by Sean Platt
“What is that thing doing?” Edward asked. It seemed to be waiting for something.
“It’s different every time,” Saul said.
The tiny crocodile looked toward the tree then toward them. Its mouth opened and in that same purring voice said, “Sand path.”
There was a swirl of brown, and the tree behind the thing shimmered out of existence. In the tree’s place was suddenly a narrow path of pure white sand. The creature gave them a final look and waddled down the path, out of sight.
“Do we follow?” Edward looked toward Saul. It was difficult, in the moment, to believe that the piper had ferried travelers this way before — and, if Saul’s implications were to be believed, that he’d done so many times. He looked terrified. If they were supposed to follow the sand path, Edward thought he would have to push the man.
Saul said, “We’re in the middle. And when you’re in the middle, every road is a road to be opened.”
“You seem frightened.”
Saul swallowed. He looked at the unicorn with large, wide-open eyes. “Whenever I leave the Dark Forest, I’m confident at first. But every time I get here, I’m surprised by how timid I feel.”
“What do you need to be confident about?” Edward asked, his eyes still on the path.
“That I’ll find my way back.”
Saul still wasn’t moving. Edward tossed his chin toward the retreating lizard’s tiny steps. “So do we follow?”
“We have no choice.”
Edward followed Saul’s sweeping glance and saw that the path behind them had become a desert, and that there was now nothing but sand in every direction. The only thing to orient Edward — all that told him the direction he’d come from — was his body’s position. He didn’t want to move because the minute he did he’d have no idea which direction was which. The only thing to finally move him was suspecting that it didn’t matter.
Saul’s words echoed in his mind: We’re in the middle.
With the trees gone, they could see the small tan-and-gray creature ahead, plodding across the sand’s surface.
The man with the pipe took a step into the sand.
The unicorn followed behind.
CHAPTER 20
ENTER SANDMAN
After a few minutes of walking, Edward’s peripheral vision showed a second crocodile-like creature plodding along not far away, heading in the same basic direction. He realized there was another on his other side, and with that, he raised his head to look properly around. The unicorn could see more in the distance heading toward them and several to the sides ahead as if they were all on one spoke of a wheel, heading toward some arbitrary center.
As they walked — and as the small, plodding creatures converged — they neared that arbitrary center. But within a few paces, Edward realized that the center wasn’t arbitrary. The sand there was growing into small balloon, which grew tall and swelled, taking shape. A moment later, Edward and Saul found themselves staring at a man who was made entirely of sand and sitting on a sand throne.
The small crocodile-like creatures reached the throne’s plinth and started to climb, scaling the sides and back as well as the legs and torso of the man himself. Then the Sandman’s features began to resolve and take on color, losing their sand-like appearance. At the end of his transformation he seemed to be a normal human being wearing a dusty tan suit. The suit’s color and sandy look was so uniform, it was almost camouflage. Against the desert backdrop, he seemed almost to vanish.
He stood and walked down from the sand throne. The small creatures with their big eye masks and pink bellies, and hissing mouths (they all seemed to be saying “Sand” over and over) continued to climb the Sandman as he descended, skittering up and down his long legs and perching on his shoulders and head. Every once in a while, one would lick from the man’s clothing and swallow, as if hungry for the sand itself.
“So,” said the Sandman, walking down to stand in front of the piper and unicorn colt, “what have you brought me today, Saul?”
Edward’s eyes flicked to Saul. He didn’t like the way the Sandman had said that, like a master assessing a servant bringing sacrifices. Was this all a ruse? Had Saul retained his animosity, feigning civility to lure him? Saul himself said he’d led rats from The Realm. Had he now done the same for a unicorn colt — leading him to this odd man in his suit of shifting sand?
“He wishes to see Mead,” said the piper.
The Sandman reached up and tapped his chin. “Mead. In the axial world. Like your world, Saul. If you can’t remain in that world, why should this unicorn?”
Edward’s eye jerked to Saul. The Sandman laughed.
“Oh, he didn’t tell you? He’s a courier — but no, he cannot return to what was once his home. He returns to the forest because that is the home he has here. But you see, he cannot pass the test that I’d require of him. His story was too precious for reality. A man with a pipe leading rats from a troubled city? Oh no, I can’t let something like that leave. But you see, my keeping him here was to his benefit. If he had been returned that first time and stayed, he would have gone home to heartbreak and death. Only so many survived the flood, you see.”
Edward found his nerve uncertain in the Sandman’s presence. He struggled for his voice. He barely managed, “Were you the one who caused the flood?”
The Sandman’s head cocked back on his neck. He bellowed laughter. The small creatures climbing his suit looked up, then resumed eating the fabric’s sand. “Oh, no, Edward the Brave. You will be so surprised once you realize who caused it.”
There it was again: Edward the Brave.
“Why are you calling me that?”
The Sandman shrugged, pulling a human timepiece from his pocket and swinging it idly on a long chain. Both timepiece and chain appeared to be made entirely from sand. “Well,” he said, “isn’t that your story?” He shrugged more obviously, putting a not-quite-sure expression on his face. “But mayhap not yet. Or mayhap a long time ago. Who can say?”
“What are you talking about?”
“All stories are timeless, and yours is no exception. Tales are composed in a time and place, but truths are universal. Was there not good and evil before there were stories to cite them? Was there not a brave being before you? One who echoed your journey?”
Edward stared at the watch, as it started to swing in full circles. He had no clue what the man was saying and didn’t care to know.
“I want to find Mead.”
The Sandman held up his hands and started to pace. The small crocodile creatures had multiplied and were now in piles at his feet, clamoring over one another as they tried climbing his legs.
“You do, yes,” said the Sandman. “But that is true of every tale. You have heard of Pinocchio? The puppet who wanted to be a real boy?”
“No.”
“Well, mayhap it’s not that time yet,” the Sandman said. “But his journey was the same, only it nested two stories together, one inside the other. Pinocchio was false; he wanted to be real. But once real, he became greedy. He said he wasn’t real even then, and we fought. But I control the doors, and his story was already told.” He took a long look at Edward. “There is a point where a story is told enough that the story becomes more real than the subject. And beyond that?” He made a fly-away gesture.
“I am not a story.”
“Not yet,” said the Sandman, still pacing. Beside Edward, Saul the piper seemed afraid to move. Right now, the Sandman’s attention was on the unicorn, and if Saul remained still, he seemed to reason, that attention would stay on Edward. “But when will it become a story, Edward? I’ve already suggested you have a hero’s journey ahead.” He looked Edward over from hooves to tail to nose, and in the second it took, Edward found himself remembering Grappy’s promise that great responsibilities would fall to him, as a unicorn prince. “You will be known as Edward the Brave. You will embark on a great quest. The question is, which came first? You the being, or you the character? Because I must say
, having heard the story to its end — and no, I won’t spoil a thing — it’s quite a tale. A tale worthy of a great epic. But how many things in true life are perfect enough for timeless tales?” He tapped his chin again. “No, Edward the Brave … I think yours is one for the books. Not one for living.”
Edward couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Literally — it wasn’t remotely believable. The man spoke in riddles. Was he a story? Did he have the chops to live out his life? What kinds of questions were these?
“Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Edward,” the Sandman said. “But you must understand that everything is thought before it is real. Everything that exists in what you consider the real world was a figment until someone or something plucked it from the fog and made it real. That goes two ways, and the line between thoughts and reality is whisper thin. Tell me, in the moments before you fall asleep, do you ever feel the presence of something bigger than yourself?”
It was the question his Grappy had asked back at the haven. Edward said, “The Wellspring.”
The Sandman pointed a long finger at the unicorn. His arm’s sudden motion made his sleeve of sand jiggle. A handful of grains sifted to the ground. Crocodiles below scrambled for spillage as if it were somehow different from the rest of the dune sand underhoof. “Exactly that. It’s also the source. You feel it when you fall asleep because that’s when you lose the illusion that there’s a difference between fantasy and reality. You see, young unicorn, the world around you is simply an agreement of sentient beings. If enough living things agree that a thing is real, then it is so. But if those same beings agree that a thing is merely thought — a wisp of imagination held by a fanciful few — then it cannot be. But what is real? If you stay here rather than returning to Mead, does that mean that you are not real? Or does it merely mean that you are in a different place?”
Edward felt like giving up, like lying down and going to sleep. Mayhap he’d experience the Wellspring — anything to free himself from this doubletalker. The Sandman was worse than the cat. If he was Edward’s only chance at finding Mead, he might as well turn around and return to the forest. Although he wondered if he could go back. Saul had seemed terrified that he might not return — not to his own world but to his adopted home in the Dark Forest. Why wouldn’t the Sandman let them return? And more troubling: Where else was there? If you couldn’t go forward or back, were you forever cursed to stay in the desert of limbo?
Edward couldn’t out-riddle the Sandman. He had been holding court longer than the unicorn had been alive, based on what he’d said so far, and had many lifetimes to design riddles that harbored no answer inside them. Edward went for the throat.
“This is stupid,” said Edward. Beside him, Saul gasped. “You’re not deciding whether to let me go. You’re giving a speech. So what is it? Will you let us go forward? Or not? Will you force us back? Or make us stay here forever? Pick one, and be done. There’s no point to your blabbering.”
The Sandman looked genuinely surprised. From the corner of Edward’s eye, he could see the piper’s shock. Apparently, the Sandman wasn’t often surprised.
The Sandman smiled.
“Oh, you are a hero in the making, Edward. I see why they will call you Brave. I don’t know whether you are unafraid or entirely stupid, but my ignorance is cause for celebration. I know all the stories across the worlds, you see, and it’s my job to deliver those stories into the minds of those who can retell them and pull something true from their yarn. But it’s the cause and the effect. Sometimes it’s unclear which is which. I like it when a new story can surprise me. It becomes a story I wish to see play out as intended. But you see, there’s still an issue. There are two things to understand. I’ve told you but one.”
Edward nodded, feeling he might have scored a point in their intellectual face-off.
“If you stay here, your story will play itself out as it has, as it already did, forever unchanging, now tethered through what you called the Wellspring. If I let you proceed into the real world, you will take control of the story. That might cause it to change, as the axial world is innovation’s true source.”
Edward shook his head. The Sandman gave a sideways smile.
“Oh, you don’t need to understand it. But in the end, that is the dilemma as it’s set before me: Do we allow things to remain as they are? Or do we roll the bones and see if there’s a way for conscious will to improve them?”
Edward pawed the sand. The small crocodile creatures stirred, glaring at him with their empty black eyes.
“So … ” Edward began.
“You may go on, Edward the Brave,” he said. “I, for one, believe in you.”
The Sandman held his hand palm up. A miniature sandstorm formed above it, churning like a tiny cyclone. Edward watched the thing pulse as it formed into a tight funnel then dissolved into a billowing cloud. It surged in and out, as if trying to decide what it wanted to be.
“Before you go,” he said, “I will tell you something that I have realized while imprisoned here: The worlds are in flux right now, which is the reason you’ve met me. Walls are so thin that flights of fancy have begun to intermingle with reality. Some say the worlds are ending, but I don’t know that I agree. Thoughts are timeless, and I live in a world made from them all. If I can see stories across time, why does it feel like the paths are always open, and not simply open here and now? I don’t know it all, Edward. I didn’t used to be, and then I became. Like a thought. I know only what I know, and not all of the whys or hows. But it seems to me that if this — this intermingling of worlds and the magic within them — is due only to the break that came with the lubrication of water, then why can I see stories across all time? And why am I the guardian, seeing as I am not a creature of water?”
The Sandman paused, watching the storm. The pause lasted long enough that Edward thought he might be done, but then he blew gently on the storm and it grew to surround them, swirling in slow motion.
“The two of you are intimately familiar with the Cataclysm that brought water,” the Sandman said. “I can’t help but believe there will be future breaks that will turn my existence to sense.”
“What do you mean?”
The Sandman looked up, his eyes no longer so steely or certain. “Just as the world filled with water,” he said, “I believe one day it will fill with sand.”
CHAPTER 21
JUST LIKE THAT
Edward continued alone.
The Sandman pointed in a direction that, to Edward’s eye, looked exactly the same as the others. He took it. There was no hesitation. He didn’t say goodbye to Saul or the Sandman; he didn’t so much as look back. His unicorn eyes were on the sides of his head, but Edward looked around as little as possible, focusing on what was more or less before him. The moment felt fragile, as everything had from the moment Saul had stopped playing his pipe, and the feeling Edward had, as he put sand behind him, was like walking on shells. He had the sensation of a narrow escape — not from the Sandman himself but from what he represented — and felt certain, as he walked slowly away, that any small moment of indecision might jinx it.
Soon the fog returned and obscured all that he’d been afraid to look at. He couldn’t see far ahead at all; he was totally enclosed in a triple-Edward-length capsule of visibility within the churning fog. And it was churning; the unicorn thought he could see indistinct shapes within it as he walked. The world began to feel unreal, and after a few minutes in the fog Edward was already afraid he’d stepped from the Sandman’s assigned path and lost his way. He began to imagine things — creatures formed by the fog besieging him from every direction, as if they were the Sandman’s unreal fauna who knew Edward had proved himself, and were jealous.
After a short while (and a terrifying moment when Edward’s visibility grew so poor that he couldn’t see his own hooves), the fog lifted. He could see grass below him. It was flat and featureless owing to the scant light but soon grew greener as the veil parted and Edward could see the swe
ll of land around him. The grass was relatively short and bare in patches as if it had been grazed. There was also a worn path before him where the grass was pressed flat down the middle and had been scoured to dirt in two ruts along either side.
Now that the fog was gone, Edward could see a rolling meadow stretched out in front of him. He heard a rattling behind him and ducked aside to hide (feeling stupid for doing so; he was a unicorn, after all) in case something unknown and ominous had decided to sneak up behind him. When Edward turned to see the rattling’s source, he saw a cart on two large wooden wheels, being pulled by two horses and with a human driver in the seat. The cart was open and held objects that Edward couldn’t fully see but that looked like boards and building materials.
The cart rattled by, and Edward, already hidden, let it go. Yar, he could intercept the cart and ask for information, but things here were new. Where was he? Had he crossed worlds again? When night fell, he’d be able to look up at the stars and know for certain, but for now the unicorn had no idea. He remembered the Sandman’s ominous words (only that wasn’t quite right; they were uncertain more than ominous as if the Sandman himself didn’t know what was coming) and felt the moment’s fragility.
When the cart and noise were gone, Edward returned his eyes to the path. Where did it go? The cart held a human. Both Saul the piper and the Sandman had implied that The Realm had survived the flood. The Realm was near Grappy’s haven, not far from Mead.
It was as good a direction as any, so Edward, feeling his old sense of bubbly optimism after its long, uncertain absence, returned to the path over the green hills.
The fog was now entirely gone, and the sun shone bright on Edward’s flanks. He closed his eyes intermittently, feeling sun in the absence of vision. He could almost picture himself in Mead, almost imagine himself running toward the small knoll in the pasture as Ammy and Appy watched and …