by Sean Platt
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” said Jack, lowering his head and wiping his streaming eyes against his forehoof. “It’s not funny.”
“Yar,” said Diane. “You’ll make it for sure tomorrow.”
“We believe in you!” said Jack. But he could barely complete the sentence because at the end of “you,” Edward’s appy trailed off into a high-pitched laugh.
The unicorn stumbled to his feet, glaring at his appies. “Did Grammy and Grappy do this to you, Appy?”
“You’re a unicorn prince, Edward, just as I was,” said Jack. “So yar, of course.”
“You shouldn’t laugh at me,” said Edward.
Jack chucked him with a hoof. “One day, you may have foals of your own. And if that happens, you’ll realize the joy of having someone with failures to laugh at.”
“And if you don’t have foals,” said Diane, “there are many others whose failures you can laugh at.”
Edward glared at his laughing appies. Then, as he had every day for the past several, he turned and walked away annoyed, headed anywhere they weren’t. However, despite his indignation, Edward found himself strangely undiscouraged. He would fly tomorrow. He knew he could do it. His appies’ ridicule was hardening him, making him even more determined and capable. He would show them. He was a unicorn prince! He was destined for greatness. He’d be the greatest unicorn warrior who ever lived. He’d fly higher than the sky — high enough to touch the sun. And when, one day, he had foals of his own (he’d have at least five, he thought, because there were five flowers he wanted to name them after: lily, daisy, dandelion, rose, and daffodil), he wouldn’t make fun of their failures. It didn’t matter what Ammy and Appy said about “the unicorn way.” He wouldn’t be a jerk like his appy, and like appy’s appy before him. There was so much sunshine and greatness in the world. Edward was determined to see that goodness — not jerkiness — triumphed.
Edward had a long time to cool down and think as he walked off into the woods, onto the slowly rising mountain trail. He walked and thought, walked and thought, ignoring time and focusing inward. He didn’t even know where he was going as the morning sun arced overhead and settled in the middle of the opposite sky. He simply walked on and enjoyed the clean, magic-scented air, plotting his flying strategy. There was no need to cut short his meandering. No need for a destination in mind. But many hours later, Edward realized that his hooves had had a destination in mind all along as he found himself entering the Riverlands. He was nearing his grammy and grappy’s place, clear on the other side of Mead. He’d walked too far. His appies would worry. They might already have found him missing, and might be wondering where he was.
But as soon as he thought it, his realization was severed by a flash of anger as he remembered their laughter.
“Good,” he mumbled aloud. “Let them worry.”
Still, Edward’s irritation didn’t last long because a magicked shelter — called a haven — soon appeared at the limit of his vision, beneath a cluster of trees. Edward loved to visit his grammy and grappy, Adam and Eve, because they were less caustic than his appies (though Jack said matter-of-factly that this was only because they were really old and would die soon) and because they told such excellent stories.
When Edward arrived, Grappy was outside, pouring magic from his horn into the soil. Gardening was something his grappy did that his appy didn’t. Edward had always wondered why but had never asked. The small unicorn sensed a strange new bond forming between his grappies and himself lately. Mayhap today they would talk about it.
Adam was, like all unicorns, a pure and brilliant white. His horn was a shiny braid of pearlescent keratin that pulsed as he worked. Unlike Edward’s ammy and appy, Adam and Eve’s skin hung loose, especially around their joints, eyes, and mouths. They had wrinkles on top of wrinkles. Their movements were slower and more deliberate than the younger unicorns. Edward had, in fact, asked Grappy how old he was once. Grappy’s response was strange. He’d said, “As old as possible.”
Edward approached. Without thinking, he said, “Grappy, why are you slow?”
It was the innocent question of a foal, so Adam simply laughed, looked up at his grandson, and said, “Young sire! You are a very long way from home. How is your flying?”
“I fell. Again.”
“Well, the sun will come out tomorrow.”
“Yar. Ammy and Appy laughed.”
“Well,” said Adam, “they’re unicorns. But you keep at it. You’ll fly eventually. Great things are in store for you, young Edward.”
Edward rolled his equine eyes. This was something Adam and Eve said often, and even to Edward’s optimistic ears, it sounded like so much claptrap. All first-generation unicorns said things like that to the foals. It was meant to show them that everyone was special — but that they were more special than the rest.
“Grappy,” said Edward. “Did you laugh at Appy when he was a foal?”
“Oh,” Adam chuckled, “his failures were beyond hilarious.”
“And when you were a foal, did your appies laugh at you?”
“I was never a foal, Edward,” said Adam. “Neither was your grammy. You know that.”
Edward kicked at the dirt. That was the problem with Grammy and Grappy’s stories. There was no way to know what was true and what was unicorn droppings conjured by an ancient crazy mind. Instead of asking further, Edward nodded toward Adam’s garden.
“Grappy, what are you doing to those plants? I thought they grew on their own?”
Adam stopped projecting power onto the plants and looked up to meet Edward’s eyes. “Well, sir,” he said, “let me answer your first question. You asked why I was slow. Because if unicorns are magic, as you are now and will be more when your horn grows out, then why should we degrade? Why should our perfect white skin ever sag, or our movements grow slow and deliberate?”
Edward waited, nodding. He’d wondered that exact thing many times. Jack and Diane didn’t discuss concepts beyond their world because their world encompassed the unseen (like magic and prophecy), but also because, Edward suspected, they didn’t feel they had to. They would live forever and ever and ever.
“There comes a time,” said Adam, “when a being has used all it has been given and is grateful to move on. I could hold the magic inside me forever, but when you grow old enough, it starts seeming selfish to do so. I’m older than you can possibly imagine, young Edward. After enough time, I finally started to see that I’d done what I came here to do with the magic inside me. We started as vessels. We helped to grow this land, and in time, Grammy and I had your appy, who found your ammy and had you. I’ve shepherded where I could, guided who I could. And now it’s time for me to return what I’ve borrowed.”
Edward looked at the garden then at his grappy. He thought of the beam Adam had been projecting onto the plants, and how it seemed that the plants should grow on their own, without tending. What his mind assembled made him feel out of control, nearly panicked.
“Nar,” said Edward.
“Yar,” Adam countered in an and-that’s-all-there-is-to-it tone. “We have this garden and several others so that we can begin to return the magic we hold. Unicorns are but instances of magic, Edward. We are not the magic itself. What you think of as ‘Grappy’ is just a glob of white magic. It’s order where order cannot stay. So we return it, slowly. We let the world accept its magic, and one day soon, Grammy and I will die and return what we have to the aether.”
Edward felt his eyes starting to well up. “I don’t want you to die.”
Grappy walked closer and stood beside Edward, brushing his big white side against Edward’s smaller one.
“Edward, listen to me,” he said. “It would be greedy for me to hold onto my magic. Magic cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form or being to another. Only a greedy being would hold onto what it has and halt that cycle. Only something impure would use magic for itself and refuse to give back. But you’re sad because we’ll be leaving, and tha
t’s only natural. But you must understand that we’re not going anywhere. At night, just before you sleep, just as you fall from this world into the one in what you think of as your mind, you feel something. Another place. Am I right?”
Edward had. Only, he believed he was either imagining things or simply confused by approaching sleep. But it felt like a transition, like he’d been dipping his hoof into something larger and more important than he could ever be.
Edward nodded.
“That’s the Wellspring,” said Adam. “What some call the Core. But through the Wellspring, we are all connected. You are there, as am I and every other unicorn. Every single thing with the spark of magic and life is there. Everything can feel every other thing — if they can get out of their own way enough to see it. So yar, my body will die, and my elements will return to the soil. But my magic? That isn’t going any farther from you than it is today, and its return to the Wellspring will make the world stronger and more able to grow because I was the first. I will still be with you, Edward. Always.”
“In the Core.”
“Yar,” Adam said. “Where there is dark and light, coexisting in harmony. Where all things come from. Magic must go back, like the elements in my body. Nothing new is ever created. Stars died to create the elements in my bones and blood. And though Grammy and I don’t know of anything that came before us, something must have died in order to free the magic we became. Whatever that thing was — like the dying star — had to have magic plenty. If whatever thing or being it was had been selfish and held onto the magic it had instead of dying, I wouldn’t be here now for you to anticipate missing.”
“What came before you, Grappy?” said Edward.
“Nothing, that I know of.”
“How can there be nothing?”
“Exactly,” said Adam, smiling slightly. “Which is why I added, ‘that I know of.’”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well,” said Adam, “I’m glad you came by today. Because as our days draw short, your grammy and I have information we must pass on to you, as we once passed to your appy. We must do this so that after we’re gone, another part of what we were can carry on in you.”
“Okay,” said Edward, his somber mood rebounding. He mentally dismissed the thought that Grappy was going to give him a going-away speech and instead focused on the positive, as he always did and always had. Grappy was going to tell him one of his stories. That was good, whether Edward believed all of Grappy’s tall tales or not.
“Come inside the haven, Edward,” said Adam. “Grammy’s making marshmallow chocolate, and when it bubbles, we’ve much to discuss.”
CHAPTER 3
IN THE BEGINNING
Edward lay on the floor of the haven while Grammy and Grappy went about their unicorn business, magicking the place clean and setting items in order. Eventually, when the bowl of marshmallow chocolate that Adam had laid out for Edward ran dry, the two old unicorns stood up beside him. Then, because a unicorn always thought best on his hooves, Edward sprang up and stood to listen to the tale his grappies seemed ready to spin.
“Where should I start?” Adam asked, gumming at his lips. Edward recognized the mannerism. It meant that Edward was about to go on a wild ride — to hear a tale that might be true, might be untrue, or might be “true-ish.”
“How about when you and Grammy Eve met?” said Edward.
“Nar,” Eve said. She turned to Adam. “Start at the beginning.”
“In the beginning, there was nothing,” said Adam. “There were no animals, no creatures, no flowers, no ground, no up and no down — or at least no up and down that stayed fixed when you flipped end for end, which you couldn’t tell you were doing because there was nothing around for reference.”
“So it was just a big empty world?” said Edward.
“Nar,” said Adam. “There was nothing. Nothing at all. It’s hard to remember, as much as the world has thickened since, and even harder to describe. But no, there was no world. Nothing solid. No air. No light. But it wasn’t bright white, and it wasn’t precisely black, either. There was just me. So I floated that way for a really long time, but I don’t know how long because when you’re just a unicorn floating in the middle of nothing, time doesn’t pass quickly. So I taught myself to whistle. That may have taken years; I don’t know. And I know what you’re thinking — unicorns don’t normally whistle. But what would you do if you were just hanging there in space with nothing to do?”
Edward turned to Eve. “Is that true, Grammy?”
“Nar,” said Eve, giving her husband a look.
“Yar, it was!” said Adam. “I’ve forgotten the trick of whistling since, but it’s true just the same. Don’t listen to your grammy, Edward. She wasn’t there. I was floating for a long time, becoming the world’s first whistling unicorn, the world’s first unicorn, and the world’s first object all in one. And after a very, very long time, I started to hear this voice in my head. And the voice said, ‘Adam. Whistle me a ditty.’”
“Adam,” said Eve.
“All right, all right. What the voice said wasn’t important anyway. What matters is that there was a voice, and because the only thing I’d ever known was the sound of my own whistling and this voice, I wanted to talk to it. But I didn’t understand about talking, so I just kind of thought at it. Now, this was in the time before thoughts … ”
“Adam,” Eve said again.
“But if you were to translate what I thought into a modern thought, it’d be this: ‘Hey! Voice! Give me something to do!’ But the voice must have been a unicorn because it just laughed at me and vanished for a while, and when it finally returned, I tried again, and again it mocked me. On the third time, I said, ‘Well, at least stick around and talk to me!’ But instead of listening, the voice said ‘Alakazam!’ and there was a popping that put your grammy beside me.
“At first, I was really excited — but not because there was another unicorn. Remember, there was nothing, so I didn’t know what a unicorn was or that I was one myself. I seemed to see these white sticks under me, and if I turned my head, I saw this huge white butt. But I didn’t get that they were a part of me, just that they were the only things to look at. So when I say that I was excited when your grammy showed up, I mean that I was excited because I could tell when I was upside-down. Suddenly there was a point of reference. And for a long time, I was totally engrossed with knowing when I was sideways, backward, spinning, moving, rotating around her, and so on. It was an exciting time.”
“That’s not exciting,” said Edward.
Eve was still eyeing Adam, but Adam just looked down at Edward and said, “Oh, but it was! You’re spoiled these days. Back in my day, rotating and turning around was all the rage. After so long in nothingness, the ability to change what I saw was amazing. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited to find new ways to turn.
“Anyway, we didn’t have light then either — and don’t ask me how we could see each other without light because your generation would never be able to understand the answer. We didn’t know we were sitting there in the nothingness like two seeds in the dirt, waiting for light, because we didn’t know what light was. But we were waiting, and when light arrived, we knew it. The voice in my head showed up and said, ‘Alakazam!’ and then whatever blackness or almost blackness we’d been in shattered, and then there was light, but it was everywhere. It didn’t come from the sun or from magic, but from all over. And then we were just in a giant white space, and in a way it bothered me because when I looked at your Grammy, she blended right in with her background.
“But after a while, the light diminished, and night came, except that it didn’t come from the sun disappearing — because there was no sun. The light simply bled from the world, and we were back as we had been. I thought the light was gone forever, but a while later it returned. That was the first day and the first night. Now, you thought rotating was exciting? Day and night had us beside ourselves. Literally, because we we
re beside each other in the void. We said, ‘This is amazing! Let’s name these things! I vote that from now on, when it’s dark, it will be “night” and when it’s light, it will be “day!“‘ I took a vote, and it was unanimous. And so the cycle began, once it was official.”
Edward turned to Eve. “Is Grappy telling the truth?”
“Shh,” she said.
“Well, the problem with night and day, once we got over the excitement, was that it marked time for us. We became very aware of evenings, dawns, and the passage of days. And so the invention of light was also the invention of boredom because there was absolutely nothing to do. We couldn’t drink from rivers and lakes or eat sweet grass — not that we understood that we might ever want to — and we couldn’t run through fields or stand in the shade or talk to anyone other than each other. We couldn’t play magic games. We couldn’t magick objects around.
“That went on for a while, and the voice in my head — and in your grammy’s head — said as the light returned, ‘And behold, for this is the first day!’ And I thought back: ‘Um, no, there have been, like, fifty days,’ and the voice said, ‘Nar, you’re wrong,’ and I was like, ‘Nar, I’m not wrong,’ and the voice was like, ‘Those were practice days and don’t count,’ and so I just said, ‘Hey, I’ve been here watching it and getting really bored despite this whatever it is I have to talk to (remember, identity and romance were in wait for creation), and so I’m totally sure that this isn’t the first day,’ and the voice just said, ‘Well, let’s just see whose story becomes the official version,’ and that was the creation of creative accounting.
“Well, once the voice started keeping score, things happened faster, which was nice. On the second day, magic smeared the world like color on canvas, then hung a beautiful blue sky on the top. Our feet finally felt the ground as gravity bloomed. We started to notice that we could feel the magic in our horns, and although we didn’t know what it was, the urge to use it felt so obvious. It just came out of us. We painted the world with dandelions and daffodils, peonies and lilacs. And forget-me-knots. Those were my invention, and with them, we saw the creation of a male first truly impressing a female because your grammy looked at the forget-me-knots and said, ‘That looks tight.’ And that was the creation of slang.”