by Sean Platt
The land was thick with palpable magic by the time Edward noticed that the stars overhead seemed to have changed again. At first, he thought he was imagining things (the change was subtle; a cup-shaped group of stars seemed flatter, though still present), but the arrangement seemed to shift unseen during the days and show him their altered configurations through every clear night. By Edward’s fifth day of walking, the unicorn realized that they had changed completely. The cup shape was gone. The W shape was gone. But the sky above still wasn’t Mead's.
Edward seemed to be traversing worlds merely by moving his feet. Land ahead continued to sprawl in accommodation. The grass continued to taste nearly as sweet as it had in Mead. Edward found a grove of apples, ate his fill, and then (with some difficulty) used his hooves to knock a few of the fruits into a sling of vines he kicked from one of the trees. His appies could have used their horns to assemble a large cart to pull the apples behind them, but Edward, working without magic, could only manage to drag his ivy sling. He did this for a day, then stopped and ate the apples he hadn’t lost or stepped on, hoping to find more fruit soon.
Sometimes, Edward attempted to fly. Several times each day, he found a suitable spot and tried to flap his wings and get airborne. The true skill continued to elude him, and he could almost imagine Ammy and Appy mocking him. He missed their mockery. Edward managed to forget his predicament and remain confident while the sun was shining, but at the end of each day, with the strange stars visible overhead, he felt alone — only it was lonelier than alone. He was the only unicorn in existence, it seemed, and didn’t understand the beings around him. He even tried speaking with a few (the tailed, sharp-toothed creatures and the tiny human-like things both seemed promising), but neither would speak, even if able. And, Edward realized, the folly of thinking they might be able to talk to him if they wanted was ludicrous. Mead’s unicorn language was its own. Even the elves didn’t speak the same language as the unicorns, so why would anything he encountered here?
Then he remembered that Noah and the other humans on the ark had spoken his language exactly. Exactly — down to the smallest nuance and shade of meaning. There had been words each hadn’t known, but that was simply vocabulary. The languages themselves were so much the same, they must have sprung from the same source, as impossible as that was to believe. Mayhap the same held true here.
Or, Edward thought as he studied the strangely altering landscape, mayhap this was all a dream. Maybe he wasn’t really here. Maybe he’d gotten lost in the magic, or had returned to the Wellspring after all. His surroundings made less and less sense. He saw what appeared to be sweet, individually made treats growing on stalks as if they were plants. He saw empty domiciles made out of huge, smooth slats that looked like enormous trader’s game cards. The streams sometimes ran with a brown liquid Edward was afraid to sample but that smelled sweet and rich and aromatic. Maybe none of it was real, seeing as it seemed so fantastical. And mayhap that was why he and Noah had understood each other — because neither really existed.
But in the end, none of that mattered. The days continued to turn like a flipping coin. The same giant yellow sun rose each morning, and Edward saw new things that he didn’t understand. It set each night, and he heard noises that weren’t there before. After a week, he had no idea if he was getting closer to Mead or farther away, or even if he was dreaming or awake, but the unicorn was convinced it didn’t matter. Who was to say that one reality was better than any other? Edward was a creature born of magic. Magic was one force that truly proved that thoughts could be real, and that potential was, when you got down to it, no different from objects that had blossomed past potential and into existence.
Edward had fortunately made peace with his odd and shifting reality by the time he encountered an enormous white smile with nothing behind it.
The unicorn stopped, staring at the giant crescent of teeth hovering above a branch to his side. The teeth were glowing as if with an internal light. They were geometric and rectangular and not rounded off even as much as his own perfect unicorn teeth (so much as he could feel with his tongue, anyway). They looked like the teeth of a human with a very wide mouth. Only there were no lips around them, so if the teeth had a host, Edward couldn’t see who or what it was.
“Lost, are we?” said the teeth, opening to reveal a tongue and nothingness.
Edward had seen too many odd things to be put off by a disembodied mouth. “Maybe.”
Eyes fell into place from above, then the area around the smile dissolved into what appeared to be a huge purple-and-white striped cat. “I like your nubbin,” it said, gesturing toward the unicorn’s tiny horn. “Are you from the center?”
“The center?” The forest was dark. Edward wasn’t precisely afraid, but the noises were still unfamiliar and he had no idea what he’d encounter ahead. He wanted to dismiss the talking cat on principle (who did this cat think he was, hiding in a tree and acting superior?), but that would have been outdated unicorn pride. He’d just been thinking about how he had nobody to talk to and no guide, and now he had these teeth. And, apparently, the cat behind them.
“The axial world,” said the cat, swishing its thick, plumb-bob tail. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
The cat chuckled, then kneaded the branch. “You don’t know.”
Now Edward really wanted to keep walking. Withholding information and making others beg for it was a unicorn trick. He should know; other unicorns had done it to him back in Mead, constantly. But he told himself that he was a stranger in a strange land with no idea how to find his way home. The cat might or might not turn out to be an unhelpful jerk, but there couldn’t be any harm in taking a few minutes to see what he knew.
“Fine,” said Edward. “Tell me.”
The cat rose, then paced on the branch. The cat was fat (its body the size of Edward’s head), but the thin branch stayed solid and firm below, as if it weighed nothing. As the cat paced, its body shimmered in and out of existence, sometimes leaving only the smile — and, occasionally, its staring white eyes.
“You are far from home, unicorn,” said the cat.
Edward blunted his surprise. “You know what I am?”
“Of course. And I know your world. We all do. It is the center.”
Edward rolled his eyes. The cat laughed as if it had never seen a unicorn rolling its eyes before. Edward had learned from the best: his appies, supreme artists of sarcasm and derision.
“All right,” said the cat. “Imagine a ring of worlds, one inside another. Each world is self-contained, and knows nothing of the others, under normal circumstances. And further, imagine that in the center of this ring is one world like the axle on which the others revolve. That one is the first world, where all the words began.”
Edward shook his head, confused.
“Oh, come now. A big unicorn brain like yours? You understand that the sun of every world holds the planets by an invisible tether. You know one moves around the other, with the largest in the center. If there is a ring of worlds, how could they hold onto one other without a giant, central world for them to spin around?”
The conversation’s assumptions were lost on the unicorn. There was a sun in Mead’s sky. Magic made it rise. Magic made it set. Magic made the grass grow. Edward supposed one seemed to be moving around the other (by all appearances, the sun moved around Mead), but he didn’t know of any tether. Unless the tether was magic itself.
“Oh,” said the cat with something like pity. “You really don’t know.” It tittered. “Well, that’s how it is. And as I said, your world’s the center.”
Edward had misjudged the cat’s potential. This was a waste of time. The cat was a jerk. So he walked past, into the moonlit darkness. The white smile appeared on a branch ahead, followed by the cat’s body.
“Does it disturb you?” said the cat.
“What?”
“The fact that you’re not alone.”
Edward didn’t know if the ca
t was referring to multiple worlds or the cat’s immediate presence in his life.
“You are disturbing me plenty.” Edward kept walking. The giant white smile again appeared on a branch in his line of sight.
“It’s okay,” said the cat. “You don’t have to believe me, or understand, or care. I was merely offering to help you. If, that is, you are lost and in need of assistance.”
This was intolerable. Edward didn’t want to play games, but the truth was that he didn’t know where he was going and did long for Mead. He’d already decided that Mead was somehow different from Noah’s world, and that Noah’s world was somehow different from where he was now. But Edward didn’t want to acknowledge the cat as correct. Accepting help from the cat was a hideous double-edged sword. He needed help, but didn’t want to surrender control.
He finally admitted, “I’m trying to find Mead.”
“Well, well,” said the cat, smiling its idiot smile and pacing back and forth on the motionless branch. “Mead, Mead, Mead. The axial world, which took its splinters, same as the rest. Things move around these days, you know. Is it this way?” The cat pointed to the right with its tail. The fat tail flip-flopped and pointed to the left. “Or is it that way?”
Edward stared at the cat.
“Oh. I see. You don’t wish to play games. Or at least, that’s what you want to pretend. You don’t care for this trickster who has appeared in front of you because you are serious and he seems quite mad. I am the tip of the iceberg. You’ll want my advice, or else you might go in that direction — ” He pointed at an angle, forward but down a path to the left. For some reason Edward knew that the cat was finally speaking true. “ — and would run into the Hatter, who makes my madness look like nothing.”
The cat’s eyes swam as its body dissolved, then hopped into altered positions on its return. Its left eye had become its right; its right had become its left.
His face growing more serious, the cat said, “Tell me, unicorn. Are you real?”
Edward was startled by the cat’s question. It stared, waiting for an answer, but Edward refused to give it one.
The cat managed a fat, vanishing cat’s version of a shrug. “Fine, don’t answer. But I know you think you are. Everything believes it is real. In fact, I happen to believe I am.” The cat stood on its hind legs, then removed its pointy ears and bowed under them like a Realm human’s hat. “A common affliction. It is even understandable. Sometimes we have our favorite sounds and musics, and we think that they are ‘good’ or that other things do not sound as pretty. Then someone disagrees, and we’ll have to admit it was only our opinion.”
Edward had tried. He really needed a guide, and he was willing to let the cat do what it had to, so long as it would, in the end, steer him toward Mead. But the cat had spoken true: it was mad, and it was hard to believe any Hatter being worse.
Edward started walking. Again, the cat’s smile preceded his path.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” said the cat’s white smile. Its body shimmered back to life. “The worlds are still soft, following the Cataclysm. You believe you can walk away from me. But if that’s just your opinion, how can you?”
“You really are mad.”
“Not at all,” said the cat, extending a leg and proceeding to clean it with its tongue. “I am merely amused.”
“I meant ‘mad’ as in ‘crazy.’” And again, Edward was struck by the similarities in their languages. It wasn’t just that words were the same. Shades of meaning were fruits on a tree.
“Interesting, isn’t it,” said the cat, stopping its licking, “how the world seems to mold to you?” It was as if the cat had read his mind about their languages. “But that’s how things are, when objectivity fades.”
“What are you talking about?” said Edward, hating his asking.
“Ah,” said the cat. It lay down on the branch, eyes dancing. “But it all comes back to my question, which you never answered. Do you believe you are real?”
“Of course.” Edward didn’t add, though it was in his voice: And what kind of an idiot question is that?
“Well, everything believes that. But much of what is here are mere imaginings of other worlds, where some of those imaginings are, in fact, from the imaginations of others. There was once an order and there will be again, if the rifts ever heal, but for now there is no way to know.” The cat put a paw to its chest, indicating itself. “I happen to know that unicorns were the first beings in the axial world. But not everyone knows that, so who is to say that your entire kind isn’t a mere flight of fancy in the mind of a dreaming girl somewhere?”
“You act like it’s arbitrary. But you said you knew it, and I know it. My Grappy was Adam, and my Grammy was Eve.”
“Oh, then you must be Edward the Brave!” said the cat. “I have heard stories about you. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Stories. Who is to say you don’t merely exist in bubbles of thought?”
Edward had never been called “Edward the Brave” and had no idea what madness the cat was blathering.
“Are you going to tell me how to get to Mead or not?”
“Oh, but I am telling you. You just aren’t listening.”
Edward resisted the urge to walk away, knowing the cat would follow. “Talk sense.”
“Sense cannot be made,” said the cat. “It’s something that must be, well, sensed.” Then, seeing that Edward was unimpressed, it rolled onto its back with a noise of resignation. “All right,” it said. “Let me tell you the way of the world. There was a great sundering of the borders between spaces, and now the axle has run through the others. We used to know clearly what was corporeal in one world and what belonged in their own spaces — to remain mere thoughts in opposite worlds, if anything at all — but all that’s in flux. You really can’t know where to go because it isn’t merely a matter of placing one of those big, white, mayhap-real hooves in front of another. You’ll have to make a choice.”
“Why did you call me Edward the Brave?”
“Because that’s who you are. Or, mayhap who you will be. But it’s like I said: I know you from stories. But which is the chicken, and which is the egg? Are you here to create stories that will later be told? Or are you here because stories were told?” The cat began kneading its claws into the branch. “It’s like I said, the worlds are still soft. Nature always finds its rhythm, regardless of the things that creatures or thoughts build within it. It does not care that you and I are here — ” The cat vanished entirely, not even leaving its smile. When it spoke, its voice came from nowhere. “ — or that we aren’t.”
The cat reappeared, now upside-down.
“Up is down right now,” it said. “Right is left. Now is then. Back is forth.” It made a circle with its paw. “All of that. For you, that means that you will encounter many things you have never seen. But that is not the same thing as seeing things that didn’t exist before, nor is it the same as seeing things that did exist before, because mayhap they did and mayhap they didn’t, depending on where you are at the time, and where they are relative to where they began. And, of course, depending on what you believe.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Oh, for sure. But that doesn’t mean I’m incorrect.”
Edward stared at the cat. Its white teeth plinked into a pattern of blackness — every other one — so that its smile looked like a chessboard. Teeth and cat reappeared, mayhap waiting for Edward to make up his mind.
“Where should I go?” the unicorn finally asked.
“Forward.”
“Which direction, I mean?”
“Any direction.”
“Which direction is Mead?”
“All directions.”
Edward groaned.
“You think that progress comes from straight lines. That has never been less true than now, after the Cataclysm.”
“You mean the flood?”
“I mean the Cataclysm. When the spindle broke. Some places, it might have been a
flood. But even later in the same world, it might have been something different. If you break a nut, you are used to believing that the nut was broken in a time and place, but that is linear thinking. I thought you were a unicorn?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you should know magic, yet are thinking like a human.”
Edward wanted to run the cat through, but didn’t have a long, sharp horn yet and barely knew magic.
“Oh, I know that sounds like an insult, but you should be more respectful. There are worlds where, to humans, unicorns are thoughts of fancy and nothing else. But my point, if you could stop thinking like a two-legger, is that the Cataclysm occurred everywhere. Everywhen. You don’t need to go to a place so much as simply go. If you are standing in a world that isn’t yours — as you are right now — then you should keep moving until you find yourself where you should be. If you don’t keep moving, you risk becoming mired in the wrong place and becoming part of a story forever.”
“Are you saying this place isn’t real?”
“I’m not saying that at all.”
“But you just said that … ”
“You would do so much better if you could see the tapestry.” The cat shook its head. “Such a pity.”
Edward ignored the passive insult. “You are saying to just walk? Keep moving?” It was awful counsel, but it was what he’d been doing anyway, and at least it would get him away from the cat.
