by Sean Platt
“Grappy!” said Edward.
“It was an amazing time, Edward,” said Eve, taking over. “Right now, even with your small horn, you know what magic feels like inside you. We learned that, too, but only afterward. At the time, all we knew was that it felt normal, and right, and simply how it was. We knew we could create but didn’t realize at the time just how powerful that first magic was.”
“I told you that the total amount of magic in the world never changes,” said Adam. “Well, this was the first burst. In the beginning, all the world’s magic was together in one place. We were using it — or perhaps we were being used by that phantom voice in order to use magic on the voice’s behalf — to create everything you see around you and all that has ever existed. And as we filled the world, the magic spread out to find its corners. Magic went into the daisies and the daffodils. It went into the other plants, and then into the other forms of life. It went to the Core once there was a Core. And when that happened, we were left with what would become our normal allotment of magic — which, considering we were the first and only unicorns, was a lot. Looking back, even compared to what we have at our disposal today, that diminished magic we were left with seems fathomless. It was as if we were guided. We made rocks and mountains and rivers and seas. Clouds appeared in the skies, and the winds came, along with animals and bugs and all of the tiny things in the soil. We lost track of it all, so powerful was that time. Magic was beyond our control, all of it in our hooves as it flew out to the world’s crevices. We spent those first days in a fugue. We don’t know what we made and what was made for us by the magic as it careened out with a mind of its own. But after a while, the magic our horns wielded began to thin. By then we were exhausted, and so we slept. The voice said, ‘Good week, unicorns.’ I said, ‘If every week is like that, I’m going to create unions.’”
“What’s a union?” said Edward.
Adam plowed forward: “After the seas and skies and ground and caves and fields and mountains were teeming with life, we both felt that the magic was on its ebb, though we still had a final burst left. And so to use that magic, we created something for ourselves. Something we did on impulse because it seemed like we might enjoy it. It was the creation of selfishness — because we’d worked so hard. We created, in the middle of what became Mead, a gigantic peach tree bursting with fruit.”
“Mmm,” said Edward. He absolutely loved peaches.
“Yar,” said Eve. “But this tree didn’t bear the peaches you know today.”
“Why not?” said Edward.
“Because up until that point, we’d operated as the agents of creation. We were purely benevolent beings, doing work for the other purely benevolent beings that would follow. We did what the magic told us to do. But in the end, we created that tree for one reason only.”
“What reason was that?” Edward asked.
“Because we wanted it,” said Adam.
CHAPTER 4
THE DARK TREE
The tree, Adam explained, was dark magic’s first appearance in the world. Edward asked why the world had to have bad magic, but Adam and Eve both briskly shook their heads at the question — not because it was a wrong question but because of what it implied.
Throughout his young life, Edward had fallen into thinking what was the default for most beings, be they unicorns or otherwise: He’d come to believe (despite constant reminders to the contrary from both his appies and grappies) that white magic was good and that dark magic was bad. But as they told him about the tree, both Adam and Eve reiterated that dark and light magic are opposites — and nothing more. The world had named one dark and one light, or one black and one white. And the creatures of the world had then, for some reason, decided that one was “better” than the other. But, Adam insisted, neither kind of magic was good or bad in and of itself. Both were needed. In the end, the world had been conceived as perfectly balanced — composed most properly of what Edward, in his young way, might have considered to be “gray” magic. Unicorns had been created as embodiments of pure light, and that meant that an equal and opposite clump of darkness was required to balance them out. Magic could not be created or destroyed; it merely moved from one place to another, changing its form. The tree, said Adam, was the unicorns’ other half. It had to exist because they existed.
“In a way,” said Adam, “the tree was a test. Up until the tree was born, the world was perfect, insofar as ‘perfect’ means what we’d think of as perfect today. But, young Edward, what else did I say the world was back then?”
“Boring,” said Edward.
“Yar,” said Adam, gesturing toward Edward with a stretched neck. “Or stagnant, or unchanging, or predictable. When there is only one stream of magic, there is never, ever any variety. How can a pure white being take a path other than the one before him? How can anything truly new ever be created? How can one have new experiences? Nar, the world needed our opposite. We had to be polluted by the dark — and I use that word deliberately because it’s not pollution at all. Once the magic settled and we created that tree, we spit that darkness from inside us and again became custodians of the white. A unicorn can have dark in him, yar, but a healthy unicorn is, for all intents and purposes, a steward of the white. Which is as it was intended, because darkness was born into the world to oppose us — to force us down different paths, to force us to choose. If necessary, its purpose forced us to die. To perpetrate evil, if there is such a thing. But do you understand that without that contrast — without the counterpoint that black gives to white and white gives to black — that there can never be anything in the world that makes it worth living inside?”
Edward didn’t understand but pretended that he almost did. Eve smiled down, seemingly knowing the thought was beyond him, but happy the seed had been planted.
“So the tree,” Adam went on, “was a way of forcing white magic into conflict with black magic … the same as light — then the intruding, alien force — came into existence in order to oppose the dark. And once that tree was born from something that might be called ‘selfishness,’ the world had a choice. We had a choice. The pure white beings were perverted into a situation that was no longer clearly the martyr’s path, and the world was better. You may know versions of this legend, Edward, but this was not the birth of evil. This was the birth of momentum. Without that tree, we might have lived forever in peace and harmony … and nothing ever, ever, ever would have happened.”
“So the Darkness was good?”
“That first spark of darkness forced a choice on the world,” Adam said. “Even if we ignored it, we were no longer just existing so much as we were choosing to ignore it. The tree provided a fork in the road. It started the engine of conflict. Conflict drives this world. Never, ever, ever wish for an end to conflict, Edward. Those who wish for an end to conflict don’t understand that there is a level of existence behind all you see, like the area behind the curtain of one of Flim Flam Matthews’s stage shows. This machine — the world around you — was set in motion for a reason. Now, no one knows that reason, and I won’t know it until I return to the Wellspring. But if you ask me, I think the world was started to provide the experience of growth, and growth only comes through conflict. Through choice. Through decision. But in order to decide, there must be two options. There are always two necessary sides on each blade of grass.”
Edward nodded.
Adam continued telling his story, explaining how the tree in Mead grew and grew and grew. As more unicorns were born, the tree continued to grow. As fish filled the seas and the skies sparkled and all of the creatures lived in peace and harmony, the tree grew ever larger. Nothing, said Adam, needed to eat anything else. There was no predation. Flowers bloomed, and nothing consumed them. Everything flourished. Everything grew tall and blossomed. None of the plants withered. None of the beings grew old. None of the fish were stolen from the seas and devoured. It was, said Adam, a paradise.
As life blossomed unfettered, the overabundance of white m
agic spilled out and created new strains of life. Pixies appeared. Fairies were born. Elves sprang into existence in peaceful tribes that roamed the grass, never trampling a blade. Unicorns made friends with the other creatures and formed alliances — because alliances were all that could be formed. But the races of creatures didn’t precisely work together, Adam explained, because there were no goals to surmount. There was no enemy. No obstacles. Magic was so abundant that all the beings had to do was to want a thing, and it appeared. Unicorns, elves, and the others were fruitful, and multiplied.
All the while, the tree grew larger and larger. Adam said that the roots broke the soil around the tree’s base, each root as big as his middle. The branches grew thicker and split off, each one begetting dozens of others. Fruit sprang from the tree: peaches as pink and as dripping with juice as if they were bags of water. They dappled the tree, blushing its top from a distance. But nobody ate the peaches because nobody needed to eat anything. It was paradise. Everything could grow, and nothing had to die.
“But still, everyone was afraid of the tree,” said Adam. “Its growth was aggressive. Unicorns multiplied and dispersed, and grass grew and formed waves of green, but the tree’s growth swallowed everything around it, nudging other life aside so that its roots could spread. The tree seemed to want more and more for itself. Looking back, it was like a giant hand stretching into Mead from below, from the dark side of the Core, and the farther it stretched the surface of Mead like a tight glove, the more it threatened to rip open and spill dark magic into our world like split innards. Elves traded whispers, speaking of cutting the tree back in order to retard its growth. They wanted to push it down like a bubble, to force the dark back to the other side where it belonged. But see, we were the ones causing that tree to swell. We were feeding that tree because we continued to spread the light. There was too much light in our world, and so darkness tried to enter it in the way entropy always tries to equal out opposites. We were building that pressure through our stubborn insistence that our world be ‘perfect.’ In our lack of flaws, we were flawed. Our perfection was our flaw. Does that make sense?”
Edward shrugged.
“This is important, Edward. You don’t know it, but you, as prince among the third generation of unicorns, have an important role to play in the world. And I’ll tell you this — that role will involve conflict.”
“Sure, Grappy,” said Edward.
Adam stared at the little unicorn, seeming to feel that his point was missing its home.
“He’s hearing you,” said Eve.
“Anyway, the tree became this ominous presence in Mead. It presided over great meadows and plains, stretching from its roots to the Core, scraping sky and brushing mountain tops. Or at least, that’s how it seemed. The elves wanted to leave. The unicorns wanted to fight it because it was something so contrary to their nature that it disturbed them in the way a unicorn of a different color would disturb us today. The pixies and fairies avoided it. Same for rabbits, squirrels, beavers — pretty much anything with buck teeth.”
Adam made buck teeth at his grandson. Edward laughed.
“Eventually, the elves did leave. They marched off, but the next day we’d see them coming from the opposite direction, mounting a rise. Then they’d try to leave again, scaling the mountains, and we’d see them later emerging from a valley. They headed away, and yet the tree stayed with them, as if the world was too small and the tree couldn’t be fled.
“The unicorns, after a great debate, tried using their magic to sever its branches — not to kill it, because we couldn’t bring ourselves to do such a thing, but to prune it back. We found it untouchable. None of us wanted to fall in its shadow. We tried staying away, but in time it was like the tree had grown legs and would follow us. It didn’t, of course, but it was something that demanded our constant attention. We couldn’t ignore it, and were eventually forced to face it. We had to turn and acknowledge the tree and its somehow aggressive fruit that demanded consumption. And when we did acknowledge it, the tree bewitched us. Not as a simple temptation but as a compulsion, like a ferrite and a stick of polarized alloy. We were drawn to the tree — almost dragged there by our nature. It felt like the tree wanted us not only to listen to it but to merge with it. As if it wanted to rip its Darkness up through Mead and grab us.”
Adam paused for effect, seeming to gauge Edward’s reaction. The young unicorn looked up, patiently waiting to hear the story’s end. He understood much of what Adam was saying, but the story was mostly just interesting as a story, like all of Grappy’s tall tales.
“So what happened?” said Edward.
“The tree spoke,” said Adam.
“It spoke to you?”
Adam shook his big white head. Then he nodded to Edward’s other side, toward Eve.
“Why did it speak to you, Grammy?” said Edward.
Eve’s sagging skin and loose lips were trumped by her blue unicorn’s eyes, which had, through all of her years, remained young and sharp.
“Because,” she said, “I was the only one willing to listen.”
CHAPTER 5
TWO HALVES OF A WHOLE
As Edward watched, his grammy took over the story. Adam settled in, content to listen to his wife.
Eve told the old and young unicorn that the world was full of messages that most beings failed to heed. There was a quiet voice inside of everything (a voice on the wind, a notion that feels like a push from the core of a being) and that those who could learn to hear those voices would find themselves able to perform magic of a sort — with or without a horn.
“Unicorns are no different from humans in that way,” Eve added.
At this, Edward felt his hair bristle, hungry to stand on end. Humans were a source of great debate, and his grappies’ stance had not always made Adam and Eve popular with the other unicorns.
“Unicorns, though they are born of light magic, can be stubborn and willfully blind,” Eve continued. “In a way, a dogged determination to be righteous and moral and pure can lead to more evil than evil itself. The unicorns of early Mead were like that. They were the first creatures: the chosen few, for whom the world was created. They felt they didn’t have to listen to anyone, and felt they were better than those beneath them. So in a way, we had conflict without conflict — but when it came to the tree, everyone agreed. The tree seemed to call us, but the world was so pure and clean and the tree was so dark that no one wanted to listen. I thought the strength of compulsion alone was reason to at least consider the tree rather than fearing it. But no one agreed, so I went by myself. And what I found was that as with the world’s other whispers, the tree had a voice of its own. I stood by and listened while the others stood back with scowls on their perfect, angelic faces. They thought I was associating with the enemy, even before anyone understood what an ‘enemy’ was. Their fear of the tree was deep in their guts, born out of the tree’s difference. My interest in the tree came from exactly the same emotion — but for me, it was about wanting to understand its difference.”
“What did the tree say, Grammy?” said Edward.
Eve stood taller, her old back straightening with what Edward took for pride. She told them that the tree had introduced itself as a proper being: not just dark magic, but “Darkness,” as if that were its name. It told her that it was the opposite of Mead’s pure light. It did not deceive her, Eve insisted, contrary to what some said when they recited the tale. She knew what the tree was from the start. She knew what the tree wanted. She knew what would happen if she gave it a way into the world they’d built. But the tree was born of balance — born, in fact, from the unicorns’ own actions — and to Eve, balance mattered more than their so-called perfection.
As the unicorns made Adam’s forget-me-knots bloom with their white magic, they fed the tree.
As the elves did good deeds, they fed the tree.
As the residents of Mead existed in conflict-free harmony, they collectively fed the tree.
The creat
ures of Mead thought they could build one side of the light/dark balance without building the other, but they were wrong. Everything they did actually built both sides, and until light and dark were allowed to fall into conflict and grind the new world forward, Darkness would build and build as a tremendous, daunting pressure.
“The Darkness told me we had a choice,” said Eve. “We could continue to build our perfect one-sided paradise until the tree’s roots shattered the world, or we could let the dark magic in — accepting flaws and fallibility into Mead — and watch the world churn, as it was meant to. We could trade everlasting life for mortality. We could trade persistent peace for occasional war. We could counterbalance happiness with sadness. We could trade some of our ease for a commensurate amount of difficulty and strife. We could choose to die — but to make the time until we did more worth living.”
“You wanted things to be bad?” said Edward.
“Two halves of a whole, Edward,” said Eve. “But think about something: If we return to the Wellspring in the end, then how is death ‘bad’? If difficulty and war and sadness that only affect this plane turn out not to matter in the Wellspring, then how can it be ‘bad’ to experience those things, in the big picture? Great unicorn storytellers use conflict to create their art. Within the worlds of their stories, when things stagnate, they create a fight. They will get their characters arguing because clarity comes from differences, not persistent sameness.”
It still didn’t sound right to Edward. Many unicorns his age already had fully developed (albeit small) horns, and those unicorns constantly ridiculed Edward about his own stub, which was basically a large, hard nubbin. When they mocked him, it made Edward feel bad. How could that possibly be good? Or was Grammy implying that there might be some benefit (or at least “not mattering”) in the future — something Edward was too young and too narrow-minded to see in Eve’s great truth? Was she implying that ridicule might change him in some way that would “move him forward” (whatever that meant) when he was older, and make him better in the long run than he would have been without that pain and strife?