by Sean Platt
“I thought they were upsetting magic’s balance,” said Edward.
“They are,” said Cerberus. “But I don’t know what we can do about it.”
CHAPTER 27
EDWARD SEES THE LIGHT
The Unicorn Blessing room was a place to hold council, but it wasn’t really a place. It was a network of magic that allowed unicorn leaders to meet without being unduly influenced by the world around them. The practice of meeting in the network had been started just after the Grand Cataclysm, when changes in the land and world made magic unpredictable.
The room the elders had created was ashy gray, lit with a muted light that came from the air itself. For the first few minutes, the unicorns’ horns seemed to glow. Their horns were the source of the magic place, and it took time for the illusion to let them forget that their minds were somewhere imaginary. After those first few minutes passed, they were just normal white unicorns in a gray room with smooth walls and floors, not unlike a well-lit cave fashioned from a synthetic material. The unicorns normally formed a rough circle in the room, and whoever was speaking moved into the circle’s center. This time, Edward stood by himself to one side as the others formed a semicircle across from him. Because he’d been kept in the dark, and it was time for him to finally see the light.
The first unicorn to speak was one of the oldest — a mare named Fiona who wore her mane cropped close, causing it to bristle and stand almost erect.
“The humans are tapping the magic veins,” she said.
Edward almost faltered on his feet. Nobody tapped the veins. They gave magic to the lands, and trying to directly access them would be the height of stupidity.
Fiona nodded, watching his surprise. “They’ve invented a drill, and initially tried using it in their castle basement. We did not know that they were doing this but later found a member of the royal family walking the hill trail suffering from magic poisoning. We didn’t know humans could even accept that much magic. Before his head cleared, we got the story out of him. He said the humans realized that magic was dangerous when accessed directly, so they immediately tried to plug the hole in the castle and, of course, realized that repairing a vein is not like filling a hole. So they moved out of that part of the castle. The hole is still there.”
“Leaking,” said Edward. He looked around the gathering, noting how all eyes were on him. This wasn’t a roundtable discussion. They were here to inform him, and only him. The old unicorns in the semicircle seemed to have known this information for a while and, judging by their faces, had taken their time to tell him because they apparently felt conflicted. Cerberus was the only young unicorn present besides Edward, his white form almost vanishing between the blindingly white elders on either side. Of course he’d be in the know; he was the leading authority on the so-called human problem. But even Cerberus, in their regular talks, had said nothing.
Fiona nodded. “Yar. It’s still leaking. But that’s not even the main problem. The problem is that the humans did not learn. They moved the drilling operation outside the castle, in the other direction from us, farther down the vein — probably because they didn’t want us to see what they were doing. They managed to run a pipeline. We don’t even understand how they did it, but they did. We’ve gone out and seen it ourselves. They’ve capped the hole with a pipe then shunted the pipe to The Realm as if they were pumping water rather than magic. The technology is beyond us.”
“Technology?” Edward wanted to laugh because the poorer quarters of The Realm still used horses for transportation and to pull carts and plows. But then he remembered the paint that made moving picture shows on the wall and animated puppet shows he’d seen on large stages. Entertainment was one area where the humans had excelled in their technology.
“Yar. They’ve done this three times that we know of. The arrangement is systemic, routing magic to three different areas of the city. What that means, well … ”
Fiona looked at Edward, not finishing her sentence. As he looked back at her and the other elders, he realized why he was here despite being far too young to be in council. And he understood why Cerberus was here, and what his old friend might have recommended.
“You need me to help you understand the humans,” he said.
A sagging-joweled unicorn beside Fiona spoke up. Edward recognized him as Clarence the Divine. “You are the only unicorn who has spent significant time in The Realm. You have a bond with them.”
Edward shook his head, looking around the ashy gray room. “I had a bond with David.”
“And the others?”
“The others mean nothing. I will not be returning to The Realm.” Edward told the elders about how the city had started to sag into decline, how its upper class had grown decadent while its lower class was poor but pacified, as if by a drug.
“You must,” said Clarence.
Edward looked at the old unicorn, but Fiona spoke next.
“Edward,” she said. “You are an ambassador, like Ulrich to the trolls. We never meant to have an ambassadorship with the humans, but your connection with the royals has made one possible. We need you. The situation has caused a problem, and now we must address it.”
“You mean the leak,” Edward said. He turned to look at Cerberus, silently sending anger to his friend. They met almost every other night for friendly conversation. And he’d revealed nothing? The longer Edward watched Cerberus, the more irritated he became. He may have been the one who’d convinced the Blessing to bring Edward in, but he’d clearly done so only when he had no other choice. Now the humans were cutting holes in the world’s already-diminished magic veins without any knowledge about how to seal them closed — rerouting the magic for their own selfish means. They’d waited too long. Now it might be too late.
“That’s part of it,” said Fiona. “But … ”
Edward took a deliberate step toward Cerberus. “March on them, then,” he said, his voice thick with spite. “You always wanted to march again? Fine. Do it. You wanted to exterminate them and return them to the Wellspring early? Fine. I will not argue against it. I do not care. They have become everything my grappy feared, and nothing of what King David was. But I will not help you. You stood back, refusing to engage. Lack of conflict softened The Realm. Your refusal to engage in any conflict with them — even verbal conflict, as I have been urging — has only made things worse. It’s as if you never learned the lesson of light and dark magic. They are two sides of a coin, meant to spar and churn. And yet you — the proud unicorn race — have refused to see that.”
Edward held his tongue, wanting to add a final thought: Just as you refused to see it when the dark peach tree grew in Mead, then banished Eve for piercing the veil. But these were Edward’s elders, and he was in a place he shouldn’t be. He’d gone too far already.
“It’s not that simple,” said Cerberus.
“No? March in. Burn their city. Kill them all, just as you’ve always wanted to — because it’s what must be done. Right? Noble Cerberus, always looking out for us while holding all the cards himself. Then, once The Realm is in ashes, find the leaks where they’ve tapped the vein and seal them.”
Cerberus’s lip twisted, but he held himself in check. He was either refusing to engage because he was among elders or because he realized he’d been wrong to keep Edward from what he knew. Edward wasn’t sure which.
In a steady voice, the big white unicorn said, “We can’t just do that, Edward.”
“Because it’s wrong?”
“Because it won’t solve the problem.” Cerberus gave Edward a long look to make sure he saw that his friend didn’t think any of what he’d said was ‘wrong’ at all.
“Edward,” said Fiona. “You’ve been to their city many times. You’ve seen how The Realm has changed. What does their royalty promise its people?”
“Peace,” said Edward.
“What else?”
“Nothing. All they do is exist. The poor till their fields, but the rich allow their fields to be ti
lled. I assume the three pipes you mentioned go to the three fiefdoms ruled by David’s three most ambitious great grandchildren — other than King William, of course. The lords are Niles, Beatrice, and Penelope.”
“Lords?” said a unicorn Edward didn’t recognize.
“It’s an honorary title, irrespective of gender. And while the royalty in The Realm seems benevolent, Beatrice is actually the most ruthless of all three, proving that tyranny is not limited to the species’ males. But yar, there are three, and each has their hierarchy, and in each it’s the same: a do-nothing upper class and a content lower class doing whatever work the magic can’t do or isn’t abundant enough to do yet.”
Fiona asked, “Why are they content?”
“Because the only reason they don’t have enough magic to till the lowest fields is because they’d rather use that magic to make themselves happy and comfortable. They will till fields if they can use the magic instead to play lute music through a small magical cloud that follows them in the furrows. They will build walls that could be built magically if the same magic can be used to paint those walls with magic pigment to show them stories. If they have found ways to tap the veins, it is only a matter of time before they will have magic build the walls as well. This you can count on. Humans want things to be easy. That is what the people demand from their rulers.”
“Tell me about the stories,” said Fiona.
Edward cocked his head. She was much, much older than he and Cerberus but a full generation younger than Adam and Eve. Edward had been listening to Grappy and Grammy’s stories since he was a colt, and those stories had included tales of people being ignored and cast aside for their beliefs. Now Grammy and Grappy’s beliefs and fears were being vindicated, and Edward couldn’t help feeling resentful.
“No,” said Edward. He glanced at Cerberus then back at Fiona. “You tell me what you meant when you said the leaks were just part of the problem.”
Fiona sighed heavily. She looked at Clarence and then at a unicorn across the semicircle with a loose upper lip. They both nodded.
“We’ve known for a while that there are other worlds, Edward. Same as you described upon your return.”
Edward shook his head. “And yet you pretended not to believe me,” he said. “You told the others I was crazy.”
“It was necessary. The other worlds deserve their own existence and don’t want our interference. The fact that you somehow ended up crossing at least two or three is troubling. You may have set things in motion that you don’t or can’t understand. They don’t like our incursions, Edward. They might have thought you were there as an act of war. And because time moves differently in those worlds, the fact that time has passed here is no indication that we may not yet be facing a threat.”
“What do you mean, incursions?”
“Not by unicorns,” Fiona said quickly. “But during the Cataclysm, so many of the borders blurred. At first, we thought that it was just our world shifting, but it was actually all of them. The Cataclysm shook the world like a bag of bones. Some other species figured that out — on both sides of the border. Traffickers began to ferry between the worlds, but the others saw it as an attack. There is dark magic in some of those worlds, Edward. Across all the worlds, light and dark are in balance, but there are worlds that are predominantly light and those that are predominantly dark. Ours, especially as it’s centered on Mead, tends to be lighter. But there are others … ” Fiona gave a small shiver. Edward found himself thinking of the Dark Forest. And strangely, he found himself thinking of how even the darkest of dark didn’t make him shiver like Fiona.
“What does this have do to with humans in The Realm?”
“We think that in the days of the Cataclysm, humanity received a spark. Or mayhap the spark was there first and was ignited by what the Cataclysm opened; we do not know. But The Realm did not perish in the flood. It survived, same as us. Its citizens built boats and rafts even after the waters were up. They rebuilt when the waters receded. We believe that agents from other worlds made contact with the humans, or perhaps curious humans somehow found their way into other worlds, although that seems less likely.”
“Why?”
“Because our understanding today is that only magical beings can cross borders,” said Fiona. “But regardless of how it happened, we do know the humans made contact with those other worlds. They became aware of those other worlds.” She swallowed. “Somehow, then, they began to harvest energy from them.”
“Like siphoning magic?” Edward fought to hold his temper. The Unicorn Blessing didn’t have a responsibility to keep him informed of everything they knew, but they did have a responsibility to protect Mead. If what Fiona was saying was true, the problem had been growing worse for a very long time, and they had known. Why more concerted efforts weren’t made to stop it, Edward couldn’t understand. He’d had a connection to The Realm for over a hundred human years, and at the beginning, when David was alive, that connection had been very close. They could have told him all of this a century ago, and he could have investigated when it would have been easy. Now something worse had happened — something Fiona hadn’t even gotten to yet — and only once the field was burning had they sent out a few unicorns to draw water from the river to douse it.
“Like that, yar,” said Clarence. “But it’s different because in this case they are taking a kind of life energy. You’ve seen the stories The Realm plays on their walls and in their bound volumes?”
Edward nodded.
“Well, Edward, you’ve been in The Realm on and off for a long time. Have you ever met a human among them who seemed capable of creating those stories?”
Edward thought about it. Sometimes, unicorns invented stories at grand gatherings, and Edward had tried to bring the tradition to David’s kingdom several times following Goliath’s defeat. He’d thought the humans simply weren’t interested in the unicorn ritual, but now, looking back, it seemed more likely that they had nothing to say.
“They’ve been stealing them from the other worlds,” said Fiona. “Overtly, I mean. You know the connection to the Wellspring, Edward. We all have it, but so do the humans. They are from the same place; they are instances of magic that come to the surface for a while and are imbued with the same non-magic kind of magic that is in all living beings. In the natural order of things — and here I mean the time before the Grand Cataclysm — humans can access the Wellspring indirectly, and because we believe the Wellspring speaks to all worlds, it means they would draw inspiration from those stories as if they came from inside their own minds — but also it would seem to come from somewhere else. That process is difficult, and it takes practice and effort to hone the connection. Among unicorns, Quentin from the east is perhaps the most talented at accessing the Wellspring source. Early on, there were humans who could do the same.”
“Okay,” said Edward. He was still angry but now intrigued. He’d certainly had boluses of information enter his head before and had wondered where they’d come from.
“But when the Cataclysm occurred, it became possible for worlds to directly connect, assuming a magic carrier could move between them. We believe that when the worlds were still liquid, the humans realized they could harvest their inspiration directly, without needing to search through their minds to find it. They bypassed the Wellspring. And once they had their taste of that pure source, they began to lose their ability to access the indirect source. They became addicted, and their natural instinct to take the easiest possible path in any endeavor worsened the tendency. Even that would have waned with time, when the worlds eventually solidified and the damage from the Cataclysm healed — had someone, somewhere, not kept a tunnel between the worlds open.”
“They’re still able to access those other worlds?” said Edward.
Fiona nodded. “Apparently, they have been all along. We’ve suspected it for a while, but now we know it’s true. And that, Edward, is why we have called you here. It’s why we need your help.”
&nbs
p; Edward felt the biggest point coming. It loomed over the gathering of elders in their imaginary meeting room like a boulder waiting to fall. Concern was carved onto every old face. Even Cerberus, normally stoic, looked worried.
“What’s happened?” said Edward.
“You’ve said that ‘creativity’ in the Realm has been deteriorating,” said Cerberus.
Edward nodded. During their discussions, Edward had read his old friend a litany of reasons for being disgusted with The Realm, reasons why he’d never return. In those sessions, he’d told Cerberus about how even the population’s opiates were beginning to disintegrate, meaning that the people were duped into being placated by more and more mindless entertainment. The same stories appeared over and over in slightly disguised forms. Classic moving pictures were recreated image by image as if the sorcerers running the shows had run dry and could only ape what had already existed before.
“Yar,” said Edward. “So what?”
Fiona shuffled nervously. “Cerberus told us what you told him, and it bothered us.”
“Why?”
“It could mean that they’d lost their connection to the other worlds,” she said. “That the hole they had been holding open had finally closed.”
Edward looked into Fiona’s big blue eyes. “But that wasn’t it, was it?”
She looked at the ground then back up. “As elder unicorns, we have the ability — if we work together and focus — to open doors between worlds. Recently, we did so and sent an emissary, even knowing the risk of how the action might be perceived.”
She looked to Cerberus, the emissary. Edward looked at Cerberus as well.
“And how did those dark things greet you, Cerberus?” Edward asked, a humorless smile creeping onto his large lips. “Are they now banging down the gates, ready to storm in and murder us all?”
“They didn’t greet me at all,” Cerberus said, shaking his big white head. “When I arrived in the other world, they were all gone.”