by Sean Platt
The sky was filled with white unicorns. All of them had wings. They had burst through the stable roofs ahead of Edward, finding themselves suddenly flooded with new power. The gray unicorns on the ground below looked up but did not unsheath wings of their own. They either couldn’t fly or were afraid of Edward’s resurrection, of the Triangulum’s return to its rightful owner, of whatever it all meant and what it might unleash. They scattered, fleeing the battlefield.
The battling machines turned at the sound of the detonating stables, but Edward considered them all — the machines of both armies — to be mere trifles. They fired beams of light. They fired projectiles. The alicorns blocked their artillery and magic with shields. Edward concentrated. Another shockwave blew out from his body in a burst of green, like the fire from Sly Stone’s sawed-off magical shotguns. Flying machines incinerated. Archetypes fell as if shot, and stayed down. Clockwork beetles exploded as the wave touched them. The troops on both sides ran, turning and heading through the nearest tear.
The melee lasted only a moment, because as people, machines, elves, giants, and the rest watched, the cracks and tears and shimmers around the battlefield began to connect, each spreading out to touch the next like spreading fissures on a sheet of calving ice. A black crack shot across the compound’s lawn, grass ripping from grass into a zig-zag of nothing. A split crossed the front of the ranch house that had long been home to the marshal program. The beams broke off and shook. The entire side of the house snapped away and fell into the void.
Parties ran screaming. Entire sections of the ground sundered and fell into nothingness. Troops tumbled into the void. Machines that could fly sped away. Kold’s giant three-legged walkers, attempting to find footing as the ground split, tipped and fell and were gone. Crack followed crack; tears connected with open shimmers. Entire sections cleaved away as The Realm fell to pieces.
Below Clint and Edward, on one of the few remaining sections of land, was Dharma Kold atop Cerberus’s back. The pair charged forward, propelled not by Cerberus’s wings (like the grays, he either didn’t have wings or couldn’t spread them — but by Kold’s magic. He still had magic — mayhap resident in his cells or in his memory. But Edward parried their charge effortlessly, dodging both the dark unicorn’s spells and the bolts of blue lightning that Kold fired from his palms. Even for Clint, atop Edward’s back, things moved in slow motion. Kold held out a hand; it glowed blue. Edward broke it off. Cerberus radiated a huge black spell that came at them like a manta, but Edward struck it with a spell of his own, and it became soft yellow and floated away. Kold drew his guns and fired. His shells struck nothing. Instead, they stopped, hovered for a moment, and fell. Kold’s face contorted in rage.
“Go!” Edward yelled. “There is nothing more to be done here!”
“How are you doing this?” Kold screamed back, looking down as the island of land he’d been standing on a minute earlier split in two and fell away.
“You did this,” said Edward. “By killing me.”
Kold stopped, his face changing. “The apocalypse,” he said.
“Yar. As you wanted.”
Kold hovered in front of them, seeming to think. Then he said, “So we both got what we wanted.”
“In a way.”
“Because we’re a team,” Kold said. “Two to open the Triangulum, and two to wield it.”
“One to wield it,” said Clint.
“Clearly, you’re not seeing how…”
“I won’t lay you dead,” said Clint, feeling the Triangulum inside him, filling him, bleeding its power away from its old commander.
“Because you’re not like us,” said Kold, again looking down. To Clint, it looked as if he’d just realized that he was sitting atop a unicorn that couldn’t fly, held up by magic he no longer controlled.
“Yar.”
“So we’ll go our own ways, our work together completed.”
“Yar,” said Clint. “We will go our own ways. You will go yours. I will go mine. And we will never see each other again. Agreed?”
Kold fought for control as the last of the world fell away, unsteady atop Cerberus’s back. Edward flapped and waited. Cerberus simply floated, looking satisfyingly petrified — quite a change from his usual arrogance.
“Fair!” said Kold.
Clint nodded.
“Now what?” said Kold, still hovering. Clint felt strong. He had the Triangulum. He had Mai. He could feel the power in every cell of his body.
“Now you fly off to greener pastures, same as us,” said Clint.
“Yar,” said Kold. Then: “Wait…!”
Clint pulled the last of the power of the Triangulum away from Kold and into himself.
Dharma Kold and the dark unicorn tumbled down, down, down, into the abyss and into the pages of legend.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
THE NEW BEGINNING
Edward and Clint stood on the porch of Clint’s shack outside Meadowlands. They gazed into the distance, past the swatch of front lawn, and into nothing. It was as if someone had draped a black curtain across Clint’s land, and that they were waiting for the curtain to rise. Below them, Meadowlands had already begun to crumble. Half of the buildings had tumbled into the abyss. The other half seemed on the verge of a massive crinkle — similar to a shimmer, but with a much more rigid edge — that could fold over at any time.
“The other unicorns will come along,” said Edward. “The grays. Give them time. They got distracted. It happens to all beings. But they will return to white if they don’t tumble down and die. And if they do, then they will fly, and will be as much a part of the new beginning as the rest of us.”
“The new beginning?”
“You might call it the end, but that’s splitting hairs. The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. It’s merely a matter of change. We always knew it, though we sometimes tried to fight it true. But Kold would have been happy with the way things turned out, were he still alive. The Realm will fall within weeks, and then slowly, the magic will re-stabilize. With time.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know — and I say that for true this time. This is all unknown, for all of us. You have a band of people. You have Emma, and Morph, and Boricio… even Churchill. There are others. Plenty of others. Things don’t end here. They change.”
“What about the Sands?”
“Strangely, I think the Sands will be fine. They’ll see fractures, of course, and the shifting will worsen. But the people who learned to live without magic? Yar, they will more or less go on, I think.”
“It’s strange to hear you say ‘I think.’”
“We unicorns aren’t used to hedging our bets,” said Edward.
“Alicorns,” Clint corrected.
“We always had wings, you know. It’s a bit like discovering you have a navel and deciding that the new discovery means you must be something else. ‘Alicorn’ is a human term. To us, unicorns simply have wings, though we’ve had to keep them hidden.”
“Why?”
Edward gave an equine smile. “The world has ended, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop infuriating you,” he said.
They sat in silence until crackling reached their ears from far off. In Meadowlands — and certainly in The Realm above, now fully open and seeming to hang in the air by many fragmented threads — fires burned.
“Mai?” said Edward.
Clint searched his head. “Gone,” he said. But he couldn’t help it; he turned his head to look at the apple tree where he’d planted her grave, which was still standing. “Like the Triangulum.”
“Oh, nar,” said Edward. “The Triangulum isn’t gone. It’ll always be in you, just as I will. And Mai. If Mai is gone ‘like the Triangulum,’ then she’s not gone at all.”
Clint shrugged. It didn’t matter.
“What about the Darkness?” Clint asked.
“It fell into the abyss when the stables cracked. I watched it slide down, like a slug.”
&
nbsp; “Into to the Core?”
“Mayhap,” said the unicorn, fluffing his wings. “But mayhap into another world. There could be any number of fissures in the dark below. The Darkness could spill into nothing. It could go to the Core. Or it could go somewhere else. But I do know this: it’s not gone. There isn’t enough entropy yet for it to be fully re-integrated, which to your mind would be the same as ‘gone.’ It will take a long time for the magic to totally re-equilibrate, and the Darkness as we saw it enjoyed the power of being collected together in one place — the same as The Realm enjoyed the feeling of possessing so much of the white.”
“So the Darkness is the anti-Realm?”
Edward shrugged his wings. “I don’t know.” Then he paused, thinking. “It’s going to be hard for me to get used to saying that.”
“You mean: now that you have become the Chosen One and fulfilled the prophecy.”
“Well, me and the one chosen by the Chosen One.”
“So what now?” said Clint.
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“For the cooker to ding, and tell us our turkey pie is ready.”
As if on cue, the cooker dinged inside Clint’s shack. Clint’s cooker ran on steam, but it was steam that was kindled from a wood fire below. Having lived for so long without central steam, spark, or even magic had its perks. It meant a man could always have his pie.
Clint stood. “And when the pie is cool enough to eat, will you allow me to have any?”
“It would be pretty rude of me not to, seeing as it’s your stove,” Edward answered.
“When have you ever flinched from being rude?” said Clint. Then the gunslinger walked into his shack, removed the pie from the cooker, set it on the counter to cool, and walked back out onto the porch to watch the world end.
“Can we rebuild?” Clint asked.
Edward turned his big white head to look at him sidelong, meeting the marshal eye to eye.
“If we’ve filled the world with unicorns that have wings,” he said, “I’d say we can do anything we want.”
GET COOL STUFF!
The Unicorn Western Saga continues with the prequel series Unicorn Genesis, coming in the Fall of 2013, and concludes with Unicorn Apocalypse, coming in Spring of 2014. Unlike Star Wars, the Unicorn Western prequels are AWESOME. To be the first to know about all Unicorn Western releases, as well as other Realm & Sands books (along with special deals, early releases and freebies), go to realmandsands.com
To get Unicorn Genesis Book #1 RIGHT NOW (and for FREE), leave a review for Unicorn Western: Full Saga by going to the following website: unicornwestern.com/get-genesis
Want to know what happened when Clint and Edward first rode into Solace? To hear how the exiled marshal and unicorn first rid the dusty town of Hassle Stone, share Unicorn Western on Facebook at the following link to instantly download the story: unicornwestern.com/hassle-stone
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Johnny B. Truant is an author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home at JohnnyBTruant.com and is the author of the Fat Vampire series and The Bialy Pimps, both of which were written for adults. You can find a complete list of Johnny’s books here.
You can connect with Johnny on Twitter at @JohnnyBTruant, and you should totally send him an email at [email protected] if the mood strikes you.
Sean Platt is co-founder of the Collective Inkwell, speaker, and author, with breakout indie hits such as Yesterday’s Gone, WhiteSpace, ForNevermore, Available Darkness, and Dark Crossings, plus two traditionally published titles with Amazon’s 47North, Z 2134 and Monstrous – all co-authored with David W. Wright. All the Inkwell’s existing pilots can be found in one low-priced volume in “The Serial Box.”
You can find Sean at SeanMPlatt.Com, Follow him on Twitter at @SeanPlatt, or email him at [email protected].
Johnny and Sean, along with David Wright (the guy whose curmudgeony stance on western research inspired the Unicorn Western series) host two podcasts: the horror/comedy show Better Off Undead and the Self Publishing Podcast. Both podcasts are available on iTunes and the other podcast directories, as well as on Stitcher Radio, and both are for mature audiences only.
