The Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

its wings made a sound like a lot of knives being sharpened all together, and sometimes it gave a cry that was dreadful because it was so soft and gentle, and even a little sad and scared, as though it were imitating the sound Felicitas might have made when it took her.

I’m a good walker. I can walk anywhere, if you give me time.

in the night, we heard the griffin, making that soft, lonely, horrible sound it makes when it’s hunting.

But the unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there, too.

what I do recall, and will to my last day, is the tiny gasp of pain that followed my strike, and the terrible sweet ease with which even a farm tool slips through flesh. And may all the gods forgive me, in that moment it felt good—it made my belly happy, and my bones—and

I’d seen squirrels, birds, little blue snakes with tiny hands, sheep and goats, such as my family raised—even

Oh, those lovely, lost, wise, half-mad, sweetly evil faces of the Dreamies, peering back at me out of bushes, thickets, even pools—those faces suddenly next to mine for a moment—prancing in the trees, swimming down the moonlight.

the limping near-bear who seemed to come and go like a candle flame;

their taunting brightness

each one of those faces gaily threatening me,

carrying by the neck a thing like a sort of fluffy frog with useless bat wings.

She shrugged and waited silently until I had done the best I could with the frog thing, choking it down, so as not to insult her foraging.

A group of what looked for a tantalizing moment to be children, snarling and blocking our way until we were nearly on them, and then turning into little tree frogs as they went dancing away.

I don’t exactly know how to talk about them, except to say that they were all almost beautiful, but not quite. I think I mean that in the way they came and went; they hurt your eyes, just a bit, they shivered between here and there just a bit, between gone and back and almost, just so. They felt dangerously lovely,

I couldn’t stop. I swear I couldn’t stop. “You don’t belong anywhere at all! And I’m sorry for you, I really am.” She didn’t even blink. She just stood there, looking at me. And while she was looking at me, and while I was still yammering, I learned a terrible thing. The worst thing in this world is not to lose all you have. The worst thing in this world is not having your heart broken. Loss passes, pain passes—even heartbreak passes. The very worst thing in this world is to hurt a heart that cares for you. I know that now.

still half hoping she’d speak to me, and half-afraid she would. It’s purely awful to feel that way about someone you’re with.

And trees that were nearly like trees the way I remembered trees: tall and slender as saplings, but somehow, they didn’t look like saplings. They had dark silver trunks and bright leaves the color I imagined the ocean to be, and where the sun shone right down on them, they glittered like blue jewels. But the trunks, lovely as they were, had a strangely temporary air about them, as though traveling troupes had propped them up for a village performance. As though they could be taken down at midnight, fast, for the next town. I’d never have thought that about trees once.

he came as lightning with eyes.

Things blur when you’re as tired and sideways as I know I was,

the weary-looking rooks raising one more noisy new nest;