Katie looked up from the unicorn she was carving at.

There had been a sound, a knock at the front door. For a long moment seriously considered ignoring it, but then she sighed. It might be something important. She put aside her tools, rose from her stool and went to answer the summons, absently wiping the clay scraps from her tanned hands with a well-used scrap of blue towel as she walked down the hall. Her sneakers made little squeaking noises on the tan floor tiles.

She spun the deadbolt and opened the door.

Waiting on the other side was a scrawny stooped individual, shifting nervously on the stoop and squinting in the bright afternoon sunshine behind a pair of fussy rimless glasses. He wore a crumpled blue suit that was well-made but ill-fitting, and made him look like a scarecrow. His face had an overly-scrubbed look to it, as if he had just spent hours feverishly scraping off ten years’ worth of grime with a stiff wire brush.

Something about him was vaguely familiar.

“Yes?” The brunette sculptor asked cautiously, holding the towel in one hand and the edge of the door with the other. The man stared at her for a long moment before answering.

“Hello... Katie.”

More cautious now, she stared back at him through narrowed hazel eyes.

“Have we met?”

“Yes... um... actually. We went to high school together. My name is Norman. Norman...”

“Tatterling. Yes. I remember you now.” The words were very flat and very dry. A painfully long series of memories rose up in her mind, Norman flickering around the edges of her high-school existence like an especially persistent skin fungus. “What are you doing here?”

“I... needed to see you.” He passed a thin hand through an equally thin tangle of sun-faded hair.

She sighed again.

“Norman, I don’t know how you found me, but I made it quite clear before that there was never going to be anything between us. Nothing has changed.” She paused and automatically glanced at one of her hands. “Actually, everything has changed. I’m en...”

“I’ve been away.” He interrupted as if he hadn’t heard her. And maybe he hadn’t; he had the unmistakable look of a man who has spent far too many months bouncing around and around inside the shiny seamless interior of his own skull. “In the years after graduation... I’ve traveled around the world five times. I kept track. Very careful track. I climbed the highest mountains, dug in the deepest valleys. Forded the widest rivers. Raided the oldest tombs.”

“Norman...”

“I... I drank tea with strange gods and sat at the feet of holy men. And not so holy ones, as well. I watched... I watched and I took notes as a man was eaten alive by a gang of trolls.” His dark gaze became even more distracted for a moment. “Under a bridge, no less. I followed the paths of the unicorns in the black forests that lie on the eastern side of Woldercan. I attended the rites of the priest-kings of the southern swamps, joined them as they danced around that damned idol of theirs. I learned forty two of the Secret Names and twenty three of the Hidden Truths. And finally, at the end of it all, among the rubble at the very end of the world, I found it. What I had heard about. What I was looking for. I had to trade a dragon egg to a dead man for it. It was very probably the last dragon egg in the world. I wonder sometimes if he will be able to get it to hatch. He seemed very certain..”

A final sigh, very tired. Almost compassionate, but not quite.

“Norman, I’m genuinely sorry to see you ended up like this, but if you don’t leave this instant, I’ll have to call the police. Do you understand me?”

He held up his hand, which was trembling slightly. Something golden was there, she noticed for the first time.

“And then after I found it, I had to find my way back to you again. So I could... give it to you. That took another three months. I should have kept better track of where you were, somehow.”

“Goodbye, Norman.” Katie started to close the door.

He twisted the thing a fraction and it glinted in the sun, a sliver of light, a crack in a wall showing a glimpse of.. something beyond. Bright and sharp and strange.

Her hand pushing the door came to a reluctant stop.

She frowned, her brow furrowing.

“What is it?”

Norman held out his hand and unclenched his fingers with a visible effort, a miser undoing the chains on his strongbox. The object bisected his weathered palm. It was a narrow golden shaft maybe five inches long, sharp-pointed and jagged at both ends and completely covered with row after tiny tight row of squiggling characters.

The figures seemed to move uneasily in the sunlight, rows of shiny squirming bugs. Norman had been holding it so tight in his hand, the shapes were reflected in red in his callused skin.

She stared at it and wrinkled her nose. The thing gleamed again in the sun and she lifted her hand a fraction, as if to shade her eyes.

“Norman, what is that... that disgusting thing? It’s so hideous I can barely take my eyes off it...”

He gave it a practiced flip in his hand. Her head did a surprised little bob as her gaze tracked it through the air.

A smile deployed a machete and hacked its way through the jungle of his grim intensity.

“Why, I thought that you understood, my darling Katie. It’s the key to your heart.”

He leaned forward and slid it into her, through her stained sweater and bra and in between her well-formed breasts.

It went in quite smoothly and painlessly, sinking down without resistance until it abruptly stopped, thudding against something. A key going into a well-oiled lock. She stared down, silent and still and wide-eyed, at the half that still stuck out of her. Norman let his hand float above it for a long moment, his cracked fingers spread.

She noticed with clinical abstraction that most of his pinkie was missing, only a ragged stump remaining. A symbol, something resembling a triangular eye, had been branded over the wound.

His hand grasped the object again and gave it a precise half-turn.

Something clicked deep inside her and she gave a little gurgling gasp, her shoulders hitching under the gray fabric.

There was another moment of stillness and then the key was noiselessly sucked the rest of the way in, leaving no blood on her skin or tear in her clothing.

She was calm now, still looking at the point of entry. Very calm, as she felt it spread inside her, a seed sprouting a thousand twining golden tendrils and thrusting them deep into her soil.

Her eyes closed and her head drooped the rest of the way down onto her chest, her hair spilling forward on both sides and concealing her face.

The towel slipped from her hand.

He waited and he watched.

The tendrils reached her brain and hooked themselves into the waiting slots, wet puffy slots that throbbed now like open wounds.

A million tiny keys, each slotting neatly into place and opening wide another door within her that she had never realized existed. Doors that led down into new rooms of thoughts, room after room that were each vast and strange and beautiful beyond all reckoning, their elaborately arched ceilings reaching higher and higher, invisible in the gloom.

Finally, the last key slid home, the last lock was sprung, and the last door swung open.

It opened in the center of everything, connected everything together. The world hinted at by the crack, by the keyhole, finally revealed in all of its splendor.

Her head came back up, clockwork, and her eyelids moved to the open position.

There had been an authoritative knock at the door and Katie had somehow found the strength to waft forth from the shaded gloom of her miserable hovel to answer it.

And on the other side.. at long last, the sun came out, and standing tall and proud in the midst of it, surrounded by a flaming aura, was...

“Norman?” She stared at him in disbelief from behind the long strands of her spilled hair. “Is... is it really you?”

“Yes, Katie. I’ve found my way back to you at last.”

“I... I had almost given up hope.” She shuddered for a moment, then started to cry.

“What’s the matter?”

She hiccuped and spoke through the tears.

“I wasn’t faithful to you, Norman. I was weak and lonely. My bed was so cold and empty without you beside me. I’ve slept with other men. I...” Her eyes widened even further in horrified realization and she looked at one of her fingers, looked at the circle that was clamped there like a smug golden leech, fattening itself off of her life-essence. “I was going to marry one of them!” She spun away in a further swirl of hair. “I’m not worthy of your love. I don’t know why you bothered to come here. You won’t.. bother to stay.”

Norman took her chin in his hand, and turned it back towards him. Turned her whole body.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It... it doesn’t?” She brushed unbelieving fingers across the hand that held her, then pulled them away, afraid of being burned by the power that coursed there.

“I’ve been with women since we parted. It has been an equally long and cold trail back to your side. So very long. I too sometimes sought companionship for the night.” He smiled, a sardonic sun. “Actually, I even found a thing that would have given me any woman in the world. For the night, if I exposed her to it long enough. For life... if I did more.”

“What... what did you do with it?”

“I disposed of it. It’s gone forever. I didn’t need it, knowing that you were here, waiting for me.”

She flushed.

“But all of that is behind us now, Katie. We’re together again.”

He pulled her towards him, by her chin.

“Together...”

She breathed the word as she melted eagerly into his arms and they kissed. Following her lead, the world dissolved away around them, reforming only when they finally, reluctantly, broke apart.

Norman reached into his suit jacket, and pulled something out of an interior pocket. A narrow hinged case, made of some strange silvery metal. He handed it to her, holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger. The thing sunk in her hand; it was incredibly heavy for its size.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

She did so, the lid flipping open with a click. Inside were two parallel sets of velvet-lined clamps. One set was empty, while in the other nestled a sharp-tipped shaft about five inches long, made of gold. Gorgeous symbols marched across it in endless rows, making her feel strange and tall and powerful.

“Take it.”

She plucked the object from its hole, and something snapped inside the space it left behind. She tossed the box away into the shrubbery that lined the front walk. The discarded container rapidly began to blotch and crumble, but her attention was focused entirely on what she held in her hand. She had never seen such a thing before, but even before he spoke she knew what she could do with it, could do to any man if she so desired. If there had ever been the possibility of more than one man in her life.

The symbols throbbed and burned against her flesh.

“You must put it inside me.”

She did so almost before the words were out of his mouth. It slid through Norman’s tie and suit and into his heart. A pause, a turning, and it disappeared inside of him entirely. He closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again.

He smiled, easily and openly. He bent and picked her up in his arms, so her shapely legs were dangling. She slid her own arm around his shoulder. He was both surprisingly strong and gentle.

“After we are wed in the eyes of the law, I will of course do this again. But for now...” He started to cross the threshold, but then paused. “Katie?”

She kissed him again, melting the universe once more, setting it on fire, bright and strange, as something vast and golden intertwined inside them.

“Yes, my dearest?”

“There is something you need to do first.”

“Oh!” She flushed again, much deeper than before. “Oh, yes! Of course!”

She ripped the grotesque clinging worm from her finger and tossed it after the box without a thought or a glance. Tossed away everything and everyone connected to it. Cut them out of her life, neatly and cleanly, like the cancers that they were.

He carried her across the threshold of their home and closed the door behind them.

Their reunion was long and joyous, and so was their marriage.

For their honeymoon, they made grateful offerings to certain altars in far-off places. Fresh offerings, newly and enthusiastically harvested.

Then they went and walked together hand in hand under the black foliage, following the paths of the unicorns.