by Sean Platt
A short time later, the sun started rising. Edward still couldn’t see past the thick forest but could see light as it bled from between trees ahead. The tops were dusted with gold. Trunks stood out in the gloom — and then, as the sun rose farther, they seemed to sparkle. Edward made out more of the surrounding area. He looked behind himself and could see the familiar path winding through the S-curve that, only a few minutes earlier, he’d had to navigate mostly by feel.
He was still looking backward when he heard a squishing noise and felt his footing give out. He’d almost slipped forward onto his face when the hard-packed ground vanished beneath him, his hoof sinking into mud.
Edward looked ahead and saw that the path before him — a gradual downslope — was completely covered with water.
What he’d taken as ground ahead was actually a flat, liquid surface winding between and around all of the trees. The flooding was absolute. There was nothing ahead, on or off the path, that wouldn’t amount to Edward having to ford water or swim through it.
Except that he couldn’t swim.
Edward cocked his small white head, listening. The river. It had to be the river. It had overflowed and flooded the valley. But that wasn’t right; he’d just looked back at that familiar S-curve in the trail. He knew the curve. He’d walked this path over and over and over again. The S-curve wasn’t in the valley. It was near the peak of the high hills, right where the high path finally started to descend. He wasn’t near his meadow at all. He was still nearly an hour away.
Edward felt cold. He looked down and saw that both of his front hooves were covered to the fetlocks in water. He was sinking in the mud, so he stepped back, righting himself on the path. Then he looked back at the S-curve, trying to make sense of what had happened. He’d grown disoriented by the night and his troubling thoughts, concern for his elderly grappies, their health, their ideals, and the profane mission they seemed so intent to rest on his still rather narrow shoulders. How could he be near the hilltop? He was so confused. It must be a different S-curve.
Edward felt cold again and realized that, again, he was fetlock-deep.
The floodwater was rising.
Still more confused than concerned, Edward stepped back again, refusing to believe what his senses and memory said. He was in the valley. He had to be. He couldn’t be at the top of the hill. And how had there been this much water in the river to begin with?
What had flooded that river?
The river, he realized, that he’d been hearing for a long time now.
When the water again touched his hooves — this time the rear ones, as he’d turned around — Edward trotted up the hill. Just past the S-curve, a side trail led out to the edge of the woods, to a spot where his appies often paused to gaze out over the meadow valley. He ran through the curve, his nerve starting to falter, and turned onto the path. A minute later he was at the overlook, where breath nearly fell from his lungs.
The entire valley was flooded. Everything was gone. The place he lived with his appies — gone. The meadow where, just yesterday, he’d failed yet again to fly — gone.
Somewhere behind him, unseen in their valley, Adam and Eve’s haven — gone.
Mead was an ocean. Only the tops of the highest hills still poked above the water, and those were being slowly eclipsed. Edward watched as the crest of a nearby hill (it was in the range he was walking, down and up from where he’d intended to go) vanished with a blip and a ripple. All around, Edward heard the rushing of water, including from behind.
The sky was packed with unicorns.
They circled like birds, seeming to take in the water. Even from this distance, watching the strange, four-legged hawks fly, Edward thought he could read their mood. Unicorns were seldom surprised, but they seemed shocked plenty now. No one had seen this coming. Even now, they probably didn’t know what had happened. There wasn’t much rain. The rivers had been well within their banks just yesterday.
But wonder was eclipsed by a stronger emotion as Edward heard gurgling somewhere behind him. He stopped worrying, and became afraid.
He couldn’t fly.
He couldn’t swim.
He had almost no horn and was drastically, woefully unskilled in magic.
The other unicorns could fly, but he was going to die.
Edward searched the sky, panicked. His lack of a horn meant he couldn’t call to the others. When whatever had happened began to unfold, his appies would surely have started to search for him. But where would they look? They’d probably assume he’d gone to Grammy and Grappy’s, but Grammy and Grappy’s haven would be gone by now. Would they think to search the path? And if they did, how would they find him? They wouldn’t be able to home in on him; the forest was too rich with magic interference. The ocean of water was too large to ford other than in a very small area. They could lay waste to the trees so they could see him from above, but if they did that, they might also lay waste to their young, unskilled, vulnerable colt.
Just as Edward was starting to wonder if he could force himself to swim, a great white shape swooped down from behind him.
“Edward!” called a voice.
He looked up to see Appy, cupping his enormous wings as he hovered above. Ammy appeared beside him. Appy’s horn glowed a dull red, and he felt himself flying skyward. Unicorns didn’t normally ride unicorns, but Edward learned that rules were made to be broken as he settled on his back.
“Thank Providence,” Jack said. “That’s the only clear spot on the trail. I was hoping you’d be near enough and would remember it.”
Edward tried to decide if he had, indeed, remembered the trail. He had, but hadn’t sought it out as a means of saving himself. It was dumb luck.
Edward slipped to one side, and this time Diane’s magic held him in place. The proposition was awkward at best, especially with Jack flapping, jostling Edward from side to side.
“I’m sorry, Edward,” he said, “but you’re going to have to ride like this for a while. I need my concentration to fly and my magic ready in case … ” Then he stopped, letting the thought hang.
“Grammy and Grappy,” said Edward, thinking of Adam and Eve’s haven, its low location, and how, right now, he didn’t see the old unicorns with his appies. Grammy and Grappy had known where he was. When the valley started to fill, why hadn’t they flown up to find him?
“Gone,” said Jack. From where Edward sat unsteadily on his appy’s back with his ammy’s magic holding him down, the little unicorn thought he saw his father’s long face change, though he couldn’t be sure.
“Where?”
“Gone,” Diane repeated.
“But … ”
“There will be time later, Edward,” Diane said. Edward saw something strange on her face, just like his appy’s. Edward thought of Adam returning his magic to the ground and speaking of the Wellspring. This would be the first time a unicorn had ever died. Edward wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He had no reference. But if the flood had risen quickly, he could believe it would have taken his grappies even with their magic and ability to heal. They’d looked so old when he’d left them, and they’d seemed so ready to leave. They had been alive since creation, and they’d been intentionally making themselves weak, preparing to go. Mayhap this wasn’t how they’d wanted to exit the world, but it seemed to have happened.
Edward tried asking more questions, but his appies would only supply him with cursory answers — most of them versions of “I don’t know.” After a while, Edward found himself surrendering questions in favor of awe. His lookout spot had vanished under water. He watched the same thing happen to several other peaks, the entire world from horizon to horizon slowly becoming nothing but sea.
Jack circled, and Edward lost his bearings. Where was his meadow? Where was that familiar line of hills? Where had the river been? And most of all, what had happened?
The unicorns continued to fly, surveying the waterworld like hornets searching for something to sting. Their horns glowed — whethe
r magically searching, trying to fight the floodwaters, or held at the ready, Edward didn’t know. The unicorns were tireless. They could fly forever, or could magick rafts on which to stand. The other beings weren’t as lucky. The three unicorns passed giant pieces of floating debris with non-flying beings clinging to them — elves, humans, and even helpless-looking trolls. Those who had survived fought for what they could grab to stay afloat. But many hadn’t survived.
The three unicorns circled what was so recently Mead, two of them flapping their great wings and watching the sun rise on an ocean of death and desperation.
CHAPTER 10
YAR, GUNSLINGER
Clint looked at the adult version of Edward, standing just off his porch as worlds crumbled beyond. He warred with two emotions, only one appropriate. He felt bad for the colt in the story, and could almost feel his loss. On the other hand, it was hard to think about Edward as a bright-eyed youngster — with a tiny nubbin of a horn — without laughing. But more than either of those things, Clint wanted to know what happened next. Throughout their time together, Edward had treated the gunslinger as if he were on a need-to-know basis. Clint was over a hundred years old now (despite seeming much younger thanks to the power of the Triangulum Enchantem), and he’d been with his unicorn partner through most of that time. He’d have thought the time he’d put in would have earned him some respect — respect enough to at least not need to pry for information — but it never seemed to happen. Until now. Now he was hearing a story that humanity didn’t remember, and one that made his time with Edward apparent for what it was: a grain in the sprawl of a unicorn’s life.
“Why did the world flood?” Clint asked.
“I’ll get to that.”
“Because you stopped. You just kind of stopped like the story was over. Is the story over?”
“Yar, gunslinger,” Edward said. “The story is over. I was a colt, I heard a story from my grappies, there was a flood. Then literally nothing happened until I met you. That’s why the worlds splintered. That explains The Realm’s prehistory in its entirety.”
“Interesting,” said Clint.
The unicorn shook his head. “In case you are too stupid to see it, I was pausing due to the moment’s emotion. I haven’t relived these stories in a very long time. They’ve been locked away within me. Because this was a very long time ago, and with enough time, even unicorn memories can change. For a race like yours, time will erase those memories. Only a handful of beings alive today would remember these times, and few would want to discuss them. It’s why we created the line savants, who survived with their archival knowledge intact all the way to and through Emma and Sly Stone: to remember for us without being affected by the burden of time. It’s why those before us created the raconteurs: to tell the old stories with their cores intact, no matter how much your kind tried to distort them.”
“Raconteurs?”
Edward looked away then back. “That’s right; you don’t know about the raconteurs. Or, for that matter, the stories. Don’t worry. That’s coming.”
“How about you just explain now?”
Edward shook his head. Clint threw an empty apple brew bottle at him. Edward’s reflexes were quick; his magic caught the bottle, inverted it, and shoved it under the back of Clint’s belt. A trickling sensation at his rear told Clint that the bottle hadn’t been entirely empty and that throwing it had been a mistake.
“I’m not being evasive,” said Edward. “I’m being dramatic.”
Clint looked at Edward. The unicorn looked every bit as stoic and uninterested as he always had. For a few decades, Edward had experienced a honeymoon of happiness and a return of the wide-eyed splendor possessed by the young Edward in the tale. The end of the world was a damper.
“You look dramatic.”
“Thankoo.”
“So why did the land flood? Did a dam break?”
“Something broke,” said Edward. “But it wasn’t a dam. It was the world itself. You know of the flood; you just don’t know it as a flood. There is a reason you don’t know all of the details, nor any human. You cannot be trusted.”
“Thankoo for the lack of trust,” said Clint, trying hard to control his bitterness. “But I don’t know the flood at all.”
“Yar, you do. You just know it as the Grand Cataclysm.”
That got Clint’s attention. His urge to joke vanished. He looked up, into Edward’s big, blue eyes.
“I thought the Cataclysm shattered the worlds. You described it as ‘the first end of the world.’” He looked out at his yard then nodded to where it abruptly ended and the black void began. “With, I suppose, this being the second end of the world. Let us hope there will be three strikes. Or at least that we can find the intact lands again before this giant commode flushes.” He looked across the void at The Realm. Or what was left of it, anyway.
“It did shatter the worlds. It gave them a wound, and the flood was the first of it — a great sea dropping into Mead, scouring it clean. But the damage was far beyond Mead. The borders thinned, like now.”
“What caused it?” Clint asked.
Edward sighed. “I will answer that,” he said, looking sad, “but first I need to tell you about the storm. About the other worlds. And about the stories we tell.”
Clint sat back, leaning on his straight arms.
“Then tell them.”
CHAPTER 11
THE STORM
They flew over Mead forever until it felt futile, almost foolish. It might have been days, though Edward, pressed tight to his appy’s back by his ammy’s magic, lost track of day and night’s passage. Edward was terrified to shivers. Nothing seemed real, and a small part of his mind had convinced him it wasn’t. After the floodwaters stopped rising, the world below seemed mostly featureless — an expanse of blue water and little else, other than dots of land here and there sticking up from the newly made sea. But sometimes Edward saw things that were fantastic, even to the young mind of a unicorn colt stranded in the air. Down seemed up, since both directions were blue. Sometimes it was dark below; sometimes only above. Once while half dozing, Edward thought he saw the world rip, as if it were a length of cloth, and saw the water fall into the void. As if in a haze, Edward watched it and thought, Good. Now the water can drain away. Then he fell asleep.
Perhaps it was Diane’s tireless magic on his back that caused his hallucinations. The sun rose and set, strangely unconcerned with Mead’s transformation. Edward saw a team of soldiers wearing armor bedecked with hearts and strange black clovers marching by as if on the water’s surface, then vanish like a mirage. He saw a single rowboat, piloted by a lone human man with wild hair under an enormous hat and a strangely cut suit of human clothing, pass by beneath them, cackling, then stared as the man steered his boat toward a sort of phantom whirlpool as if it weren’t there. A moment later, it wasn’t, and neither was the strange human.
Edward didn’t fight the visions. It was more comfortable to believe the world was what it couldn’t be — that it was actually ripping and tearing and crumpling and becoming populated by strange, impervious beings — than to believe what seemed to be the truth: that everything unable to fly or float was dead.
For days, they watched, circled and found nothing. Edward tried to sleep or disbelieve his eyes, no matter what they said. Mead wasn’t what it had been. Grammy and Grappy were gone, having decided to die before their time for reasons Edward had almost understood, but which now made no sense whatsoever. Nobody should die. No unicorn should die. But it wasn’t just Grammy and Grappy who had perished in the flood. Edward knew plenty of other foals who couldn’t swim, or yet fly, and whose horns were too small to effectively magick their safety. They couldn’t all have been saved so serendipitously by their appies. Edward couldn’t figure their odds and didn’t want to ponder. Adept fliers like Cerberus would be fine, at least until their strength eventually surrendered. How long, he wondered, could a unicorn stay aloft?
His appies seemed tireless bu
t were clearly using all the magic and energy they had. When Edward tried speaking — perhaps to ask them if the city of light below was real or just another phantasm — they shook him off. Their eyes were down. But after enough time, he began to feel about them the way Edward felt about himself and all of the other unicorns who continued to circle: They didn’t know any more than he did, and were just as scared and confused as he was. Mead had an order and a hierarchy, as much as everyone denied it, and unicorns were the kings. The elves and trolls and humans could pretend to be independent and autonomous, but in the end, the unicorns were law. They weren’t used to living without direction. They weren’t used to contending with things they didn’t understand because nothing was supposed to happen without their blessing.
Mayhap Adam and Eve could have explained the flood. But Adam and Eve, so far as Edward could ascertain from his tight-lipped, concentrating appies who were trying to hold themselves together, were gone.
After somewhere between five and seven days, Jack said, “I’m no longer convinced this is Mead below us.”
Diane looked over.
“There are still unicorns in the sky, but the wind has been building from the sunset horizon, and we’ve gone days with no points of reference. We could be anywhere.”
“Appy,” Edward said, feeling Diane’s magic hand pressing him flat, “how long can you fly?”
“As long as I need to.”
“Is this our life from here on?” The thought was depressing. He’d rather Appy couldn’t fly anymore and they’d simply fall into the water and die. He could never even learn to fly if he grew up in this terrible, unending limbo because he’d never be able to practice. Their legs would forget the trick of walking. Even if it was possible to fly forever, who would want to? Wouldn’t it be like trying to hold onto an idea whose time had faded? He’d rather just go where Grappy and Grammy had gone: back to the Wellspring, which, these days, the young unicorn swore he could see in front of his eyes.