Chapter 20: She Knows

Ranger started visiting more often. She often arrived earlier and stayed later. Her satchel was heavy with books and scrolls that she spread over the boulder like a research station. She moved between them with a focused and frantic energy. She was on the brink of a discovery that was too large for her head.

She had been visiting every day except “Monday” but now she had been coming every day. Sometimes she would arrive before dawn. This meant waking early for a woman, a bridge he could not–would not cross while still being a horse.

She was researching him. 

Andy watched from his customary position. (Standing next to the boulder, close enough that her hand could reach his horn, which it did frequently, half because she found something magical and couldn’t stop touching it and half because she needed something tactile to ensure she wasn’t dreaming.) Her new books were filled with diagrams and scientific looking illustrations of creatures that looked, with a similarity that made his eyes widen, like him.

Horned ponies. The illustrations showed them in stages: small and rough-looking (similar builds to Andy’s new proto-horse form, a larger more refined horse. And the final stage being a unicorn. They looked similar to unicorns from fantasy stories on Earth. They were huge though, and looked closer to a clydesdale than a dainty ankled draft horse.

She had books about unicorns. They were hand written, on aged yellowing paper. She was cross referencing him against textbook illustrations of unicorn precursors. Her expression had transitioned curiosity, to nervous, to something Andy was choosing to describe as reverent.

She believed he was becoming a unicorn. She was a scientist comparing evidence, accumulated data. She turned the page. A unicorn and a human with a diamond shape between them. The unicorn’s horn was shining. She began copying the text into her notebook. Circling one of the words.

“She knows,” Andy sent to Teeth, while Ranger turned the pages with a wild intensity. “She knows. She’s comparing me to textbooks. She’s researching my destiny. I’ve never been the focus of someone’s attention like this. I’m not sure whether to be validated or creeped out.

Teeth responded, she’s not just reading. She’s worried. 

Andy turned both ears toward the fox who clarified, “Ranger’s body language has changed. She’s tighter, more guarded. She keeps looking up and scanning the treeline. She’s also barely spoke in the past several visits.” After another beat she added, “She’s worried about someone following her here.

Andy hadn’t considered that and the implication hit him like a bucket of ice water. She wasn’t just researching what he was, or what he could be. His existence must mean something, or she thought it might. Or that someone else might think that it would. Myths attracted attention, attention attracts power, and power attracts conflict. The danger she was worried about was not predators in the forest, but people from outside the forest. 

Why? Why was she protecting him? Thinking back on it, it had been true for days. She’d shifted from researcher to guardian. Andy, who had focused on the emotional complexity of having a beautiful woman scratch behind his ears, had missed it.

She was protecting him. Had she told anyone else, or was he a secret? All he knew for sure was that she talked less. She was making fewer notes or closed the book entirely and held it against his chest. She kept scanning the treeline.  The stress though was getting to her. Visible tension sat on her shoulders, a perpetual furrow on her brow. 

“She’s protecting me,” Andy thought, and the thought carried through his horn before he could modulate it. “She found a unicorn precursor and instead of reporting it, she’s keeping it to herself. She’s choosing me over her career. A woman is protecting my horn.”

The fox sent: you’re projecting. She’s protecting a rare specimen. This is entirely professional.

“She strokes my horn. That’s not professional responsibility.”

After a long, weighted silence, “ok.” 

Andy either missing the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it responded with, “Listen. I’m a virgin almost-unicorn and a woman is protecting my secret with her career on the line and I can’t even say ‘thank you’ because the [THOUGHT PROJECTION] doesn’t work on her for some reason. I want to tell her I understand what she’s doing and the gulf between what I want to say and what I can communicate is so wide that I could run a speed trial across it and never reach the other side.

When his fox didn’t respond he added. “I have a lot of feelings.”

I know. I can feel them. They are very loud.

The next day she arrived with rope, and cut branches. The construction took most of the morning. Andy and Teeth went back and forth between watching her, and trying to get back into their hunting and speed trial routine. Andy wasn’t improving and it was starting to make Teeth irritable. 

On their way back to the clearing she sent, “Are you even still trying?"

“What? Of course I am.”

“You haven’t increased your gallop efficiency in days, and I don’t know that you’ve really gotten any closer to your next tier either.”

“I’ve just plateaued. Maybe this is as good as I can be.”

“See? This is what I mean. Since when does the same individual who started as a single cell decide that he’s plateaued?”

Andy didn’t answer because they’d crossed over the threshold into the clearing and they could see what Ranger had been doing. She’d built a shelter. It was a simple triangular construction with interlocked branches covered in broad leaves. She was building him a structure. This was a larger structure than the depression under the log he and Teeth had been sharing. (He’d outgrown it but it was home)

This structure was positioned between two trees partially hidden by dense underbrush. A hiding spot, chosen so to conceal its occupant from the main game trails. She wasn’t just building a shelter, she was building a hiding place. Andy watched her work, standing at a respectful distance that his body language communicated as “I am interested and will not interfere” and his human consciousness communicated as “a woman is building me a house and I’m going to stand here and feel things and hope the horn doesn’t broadcast them too loudly.”

His horn broadcast them very loudly. Golden-green light pulsed with each emotional spike. His horn started mimicking victory battle music. Ranger noticed the pulsing, and the singing horn. She paused, branch in one hand, rope in another and looked at Andy with a softness that he had not seen directed at him in either life. She wasn’t asking for anything. She was just here, building him a shelter and looking at him like he mattered.

She said something. The sentence was low and warm. It was a tone she frequently took with him since the rock puzzle test. He still couldn’t understand her words, but the tone was one Andy had taken to believing meant, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“She brought me apples,” Andy excitedly projected to Teeth. “Apples! When I eat them my entire body experiences a joy so disproportionate to the stimulus that I now understand on a molecular level, why horses love apples. It’s not a preference. It’s a spiritual experience. Apples are equine religion. I have found God and God is a fruit and the prophet is a woman with freckles.”

Teeth sent an eyeroll and disappeared into the woods. 

Andy’s apple obsession was immediate and deeply embarrassing. He ate the first apple offered with restrained dignity. The second, with slightly less restraint and the third by pressing his nose into the cloth bag and extracting himself before she could offer it. He realized afterwards that it had been quite rude but he couldn’t find it in himself to regret his actions because the apple had been so incredibly delicious.

She laughed. It was sudden, genuine and accompanied by her wrapping both arms around his neck. Her laugh, the remainder of the apple on his tongue and the hug produced a moment so dense with competing sensations that Andy’s brain performed the emotional equivalent of a stack overflow (too many inputs, system unable to process. Please stand by.)

The fox sent, with the gentle precision of a companion who had been watching a disaster unfold in slow motion for weeks: “you are so far gone.”

“I know.”

“It’s going to be complicated.”

“I know.”

“She thinks you’re a horse.”

“I KNOW.”

“and when she finds out you’re not?”

Andy didn’t send anything back. The question had been sitting in him since the first time the ranger touched his horn: what happens when she finds out? When the proto-horse becomes a unicorn and the unicorn becomes a person (if it does; the humanoid form was theoretical, not confirmed, not guaranteed) and the person stands in front of her with hands and a voice and says: hi. I’ve been the horse the whole time. Every ear-scratch. Every apple. Every time you talked about your day. I heard all of it. I was in there the whole time.

What does she do with that? “Hey, remember when you used to stroke my horn? That was… yeah. That was exactly what it sounds like.”

No answer existed. It was a thread he couldn’t pull yet because pulling it would wreck the best thing in his life. In either of his lives.

“Forward,” Andy thought, the mantra that had carried him through four tiers and would carry him through two more. “Forward, and the answer will be there when I get to it. She’ll be there when I get to it. She’s not going anywhere. She told me: I’m not going anywhere.”

“Did she?”

[SPECIES: PROTO-HORSE (MAGICAL BEAST)]

[PURITY AFFINITY: ACTIVE]

[VIRGINAL STATUS: MAINTAINED]

[CONTRIBUTING FACTOR WEIGHT: 23%]

[PARTY MEMBERS: 2]

[HERD BOND: COMPANION (VULPINE ADEPT)]

[SOCIAL BOND: DEVELOPING (HUMANOID, RANGER-TYPE)]

[XP: 1528/3000]

[GALLOP EFFICIENCY: 87%]

Growing. Always growing. The horn, the bond, the feelings, the distance between what he was and what he would be.

Just over fourteen hundred XP. He’d get there.