I did a round of spell practice for my upcoming wizardry exam- the question of which spells I would have to be able to cast for the exam had been answered for years thanks to it being a standardized exam administered by the Mage's Guild- and then decided that I'd been more than productive enough for one day, and that I should reward myself for my efforts.
"Hello there, Joseph," Antiope said, as I walked into the store. "How's Frederick doing?"
"Just got done fixing his wheelchair, so maybe he'll come by tomorrow and tell you himself," I said. "He told me he's got at least two more decades in him, though."
"Color me surprised," Tim said, carefully levitating a heavy cardboard box down from a high shelf. "I know he's a half-elf and all, but a creaky old man like that feels like he should be dying in a few years, y'know?"
Antiope and Tim were interesting figures in Greenwood Village- or 'Elftown,' as some outsiders called our neighborhood. Antiope was a druid, just like my dad, although she wasn't quite as powerful as the guy who'd been trained by a unicorn for two centuries before the War. But, like Dad, she'd settled down here in Greenwood Village pretty soon after the War, and hadn't moved since. Over the course of her three centuries here, she'd ended up marrying a succession of human men, raising children with them, and mourning their loss, until this time, the man she met and fell in love with happened to be an elf.
Tim, by contrast, was far closer to a peer to me, for all that he was more than old enough to be my father. He was a full-blooded elf, just like Antiope, but unlike Antiope and most of the other elves in Greenwood Village, he was in his mid-40s, and had never known a world where elves weren't a subject people of the Hikaano Empire. And for some reason, despite Tim having been just as old as Antiope's human husbands had been when they first met... Iunno. Something about it always wigged me out, a little. Like Antiope was a real elf, and Tim was just some pale blonde guy who happened to have pointy ears.
"I get what you mean," I said. "Twenty years is plenty of time for him to have some kind of household accident, even with him being a pretty meticulous and careful man who lives with a powerful druid. I might not have that full twenty years. But... well. I hope I do."
"I hope so too," Tim said. "I'll admit, I wasn't super sure about bringing Frederick into the publishing house, but I am more than happy to be proven wrong. That dude can write."
"Speaking of the publishing house..." I began, pulling out a few shiny brass dollar coins and setting them on the counter.
"Yep, got your monthlies right here," Antiope said, reaching under the counter and rummaging through a box. "Here we are." She pulled a stack of comic books out and dropped them on the counter. "You do know we carry comic books starring boys, right?"
"Do you really need me to explain why a teenage boy would prefer looking at drawings of, shall we say, larger than life women?" I said dryly.
"Suit yourself," Antiope said, jotting down a note in her records- that I'd come to pick up my monthly subscriptions, what time I'd done that, and a bunch of other tedious bookkeeping stuff that gave Antiope an objective view of which hours were the busiest for her family's store, and thus required more staffing. After all, it wasn't just her and Tim who worked here, they were simply the only ones here right now. "Enjoy yourself, young man."
"I fully intend to," I said, nodding back at her as I stowed the thick stack of books in my coat's internal Bag of Holding. "Tell Talia I said hi."
"I'm here!" Talia called, before bursting out of the stairwell behind the counter and soaring through the air at me.
"Do we have to do this every time?" I asked, as I caught Talia in midair with a burst of arcane force. "You know I'm going to screw it up and break something eventually, right?"
"But it's funnn," Talia whined.
"Everything on that side of the counter is enchanted for durability," Tim added. "It'll be fine."
I rolled my eyes, and threw my arms open to accept the inevitable Talia Hug, which came right on cue.
Talia wasn't built like the typical elf. The typical elf was tall and slender, and with even weaker sexual dimorphism than the already weak dimorphism of humans- there was a reason the human idea of "androgynous" was simply "an ordinary elf." And while Talia's parents, both being noticeably shorter than the average elf, could possibly explain why Talia was eighteen years old and still only five feet tall, there was no reasonable explanation for why Talia was so curvy. Not that I was complaining, mind you; Talia was a very affectionate friend, and... well...
Stolen novel; please report.
...I was the grandson of Artorias Wind-Caller. He liked 'em thick, and so do I.
I had to inherit something, didn't I?
"Mom, Dad, can I-" Talia began.
"You're an adult, you can do what you want," Antiope said.
"Have fun," Tim added.
---
"You sure do read a lot of comic books about girls kissing, huh?" Talia remarked, as we sat on the roof of my house and picked through my monthly subscriptions for the most tantalizing bits.
"You're also reading them," I pointed out.
"Yeah, but I'm a girl," Talia said. "It's normal for me."
"I'm pretty sure the humans would disagree with that," I said. "I just enjoy artwork of attractive women, and happen to prefer it in a context where there isn't some random-ass poorly-written dude I have to pretend isn't there. You enjoying that same artwork for the same reasons, though, would be 'elven deviancy,' because humans are homophobic."
"The comic books are also elven deviancy," Talia pointed out. "That's why Greenwood Village has its own publishing house, remember?"
My mother, a powerful wizard, was already expected to keep up with technological innovations as part of her work as a wizard-for-hire. As such, she'd often fill her free time by tinkering with various iterations of the printing press, and ended up sponsoring a small publishing house in our neighborhood just to get the damn presses out of our house.
Naturally, the local publishing house that existed entirely because a powerful wizard realized she didn't have a use for all these printing presses but still wanted someone to use them ended up getting a lot of use from locals with their own artistic impulses, printing all sorts of random bullshit... until someone managed to print something that people actually liked, and suddenly Greenwood Village's artistic community began to take the publishing house much more seriously.
The publishing house's output was pretty diverse, all told. Most of its output was serialized media, usually on either a weekly or monthly basis, although it did publish a few whole, standalone works that weren't just lightly-edited collections of a serialized work. Some people published an ongoing story about the adventures of some fictitious protagonist, some published fictitious stories about real historical people, and some people just wrote a new thing every week or month that was in the same vein as the things they'd made every publishing cycle for the past while and so simply slapped the same name on it and called it a day.
"Yeah, but humans are more fine with women kissing each other than men doing so," I said. "Since humans are, generally, pretty patriarchal, and boys think it's hot when girls kiss but gross when boys do it. I understand it's currently not happening, but I think it plausibly could happen that a human publishing house decided to launch its own answer to 'Girls Loving Girls In Improbable Situations.'"
"They'd fuck up the improbable situations," Talia muttered. "They wouldn't get that the series is a high-concept joke about strange adventures that always end the same way: with two chicks making out."
"Sure, but I think there's still some artistic merit to drawings of girls kissing, even if they're not the punchline to a high concept joke," I said. "I mean, let's be real with each other: you know I'm not reading this series because it makes me laugh."
"Right, you're reading it because you're theoretically into girls," Talia said.
"Talia," I began, wearily.
"Come on, man," Talia pleaded. "The unicorns are gone. The mage-knights are gone. The old days are gone, and were gone since long before you were born. Your insistence on maintaining your virginity-"
"Talia," I said, more firmly. "We're not having this argument again. Yes, you're my girlfriend. Yes, I do think you're attractive. Yes, I do intend to put a few babies in you one day. But... not yet. The unicorns are not gone. Sightings are rare, out on the frontier, but they do happen, and they are still out there. For so long as they're still out there... I can't give up hope. Elken could still be alive."
"He probably died in the War."
"He threw his own rider into a snowbank and ran away; if any unicorn survived the War Of The Roses, it would be Elken." I shrugged. "But even if he has died in the time since, we know there are some unicorns left."
"Joseph..."
"My father was a mage-knight. His father was a mage-knight. And his father, too." I clenched my fist. "I'm the latest in a long line of mage-knights."
Talia simply sighed, but I kept going.
"If anyone is going to bring them back, it's going to be me."