Unicorn Genesis (Unicorn Western)

by Sean Platt

  “No,” said Diane. “Of course not.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack at the same time. Then they looked at each other, realizing perhaps that they should synchronize their stories.

  “What happened to cause this?”

  “I don’t know that either, Edward. As I’ve told you.”

  “You haven’t told me anything.” He tried to sit or stand and failed. “You just keep telling me to be quiet.”

  “I need my magic ready. For when … ”

  “For what? What is here to threaten us?”

  “Edward … ” Diane began. On his back, the giant magic hand seemed to soften.

  “Can’t we magick a raft?”

  “From what, Edward?” said Jack. His appy’s voice was somewhere between irritated and sad. Edward had the terrifying thought that Appy felt just as hopeless as he did, but was trying to believe in a nonexistent future simply for Edward’s benefit. “There are no materials.”

  “Make the materials. Make a boat.”

  Diane answered, her voice tender beside him. “You’re not thinking. You know we cannot make something from nothing. No one can.”

  “Grammy and Grappy told me they created … ”

  “Your grappies had a lot of stories,” said Jack.

  “He means that they worked through Providence,” said Diane.

  Jack didn’t respond, but Edward got the distinct impression that it wasn’t what Appy had meant at all. He was angry with the flood, and with Adam and Eve for leaving them. The first unicorns had insights — however mocked and fought by the others — that the younger ones didn’t (couldn’t?) understand. They were never surprised by things that shocked others. And yet, they were always concerned by things that bothered no one else. Like humans.

  Edward peered down, past his appy’s great white back, and looked at the never-ending blue below. The wind was stirring from the sunset horizon again. The water’s surface was starting to ripple. The wind had, so far, seemed to come in regular cycles that grew stronger the longer it blew. Were there humans below, in boats made for the river? And if so, could they survive? Or were Grappy’s concerns solved entirely when they’d lost their city?

  Had they lost their city? Edward hadn’t thought about that before.

  He had assumed the Realm was destroyed, same as Adam and Eve’s haven. But then he thought of what Grappy had said about the disproportionate human use of white magic — and about how Grappy was afraid that the humans would one day become developed enough to outthink even the unicorns themselves.

  “So if it’s not Mead below,” Edward said, “what’s next?”

  Jack sighed and for the third time said, “I don’t know. We can survive up here for plenty longer, but I’m tired. I want somewhere to stand, a place to rest and graze. I’ve been communicating with the others. Slowly we’re starting to agree: Whatever we’re waiting to show itself as the source of this horror — whatever we’re angry with, and wish to punish as if our anger will return our home and raise our dead — will not show. We are fools, chasing what is gone. Pretending it’s possible to rewind time and reclaim our lives. Mayhap the waters will recede, and Mead — such as it remains — will be returned to us. But we cannot make it happen by force of will, no matter how long we circle and remain angry like stirred hornets.”

  “You want to move on,” said Edward. “Look for land.”

  “Yar,” said Diane. Edward realized that for the first time, they were actively moving. The wind from the sunset horizon didn’t just seem stronger; part of what he felt was the wind of passage, as they steered toward it.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There are mountains in this direction. I can no longer tell how high the waters have risen, but mayhap there’s solid ground waiting.”

  Edward looked ahead, noticing dark clouds smudging the distance. Wind was pouring from them. As wind came in waves over the past days, Edward had gotten the distinct feeling of something trying to break through. Now, looking into the clouds, he found himself growing nervous for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom.

  “Those clouds,” said Edward.

  “Yar,” said Jack. “There are clouds ahead.”

  Edward wasn’t thinking of clouds. He was thinking of something Grappy had once told him long ago, during one of his fantastic stories. He’d spoken of something called a storm. Edward had never experienced a storm, and, if Grappy was to be believed, neither had any living unicorn. Even Grappy treated the subject like an ancient myth, but looking back, Edward found himself with new context. He thought of the tree, and of Eve piercing the veil between dark and light by eating the tree’s peach, and thus equalizing the pressure. The storm from Grappy’s storybook (it was depicted as a horrifying triangular thing that twisted from sky to ground like a writhing snake) existed, Grappy had said, in order to equalize differences in the air that had never existed in such polar opposites in Mead. Grammy, Edward remembered, had found this ominous, almost as if she wished Mead had storms of its own — one more way the world should be eating its peaches and reveling in the disorder it caused.

  Edward had plenty of time to think on what Adam and Eve had said while they’d been flying, and thought he was starting to understand about balance and the value of conflict and the dark. But the clouds ahead were flashing as if with some interior magic, and Edward felt like a brand-new foal.

  “It looks like a storm.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Edward,” said Jack. At the same time, Edward thought he saw something flicker in his ammy’s big, blue eyes, as if a long-dormant idea had reasserted itself.

  “It could be a storm,” she said.

  “There has never been a storm. It’s a thing of legends and tall tales.”

  Diane argued, “There has never been a flood, either.”

  Jack shook his head. His mane danced. He seemed to accelerate, leaving Ammy a few wingstrokes behind.

  They flew on. Clouds continued to darken. Light bled from the world too fast. Sunset hid behind billowing black clouds, and the absence of an evening sun made the clouds that much darker. Edward shook. His breathing quickened. The wind grew stronger, and Edward, both looking forward at his appy and sideways at his ammy, felt as if they were traveling at insane speeds. Around them, the great white winged birds, tinged gray by the over-rapid twilight, soldiered on, just as fearless.

  Edward felt sure the clouds were getting darker, but Jack wouldn’t hear it. Night was coming; the clouds were merely bled of their color by the sun’s departure. But Edward’s mind kept flashing back to Grappy Adam’s story and his storybook with its vivid, terrifying pictures. A book of fantastical tales adults read to foals so they could teach them moral lessons, but neither Grammy nor Grappy (who’d grown up with their fair share of the fantastical) ever seemed willing to dismiss the book’s events. Edward had pointed out the horrible storm (in the story, people went through it into another world, but only after enduring horrors) and had said — not asked — that such a thing could never exist in Mead. But his grappies hadn’t validated his skepticism, and said something he couldn’t forget: “Almost anything can exist if we allow it.”

  Older unicorns were supposed to soothe foals when they hurt themselves, telling pretty stories while pain endured and healing occurred. On the rare occasions when older unicorns worried, they were supposed to tell foals there was nothing to worry about. For foals, life was supposed to be pretty, perfect, and nothing else — but still, neither Adam nor Eve would ever talk down Edward’s fears. They seemed determined that he know the world’s true nature as they saw it, with all its thorns.

  And, apparently, anything else that was allowed to exist.

  Edward seemed to see a flash of light from behind him. Moments later, strange sounds tore through the blooming night. A horrible racket — the din of a world splitting apart.

  “What was that?” said Edward.

  “The sound of us approaching the mountains,” Jack said. Around them, hundreds of unicorn
s had gathered. Edward didn’t think there were more unicorns now than there had been in recent days, but they’d come much closer. Perhaps out of fear for something they, even as kings of all creation, no longer understood.

  “It was thunder,” Edward said.

  Jack chanced a look back. Edward barely got a flash of his appy’s eye but saw enough to know he was angry. Only he wasn’t just angry. He was furious.

  “Sit still, and shut your flapping lips!” he bellowed over the growing wind. “Unless you want to be in charge, I’ll hear no more about your grappy’s superstitious manure!”

  Edward cowered, lying lower even than Diane’s magic pressed him. He felt moisture in the air, then rain. But it wasn’t pleasant rain like they knew back in old Mead; it was a foreign, angry sort. It came at them sideways and shifted with the wind’s whim. Appy, Edward realized with horror, was frightened. That’s why he was so angry. Unicorns weren’t used to uncertainty; they were masters of all and victims of none. But it was too late to turn back, out of the non-storm and away from the non-thunder. The winds had grown fiercer, and the thunder — it was thunder, and the flashes were lightning; Edward was sure but wouldn’t repeat it — had them surrounded.

  They had nowhere to land, or to take shelter. Nowhere to rest. And no way out.

  A gust knocked Diane back. Edward felt her magic hold falter a moment, then quickly recover. She pumped forward, arriving as close to Jack and Edward as their large flapping wings would allow.

  “Hold tight, Edward!” she yelled.

  It was absurd; he was a foal balanced on a thrumming back. He didn’t have a human’s hands to clasp Appy’s neck. He didn’t have a human’s outward-rotating hips to grip his appy’s heaving sides. He couldn’t weave his fingers through his appy’s mane because he had none. For the first time, Edward envied that lesser species, and thought how secure and right it must feel to mold your body to another, stronger and more powerful than your own.

  There was a flash to their right, and a giant fork of white light shot toward the unseen ground below. It stole Edward’s breath; he closed his eyes and violently shivered. Lightning gave the air a distinct tang as it passed and left the scent of something burned. In Grappy’s stories, lightning struck trees. Was it possible there were trees below? He couldn’t see. Up, down, right, left, forward, and back — all the same and churning masses of black menace. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed. Jack was rocked on his wings, and Edward slid, helpless. Eve’s magic hand held him tight, but the rain made Jack’s back slick, and the friction was waning. Even the magic hand’s pressure didn’t seem like enough, less steady than ever.

  “We have to go back!” Diane yelled. Her voice was nearly lost to the wind, wicked away in a spout of updraft.

  “There’s nowhere to go.” Jack said it plainly, and Edward doubted Ammy could even hear. Edward knew his appy well enough to imagine his face as he said it. His lips would be set tight; his eyes would be forward-facing (as much as was possible for a unicorn, anyway) and steely. Jack couldn’t make the storm stop, and could no longer correct his stubborn insistence to charge it. The only way out was through. They might make it and they might not, but Jack’s face would show no fear. It was all he could do to remain confident for the others — the others who had followed the lead of Adam’s son because Adam and Eve had been the only two who might, in some small way, have understood what was happening.

  They couldn’t go back. The storm was all around them.

  “What are we going to do, Appy?” Edward shouted over the wind.

  “We are going to fly, Edward. We are going to reach the mountains. Then we are going to find shelter and rest, and wait this out.”

  Edward knew his appy was making it all up. He had no reason to believe they were anywhere near the mountains, or that the tips still rose above the floodwaters. But pessimism wouldn’t help and optimism couldn’t hurt, so Appy was saying what Edward wanted to hear. And despite everything, he found himself somewhat comforted. Edward’s appy, despite their sometimes-acrimonious relationship, had always done his best. Mayhap he could do that now, when it mattered most.

  On the other side of Edward’s mind, he wondered if the storm could be waited out. Storms were things of legend, but in legend, they were giant equalizers, righting a fault in the world to balance opposites, the same as Eve’s eating the peach of the dark tree had allowed magics to mix and create an in-between species of gray. But what had gone wrong with the world this time? How long would it take for a storm to equalize the trauma it seemed to have sustained?

  They struck a brick of wind so hard it felt like running into a tree. Edward was briefly airborne, before Diane could push him back down. Then they hit another, and the hand on Edward’s back faltered again. It was back just in time. The world below was a tempest of swirling fury. Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Edward’s heart echoed in his chest. His mind tried checking out, to slip into panic’s escape. But he kept himself focused, feeling that if the other unicorns had to remain present, he should too.

  But then they struck another invisible wall, and this time he left Jack’s back for good. He felt Diane’s magic hand try to grab him, but once he was aloft the wind caught his chest flat, and he flew back behind his appies’ streamlined, flapping bodies. It happened so fast that there was no chance to recover; he saw Diane and felt her reach out, but then there was only blackness. The wind was too intense; it sat below him like a pillow. He wasn’t falling. He was moving up, and sideways. Then, as the air pillow threatened surrender, Edward saw something that killed his breathing.

  It was right out of Grappy’s storybook.

  The storm had taken on a corporeal shape. He could only see it when the lightning flashed, but it was right there — right in the middle, like a garden’s fountain. The storm’s focus was a giant funnel: wide at the top and narrowing as it descended. The thing was wild and angry, seeming to roar like a wounded beast. Between lightning flashes, he could feel it, dimly aware that he wasn’t precisely falling but was instead beginning to orbit, falling toward it. When lightning flashed and thunder boomed, Edward saw it in all its horror, sneaking near in the darkness. With each flash it drew closer, its churning, semi-liquid sides like a wall.

  He might only have watched the storm’s funnel-shaped cloud approach for two or three seconds. For Edward, it seemed to be an eternity.

  Then, feeling the air sucked from his lungs, the unicorn was pulled into the storm to become one with its rage and destruction.

  CHAPTER 12

  ALL ALONE

  Edward woke up.

  He was on a rocky outcropping. After so long in the air, the ground against his side felt very strange, and for a long moment the unicorn didn’t know where he was. He forgot the flood, forgot the storm, forgot his appies and his grappies and all the other unicorns. His mind seemed to reset as he blinked at the rocks around him, finding them painted with dried colors like weaver’s pigment. He realized he was looking at his own blood. He stood, shaking himself out, and found his side covered in the same hues. He must have smashed into the outcropping very hard — but then because he was a unicorn, he’d healed.

  The reset continued. He looked around, dispassionate and neutral. Part of him wanted to blank the past, to see his situation exactly as it was and nothing beyond that.

  In the distance, he could see a great lake. Only it wasn’t a lake, he realized; it was more like an ocean. It stretched as far as his eyes could see. And, as he turned, could see it covered three-quarters of his view. Behind him was the rock, and it stretched back some unknown distance (and went up as it did, he noticed), but the rest was water. It was so calm he could see ripples when something fell — dropped by birds, speared by insects.

  The flood. Edward remembered the flood.

  It was like coming back from a long dream. He recalled entering the churning storm. He remembered days spent above a vast flood. He turned, now feeling himself whole, and realized that he’d made the mountains after all.
Only, they weren’t as his appy had described. Behind him was an expanse of grass, but the grass was somehow different from Mead grass. There were clouds circling the mountain farther up, but they had a dull red hue, as if lit by the morning sun from within. The air smelled strange, and carried a taste. And in the distance there was … singing? Edward couldn’t be sure.

  He turned from the mountain to the flood. He wondered if the waters had receded, then looked around and realized that nothing low to the water was wet. So the waters hadn’t moved after all. He looked back at the mountains and could hear that strange sound. There was a road not far off, and it wound around the cliffside toward something unseen. There was a glow — vaguely colored — coming from that direction.

  He blinked and realized there was nothing. Not even a road. The mountain was barren, but still somehow foreign.

  He remembered the others, and remembered his appies.

  Had they made the mountains? Was this even the mountains? It had to be, so Edward approached the road that was never actually there, prepared to scout and find some of the others. It took him a short time to circuit the mountain’s remaining height, finding it much smaller than he’d hoped. He’d climbed to the summit, feeling like a mountain goat, and found it quite close. Then he did it again, this time twice as slowly, seeking nooks and crannies, anywhere winged unicorns might hide. There was nothing on the mountain — basically now just a small, rocky island — other than him. Whatever Edward had sensed originally — a road, the sounds of singing, a pinkish haze in the clouds, the feeling of a storybook city just around the corner — had never been there. He was alone.