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“Magic protection.”
I grumble. “Really? Dammit.”
“But we teleported her here?” Tammy’s expression would be perfect for a GEICO caveman commercial.
“She teleported herself here,” says Maple, and gives the unicorn a ‘you silly fool’ stare.
“Can’t she just teleport her horsey butt back home?” asks Tammy.
“Not now.” Maple sighs. “If she wanted to go home right away, it would have worked. Been here too long. Weak.”
Crap. I stare at the sky as if there’s going to be an answer up there. “You’re saying she’s been away from her home for too long and she’s getting weaker the longer she stays here?”
“Yes.” Maple nods.
“Oh, no.” Paxton sniffles. “I’m sorry.”
The unicorn nuzzles against her. Paxton clings to her neck and sobs softly.
“Drama.” Maple rolls her eyes. “She’s not going to die from being away… but the shadows will want to hurt her.”
“What do you know of those things, anyway?” I ask. “What are they?”
Maple rotates to face me. “Thelmora is here in the mortal world. There is a backward Thelmora full of darkness and evil. It is like a shadow cast by the real place.”
“Oh!” Tammy snaps her fingers. “That makes sense why these creatures look like silhouettes. They’re just shadows of the good things that live in Thelmora.”
“Twisted, evil shadows,” adds Maple. “They are at war.”
“There’s fighting going on there?” Tammy bites her lip. “No wonder she wanted to get away.”
“No, no.” Maple shakes her head so fast her hair floofs up like one of those troll pencils I had in high school. “The shadows want war, but they can’t. Thelmora is safe. Neither can cross. But unicorn is not in Thelmora now, so she is vulnerable. Outside the protection magic.”
“So, it’s like two feral cats separated by glass. They really want to hurt each other but can’t.” Tammy taps her foot.
Maple shrugs, then looks back to me. “More time unicorn here, more danger. Must take her home.”
Great. I’ve got to figure out how to transport an animal the size of a horse (okay, a smallish horse) out to the middle of the freakin’ ocean… and do it fast.
See, this is why I like boring days at the office.
It’s a vacation from craziness like this.
Chapter Eleven
Tea and Cupcakes
We relocate our meeting to the dining room—except for the unicorn.
She’s happier outside with the trees and open sky. The rest of us are having tea and cupcakes with the faerie queen because that’s apparently what faeries do. It’s part politeness, part ‘thanking Maple for her help’. There’s like a rule or custom about whenever a faerie visits your house, it’s obligatory to give them cake or they might start playing tricks.
Over tea and cupcakes (purchased from our local grocery store down the street), Maple tells us about Thelmora. She’s not exactly sure how long ago it happened, but it’s probably over a thousand years, likely much longer. According to her, various sorts of creatures like unicorns, trolls, ogres, dragons, all sorts of stuff you see in folklore tales, plus a lot more we’ve forgotten about used to be everywhere on Earth. Humans have a rather powerful psyche, so to speak. As we grew in numbers, we predictably interacted with the world in violent ways.
At first, humanity clashed with the other beings physically. The more we bred and multiplied, the more parts of the planet we ‘civilized’ from the primordial wilds. This forced magical creatures deeper and deeper into unexplored regions. The old creatures hid so well from humans to avoid being killed that humanity started to believe they’d never been real at all. Humanity convinced itself that dragons, unicorns, and so forth never existed and had always been nothing more than fanciful tales. Such a powerful collective psyche basically poisoned the world against magical creatures.
So, they retreated to a place far removed from where the humans of the time had the ability to reach… a mini-continent way off in the ocean. It’s kind of like an Atlantis situation, except this one didn’t sink. Maple tells us about how the stories describe the magical creatures removing not only themselves but that entire land mass from human awareness.
It exists for real. It’s not phased out of this world or in some alternate dimension. Magic simply causes humans not to be able to see it or find it, even by accident. Someone on a ship cruising directly toward the island will just kind of steer around it without realizing they did so. They—and even their electronic instruments—will continue to believe they’d gone in a straight line even though they made a big circle around the place.
