined in the shack. Kold had tried to twist her plenty.
He sniffed the bottle again. It had been over sixty years since he’d first collected the water that was under his nose, but he remembered it as if it were yesterday. He’d been in the underground cathedral in Precipice. He’d filled his waterskin after scooping the Orb water from a spring using the Cup of Ages, as Edward had called it. The unicorn had then told him to smash the cup. Clint had even seen the remnants of that cup earlier in the day, when the tunnels from the Read Room had led him full circle, back to that underground cathedral.
Edward had said, Intention matters to magic.
Kold had gotten his Orb of Malevolence from an underground river at the bottom of a copper mine, miles from its source. Clint had gone through the whole song and dance, extricating the cup from a cage with a complicated lock in order to collect his own Orb. He’d done it because, as Edward had said, intention mattered.
“Kold cheated,” said the gunslinger.
“Yar, he did,” said Mai.
“He had enough to power the Triangulum, to breach the wall, and to storm The Realm. He had enough power to grow his army and to assassinate the king and queen, but…”
“… but he didn’t have enough to power the Triangulum to its true purpose,” Mai completed.
On his other side, Emma nodded. “You were supposed to power the Triangulum to its true purpose,” she said. “Not Dharma Kold — you. The Triangulum belongs to you, Marshal Clint Augustus Gulliver, chosen partner of the Chosen One.”
“What is the Triangulum’s true purpose?” he asked.
Mai touched his shoulder, making him turn back. The same exasperated look was still on her face. “Find out for yourself, you skeptical stick-in-the-mud.”
Clint shook his head. “How?”
Mai leaned forward, placing her ghostly lips an inch from his ear.
“Drink it,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
THE SOUNDS OF AWESOMENESS
The Orb of Benevolence was in Clint already. He’d had Mai’s heart from the beginning.
The Orb of Synthesis had opened a door for him and him alone, and had passed him through it. He’d heard it in his head — felt the Triangulum’s power in his nerves and blood. He’d heard it speaking with Kold’s voice, but it also spoke with a voice of its own, buried and suppressed.
He touched the pure Orb of Malevolence to his lips, willing the dark magic to obey his intention, to turn malevolence into benevolence and to turn the Triangulum Enchantem white — to wrench it from Kold’s grasp.
Clint’s eyes lit. Everything was suddenly pure and clean. He heard explosions and artillery outside, but was oblivious to their presence. The guards outside didn’t know they were in here, and that the very thing they were protecting was already dead.
Dead, using the verb yersae, not brevae.
Clint saw the Triangulum’s true purpose blossom before him. He didn’t know if Emma knew what it was intended to do or if she had simply had faith, but the answer was so obvious to Clint that he didn’t have to think twice. The Triangulum was meant to cause the world to evolve, not die. To cause a change, rather than an end.
He put his hands on Edward’s side.
The unicorn’s head jerked up. The stump where his horn had been glowed pink, then reshaped itself and became its familiar long, pearlescent spiral. His blue eyes opened. Then he looked back at Clint and said, “You’re even uglier after the sweet sleep of death.”
“Get up, you stupid, legendary horse,” said Clint.
“The Darkness is outside,” said Edward. “It made me weak.”
“I know.”
“But now, it will fear me.”
Clint chuckled. Laughing was such a foreign motion for his diaphragm after sixty years of sorrow that he felt almost as if he’d fractured a rib for the sake of levity.
“Let it fear your super-powered jerkiness.”
Edward tossed his mane. “Get on.”
Clint climbed up, then looked at the wall in front of him and remembered that they’d gotten inside by folding, and that there were scores of troops outside. “The place is totally surrounded,” he said.
“Not totally.”
“You haven’t seen it out there. There’s all sorts of magic. Unicorns are dying. We can’t simply blast our way out.”
Edward chuckled. “I have news for you, gunslinger. I’ve kept one more secret from you. But it’s okay. We’ve kept it from all humans until the time was right to show you true. You
’ve no idea how hard it has been to willfully keep this one in, dying if necessary to keep the secret.”
Clint rolled his eyes. “It hardly matters.”
“You’ll want to hold on. This will require some changes to your riding style.”
Clint was about to ask what he meant, but then Edward’s sides began to bulge, nudging the gunslinger’s legs wide. He moved them back, away from the growing protrusions, finally finding himself flat on Edward’s white back, his legs across the unicorn’s rump and his face full of mane. The lumps on Edward’s sides became massive triangular shapes, emerging flat from his sides.
“What are you doing?” Clint yelled.
Suddenly everything became louder. Explosions racked the stall, making everything shake. Clint heard shouts as the roof rattled on its frame.
“I’M SORRY,” Edward said, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUNDS OF AWESOMENESS.”
The triangles on Edward’s sides grew, puffing out as they thickened. Then the shapes tipped out, away from his body at the rear, and unfolded. They spread wide, testing the limits of the already-large stall. In them, Clint saw feathers. Feathers.
Still on the ground, Morph and even Emma gaped and gasped in tandem. Apparently there were some things missing from the scriptures after all.
“Oh man,” said Edward, wiggling his back. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to stretch those.”
“You have wings?”
“Yar.”
“You’re a pegasus?”
“Pegusi don’t have horns. The word most humans would use is ‘alicorn’.”
“You’re an alicorn?”
“Get a hold of yourself, gunslinger,” he said, but he was clearly enjoying the effect he was having on Clint. He sounded positively giddy.
“But the battle…”
“I’m not afraid of the battle,” said Edward. “I feel as if I’ve just came back from the dead.”
Edward flicked his head, surrounding Morph and Emma in a protective bubble. Then he flicked it again as he beat his wings, and a tremendous burst of energy blew out from his body. All of the walls of the cell — indeed, of the entire stables — blew out as if hit by an enormous shockwave. The building was simply obliterated. As Edward flapped and began to climb, Clint struggled to hang on for dear life. He watched as fragments of wood and stone flew across the battlefield. He shoved his legs behind Edward’s wings, trying to find his balance.