Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 24th March, 2023
"Oh, and you must take some of this!" Charlie moved yet another crock of food into the "must take" pile.
"You know," Douxie murmured sotto voce to his brother, "I had thought you were the only person I knew who was like this at loading up people with leftovers."
"I'm not that bad," Jim protested.
Douxie looked flat at him. "Jim, the last time you sent food home with Toby, his nana didn't need to cook for three days."
Jim opened his mouth then closed it, electing not to reply. Douxie smirked, mentally adding a checkmark to his tally list.
"Charlie," Douxie said instead, "we really appreciate the supplies. We do! But we've not exactly got a handcart here. We need to travel light. Only what we can carry."
"And Doux's already added a lute to his stash," Jim pointed out.
"Hmm." The dragon considered the mound of food he was trying to press on them. "I see your point. But you will take some with you, won't you? I'd hate to feel like a terrible host."
"You have been the most gracious of hosts," Douxie was able to assure the dragon. "I'm only sorry we've been such poor guests, arriving without warning and without a gift."
Charlie snorted. "Nonsense! You've given me the finest of gifts - the knowledge that Aurelia's child will be a son, and that he will thrive. Now, as to perhaps more sensible traveling supplies..." He sorted through the containers, cutting the stack down by at least half. "Cheese will keep, as will the bread. Some dried meat and fruit. You do have a reliable source of water?"
Douxie raised his hand; blue light ghosted around his fingers. "Not a problem," he promised.
"Very well, then. This should do you for a few days, and then the goodwife at the farm will take care of you. She's really quite a remarkable woman, you know," Charlie told them.
"We look forward to making her acquaintance," Jim told him. He looked thoughtful. "Hey, you know all those dead bodies at the entrance to your place?"
"Knights," Charlie pronounced, his countenance darkening.
"Yeah. Um. Anyway. I think a couple of them had arrows. Any chance we could steal a few of those from you?" Jim asked. "So Douxie doesn't have to waste his magic making some."
"It's hardly a waste," Douxie told him, but was overridden by Charlie's delighted laughter.
"Why, yes, of course! Feel free to do all the corpse looting you desire," Charlie told Jim. "I really should have cleaned up in there before now. Don't know why I haven't."
"Don't," Jim told him seriously. "Seeing the dead bodies might scare off a few morons trying to hurt you and. Um. Your son." He exchanged a look with Douxie, who nodded. They were both trying to avoid using Archie's name. The fewer ripples in time they caused, the better. Let Charlemagne come up with Archie's name on his own.
"I'll go collect the arrows," said Douxie, privately hoping that they came with a quiver as well, "and retrieve our rope. You," he told Jim, with a wave at the mound of food, "figure out how we're going to carry all this."
"Well, then, this is about as far as I can take you," Charlie said, roughly three hours later and something like seventy miles east of his home. The dragon glanced up at the overcast sky. "I really don't wish to leave the den alone at night, not these days."
"It's fine," Jim assured him with a wave, surrounded by the increased stack of their belongings. At least they wouldn't be going hungry for the next few days. "Thanks for all your help."
"It's as little as I could do," Charlie assured him, before turning to Douxie. "I will see you again in fifteen centuries, I assume."
"If we're all lucky," Douxie told him. "Take good care of yourself, Charlie. And your son."
"I will." Charlie's expression did a strange thing. "You... will take care of him for me as well, won't you?"
"Of course I will," Douxie told him. "He and I have always taken care of each other."
"It's just... it's a hard thing, knowing he'll go out into the world all alone," Charlie told him. "I hate to think of him being dependent upon a wizard's charity for his position."
Douxie blinked. "Charlie... do you think Ar- do you think he's my familiar?" he asked slowly.
"Well, yes," the dragon answered. He glanced at Jim. "At least, that's what I was led to believe...?"
Douxie's soft laughter drew the dragon's attention back to him. Douxie shook his head. "Charlie... it's not like that at all. He's not... he's not my assistant or anything like that. Your son is..." His words trailed off as if he was looking for the right words. "He found me, an outcast child, in the rain when I was all of five. He saved my life. He raised me."
Charlie's eyes grew wide and wider at these revelations.
"He's not my familiar," Douxie said. "I'm his. He's my family."
"Oh," said Charlie. "That... does puts something of a different perspective on things, I suppose. That it's... mutual?"
"It is," Douxie agreed.
Charlie peered closer. "An outcast, you say?"
Douxie's mouth thinned to a line and his arms crossed himself, but he didn't look away. "My parents died of plague about the time my magic started showing. The village decided I must've caused it. Hence." He shrugged.
"A harsh punishment," Charlie mused. "Particularly for a child."
"I would have died," Douxie said flatly. "Your son saved my life, and has continued to do so, many times over. More than I deserve, really."
"Hey," Jim interjected. "No it's not."
Douxie waved him off. "You're not in this discussion."
"Beg to differ," muttered Jim.
"If he values you that highly," Charlie told Douxie, "then it is not your place to say his affection is misplaced." He leaned forward and, very gently, touched his forehead to Douxie's. "Take good care of my son."
And with that, the great dragon turned, spread his wings, and was gone.
Douxie sighed, looking after him. "Dragons always have to have the last word," he murmured.
"Not at all like anyone else I know," Jim said.
Turning around, Douxie made a gesture at Jim that, in certain times and places, would have been considered rude. He wasn't sure if sixth century England was among them. Regardless, Jim smiled and returned the gesture. "Come on," Douxie said, "let's divvy this up and get going. We've got two days' walk east, if my guess about the terrain and dragon airspeed is correct."
"Ugh," Seamus complained, deep in the bowels of both the Mothership and his homework. "I know I'm missing a variable."
"Let me see." Krel gave his float-chair a push and coasted over by Seamus', taking his notebook and looking over the scribbled equations. "Uh... oh, I see." His own writing implement made a glowing blue circle around one of the black ink figures. "Here."
"Thanks." Seamus took the paper pad back and frowned at it, chewing on his lower lip in thought.
"I think your essay looks good, Krel. It just needs a couple adjustments." Eli offered his datapad back.
Krel groaned as he accepted it. Ever other line had corrections and suggestions made in red. "Why must your planet's literature be so klebnathing nonsensical?" he demanded.
Seamus snickered. "It's Alice in Wonderland," he said. "It doesn't even make sense to us."
"I've heard a theory that it's kind of like Shrek," Eli volunteered. "In that it's full of references to things that Victorians would have known about without even thinking, but that we don't have the context for any longer."
"I do not have context for anything on this planet!" Krel growled. "It is stupid."
Seamus and Eli exchanged a look. "So... would you rather go back to Akiridion-5?" Seamus asked.
Krel snorted. "I would rather General Morando... what is your phrase... died in a fire. But no. I like Earth better."
"Even with our stupid literature?" asked Eli.
"Even with your stupid literature and magical accidents that mean Douxie, who I could ask about that theoretical context of the book, is stuck in another century and not able to help me with this essay."
Eli winced. "You could ask Miss Zoe...?"
Krel waved off the suggestion. "She lacks both patience and the free time."
"Hey, so." Seamus raised the chewed eraser end of his pencil in the air. "Question. How come you and your sister have different accents? I mean, English can't be your first language, so why do you two sound different from each other when you speak it?"
Krel stared at him. "What do you mean, different accents?"
"Like the way people say things?" Eli offered. "Poh-tay-to instead of poh-tah-to and all that?"
"I... do not understand."
Seamus and Eli exchanged another look. "Wait, can you seriously not hear the difference?" Seamus asked.
"They are the same word," Krel told him, confused. "What is the difference?"
"The um. The vibrations in the air?" Eli asked. "They're on different wavelengths, making different sounds?"
"Yeah," said Seamus. "People from different places talk differently. You sound like you're from Mexico, and your sister sounds like she's... Russian or something. I dunno."
"And Varvatos sounds American, and Miss Zadra sounds British," Eli put in, nodding.
"But the two of them weren't raised together," Seamus pointed out. "They might have different accents in Akiridion. Krel and Aja were brought up together, so they shouldn't have different accents. It doesn't make sense."
Krel blinked. "I have no idea," he said, and spun his chair around to face the closest viewscreen. "Mother, do you have any insight?"
"If I may." The screen flickered to life, showing images of Krel and Aja's human forms. "Your transductions were crafted to enable you and her highness to 'slip beneath the radar,' as humans say."
"Yes, yes." Krel waved his hand dismissively. "A human female and a Latino. I remember."
"Your telepathic receptors subconsciously analyzed the expectations of those around you when you first began to communicate with the local lifeforms, and your speech in their language took the form they expected."
"Ah, that makes sense," Krel mused.
"Wait, what?" Eli demanded, sitting bolt upright. "Telepathic receptors? You're telepaths?!"
"So you sound Hispanic because people expect you to?" Seamus summed up.
"I suppose so."
"Can we go back to the telepathy thing?" Eli asked. "That seems kind of more important, here!"
"Most galactic species possess some rudimentary form of telepathy," Mother informed him. "Akiridions are not unusual in this respect. Humans, with their lack of a telepathic receptor, are."
"It is how most interstellar species are able to communicate with one another easily," Krel said. "We 'feel' what the other party's language is like, so we are able to speak it fluently. Sometimes, when there is not an atmosphere suitable to language conduction, it ramps up automatically and we can talk in vacuum. Which is useful! Particularly when it comes to some species that live on planets and asteroids lacking significant atmosphere. It certainly makes negotiating trade agreements and ceasefires much simpler, when we are all able to speak each others' languages."
"Man," said Seamus, eyes wide as he leaned back in his seat. "Can you imagine if humans had that ability."
Eli sighed wistfully. "A DNA-based Universal Translator. That would be so cool..."
"Yes, well." Krel frowned. "Unfortunately, I do not think it would be easy to install such a thing. It is not exactly something you can download like a program on a computer. Unlike Balurians, your biology is not that malleable."
The next day dawned overcast but dry. Miraculously for England, in Jim's admittedly limited experience, it stayed that way.
"I feel like it's suspicious Herne hasn't appeared to harass us again," Jim muttered mid-afternoon as they pushed their way through yet more forest undergrowth. He was laden with pots and pans and wrapped loaves and Excalibur. Douxie was similarly weighed down, but had his lute and longbow as well. Well, at least they weren't going to starve, and they weren't needing to waste time hunting.
"Shh!" Douxie told him, looking nervously about the trees. "Don't say the names of those you don't wish to appear."
Jim rolled his eyes. "That's a superstition. Like throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off bad luck."
"It's not bad luck," Douxie said. "That's an anti-gnome ritual."
Jim blinked at his brother. "Wait, seriously?"
Douxie smirked. "Try it around Chompsky sometime. Gnomes are absolutely mad for salt. It's supposed to distract them for long enough that you get to eat your meal and not have it stolen by them."
"Huh," Jim said, tone considering, as he hoisted his burden higher and tromped onward. He pictured Chompsky, belly rounded, passed out atop a mound of table salt, replete. "I hope Toby's Nana has her salt shakers locked down."
Douxie laughed, so Jim counted it as a win.
Then Douxie froze. Absolutely completely froze. Like he was caught in a stasis trap.
Jim froze too. "Douxie?" he asked cautiously, eyes flickering out to the sides, seeking.
"Shh," Douxie hissed. One hand waved, beckoning Jim forward. "Jim, look," he breathed, something awed in his tone.
Carefully, minding where he placed his feet, Jim crept up next to the wizard.
Ahead of them was a small (very small) clearing. And in it stood...
"Holy crap," Jim breathed, staring. "Is that a unicorn?"
"It is," Douxie confirmed.
The creature was not a deer and not a horse, but something in between the two. And unlike every depiction Jim had ever seen in a Hollywood movie, it wasn't pure white, but instead a pale gray. Its muzzle and fetlocks shaded deeper; its hooves and the hair of its mane and tail were almost black. "What is it doing?" Jim whispered. Because the unicorn was thrashing its head around, pushing the sides of its horn against a tree, rubbing at the bark like... well, he'd heard bears rubbed themselves against trees to soothe itches. But horns (and he knew this because he'd had horns, and sometimes still did) were keratinous. Dead matter. They didn't itch.
Douxie cast him a sly sideways smile. "Jim, unicorns are a bit like deer."
"Huh?" Jim didn't get it.
Douxie rolled his eyes, shaking his head with a fond expression. "Deer shed their antlers each year," he said. "Unicorns shed their horns. They both grow new ones."
"Huh." The things you learned, Jim supposed.
He returned his gaze to the unicorn just in time to see the horn tear free from the pressure. It hung, for just a moment, by a strip on the far side from them, then a toss of the unicorn's head set it free, arcing through the air.
Jim could just barely see, under where the old horn had been, a tiny baby new horn growing, maybe an inch long. "Wow," he breathed.
Which was apparently enough to catch the unicorn's attention, now that it was no longer taken up by trying to get rid of an annoying old horn. It whipped its head around, staring at them. Its eyes, Jim noticed for the first time, were a deep almost luminous purple, like the hearts of some of the giant amethysts he'd seen in the stalls at Trollmarket.
Like Claire's magic.
The unicorn's nostrils flared.
"Uh, Douxie..." Jim said nervously. Because enough of the mythological creatures he'd encountered had been the opposite of what human expectations had led him to believe, that he wasn't sure if a unicorn was safe. King Arthur was a murderous dickhead. Dragons were benevolent. Trolls were complicated. Gnomes and goblins were... okay, they were morally gray.
Douxie was watching the unicorn as intently as he was. When it pawed the ground and its head lowered, the wizard breathed something that seemed like relief. "It's all right, Jim," he said. "Go over to the unicorn."
Jim stared at him. Even he knew some things about who was allowed to touch unicorns. "Me? I'm not even a virgin, Douxie!" He and Claire had done things on Camelot, which Claire's parents were never allowed to find out about. Though that had been in the future. But still! "Well, with time travel shenanigans and all, maybe I am, but still-"
Douxie shoved him forward. "They don't care about virginity, Jim. They care about purity."
"But-"
"Go meet the unicorn."
Jim made a futile what the heck?! open-handed gesture at Douxie, then, shrugging off all the things he was carrying bar the sword on his back, stepped into the clearing.
The unicorn walked forward, meeting him halfway. It wasn't so much taller than Jim. Its dark hair was rough, tousled, looking nothing at all like a commercial for hair conditioner. When it pushed its dark muzzle into Jim's hands, the Akiridion armor mesh on his palms melted away like magic. The unicorn's skin and hair felt warm, moist. Hot air huffed out of its nostrils.
Jim met the unicorn's gaze and fell in.
Stars gleamed there. Universes. Eternities. Jim lost his breath as the universe enveloped him. It was so vast. And he was so tiny. A microscopic blink that would be gone in an instant. The world, the universe would remain, moving on without him. Like he had never existed at all.
And yet, he realized... somehow, even framed against that unfathomable cosmic scale, he mattered. What he did, who he loved, the legacy he left behind... it all mattered. All of it.
He only realized he was crying when the unicorn looked away, lowering its head.
Its tiny newborn horn tapped against his amulet. The gears in it started spinning, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Cyan light spilled forth.
"Bleeding balroths," he heard Douxie say, but the wizard's voice seemed a thousand miles away.
It felt like it had that first moment the amulet had come to Jim, atop Bellroc's titan, when he had proclaimed who and what he was, with no doubts. He was a hero, whether or not he had magical mechanical support.
It wasn't hubris, when it was truth.
The unicorn looked at Jim again. He had the feeling that it was trying to tell him something, but he didn't know what.
"I- I don't understand what you want," Jim said. "What do you mean?"
The unicorn closed its fathomless eyes, bowing its head, and looked away from him.
Jim swallowed.
The unicorn headed for Douxie.
The unicorn was heading for him.
Douxie's eyes widened, and he stepped back, fighting the urge to run.
He might fit the mythological definition of what unicorns liked, technically, but he was under no illusions as to how connected to reality mythology actually was.
But he stood his ground, swallowing and terrified, as the creature approached him.
It was so beautiful, was the thing. But not a polished insincere perfection like the Fey.
No, unicorns were rough, and real, and as inimical to human thought patterns as octopi.
Douxie knelt as it stood before him. "My lord," he murmured. A title he didn't give to kings or dragons, but only to one man... and to this creature before him.
Time shone through its eyes, as did space, and cosmic knowledge beyond the grasp of any mortal being.
Douxie risked a glance up, into those ineffable eyes. His throat tightened. "I'm sorry," he managed. "I've never managed to save anyone."
Let alone your kind.
But if the unicorn held it against him, it didn't show it. Instead it lowered its head, nudged him to his feet. Then, like Charlie, like Archie, it pressed its forehead to his, the horn just touching Douxie's hairline. After a moment, it closed its eyes.
Douxie closed his, and raised daring, unworthy hands to touch the unicorn.
It was warm beneath his palms. Alive.
In this time and this place, unicorns were alive.
In his own, they weren't.
His tears fell free, and when he blinked his eyes open, sniffing, the teardrops gleamed on that silvery hide like morning dew.
The unicorn looked at him again, then shook its head and cantered away through the brush.
It was gone in seconds, with no sign of its passage.
Like it had never been.
There was something in that thought, Douxie knew, something deep and profound. But with his heart touched and wounded, grieving for yet another loss he'd been powerless to prevent, he couldn't follow his own thoughts now.
"Douxie," said Jim quietly, coming up to him, "what just happened?"
Douxie brushed away his tears. "We'll go no farther today," he said quietly to his brother. To the one man he would call lord. "I need to tell you about unicorns."
Aaarrrgghh waited patiently in the library for Blinky to return from his new job at the human wizards' bookstore. Aaarrrgghh did not personally see the appeal of books (though, he thought, depending on their subject matter, they could certainly be tasty-) but he did like to listen to Blinky reading aloud from them.
Blinky thought it was something that had been taken from him, stunted in Aaarrrgghh's upbringing among the Gumm-Gumms. Stifled. Something that had not, and perhaps could not, grow correctly any longer.
It wasn't that Aaarrrgghh couldn't read, though. At least in Trollish. And some things in English. "Wrong Way." "City Dump." "No Entry."
But the ability to just sit there and study a book for hours on end... that he did not possess. The words wavered, their meaning paled, his head ached.
For all that he couldn't concentrate on reading the words himself, though, they always made perfect sense when Blinky read them aloud. And despite his reputation as a dumb brute, Aaarrrgghh hadn't been one of Gunmar's generals because he was stupid.
But more than for his inability to read long, he cursed Gunmar and the Gumm-Gumms for making it hard for him to speak. Words mattered. Words were important. They were just... hard to force into shape.
Blinky understood that. And so did Toby. Both of them were happy to fill his silences with words of their own, and to listen when Aaarrrgghh finally managed to pin down the correct words and say what he thought, what he meant.
He acknowledged that he was damaged. But, more importantly, he also knew that he was not broken.
Trollmarket liked Aaarrrgghh because he was big. He was strong. He was friendly. He moved whatever someone needed moving; dug new tunnels and homes whenever there was a cause; curled up napping peacefully next to the Heartstone, basking in its soothing warmth, when he had free time.
And he meditated. Rather a lot.
It had become second habit, these days. Ever since Jim had come into his and Blinky's lives. A human! A child! A weakling, as Draal had put it in another timeline.
Aaarrrgghh protected those smaller than himself. And Jim had been so small...
Not that he was physically much bigger now. Not that he /had/ been much bigger in the future. But there were more ways of taking up space than with just one's body, and Jim had grown, well and truly, into the mantle of the Trollhunter. He had proven himself a worthy successor to Kanjigar, and then... more. He'd done what no other Trollhunter, in nine centuries, had managed to. He'd killed Bular. He'd destroyed Gunmar. And then... he'd taken on the Arcane Order.
"Not strong apart," Aaarrrgghh said aloud, tasting the words in the air. "Strong together." And that made so much sense to him now, changed by centuries of socialization courtesy of Blinky. But it would not have made sense to him under Gunmar. The small and weak were to be derided or destroyed; the strong, tested against, until you yourself were strong. It was every Gumm-Gumm for themselves, and Gunmar, the strongest, at the top of the heap.
For all Aaarrrgghh's years with trolls, he had never consciously realized that the Trollhunters, singular and secretive, had held to the same code as their enemy. Until Jim had said Not Trollhunter; Trollhunters.
It had taken new blood, literally, for things to change.
"Miss Jim," Aaarrrgghh murmured. He knew he wasn't alone in that; everyone who had contact with the young king was feeling bereft without him here to guide them. To be their lodestone. Their Heartstone.
But Jim was strong, and Jim was clever. He would return to them. Aaarrrgghh had pure, simple faith in that.
A shadow portal opened in the center of the library and Aaarrrgghh perked up. A second later, Blinky stepped through, swagger in his stride. He was clearly pleased with having done a good day's work in his new place of employment. Under one arm, he carried a book which... well, it didn't look like anything to do with wizards, being shiny and new instead of musty and well-worn. "Ah, Aarghaumont!" he cried.
"Have good day?" Aaarrrgghh inquired.
"I have had the most splendid day!" Blinky gloated. "I feel that my part-time employment in the arcane bookshop will be most satisfactory, firstly to myself, secondly to the other employees, and thirdly to our goal of accustoming Arcadia Oaks at large to the presence of trolls among them."
Aaarrrgghh nodded, pleased that his partner was pleased. He cocked his head to the side. "New book?"
Blinky beamed, holding it forward for inspection. "Indeed! Toby dropped it off for me midday."
"California Driver's Handbook," Aaarrrgghh read carefully off the cover.
"I will pass that test and become the first troll to hold a driver's license." Blinky clenched his fist, the flames of determination burning bright in his brown eyes. "But what about you, my friend?" he inquired. "How was your day?"
Aaarrrgghh sighed. "Missing Jim," he admitted.
Blinky's enthusiasm immediately fell away. He placed his book on a table and approached, patting Aaarrrgghh's arm. "As do I, my friend," he said softly.
"Jim will come back."
"Yes. I have full faith in him and Douxie to conquer whatever challenges the universe has set before them, and return to us." Aaarrrgghh wrapped his arm around Blinky, hugging him as he might any of the children. "It is just..." Blinky sighed into Aaarrrgghh's fur. "It is just hard waiting," he agreed.
Aaarrrgghh hummed. "They also serve...?" he suggested.
"Indeed. They also serve, who only stand and wait."
Aaarrrgghh sighed, and let the standing, and waiting, envelop them both.
"All right," Jim said eventually, looking at where Douxie was holding the shed unicorn's horn like it was some kind of sacred talisman. "Tell me about unicorns."
Douxie sighed, his green-and-gold gaze locked on the footlong spiral. He'd certainly gone hunting for it in the brush, first thing, before making them their daily shelter. "What did you see in its eyes, Jim?"
"Infinity." Jim bit his lip, trying to remember the edge of that feeling. "How big the universe is, and how old. How I'm not even dust in its eye. But... but also, how what we do matters, even as small and brief as our lives are."
Douxie nodded. "Have you ever studied octopi?"
Jim blinked. "No...?" he asked cautiously. "Is this going to be one of those stories where you start at something completely unrelated and work your way back around to the original point?"
He got a small smile from his brother. "Very much so," Douxie said, and set the horn down on the bed. "You would've hated wizard training, it was at least fifty percent meandering stories."
"Probably," Jim agreed. "So. Octopi?"
Douxie cast an illusion of one in the air, moving and writhing, and leaned back on his hands. "So. Octopi, like their cousins the giant kraken, are quite clever creatures. They can defeat any puzzle put before them, escape their tanks in aquariums, get back into their tanks if they so choose, and we know they dream. They've one of the highest brain-to-body-size ratios of anything on the planet. But, and this is critical, we have absolutely no idea how they think. Their thought processes are literally more alien to us than, say, Aja and Krel's."
"Aja and Krel are descended from Atlanteans," Jim pointed out.
Douxie waved that off. "Stuart, then. The point is..." He sighed. "One of the Hawaiian beliefs was that octopi are the sole survivors from the wreckage of another universe, the one that came before ours. And I'm not sure they're wrong about that."
"So how does this relate to unicorns?" asked Jim.
Douxie picked up the horn again, rolled it back and forth in his palm. "In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is one of the Maiar." He flashed Jim a smile. "You might call them 'angels'. Direct messengers of the One. In our world... unicorns sort of hold the same space. They're beings beyond thought and time, given form and flesh to guide us. As unknowable and inexplicable as octopi." Roll, roll. "And by our time, they're gone."
"What?" Jim whispered.
"Extinct," Douxie said without mercy, though not without kindness. His gaze didn't meet Jim's. "For much the same reason as the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the thylacine. The greed and hatred of man."
Jim felt cold. "They're extinct?!" Who could do that? Why would they do that?
Douxie stopped rolling the horn. All his focus seemed to be on it now. "Arthur had a feast once." His voice was very soft. "It was not too long after Merlin had taken me in. We were required to attend, of course. It was a display of the king's power. Everyone needed to see him. See his tame wizards. He was so powerful he could keep us on a leash." Douxie snorted. "Never mind that it was Merlin who'd made him. Oh no, it was all Arthur's glory and might."
Jim swallowed. He already knew he wasn't going to like this story. "What happened?"
"Merlin, beforehand, bade me not to eat. I didn't know what I was being punished for. I was still half starving then."
Jim wanted to point out that Douxie was still half starving now, but didn't. He waited.
"I didn't understand at all, until the main course was brought in." Douxie's fingers tightened. "A unicorn. Its head was on a platter presented to the king. Mageling that I was, I'd never seen anything so ghastly horrible."
"He killed a unicorn?" Jim looked at the door of their treehouse, as if he could see the wood beyond, and the unicorn still there. "Was it the one-"
Douxie shook his head. "Different coloration. So not this one." He waited a minute, then added, very quietly, "I'd never seen Merlin so furious with Arthur, before or since. But he still didn't speak against him. Didn't say a word. Just... didn't eat. Morgana either."
And wizards, Jim knew, always needed to eat. So not eating, in a very public venue, was... some sort of passive protest, he guessed. As much as Merlin thought they would be able to get away with.
"I haven't heard of any unicorns being sighted since the mid-eighteenth century," Douxie said, barely a murmur. He looked up at Jim, his eyes bright and wet. "So take comfort, if you can, that you've met the approval of a miracle that mankind will never see again."
Jim felt horrible.
Douxie's hand found his, and squeezed. "I'm sorry. The unicorns were gone long before you were ever born, Jim. And even if we restore magic to the world, we'll never see their like again."
Author's Note: Sorry this chapter is a day late. It's been a stressful couple weeks! Douxie quoted Milton some while back in this story; Aaarrrgghh and Blinky echo the quote in this chapter. The unicorn's coloration is based off the painting of one in the Arcadia Museum - it's on the wall behind and to the right of Killahead Bridge.
AND! My friend Bluheaven-ADW made a FANTASTIC Your Future animatic and art from this chapter for her last entry to the Jimtober 2023 art challenge! It can be found at tumblr dot com / bluheaven-adw/732379318176677888/your-future-hasnt-been-written-yet-chapter-1.
