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Tammy rubs her forehead. “That’s when I was about ten… for the second time in my life. Ugh, I might’ve been sleeping, sorry. Then again, you guys didn’t talk about it much or I’d have remembered it.”
Maple slaps herself in the forehead so hard she does a midair backflip. She’s been around modern humans too much. I can’t imagine facepalming is normally part of fey culture. “Okay. Quick version. Mortals are backwards. They fear and hate magic. Kill things. Really long time ago, magical creatures all went to Thelmora to protect themselves and hide from mortals.”
Not the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Okay. So, where is it? Through a portal or something?” I ask.
“No.” Maple rotates to face me and floats up to eye level. “It’s a big island. Really big. Almost too big to be an island. It’s here in the mortal world.”
“Australia?” Tammy blinks.
“Not Australia.” Maple shakes her head. “Thelmora is our name for it. Some mortals call it Elsewhere.”
“If this Thelmora place is not in an alternate world but right here on Earth, how do we get there?” I ask.
“It’s hidden by magic.” Maple waves her right hand across in a grand gesture. “Powerful, old magic. Only a creature from Thelmora can see it. Not even me.” The faerie queen spins to look at the unicorn. “She needs to go back there.”
“Is this a thing like where she simply needs to decide to go home and then she disappears?” I ask.
The unicorn stamps lightly at the ground and lowers her head.
“She’s been away too long,” says Maple. “We must bring her home to Thelmora.”
“Great. Okay. Fine. Where on Earth is it?” I ask.
Paxton starts crying, silently. This is fine. She is sad the unicorn has to go, but I’m going to take her lack of protest as a sign she knows it’s the best thing for everyone involved. The only thing that would make her sadder than being separated from the unicorn is being responsible for the death of such a magical, innocent creature.
Maple seems confused. Oh, that’s probably why she’s been avoiding the question. She doesn’t know how to answer it.
“Hold on. Be right back,” I say… then run to the house.
One of the strange unspoken truths of the universe is that every young boy’s bedroom has a globe in it. I don’t know why this happens. There’s no explanation in my mind for why Danny bought our son a globe years ago. Maybe parents think their kid will need it for school or something. Odd that we never put one in Tammy’s room. I honestly don’t think Anthony ever looked at it twice. It’s always just kinda been there in the background.
Perhaps the strangest, most unexpected thing to happen this far in my life—even more so than a legit unicorn showing up in my backyard—is a globe being useful.
I recover said globe from the top of one of Anthony’s cabinets where it’s lived for the past ten years at least. To say it’s dusty is an understatement, but a damp paper towel or two is all it takes to fix that.
Upon my return to the yard with a now clean globe, I hold it out to Maple. “Can you point at the location of Thelmora?”
She stares at me like I said the dumbest thing imaginable. “That’s a ball!”
Tammy laughs.
We spend the next almost ten minutes explaining the concept of maps and globes. I think Maple is more shocked at the idea of planets than I am at unicorns being real. However, she does know about maps. Eventually, she seems to adjust—or maybe she’s messing with us about being confused by globes.
I’m not prepared for where she points.
Her tiny finger pokes the globe out in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, a fair distance north and a little west from Hawaii. The spot she’s indicating is roughly midway between the West Coast and Japan as far as east-west goes. It would be somewhat difficult to find a place on this planet farther away from land than this.
“Oof. I guess the magical creatures really wanted to avoid humans,” I mutter. “Okay. Give me a minute to see if I can find an image on Google.”
“Google?” asks Maple.
“She’s looking for a landing spot to teleport the unicorn to,” explains Tammy.
“Won’t work.” Maple zips up to hover in front of my face. “Teleporting is impossible.”
“Why?”
