a short story by Sean T. Collins
“It’s trivially easy.” Vayanna was standing near the rocks at the edge of the glade, deposited by some long-ago stream. She pawed at the ground impatiently with one hoof. “That was the whole point of all of this.”
Sitting on the grass in the twilight, Barnod looked at the enormous gemstone in his hands. The Red Prism they called it, the wizards who’d warred over it for years. Barnod was first blooded in one of those wars, striking down a Thedan while in the service of the Wizard of the Wastes. Even as the blade sank into the man’s skull, Barnod saw in his eyes that the man no more wanted to be there than did Barnod himself. But orders come, and men march.
He set the gem, which was half again as broad as his fist, down on the grass beside him. He and the Prism were surrounded by an intricate pattern of shapes and runes, rendered in white around the center of the glade. Vayanna herself had done it, carefully following the steps outlined in the spellbook Barnod had stolen along with the Prism herself. Over and over she would dip her horn in the bucket of paint Barnod had carried with him into the Bluewood, then lower her head toward the ground. Barnod would take it in both hands and guide it, gently, as they painted out the spell together.
Finally he looked up at Vayanna. The unicorn was a mottled purple and brown against the blue foliage of the forest and the grey of the rocks. She looked at him expectantly, through eyes violet and sad. That was not the state of Vayanna, though. She was happy, always happy. Like all beasts of her kind, she was joy incarnate. Barnod loved her for it.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “You’re right,” he said finally, the statement a deliberate exorcism of his own doubt. “You’re right,” he repeated. “The Red Prism will take care of it. I just— ”
“So what if you’re not a wizard?” Vayanna walked closer to her lover, careful not to tread on the markings they’d made. “Have I ever cared about that in the slightest?”
Barnod brushed his hands over his bloody cloak and stood. “No…”
Vayanna shook her head, her dark purple mane a luminous, lively black in the moonlight. “No, not ever,” she confirmed. “I don’t love an apprentice wizard, I don’t love some dropout from the Crucible, I love you.” She lowered her muzzle onto his shoulder. ”I love Barnod.” He could feel her jaw move as she spoke.
Barnod tilted his head to the side to rest it against her, raising his left arm to wrap around her head in an embrace. “I love you,” he said. “More than…well, more than I ever thought it was possible to love a—” He stopped short.
“A person,” Vayanna said, lifting her head to look him in the eyes with one of her own. “That’s all I am, Barnod — a person.”
“Of course you are!” His voice was suddenly vehement, so terrified was he of offending her. Whatever their other differences, the Horned Ones were a thinking race just as humans were. “You are the greatest person I’ve ever known, Vayanna Ayalawaya of the Ivory Horn.”
It was true. When Barnod had deserted the Waste Wizard’s army, it was Vayanna who’d found him, dying of infection and exposure at the Bluewood’s edge. With her power she’d nursed him back to health; with her tenderness she brought him back to life.
Quickly they found they had much and more in common. They shared a love for birds and their study; Vayanna would call one species after another to alight on her horn or her back, where Barnod could observe everything from the tiniest hummingbird to the mightiest hawk at a closeness even the gods were not afforded. They both drew deep delight from the music of the Kelekeri, whose harps were praised above all of Elf-kind, and for good reason. They both fell in love with the Bluewood, for under its eaves they fell in love with each other.
Barnod couldn’t remember whose idea it was to use the Red Prism. That was funny; it seemed like the sort of thing he ought to remember. But that’s often how it was with he and Vayanna: Their thoughts blended together, so that it was hard to tell one’s ideas from the other.
The Prism, it was said, refracted all light to a gruesome shade of crimson, an indication of its uncanny nature. Its origin was a matter of dispute. Some wizards said it was dropped into the world by Shon, the Lord of Time, as a means of transformation and redemption. Others insisted it was thrust up from the underworld by Loshon the Unchanging, who intended it to tempt the followers of Shon into defying their fate. No one seemed to know for sure during the wars, but everyone had a buddy whose buddy had a brother whose commanding officer had said…whatever. It didn’t matter, not anymore.
The thing was that Barnod didn’t fear the change itself. Neither did Vayanna — to a fault, almost. What Barnod feared was his own capabilities, or lack thereof. He’d barely started at the Crucible when the wars began, and like most students he was immediately drafted, in hopes that the aggregate of their abilities would be enough to turn the tide.
That hope was not misplaced, as it turned out. The Wizard of the Wastes’ control over the crucible gave his army the edge, and when the final battle took place on Nickel Plain, students stood on the front line against the Spiral Wizard. Barnod had not been among them, which was the reason he was still alive. But the acolytes’ sacrifice enabled the Wizard of the Wastes to claim the Red Prism as his own, once and for all. The Spiral Wizard retreated into his vortex, and the matter was settled.
But not for Barnod. The Waste Wizard’s victory was catastrophic for him, as he would now be a wanted man for his desertion among the victorious side and an outcast for his initial participation in the slaughter among the losers. All he wanted to do was slink away and raise a family on a farm somewhere; he didn’t know the first thing about farming, but the sound of it was irresistibly romantic.
One of the few things that the grunts on both sides of the battle agreed upon was that the Red Prism could refract life as well as light. A person who gazed into its depths could emerge from the experience a different person entirely — the person they were meant to be, perhaps, or the person they most wanted to be.
In the hands of a wizard, the Red Prism’s power was nearly limitless. In the hands of an apprentice like Barnod it was primarily a large red gem, but by all accounts it would still be enough to transform a unicorn into a human even in untrained hands. It could turn Vayanna into the woman of his dreams, and hers as well.
They had tried doing it the way they were. They really had. After sucking her horn for a while, he’d put himself inside her and spend. It was good for Barnod, great even, and it was frightfully romantic for them both. But he wanted, he needed, Vayanna to feel as good as he did when they did it, and so did she.
They loved the idea the second they came up with it. They thrilled to it, held it between them, threw it up in the air to watch it flutter around them like a swarm of butterflies. Love like this, need like this, did not come around for people like Barnod often. He knew that unicorns experienced love differently from humans — it had something to do with their immortality — but in the moonlight in the blue forest, looking into Vayanna’s eyes, he knew she loved him as much as she’d ever loved anyone or anything else. All either of them wanted was for him to look into eyes that matched the size and shape of his own.
Vayanna had brought him to the Waste Wizard’s fortress herself, cloaking them both under a shield of inviolability using the power of her horn. With the Vintner’s Blade in his hand — he’d stolen it from the corpse of an enemy soldier he only later realized was King Strobba of the Valleylands — Barnod and his mount and lover slew their way through a phalanx of guards, stealing the Red Prism and the spellbook that had been claimed with it. It was over before the guards knew what hit them, and the Wizard, who’d been in his cups since his victory, was too drunk to notice anything was wrong.
They rode hard for half a week until they reached the eaves of the Bluewood. Only then did they feel safe from the Waste Wizard’s forces. Even now they would be combing the no-man’s-lands for the bloody-handed thieves who’d stolen his rightfully gained spoils of war, looking for a man with a mighty blade and a steed with a deadly horn.
It wouldn’t matter. By the time the hunters reached the Bluewood, Barnod and Vayanna would be long gone. His sword was driven into a dead tree nearby, from which he had no intention of retrieving it; his hornéd steed would soon be neither, but rather a beautiful woman with violet eyes who in no way would match the evidence of an animal attack.
For all the danger of the plan, Vayanna had been happy to go along. She could find the happiness in anything. It was one of he reasons Barnod loved her so much to begin with. God, how he dreamed of holding his woman in his arms — how he longed for it, how he hungered for it. His love for Vayanna was a staruburst inside of him, an exploding sun. He needed her to have a body capable of receiving the imprint of his love for her, using his own body as an instrument. He wanted to walk with her, really walk with her, arm in arm, hand in hand. He wanted to sleep in a bed with her, curling up behind her, telling this immortal woman she was a little girl he’d take care of for as long as he lived.
He hadn’t meant to do it, but by pronouncing her full name and title, he had initiated the ritual.
“Now, baby?” Vayanna said trepidatiously, hoof in the air.
“Now, baby,” Barnod confirmed.
She stepped into the circuit of spells. Immediately they blazed forth in heatless crimson fire.
Barnod picked up the Red Prism and stood. He and his lover approached one another as the red flames flickered, until they were face to face. Barnod lowered his forehead to Vayanna’s snout, left hand wrapped around to stroke her main, right hand carrying the Prism.
“I love you with all my whole heart,” he said.
“I love you too,” she said. “Do it, please.”
Barnod nodded. Holding the prism to her horn, he closed his eyes and repeated the phrase he’d studied half a hundred times in the moldering spellbook:
“Let the heart have its way.”
A wave of red light coursed down the length of Vayanna’s horn and through her head and body. Then another, then another, then another, syncing to the beat of her heart.
“Vayanna, are you—”
A fearsome whinny told him all he needed to know. Take care to stay within the circuit, Barnod stepped away from the unicorn, who by now appeared to be throbbing with an infernal red glow that got brighter and brighter with each pulse. A sudden spray of droplets against his face made him realize the red light was turning liquid, spraying now from Vayanna’s body with each burst of illumination. The unicorn shook her head from side to side and staggered.
Then the light grew so steady and bright Barnod had to shield his eyes. He didn’t see the explosion coming until it was already hitting him, soaking him from head to toe in thick red fluid that was luminescent in the dark. The spray of red in the air made the Bluewood behind look purple in the gloaming.
The ground was as saturated as his hair and clothes when next Barnod looked up. There, standing before him, was Vayanna, a unicorn no longer. But her purple hair, her skin of coffee and lavender, and the white horn that lay glowing red at her feet left no doubt: This was the woman he loved.
Then he looked in her eyes, and he knew something had gone wrong. They were remote, staring off into the distance, gathering tears. Her lips quivered. With what appeared to be genuine physical force, she wrenched her head to look at Barnod, and sobbed so hard it was as though she were vomiting.
Barnod rushed to her, throwing his cloak around her nakedness, taking her hands in his. “Vayanna,” he said, “Vayanna, Vayanna my love, what’s wrong?”
He looked into her eyes and saw horror looking back at him. Speech was a struggle for her, he saw, perhaps due to the unfamiliar musculature of her jaw. Nevertheless, with some effort, she spoke to him. “Is,” she said. “This. What it’s. Always. Like? For you?”
“Like what?” Barnod asked, not understanding. “Is what always like—”
“Love,” she said, through teeth she restrained from chattering long enough to get the wordout.
“Yes!” he shouted, eyes brightening. “Yes, love is always like this, it’s always there, it never dies.”
Vayanna’s face crumpled. Tears streamed from her eyes. “Mortals die,” she said. “Love should die.”
Her legs gave out, and Barnod caught her, easing her to the ground, where he held her in his arms. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Forever, that’s what we wanted, remember?”
With what seemed like physical pain she lifted her beautiful face to look into his. The tears were flowing freely now, in rivulets that marked the borders of her human form’s strong nose. “Forever is too long.”
Barnod’s heart was pounding. Something was very wrong here. “Vayanna” — it pained him to say this, but he loved her too much not to — “we can change you back at any time. The Prism has that power.”
“Can it undo what I have done to my own heart?” she wailed with sudden vehemence. “Now I see! Now I see that love is a curse for those of mortal form,” she finished for him. She was shaking now.
Barnod was starting to panic. “But — but you’re still immortal, the spellbook said that you’d still be immortal!”
“Immortal, yes,” she said bitterly. “In my bones, in my sinews, in the hair of my mane, yes, yes, immortal, yes. But my mind has taken a shape that can never be restored.”
She looked up at him, and there was such pity in her eyes it made him ashamed. “How do you live like this, o man? How can you survive love, knowing all the while that it yokes you forever to the heart of a corpse?”
She had the horn in her hands already, somehow. Before Barnod knew what was happening she plunged it into her chest. Deeper and deeper it sank without emerging from the other side.
Barnod had her hands in his now, he was pulling back, he was fighting her every inch, but it was no use. Still glowing a dull and angry red, the horn vanished into the bare spot between Vayanna’s breasts.
She opened her mouth, let out an equine scream that sent a flock of bluecrows soaring into the air above the canopy, and died in Barnod’s arms.
He spent all that night and into the next morning preparing her grave, digging till his fingers were bloody and his body wavering with exhaustion. Finally he lowered her into he hole, kissing her on he forehead where her horn once grew. The horn itself he placed in her hands.
He buried her then, one handful of soil after another. As the sun shone down he finished, fingers dirty and bloody, gore-stained tunic soaked now with sweat, body trembling with exhaustion. At last he collapsed and fell asleep on the grave he’d made her. In the distance he heard, faintly, a Thedan horn. As the last few tears left clear paths through the dirt coating his face, he slept with the woman he loved.
