Book 2- Chapter 1: Happily Ever After (Day Six)

Chapter 1: Happily Ever After (Day Six)

Andy Snodgrass burned the eggs on day six of having hands.

This was not, in the broader context of his culinary history, a significant event. He had burned things as a human too. Toast. Rice. Once, memorably, EasyMac, which his roommate in college had insisted was impossible, which Andy had proven was merely improbable through a combination of distraction, a phone call from his mother, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between heat and time. But burning eggs as a human had been a failure of attention. Burning eggs as a mythic unicorn who had only possessed fingers for six days was a failure of motor control, and the distinction mattered, because the pan was on fire and he could not figure out how to turn the knob to the off position. Knobs required a pinching-and-rotating motion that his brain understood perfectly, that his fingers interpreted as “grip and twist the entire apparatus off the stove.”

He’d knocked the stove to the ground. His eggs were carbonized. Their lean-to smelled like burned protein and the full-body embarrassment of a creature who could channel mythic-class life magic through a horn that had persisted across six evolutionary tiers but could not successfully operate a camping stove. A wren on the lean-to’s ridgepole cocked its head at the smoke, decided the situation was beneath its concern, and resumed grooming.

Veronica was watching from the bedroll.

She was wearing his shirt. Not a real shirt. A glamoured shirt, made of condensed ambient magic that Georgina had taught him to produce before his first political meeting, because showing up to negotiate with a lord while naked was, in Georgina’s words, “inadvisable.” The shirt existed because Andy’s magic said it existed, which meant that Veronica was wearing a garment held together by his willpower, and his willpower was currently focused on the eggs, which meant the shirt was flickering at the edges, which meant Veronica was wearing a shirt that was becoming see-through at the shoulders because Andy was distracted by breakfast. She had stolen three of his glamoured shirts so far. She preferred the ones he made in the morning, when his magic was rested and the fabric was warmer. Andy preferred not thinking about the implications of his girlfriend wearing his condensed magical essence against her skin, because the horn had opinions about the implications and the horn’s opinions were not quiet.

She did not seem concerned about the shirt. She seemed concerned about the stove, which was sideways on the ground, still producing smoke from what had once been food.

“Okay,” Andy said. “Okay. I know what I did wrong.”

He picked the stove up. With his hands. His hands were still a novelty, six days in, each finger a small miracle of articulation that he appreciated and could not fully control. Picking up a stove required coordinating ten fingers and a wrist-rotation component that his equine muscle memory kept interpreting as “stamp the ground.” He set it on the flat stone that served as their kitchen counter. He looked at the eggs.

Blackly, they looked back. In the way that carbonized food does.

“I’ll make more,” Andy said.

Veronica said something. His understanding over her language was accelerating, six days of immersion filling in the gaps that truth sense couldn’t cover, but he didn’t need words for this one. Her tone was amused. Truth sense translated: amused. Her head-shake was the same head-shake she had given him when he was a horse and tried to eat the entire apple basket in one sitting. Some gestures transcended species.

She got up. Crossed the clearing in bare feet, his flickering shirt stilling as she moved. She took the pan from him with the efficiency of a person who had been cooking successfully for her entire adult life and was now watching a mythic creature fail at it with the patient tenderness usually reserved for a child learning to tie shoes. She cracked two new eggs. They hissed. Within ninety seconds, they were done.

She handed him the plate.

“Thank you,” Andy said, which was among the first phrases he had learned in her language and remained the most frequently deployed because Veronica did something like fifteen things per day that warranted gratitude and Andy was determined to acknowledge every single one.

He sat on the ground next to the chair.

Veronica had brought the chair two days back, sourced from somewhere in the ranger supply chain that Andy didn’t fully understand but suspected involved a quartermaster who had been told “I need a chair for a unicorn” and had interpreted this as creatively as possible. It was wooden, sturdy, and designed for a human being with normal sitting habits, however, and here is where it gets weird: the chair was bedazzled. And not just regular old shine and shimmer. It looked like someone found the glitter aisle and decided to glue gun the living daylights out of that chair and then knocked over the entire supply of glitter directly on top of it.

Andy’s sitting habits were not normal. Andy’s sitting habits were informed by the better part of this life spent as a quadruped. Every time he approached a chair, some deep equine instinct told him the correct response to a flat elevated surface was to stand next to it. When he overrode that instinct and sat down, his body arranged itself in a posture that was technically seated and practically a controlled fall that left him perched on the edge with his legs at angles that suggested recent origami.

The floor was better, it was honest and did not require him to bend in ways that his recently bipedal skeleton found suspicious.

Veronica looked at him on the ground. She gave a disapproving look and then looked at the chair. Looked at him on the ground. She gestured at it, “The chair,” she said. He understood that one.

“The floor better understands my posture,” Andy said, in English, which she did not understand, and then in her language, badly: “Floor. Good. Chair. Bad.”

She pressed her lips together. That strangled nose-noise. She turned away before the containment failed, but her shoulders were shaking, and the truth sense said: amused but at the back of it, irritated. She had been patient waiting for him to reach human form, but now she seemed to object to any of his old habits.

She turned back around and his horn sang. It had been singing continuously since the evolution, a warm, golden hum that rose and fell with his emotional state like a mood ring with a speaker system. Right now, sitting on the ground eating eggs his girlfriend had rescued from his incompetence, the horn was producing a sound that the System would probably classify as CONTENTMENT (DOMESTIC). Andy would classify it as the musical equivalent of a man who had spent twenty-four years and six evolutionary tiers arriving at the breakfast table, discovering that the breakfast table was real, the person across from it was real, the eggs were real. All of it, every bit of it, was his and yet–

He could not turn the horn off. He had tried. The horn did what the horn did. The horn had opinions which were loud and at this exact moment, unanimous: Andy Snodgrass, formerly dead, formerly a cell, formerly a jellyfish, formerly a frog, formerly a horse, currently a unicorn sitting on the ground next to a chair, pretending to be a man. The horn was not having the same emotional turmoil as the brain and so it sang whether Andy wanted it to or not.

[HORN STATUS: SINGING (CONTINUOUS). VOLUME: ELEVATED. THE HORN IS PLEASED.]

“The horn is always pleased,” Andy told the notification. “The horn has been pleased for six days. The horn was pleased each time Veronica laid her hands on it.”

No response. Its silence had evolved over the course of their relationship from bureaucratic indifference into what Andy suspected was something very close to smugness.

He glared at nothing and said aloud to the system, “You’re very proud of yourself aren’t you?”

Silence.

He practiced buttons after breakfast.

This was the third day of button practice and the results were not encouraging. Buttons required a coordinated effort between thumb and forefinger that he could perform in theory and fumbled in practice every time. He looked like a man trying to solve a very small Rubik’s Cube sewn onto his own chest. His shirt was glamoured along with the buttons. He was practicing buttoning a shirt made of his own magic, which meant every failed attempt was technically him losing a fight with himself.

“This is fine,” Andy said, failing to thread a button through its hole for the seventh consecutive time. “This is a minor setback in an otherwise remarkable adaptation to bipedal existence.”

A beetle trundled across the flat stone beside the stove, its carapace catching the morning light, entirely unbothered by the culinary catastrophe occurring at its altitude. Andy watched it navigate a crumb of carbonized egg with the focused determination of a creature whose problems were small and solvable. He envied it.

Teeth, from her rock, sent an impression: amusement dipped in contempt, the specific emotional texture she reserved for moments when Andy was being ridiculous and she wanted him to know she had noticed.

Teeth had evolved. Quietly, the way she did everything, while Andy had been busy grinding speed trials and eating apples, and falling in love. The party XP bonus, the twenty-five percent that stacked on every kill and every trial and every purification, had been feeding into the bond the entire time, and somewhere after the Binder’s second attack, her Tier 5 threshold had tipped over without ceremony. Andy had woken up one morning to a fox that was larger, almost half again the size of her Spirit Fox form, the extra mass settled into her frame with the lean, deliberate elegance of a predator that had evolved past the need for bulk. Spirit Fox to Phantom Fox. Phantom was visible: her fur still read as russet at a glance, but the silver-blue undertones had deepened, catching the morning light in a way that made her edges shimmer, not quite translucent, not quite solid, like something that existed slightly more than a normal fox should. Two tails now, the second one arrived during the evolution with no fanfare and no explanation, just a fox who had one tail and then had two and who treated questions about it with the pointed silence of a creature whose personal evolution was not up for discussion. Her eyes glowed faintly even in daylight. Phantom Fox. Spectral Guardian. Both titles suited her the way the rock suited her: completely, without negotiation.

“I didn’t ask for commentary,” Andy projected.

Teeth sent: I didn’t offer any. My face did all the work.

Her face was, in fact, doing all the work. Narrow vulpine features arranged in an expression that transcended species barriers to communicate a single, clean message: I am watching you fight a shirt.

Andy gave up on buttons. He glamoured the shirt closed. This was cheating. He did not care. He had earned the right to cheat at buttons through an entire second life of not having fingers and he would learn buttons at his own pace, which was the pace of a man whose fine motor control had been tuned into sticky webbed feet and then hooves ever since crawling out of the primordial goo.

Gustave had evolved too, and Gustave’s evolution had been, characteristically, the most dramatic thing anyone in the party had done without asking for credit. The same party XP (He was referring to this as chapter 31 in book one of his second life– which is how he’d begun to think of the events of his second life) that had pushed Teeth to Phantom Fox had pushed the hawk past his own threshold and Storm Hawk had become something else entirely. Andy had watched it happen from across the clearing: Gustave on his branch, wings spread, the bronze-gold plumage rippling like heat distortion, and then the light shifted and the hawk was bigger, his feathers deepening from bronze to storm-grey shot through with veins of iridescent gold, his wingspan stretching from a meter and a half to something closer to two, broad enough to cast a shadow Andy could stand in. Lightning had cracked, once, from a cloudless sky, and Gustave had opened his new eyes (storm-grey ringed with gold, replacing the old amber) and sent a single impression through the bond that communicated, with the understated precision of a creature that refused to be impressed by its own semi-apotheosis: adequate.

He circled now with the precise, unhurried discipline of a raptor that took territorial defense personally and considered any deviation from optimal flight patterns to be a moral failing. Through the companion bond: calm, watchful, the satisfaction of a storm sovereign whose territory contained no threats and who was maintaining peak readiness anyway, because relaxation was for lesser birds.

Barnacle was on his rock.

Barnacle had probably been on his rock since the beginning of whatever narrative structure the universe was running. Barnacle would be on his rock when the last star in the sky burned out, the cosmos collapsed inward, the final proton decayed into nothing. At that point Barnacle would filter the void and find it acceptable.

[BARNACLE: XP ACCUMULATING. SOURCE: CLASSIFIED.]

Andy stared at the notification.

“Classified,” Andy said. “The barnacle has CLASSIFIED XP.”

This was new. Or not new exactly. Barnacle’s XP had always been a mystery, a running background process that the System acknowledged without explaining, but “source: classified” was a level of bureaucratic secrecy that implied either Barnacle’s XP acquisition method was too complicated for mortal comprehension or too alarming for public disclosure. Andy was not sure which possibility concerned him more. A barnacle with a classified income stream. A six-centimeter crustacean with redacted growth metrics. The most opaque member of his party, and the competition for that title included a fox who communicated in subtext and a hawk who found emotional expression “The antithesis of dignity.”

Barnacle did not comment. As usual Barnacle’s commitment to silence was not a choice but a lifestyle which in all honesty must, because Barnacle the barnacle was the most emotionally stable member of the party by a margin so wide it was embarrassing for everyone else.

Andy loved him.

He pulled up the full status screen mid-morning, sitting in a patch of sunlight (on the ground, next to the chair, which had become a shelf for Veronica’s book), with Veronica reading on the boulder and the clearing humming with the ambient glow of six tiers of accumulated life magic. A rabbit had emerged from the underbrush near the stream, sitting in the warm zone of his territorial influence with the blissed-out stillness of a creature whose fur was growing faster and shinier than biology alone could explain.

[STATUS: ANDY SNODGRASS]

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

[SPECIES: UNICORN (MYTHIC CREATURE). TIER 6.]

[FORM: HUMANOID (ACTIVE). EQUINE (AVAILABLE).]

[HORN (MYTHIC): GOLDEN. SPIRALING. 50CM (EQUINE) / 15CM (HUMANOID). RADIANT. SINGING (CONTINUOUS). UNPRECEDENTED.]

[ABILITIES: HEALING AURA (APEX, 30M). PURIFICATION BLAST (APEX, ENHANCED). TRUTH SENSE (ENHANCED, 30M). TELEPATHY (ENHANCED, 50M). HUMANOID SHIFT. HORN SONG (CONTINUOUS, UNPRECEDENTED). LIFE MAGIC AFFINITY (MYTHIC CLASS). TERRITORIAL INFLUENCE (MAXIMUM).]

[PURITY AFFINITY: STRONG. SOURCE: AUTHENTIC CONNECTION.]

[PARTY: TEETH (PHANTOM FOX, SPECTRAL GUARDIAN, T5). GUSTAVE (TEMPEST RAPTOR, STORM SOVEREIGN, T5). BARNACLE (TIDAL CRUSTACEAN, SESSILE, T3). VERONICA (RANGER-TYPE, HUMANOID, BELOVED).]

[EVOLUTION PATH: ??? – REQUIREMENTS UNKNOWN.]

He read it twice. The same locked evolution path from the end of Book 1 (his book, his insistence on treating his own life as a narrative with volumes and chapters and a really aggressive horn motif). Question marks where the future should be. A door with no handle and no keyhole and a small sign that read: figure it out.

Six tiers. Cell to jellyfish to frog to horse to mythic beast to unicorn to the man sitting on the ground in a clearing eating eggs and wishing they were apples. The longest character arc in evolutionary history, and the skill tree still had branches he couldn’t see. He had maxed his current build and the endgame was a question mark, which was either exciting or terrifying depending on whether you were the kind of person who found locked doors motivating or anxiety-inducing. Andy was and had always been both kinds of person.

Six days of Veronica handing him plates, correcting his pronunciation, reading on the boulder while his horn sang at her was not as flawless as he imagined it being. He tried compressing his worry into happiness. He had after gotten everything he wanted.

He would figure it out. He always figured it out. His calcium spike had figured out how to become a horn. His horn had figured out how to sing. Andy Snodgrass would figure out what came after Tier 6 with the same strategy he had applied to every previous impossible thing: point the horn forward and walk.

Veronica found him in the clearing at midday, practicing utensil grip on an apple.

He was not eating the apple with utensils. He was eating the apple with his mouth, stem-first, because Andy Snodgrass had eaten apples stem-first since Tier 4 and the acquisition of hands had not altered a habit that predated fingers by three evolutionary stages. Utensils were for the NEXT apple, which he intended to eat with a knife and fork like a civilized biped, because Veronica had gently suggested (through tone, through a facial expression that communicated “you are a mythic creature who eats fruit like a feral animal”) that learning to use cutlery might be a reasonable goal for his second week of having opposable thumbs.

She watched him eat the apple core-first. Her expression combined fondness with the resignation of a woman who had accepted that certain behaviors were load-bearing.

He picked up the fork. Held it. Forks required a grip between thumb and first two fingers that his hand understood conceptually but executed as a full-fist clench, making the fork look less like a dining implement, more like a weapon he was about to stab someone with.

“I know what it’s supposed to look like,” Andy said. “I have eaten with forks before. In my previous life. I was moderately competent with forks. The problem is that this hand” (he held up his right hand, flexing the fingers with the careful attention of a man inspecting equipment he did not trust) “this hand remembers being a hoof. This hand spent an untold amount of time not being a hand. The hand is not forking good at this.”

He let out a wheeze at his own joke, which Veronica must not have understood because he was the only one laughing. Veronica adjusted his grip. Her fingers on his fingers, repositioning, the casual physical intimacy of a correction that was also, whether she intended it or not, a touch. The horn’s volume increased. Noticeably. Its singing shifted from background hum to foreground “LA LA LALALA LA”, the harmonic equivalent of an emotional broadcast system that had no concept of discretion and no interest in learning one.

Teeth, fifty meters away, sent an impression so immediate and so sharp that Andy nearly dropped the fork.

FIFTY METERS. I AM FIFTY METERS AWAY AND I CAN HEAR YOUR HORN SINGING ABOUT HER FINGERS. CONTROL. YOUR. HORN.