by Sean Platt
“Just walk,” it said, rolling over on the strangely immobile branch. “Walk, and think. Remember who and what you believe you are. We know stories will one day be told about you, and you get to decide whether those things are merely a foreign world’s legends. The world’s fabric is thin, and if you ever find your Mead, you must cross at the tear, where the axle broke the veil. That crossing will not be easy, even if it seems so. A straightforward path is a trick. You must give it complications. You may see things you believe to have already happened, things that are yet to be, and things that will challenge your sense of what is and what isn’t.”
“Like jerky vanishing cats?”
“Oh, but there is only one of me. I believe it so firmly that it has become true.”
Edward stared at the cat, ready to be done with this farce. Fortunately, he had an excuse. The cat said he had to keep moving. The trick was convincing the cat that he didn’t need to keep Edward company.
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” said the cat. “Don’t forget to enjoy yourself.” Then his eyes made small jerking motions, seeming to urge Edward on. The unicorn started walking then stopped and looked back, a bit intrigued that he had clearance to leave and was returning.
Edward said, “One more thing.”
“Of course.”
“Why are you here?”
“This is where I belong.”
“In my path, I mean. You know me. You know the whole story, beyond what anyone else seems to know — certainly more than I knew, and based on your own tale, I’m from the first race. So how did we meet? Or have you been following me?”
The cat shook its head, as if amazed by Edward’s obtuseness.
“I am here because I am a part of the story.”
“What story?”
“Your story.”
“I am not a story,” said Edward, already annoyed that he’d asked.
“That’s the spirit.”
The cat vanished, leaving only white teeth and two eyes.
One eye winked, and Edward found himself alone in the quiet, dark night.
CHAPTER 16
AN IMPORTANT DECISION
Edward tried to forget everything the cat had said as he kept walking. It was all so annoying and unhelpful. It was presumptuous (the cat thought it knew him more than he knew himself!) and insulting (unicorns could be flights of fancy rather than the progenitors of existence?) and downright unhelpful. If anything, the cat’s help seemed like it would inevitably steer him in the wrong direction. When a unicorn found himself somewhere unfamiliar, it was best to stop, ask around, and determine both where he was and in which direction he should be going. If he just kept moving, he’d inevitably find himself farther from Mead than ever, unless he was very lucky.
Once Edward judged he was far enough from the cat’s domain, he lay down to sleep and study his unfamiliar surroundings.
He’d met the cat in a forest like the ones around Mead: There were large trees with long branches interspersed with saplings and patched undergrowth. He’d distinctly heard and felt pine needles cracking under his hooves and was fairly certain he’d kicked into a few pine cones. Closer to the spot where he’d spoken with the cat, Edward had felt leaves tickling the skin above his hooves and, in the moonlight, had noticed leaves on the trees. Even after walking for a while after leaving the cat, he’d still been in the woods, and, working mostly by feel and the few beams of silver moonlight penetrating the canopy, had cleared himself a bed in a soft spot covered with pine needles. Now, he woke to grass.
He thought back to the encounter with the strange, vanishing cat. He looked around at the grove, with green grass underhoof and tentative morning light breaking in what he assumed — in the absence of contradicting evidence — was east. He felt a sudden urge to orient himself — not in a location on a map but in a location within the cosmos. The stars had already been washed by the dawn, and Edward couldn’t tell whether he would have seen Mead stars or stars from the newly crossed worlds.
Edward strolled to the glade’s edge where the smattering of trees surrendered to meadow. He looked across, feeling a strange disorientation. Or, perhaps more accurately, he might have felt the return of a sense of orientation. Was this Mead? Had he never left? The idea seemed ludicrous, given that he’d last seen Mead as an unbroken expanse of water and that he’d flown and walked for weeks since that time, but it was tempting. Which, really, was the more ridiculous proposition: That he’d had a long dream or that his old world had ended and he’d wandered through at least two new worlds to encounter a crazy man with a ship full of animals and a vanishing cat?
The cat was the easiest — and most tempting encounter — to dismiss. For one, it was the most recent; he could actually have seen Mead flood and actually have met Noah and actually have wandered through sundered worlds yet still might have imagined or dreamed the cat. He’d seen more amazing things than vanishing animals in the past, given the magic of Mead (and of the other unicorns, he thought with some degree of jealousy), but the cat wasn’t just magical — if magic was even the tool it had wielded. The cat was prophetic, like a story he seemed to remember hearing (Where? He couldn’t place it) about prophetic owls. Its appearance was strangely coincidental, as if it had been waiting for him. And its advice, taken all by itself even without the rest of the absurdities Edward seemed to remember, was so obtuse as to hurt his head. The cat had made no sense; all of its words had been wrapped in riddles and doubletalk. Back is forth? What did that mean? The cat spoke of reality as a matter of opinion, and of place and direction as arbitrary.
It had to be a dream.
Edward let the idea sink in as he surveyed the peaceful meadow, breathing slowly and deeply, smelling the air’s fresh scent and finding that it recalled memories of Mead and other unicorns. He half expected to see Ammy and Appy at the meadow’s far end, grazing as if nothing had happened.
Appealing though the thought was, the unicorn couldn’t make himself believe it. Like it or not, he’d met that cat in the woods last night. And like it or not, he’d awoken somewhere very different than where he’d lain down. Edward wanted to believe he’d been delusional when falling asleep, but his head was clear. Unless he’d been somehow magicked (and he hadn’t; surely he’d have felt outside magic’s influence), then it had actually happened. All of it. He had to face reality — such as it was.
Edward walked out into the meadow, forcing himself to admit that something had shifted. The meadow, on further inspection, wasn’t like Mead after all. The unicorn grazed the grass. It tasted somehow different — almost effervescent, as if he were drinking one of Grammy’s fizzies. The sunlight felt somehow wrong. It wasn’t unpleasant, and the temperature was right, but the angles were off, even accounting for the differences in sunlight dependent on season. The air was sweet but held something Edward couldn’t quite place. The scent recalled Grammy’s food, and even a hint of her marshmallow chocolate.
He walked through the meadow and found himself entering a path that emerged from its end. The path was yellow underhoof, composed of small, rectangular stones. When he’d first entered the path, Edward thought it was crushed dirt, but as he walked, his hooves began to clack against the hard, handmade paving stones.
As he began to realize the yellow road underhoof seemed like something humans might make, Edward arrived at the lip of a valley and almost gasped. Behind him, the path was small stones. In front, the road seemed to become better and harder, its stones so perfectly aligned and squared off that it looked like the work of unicorn magic, or of machines he couldn’t fathom. At the very end of the long and winding road, very near the bottom of the valley, was a sprawling green city that looked as if it were made of crystal.
Edward heard a small noise behind him. He turned to see a tiny human in a pointed hat run past him without stopping, as if he weren’t even there. He followed the man’s passage, watching his short legs churn on the yellow stone road. But as he did, he realized that the path was i
ndeed normal yellow stones, not particularly well set, and that the only structures in the distance were huts with plumes of smoke curling from their chimneys. But hadn’t he just seen a city made of glass?
Edward shook his head.
Pretending that he hadn’t just experienced a strange shift in reality (I’m tired, he reasoned), Edward continued down the path and past the small domiciles. He didn’t stop or slow, nor did he attempt to speak with anyone he passed. For their part, the inhabitants of the huts and eventual villages didn’t so much as look in the unicorn’s direction as he passed. Edward wondered if it were possible that they couldn’t see him but didn’t want to know. So he walked, taking progression as progress.
Edward walked for most of a day. As he entered the valley, he decided he’d seen enough similar dwellings that he could consider the structures in the hollow, taken as a whole, to be a village. The entire place was occupied by the strange men and women with the pointy hats. The men wore strange cloaks with straps that ran over their shoulders and attached in the back. The women wore dresses like humans but with frilly white garments visible (and audible; they rustled like leaves) underneath. There was plenty of village chatter, and the noises of many kept animals.
Later on, Edward encountered a settlement with occupants much like those of the first — small, like humans — but these people, Edward noticed, had large, hairy feet. All of the men carried small wooden pipes between their lips, from which a fragrant odor emerged on blue smoke. Their houses were different; rather than being thatched huts, all were cut into the sides of hills and had large, perfectly round doors.
He cleared the hairy-footed people without incident, stopped to drink from a stream, and realized that the air had begun to change in color. It was in the sky, not the sun. Edward trudged on, wondering if he was walking through a kind of pink cloud, and began to see things around him that were diverse and strange enough to be an oddities show:
A three-story house shaped like a boot, tended by a loud and seemingly human woman with a broom. As Edward passed, dozens of children climbed in and out of the windows and then ran screaming around the place. The woman yelled for order, and the children paid no attention.
An upright pig in human clothing cobbled flat red stones together with some sort of gray paste. With Edward within earshot, a second upright pig walked over to the first and said, in Edward’s language, “I’m telling you, these bricks are overkill.”
A human girl wearing a hooded red cloak, carrying a basket, skipped by. As Edward watched her depart, a wolf crept past, walking upright like the pigs, drooling.
After a while, Edward stopped wondering what he was seeing and decided that one of two things was true. Either he was dreaming (or his mind had snapped; same basic idea) and none of this was actually happening, or it was happening just as he saw it. There was no point straddling possibilities. If pigs were really building houses, then it was what it was and he had to accept it. If they weren’t and Edward was actually asleep or cracked in Mead, then he might as well enjoy it and hope one day to wake. There was no advantage in denying his eyes. After a while it was almost like a defense mechanism.
The day grew long. The sun began to sink lower in the opposite sky, having traversed a strangely looping route that curled like a kinked hair. The landscape stayed fantastical. Roads turned into a hard substance, sticky when wet, sweet when his hooves pulverized it and sent dust to his face. He saw plants that bloomed, from stem to leaf, in colors that shouldn’t exist. He saw creatures he’d never seen, including an enormous hairy thing walking hand in hand with a small human woman. He saw a creature under a bridge and heard a talking sheep call it a troll, but the troll was nothing like the enormous, dark creatures Edward knew from Mead. Finally he happened on a red wall, not unlike the walls of the pig’s half-built house. On top of the wall sat a gigantic egg, wearing a face.
The egg was the first thing Edward had passed that had acknowledged his presence. Edward wasn’t sure if he should be happy (attention meant he was still real, at least) or irritated. Sometimes a colt wanted to walk past a giant egg without being required to dignify its existence.
“Hey,” said the egg.
Edward kept walking.
“Hey,” the egg repeated.
Edward didn’t look over.
“Oh, you’re too good to talk? I see how it is.”
Edward stopped and turned his head. He hadn’t realized the egg was speaking to him. He wasn’t used to giant eggs, and had no idea how they normally conducted themselves.
“You can see me,” said Edward, feeling his sense of dreamy contemplation collapse into hard reality. A moment before he’d been experiencing a three-dimensional horror show featuring a giant egg who was, he realized now, wearing cowhide pants. He was forced to see it for real. It was singularly unpleasant, and Edward had a moment of pity wherein he wondered what had happened to his life.
“Oh, har-har,” said the egg. Apparently, others had pretended to be invisible on this stretch of path in the past. It pointed to something on the ground with a tiny arm. “Hand me that, will you?”
Edward looked down at a pie.
“I can’t hand it to you.”
The egg put its hands on its hips. The motion made the top-heavy thing wobble. Edward had a moment where he thought it might fall.
“Look,” it said, “it’s none of your business whether I eat that pie or not. I know I have a bit of a weight problem. But what is that to you? Just hand it to me, and keep your judgment to yourself, okay?”
Edward looked at the pie again. “I literally can’t hand it to you,” he said. “I have no hands.”
“Magick it up here. You’re a unicorn, aren’t you?” His eyes went to Edward’s stump of a horn, and his egg cheeks puffed with laughter.
Edward suddenly didn’t want to tell this egg that he couldn’t do magic. “Why don’t you get it yourself?”
“Why don’t you jump up my butt?” said the egg. Then its tone changed and became less angry. “Okay, fine. I can’t get down. I had a ladder. Some jerk pig came and took it.”
“Hop down,” said Edward.
“But then I won’t be able to get back up. You see my bind.”
“Why would an egg want to sit on a wall? Get down, eat your pie, and return to your nest.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Hands back on its hips, the egg’s shell blushed red. “Oh, just because I’m an egg, I live in a nest? I have a very nice house across town, I’ll have you know. I had some pigs run pipe. I have indoor water! You should see the quality of my faucets.”
“Oh,” said Edward. Then, realizing he couldn’t pick up the pie and therefore had no more to discuss with the egg, resumed walking. The egg yelled after him.
“Don’t you walk away from me, punk!” it hollered from behind. “You think you’re better than me? What makes you so special, you with your stubby horn? What makes you so … ” There was a surprised scream and a loud breaking. Edward turned to see the egg lying in pieces. Its mouth was split vertically down the middle, but that didn’t impair its ability to hector Edward. The two pieces of egg alternatively blurted rude words at Edward and asked if he was happy now that his shell was broken.
Edward looked around, wondering if he should call someone. He couldn’t do much himself because he only had clumsy hooves and no magic, but mayhap there was a shaman around. As soon as he thought it, two dozen humans galloped up and dismounted around the egg. The humans picked up a few pieces and began trying to fit them together. After a moment, the horses rose onto their rear legs and, intent to prove Edward wrong about hooves’ lack of dexterity, began to tap at the pieces as well.
“Is that egg going to make it?” said Edward, not particularly caring. Expressing feigned concern seemed preferable to helping, and the occasion did seem to call for something. He looked down at the shattered pieces of shell. There were a million.
One of the men waved a dismissive hand at Edward. “With all these horses and men?
” He scoffed. “I’m sure we can handle it.”
Edward doubted it, but there was no point in arguing — especially seeing as the horses were proving more adept at egg-assembling than he could probably ever be. He wasn’t about to stick around and be shown up by a bunch of horses.
The sun was sinking as he left the village and again found himself alone. Human/pig/egg/creature dwellings thinned, then vanished. Nature returned, such as it was. The pink haze departed, and the light began to take on the familiar tinge of evening tangerine. Shadows became long, and the air became brisk, but not unpleasantly so.
Edward found himself wanting to slip into a fantasy and imagine himself back home in Mead. The light was exactly as he remembered it being as he’d played in the fields with Cerberus. In those golden evenings, Ammy would always try to call him home — and, owing to Edward’s small horn, would always fail. Edward had known the hour each of those times, of course, but usually chose to ignore it and stay out instead of heading home. Sometimes, golden evenings were just too gilded to abandon.
But where he was now wasn’t Mead, no matter how pleasant the cooling air felt on his hide. Soon night would fall (and what weird things might be in that night?), and then he’d look up and see unfamiliar stars, and he’d hear sounds he’d never before heard in his own world. He had to keep moving as the cat had told him — to keep trying to find his way home.
Edward crossed the field. Abruptly, it ended in thick woods. Ahead of him were two paths. He didn’t want to go backward. Backward was oddity, strangeness, and cats who spoke in riddles. Forward was the only way, and moving forward required him to make a choice.
He looked at the two paths in front of him, trying to decide which to take.
At first, the answer seemed obvious. The path on the left was bright and sunny — sunnier, in fact, than it should have been. There was a single tree on either side, and now that Edward looked more closely, the path wasn’t much more than those two trees. All he’d have to do would be to take a few steps forward, and then he’d be in a place that was almost supernaturally warm and wonderful: a field filled with swaying grasses, squirrels, rabbits, and birds flitting through the air, singing their sweet song.