by Sean Platt
“You don’t understand,” said Eve, watching the young unicorn.
Edward shook his head. His white mane billowed.
“Well,” said Eve with a sigh, “you’re not alone. The others didn’t understand then, and the elders in our governing Blessing — like Fiona and Clarence — still don’t understand today. But what is happening now with humans and their new city is proving me right. You cannot cater to only one side of the magic. You must accept both.”
“Stupid humans,” said Edward, because he thought it was what his grammy would want him to say. But Adam and Eve both looked at him seriously instead of with approval, and Edward looked away, thinking he might have said the wrong thing.
“Anyway,” said Eve, her gaze even, “I listened to the tree day by day, week by week. I watched the other creatures watch me. They didn’t like that I listened to the tree, but they were pure white and couldn’t imagine opposing me in any way that would make a difference. They picked their flowers. They bathed in golden streams. Everything in Mead grew and grew and grew. And as it did, the tree grew as well. Every time I returned, its voice was louder and stronger, like someone slowly waking from a deep sleep. Landmarks I’d seen on the grass were devoured by the tree’s trunk as it expanded. I could feel its sides seem to shake as if with pressure. It told me that it wouldn’t last much longer. So I went into my own mind, into my magic, and searched for that first voice we’d heard. I never found it again but did begin to have dreams of sundering worlds — of the tree splitting everything we’d built like dry wood. I began to see that the tree was right. Being white magic creatures, we didn’t like what the tree represented, but that was just us being proud — something I don’t have to tell you unicorns tend to be, to the point of becoming stupid and blind and forgetful. We couldn’t help but judge what was different from us. But even with that aside, ours was a choice between dark and darker. We could suffer a little now, or suffer a lot later. Both options were difficult.
“So I asked Adam what he thought. I whispered to the other living things (those who would listen, and weren’t too proud). I tried asking the voice, but all I heard back was my own voice — as if that great power from the beginning was there but wasn’t going to help me, and was instead going to force me to decide on my own. I asked the tree, always remembering to take its advice for what it was as it urged me to help it sow its fruit in Mead’s fertile soil. The legends you may hear about your grammy make me sound weak and impulsive, but I was anything but. The knee-jerk reactions came from others, who wouldn’t even consider the issue before rejecting it. I took months to consider. I saw the world start to shudder and crack. I peered into the chasms that began to form around Mead that the others pretended weren’t there. I felt the tree quake under my touch, shaking like an imminent explosion. And in the end, I decided to do what the tree suggested. I decided to pierce the veil between our worlds — to let the dark magic stream into Mead a little at first, to release the pressure.”
Edward’s big, blue eyes were rapt with attention. He looked up at Eve and said, “How did you do that, Grammy?”
Eve nodded at her grandson. “You know the legends, Edward,” she said. “I ate a peach from the tree.”
CHAPTER 6
EATING THE PEACH
Eating the peach, said Eve, was a symbolic act of acceptance. She knew full well what the tree was (it had even gone so far as to introduce itself by name), and she chose to take a part of it into her pure, white-magic body.
“I felt the change immediately,” said Eve. “When the first bite of that peach fell into my stomach, I felt a kind of quenching, like putting water on a fire. My stomach didn’t destroy the peach, and the peach didn’t destroy anything in me. The two, together, became something new, between light and dark. It was like when human thinkers combine a science acid with a science base, creating something that is neither. Matter and antimatter. Black paint and white paint combining to make gray. As the peach moved through me, I changed it, and it changed me.
“But once I’d taken that first bite, it stopped being like acids and bases and multicolored paints; the change had been like pricking a hole in an overfull sack of water. I didn’t need to eat more, or get the others to eat from the tree. My single bite began the process for all of us. Dark magic leaked into our perfect world, starting in me.
“At first, it scared me. I could feel the change spreading out from my middle, making me something different. It was changing me so much that at the beginning, I thought I’d made a mistake and had doomed us all. Then I found that my mind gained a new clarity. I could see courses of action I’d nar considered before. I began to find things I didn’t like about the others, whereas I’d previously loved them all without the slightest of flinches. But it’s good, Edward, to see imperfections. Because as the change spread to Adam, we saw things between us that differed — and at first those differences scared us. But then we started to talk and to explore and to try things that we’d never have tried before because they didn’t feel like pure white magic. Our differences made us better, and made us better companions. The elves started fighting as the change spread to them. They formed separate tribes rather than one large group. The tribes sometimes got along and sometimes fought. But then, after that, they began to explore and build because the gaps between what they could do and what they wanted to do grew suddenly insistent. Creatures began to eat other creatures, and we all ate the plants — even the beautiful forget-me-knots. But there were always more creatures, and more and more flowers, and as one form of magic was consumed by another, the effect was like stirring a giant pot of stew. Life no longer required creation magic to flourish. It gained a new kind of magic all its own. It was like a great machine had been started, and plants mixed into other plants, creating new and more delicious fruits and vegetables. Animals mixed and created new strains. Once everything became threatened with death, amazing new adaptations began to blossom in the animals. The ones who lived longest and most reliably gave birth to offspring became those who could survive best in our new world of conflict, and as a result, the conflict made them harder and better. Certain animals gained shields, and others speed. Yet others gained knowledge, and grew able to think themselves out of danger.”
“Like humans?” said Edward.
“Like humans,” Adam agreed, stepping in. “Elves were here from very early on, but they were imbued with the original magic. Humans weren’t magic, except in a few rare cases — and yet they bloomed as if they were. We watched as hairy tree dwellers lost their tails then learned to use tools. We watched those creatures stand upright, grow tall and soft, shedding most of their hair. Then we watched these frail things with no magic or defenses form groups and societies, outsmarting animals much larger and stronger than they were due to superior minds.”
“But Grammy and Grappy,” said Edward. “Um … didn’t that ruin the beauty of Mead? I heard that the peach thing and the Darkness created the briars and the thistles.”
“Possibly,” said Adam. “But I think it depends on how you look at it. Yar, we saw thistles and blight as the tree spilled into our world. We saw thorns and brambles and saw whole areas swallowed by fire. But what remained seemed more beautiful to our eyes once we had something to compare it to. You must remember, Edward: There are only a handful of unicorns still alive who remember what it was like in Mead before the tree grew too large. Most of the unicorns today think that a perfect world would be beautiful, but young sire … there’s simply no sustaining beauty in a uniformly beautiful world. That so-called beauty is simply ‘how things are’ when there is no ugliness for contrast.”
“What happened to the tree?” Edward asked.
“It shrank,” said Eve. “It became a normal tree. The Darkness left it, slowly deflating into Mead through the slit I’d made between our worlds. The pressure left, and our world stopped being pure light, and the tree stopped being pure dark. For a while, we lived in a world of perfectly balanced gray. There were clumps of unbalance
d light and dark, of course, but they were small. Unicorns were still very, very close to pure light. Same for elves. But other dark creatures then came to balance us out: trolls, gargoyles, ghoulem. But across Mead, taken as a whole, things were exactly as they should be. There was light and dark; the two lived together in harmony the same as day and night share the sky.
“Humans continued to proliferate, but they were still new. They were strange creatures — approximately half light and half dark, unlike almost anything else in existence. In a way, humans were perfect — despite the opinions of unicorns then and unicorns now. We were flawed because of our lack of flaws, but humans were flawed to their very cores. There was no resisting the peach tree that lived inside of humanity; they accepted it fully and feasted from its fruit.”
Edward stared up at Adam, starving for more words. Adam smiled and continued.
“But as millennia passed, as your grammy and I had foals of our own — your appy and his brothers and sisters — the humans became more and more advanced. The unicorns didn’t like the humans’ advancing and their innate darkness, so they stayed away. The humans knew we existed, and in no time at all they seemed to know exactly what we were. They sent parties to watch us because they were curious. We’d see them at the edge of Mead from their new tribes on our outskirts, poking their heads up and observing what we did. Sometimes we’d blast spells to make them go away, but mostly we just abided them since they seemed harmless, and not much different from lions or boars.
“So for a long, long, long time, we grew as two distinct groups: humans on one hand and unicorns on the other. The animals had no affiliation and went back and forth, the elves fell mainly into seclusion, and the dark creatures haunted us both. Humans grew ever more intelligent, until their brains began to approach the level of ours. We had magic, but for us that was almost a crutch. Humans had taken full advantage of the conflict catalyst, fighting and killing and warring and feuding and trying to survive without the aid of magic, and the humans who made it through those hard years were razor sharp, having been honed like blades. Unicorns are proud and pretend that humans are stupid, but humans are not stupid. Strip us of our magic, Edward, and humans are essentially our equals.”
Edward wanted to protest. Everyone knew that humans were stupid and beneath mention compared to the superior unicorns, but Grappy had taken many barbs over his advocacy of human rights. Edward wasn’t convinced but knew it was disrespectful to argue.
Adam sighed. “It might have been better, looking back, if human relations had been established earlier than they were. But in the beginning, humans were no different from rabbits and fish. The hairy no-longer-tree-dwellers could use sticks and rocks to get food, but that seemed like novelty at most. By the time they started to cluster and hunt, I began to suspect their species was different. But because they live such short lives, they are forever facing that sharpening edge of survival in never-ending conflict, and none of it magic. Before we could blink, they’d crossed some kind of a chasm and were conscious, cognizant beings. But by then unicorns’ opinions of humans had already hardened, and their opinions of us as arrogant outsiders had gone through several generations. We ignored them, and they ignored us. And before we knew it, a thousand years had passed in vague animosity.”
“Couldn’t you go and talk to them?” said Edward.
“We could have, sure, and some tried, but prejudices are hard to change,” said Adam. “The unicorn emissaries — I was one — were treated like idiots. The others asked why we bothered with such base, animalistic, dark creatures. And on the other side, we found that most humans didn’t wish to hear us. They saw us as threatening, arrogant beasts. We’d had a millennium of separation, and that’s all it took for distorted perceptions of each other to form and root among both them and us.” Adam laughed. “And besides … the humans rode horses.”
Edward felt his snout want to bunch up in irritation. Horses.
Adam looked at Edward and laughed harder. Eve joined him.
“Horses are just animals, Edward,” said Adam, trying and failing to keep his voice steady as Edward’s horse-loathing overtook him. “They look just like us, but you can’t hold that against them. They can’t help how they are, and they can’t help that they can’t talk or use magic, and are generally quite dumb when compared to ‘the great and mighty unicorn race.’” Adam said the last with heavy sarcasm. “Personally, I think horses were a joke at our expense. I think that very first voice I heard in the void has never stopped nudging evolution along, helping it and tweaking it as necessary. Take flamingo-birds. How could something so ridiculous arise by coincidence? Look at the platybeaver. Is it waterfowl or a land animal? Horses, I think, were that thing’s way of knocking us down a peg. It said, ‘You take yourselves so seriously? All right, here’s something dumb made in your image.’ But do you want to know a secret? I always liked horses, mayhap because I got the joke. Being an old unicorn has its advantages, and not caring too much what others think of you and being able to laugh at yourself are certainly two.”
“You like horses?” said Edward. He was aghast. His grappy might as well have just said that he enjoyed bathing in manure. It was the sort of thing Edward didn’t know he’d be able to get past. Would he ever be able to respect Grappy again?
Adam gave an equine shrug. “Horses paired with humans almost from the beginning,” he said. “The bond made life better for both species, proving that one plus one can sometimes equal three. Humans gained the ability to go farther and move faster, opening new avenues of trade and expansion. Horses gained stable sources of food, shelter, and protection from the wild.”
Edward snorted, unconvinced. In the short lull that followed, Eve returned to refill Edward’s marshmallow chocolate and her own. Adam walked a few steps toward the haven’s open end, seeming to stare off wistfully into the distance. But when Edward came up beside him, he realized his grappy wasn’t simply looking out at nothing. In the distance, Edward saw a low cluster of buildings: a small human settlement of huts that exemplified the animosity with the outside world Adam had mentioned humans tended to have. They’d built a wall around it.
“Grappy?”
“Yar, young Edward.”
“Is that the end of the story? We’re at the now, with humans and all … but … is that the end?”
“Does it seem to you as if something is missing?” Adam asked, his sagging lips lined in a soft smile.
“Yar,” said Edward.
“What’s missing?”
“Well, nothing, I guess. But it was such a long story — which is great, of course — and so it seems like there should be a … I don’t know … a reason for telling a story that long.”
“A moral,” said Adam, again looking into the distance. “A moral to the story?”
“Yar.”
“Well, there’s one piece I haven’t told you yet,” said Adam, “and I think that once you hear it, you’ll understand why I told you this story, and what I hope you’ll get from it.”
“What’s the last piece, Grappy?”
Adam looked down at Edward then nodded his horn toward the cluster of buildings in the distance.
“Edward,” said the world’s oldest unicorn, “I want to tell you about the Realm.”
CHAPTER 7
THE REALM
“The Realm?” said Edward.
“That’s what they’re calling that settlement,” said Adam, again indicating the cluster of human dwellings. He laughed. “And unicorns are supposed to have egos! I’ve seen their ‘Realm’ up close. It’s a scattering of shacks. Micro-centers for trade. But they have a leader, and he lives in a nicer hut than the rest, and they have put pickets around it as if pickets would matter to a unicorn … or a troll, for that matter.”
Edward looked at the ramshackle assortment of buildings pocking the horizon. It was beyond unimpressive. The place was probably rife with horses. It certainly didn’t seem worthy of a day’s long discussion by his grappy.
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p; “Um … ” said Edward.
“Oh, it doesn’t look like much,” said Adam, “but it worries me, and I’ve learned from experience that if you turn your back on humans for a few decades, they’ll grow and grow and grow. This feels to me like the very beginning of something not unlike the tree in Mead — and this time, I don’t want us caught unaware. We let humans grow into our adversaries because they change so much faster than we do, and now that they’re building walls — even ineffectual walls like that one? Well, it fills me with foreboding.”
“Why?” said Edward.
“Well,” said Adam, “to explain that, we must go backward a bit again, to the dawn of humanity. It wasn’t long ago by unicorn standards, but that’s exactly why I want to watch this situation closely now, before things change in a blink.”
Eve brought out more steaming marshmallow chocolate, held in front of her on a pillow of light yellow magic. She set Edward’s dish before him, then another in front of her husband, and a final one in front of herself.
“Magic is everywhere, Edward,” Adam said. “All you need to do is find ways to access it. That’s simple for us and for the other creatures born in magic, but humans were born without it. Without it inside them, that is. But they’re crafty, and curious, and soon they began finding old bits of life — like pieces of the earliest plants and trees — and noticing how, when they held their minds just right, those objects would sparkle and light up. Now, the humans aren’t doing magic, you understand. We can do magic, but they can only pick it up and use it where they find it. But this is a magical world, and magic permeates everything. It runs below the surface in enormous rivers that branch off into the world’s every nook and cranny. It’s sprinkled through the soil, causing everything to grow. For those who know how to use magic, it’s almost like it’s lying around in great piles, waiting to be gathered. And the humans, being crafty, discovered how to use it. Except that’s not quite right. They didn’t find out how to use it. They found out that they could.”