A worn leather bag lay against his bookshelf. He picked it up and began to fill it with jars and little velvet satchels of herbs. Slinging it over his shoulder, he took one last look around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything before he left his tiny hovel of a home.
Ti Tunfa was a small town that sat in the weedy plains of central Zylekkha. It was a neat, tidy place with cobblestone streets and square, whitewashed buildings with peaked roofs of crumbly red tile. Raettonus thought of it as being a very sterile place. There was little color in it and, though he’d lived there many years, he’d never seen the streets busy.
Today was no exception. His boots pattered softly against the stones underfoot as he walked into the almost completely empty street. In this part of town, the buildings were cracked, decaying things that cried out for new coats of paint to hide the chips and mold dotting their exteriors. He didn’t bother to lock his door. No one would bother a broken shack at this edge of Ti Tunfa.
“Hey, Raet!” called Brecan from down the street. Raettonus scowled and turned toward his voice. “I was wondering when you were gonna wake up! I was gonna wake you, but then I thought you might be angry, so I let you sleep instead.”
Brecan was the first friend Raettonus had made in this alien land. The only friend, in fact—though “friend” was more of Brecan’s word than his. They had met when Raettonus had first entered Zylekkha. Brecan had attacked him.
He was a unicorn, Brecan. That was what he said, at least, but in truth he was more like some strange perversion of a unicorn. He had the face and arched neck of a desert horse, true, but his mouth opened wider, and it was full of sharp fangs. His horn was short and slender and looked like blue-tinted glass, and he had a bristly mane of off-white hair that stood up along his neck. His forelegs were slim, also like those of a horse, save that his light-colored hooves were cloven and sharp. There was a gentle slope to his back—which, along with his large, leathery wings, had made him hard for Raettonus to ride at first—and his hindquarters were those of a white lion with a long, thin tail with a brick red arrow at its end.
Raettonus slapped Brecan sharply on the nose. “You should’ve woken me,” he said. “I wanted to get an early start before it got hot out.”
“Ow,” said Brecan, his tail drooping. “But, Raet, you always yell at me when I wake you…”
“That’s other days. Today I wanted to get an early start before it got hot out.”
“I’m sorry, Raet,” Brecan said, lowering his head. “I didn’t mean to let you down. I was just helping Rhodes get—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Raettonus, smacking the unicorn again. “Let’s get going.”
Brecan closed his mouth and nodded eagerly. He moved his long, white wings forward so Raettonus could mount him. “When we get to Kaebha Citadel, I get to stay with you, right?” he asked, craning his neck around to look at Raettonus with his pale blue eyes. “You’re not going to send me away, are you? I get lonely here by myself.”
Raettonus pulled up his riding boots. “You’re not by yourself here,” he said nonchalantly. “There’s Rhodes.”
The unicorn considered that for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, there’s Rhodes. But that’s only sometimes, and it’s not the same.”
He shrugged. “If the general will let you stay, you can stay,” he said. “I don’t care either way, honestly.”
That seemed to strike Brecan. He flattened his ears. “You don’t care?” he asked in a small voice.
“Not even slightly,” Raettonus said, grabbing a hold of his mane. “Can we get going?”
“Y-yeah,” said Brecan, spreading his wings. “Sure, Raet.”
He took a few running steps and then leapt into the air. The unicorn and his rider spiraled up, away from Ti Tunfa. Raettonus watched the little city sink away beneath them, the little white and red buildings falling farther and farther away as the pair rose into the clear blue sky. Raettonus could still remember the first time he had seen Ti Tunfa, approaching it on Brecan’s back. Scared half to death, he had gripped the unicorn tightly as the city had appeared on the horizon like a row of little dollhouses coming closer and closer.