• Published 6th Oct 2012
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The Last Human: A Tale of the Pre-Classical Era - PatchworkPoltergeist



“It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.”

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River Reeds

Some strips of dried meat, five apples, extra socks and shirts, two ropes, his knives, an extra pair of tough pants, fishing wire, needle and thread, a box of matches, two Twinkies, and his favorite book. All packed neatly into a sack. A small sack.

This was not an expedition. This was not an adventure. This was a small outing. Leave, find something that spoke, ask around until assured humanity still existed (which it of course did). Then go straight home.

The human gathered his courage and walked. Morning shadows from a forgotten empire hid him from the sun as he traveled southward, following the tame river that flowed through the wide expanse of concrete. The human moved quickly, with only fleeting glances at passing scenery. He wasn’t sure he could get his legs moving again if they stopped.

Here was where he killed a den of coyotes without any remorse. Over there by the mailbox, the bench he sat on as he made a splint for an old injured grackle.

Several blocks farther, the gutted-out mall he lived in before the library. A block after, the blackened remains of what once was a red pickup truck burned from the inside out.

The first tall tree he climbed and below that, the sidewalk where he broke his leg. The same sidewalk where warm, strong arms held him until he stopped crying. Where someone told him he must try to be brave even though his leg really hurt and it was scary.

Many, many dead streetlights near all of these. Some bent or fallen over from wind or age or neglect, but most still standing with a sort of mournful dignity. And then the one lamp that still lit and hummed when the sun went down.

An empty lot where shrubs and flowers grew around a humble gathering of stone markers jutting from the grass. Here was the only spot where the human took pause. He gathered bits of honeysuckle and pressed them carefully between the pages of his book. In return, he left sprays of flax flowers and pink carnations. Gently, he kissed the tip of his fingers and touched the edge of every stone.

And the man walked on.

The human followed the river until the pavement was broken more and more by dandelions and wild grasses. At last he came to a point where there was only the dirt, grass, and stray leaves under his boots. Only then the human looked behind him. There was a faint blob of greys and browns in the distance. A tower’s silhouette stabbed at the clouds. He took a breath and filled it with the taste of iron, asphalt, brick, and mortar.

The human ignored the tightness in his heart and went forward.


Through the hours, days, and weeks, the human rose before the sun and traveled until it was too dark to clearly see or his feet ached too much for another step. Whichever came first. The river ran beside him and the farther it ran away from the iron city, the wilder it became. At home, it flowed so tame and still that it hardly moved. Now the water burbled and laughed constantly, and the human had to be careful the laundry wasn’t swept away.

And the sky! He could hardly believe it was the same sky from the city. Out here it wasn’t cut into little sections by tall buildings. The sheet of blue just went on and on. The human kept close to the trees whenever he could to hide his smallness from it.

The food ran out quickly and the human was glad he decided to follow the river where there was no shortage of supplies. The creatures that came for water had no fear of him and fell easily under his knives. Almost too easily. Most of them ran hardly a foot before they were caught—why, a hare practically climbed into his lap once. It almost felt… unfair sometimes. Of course, his lovely new deerskin cloak and the warm juices of hare meat kept it from seeming that unfair.

Such plenty kept his steps spritely and heart light, despite the fact he traveled for miles and found little information of other humans. The ponies that visited his city were right­—nobody around for ages.

The man saw an old yellow unicorn once but she was no help at all. They discovered each other after he woke up from a nap and she nearly tripped over his legs. He asked several times about his people, but the old thing was deaf to his questions.

She’d just peered at him strangely, musing to herself about “how cold the little hairless yeti must be.” The unicorn was likely senile too, for when he moved away she followed him down the riverbank with a blanket and some vines. She kept calling out bizarre things. Things like “Here, now. Here, boy!” and “Poor little dear” and “I won’t hurt you, my chuck,” over and over. How absurd—as if the frail mare could ever hurt him! The human had to run ahead a bit and hide in a tree before the unicorn gave up and went away.

“What a silly pony,” he mused to himself later, “To not know a man when she looks right at one. Ha, who knows? Perhaps there are thousands of people walking the earth and it's only the foolish ponies who ever run into them.”

One morning after a fresh breakfast of trout and blackberries the human found himself in an exceptionally bright mood. He was splayed out in the grass letting the sun soak in his bones, with his pants rolled up high and long legs dangling in the river. It put him in the mind of his city in the summer when it was warm enough to swim, yet cool enough to walk upon the pavement without burning his bare feet. For once the thought of home cheered him, and waving his feet in the water the human sung to himself:

Don't sit under the apple tree

With anyone else but me

Anyone else but me, anyone else but me

No, no, no

Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me

Till I come marching home.

Don’t... Hm.”

How did the next part of that song go? It had been so long since the last time he sang it and the human didn’t bring a book of lyrics. Suddenly, as if too impatient to wait for him to catch up, the song continued without him:

Don’t go walking down lovers’ lane

With anyone else but me

Anyone else but me

The voice rang out from the river, clear and beautiful as crystal bells. The human, suddenly very embarrassed about his own singing voice, timidly sang back. “Anyone else but me?”

Anyone else but me!” the voice cried.

The human looked around but found nobody there.

No, no no, don’t go walking down lovers’ lane

The human looked up into the trees and across the river. Nobody there.

Till I come marching home!”

The human looked down. A pony in the water looked back with eyes too big for her head. “Hello!” she giggled, “Is it me you’re looking for?”

No. No, not exactly a pony. She (presuming it was a she) certainly had the head of a pony, but her body was long and curvy, ending in a little tail that curled around a rock to keep from drifting away. There were fins instead of hooves, and her garishly pink pelt was smooth and shiny as a fish or an eel. It was iridescent when the sun hit her at certain angles, like oil puddles after rainfall.

“Like a seahorse,” the human mused to himself. “Or... maybe a seapony?”

The creature waved its little fins at him delightedly. “Shoo-be-doo! Shoo-shoo-be-doo!”

Seaponies know songs the way a pegasus knows clouds. In them is every lyric, every melody, every song, whistle, and hum that ever was or will be, for they are old as the tides. Outliving even the dragons by a fair millennium, seaponies have the time to rehearse them all perfectly. Songs are the only things they know, however, and they can only hold so much music at once. Words are shared between them like pollen among flowers, usually approaching land creatures in a chorus of three, five, or twelve to sing a conversation. A seapony alone struggles to keep all the songs straight, one colliding with the other. A tangible conversation with a lone seapony is nothing short of miraculous.

The human yearned for straight and simple answers and knew none of this.

Reader, pity him.

“But wouldn’t a seapony belong in the sea?” he wondered. “You’re a bit far from the sea, aren’t you?”

“I’m a deep water sailor just come from Hong Kong, you give some whiskey, I’ll sing you a song. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes it’s not for days. Drop the anchor, lift my heart.” The seapony flourished a dramatic fin. “I will be there and everywhere, here there and everywhere but my life, my love, and my lady is the sea.”

“You must have traveled far.”

“I am a traveler of both time and space. Keep a little birdhouse in your soul,” she said. The seapony rested her head upon the shore, tangles of sea green mane clinging to her face. For a time she watched the man’s legs floating in the water humming shoo-be-doos to herself.

Then she peered at him curiously. “Are you going to Scarborough Faire?”

“Err, pardon?”

“If you’re going to San Francisco,” she informed him, “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. They tell me a fault line runs right through here. Atlantis will rise, Sunset Boulevard will fall. Better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone!” The seapony grinned little sharp teeth, “Where the beach use to be, won’t be nothin’ at all.”

The human wasn’t sure what most of that was supposed to mean, but mention of ancient San Francisco lit a candle in his heart. “Do you think you can help me? I am looking for somebody.”

“Don’t you want somebody to love? Love does exactly what it wants to do!”

“Um. No, not exactly. I’m looking for someone that looks like me.” Suddenly he thought of the strange old mare who chased him with the vines. A knot tied in his stomach. “Can you even tell what I am?”

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”, the pink pony told him. When the human wilted, she pressed against him and soothed, “I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream. You could hide beside me, maybe for a while? And I won’t tell no one your name.”

“Really. Then what is it, then? What am I?”

“Andy, you’re a star! You are my shining star, you are my only sunshine.” The seapony tugged on his leg and gestured to the river. “Black hole sun, won’t you come? If the sun don’t come you get a tan from standing in the English rain.”

Against the assault of good cheer and the sun still pleasant on his shoulders the human’s melancholy slipped away. He laughed, though he knew there wasn’t much to laugh at.

Satisfied, the seapony came back to the surface and smiled at him. The human reached out a hand to offer her some of the blackberries leftover from breakfast, but the pony made a face at them. Then she sneezed a little jet of bubbles.

“You’re sort of a silly little pony,” the human told her. “You certainly mean well, even if not much help. Thank you for trying, but I need to move on. If even you don’t know me then I may have farther to go than I imagined, and the morning is already over. Farewell, little seapony.” He brought his legs out of the water and reached for his socks and boots.

In the river, the seapony tilted her head and frowned. She bobbed in the water absently humming, “He’s got the whole world in his hands, he’s got the whole world in his hands...”

And then the pony recited smooth and empty of melody: “Human. Humanus. Homo Sapien. Order: Primate. Family: Most likely dead. Class: Synapsida. Phylum: Chordata. Otherwise known as the ‘contradiction creature’, due to its unpredictable and often senseless nature. Commonly mistaken for a hairless ape. A vain animal that may compose symphonies inspired by alley cats, but cannot imagine the world going on without them. The augmentation of the earth and adorner of ships. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? He is wise enough to win the world but fool enough to lose it. Man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew, now man’s reign is through. Duck and cover, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades! Shoo-be-doo! Shoo-shoo-be-doo!”

The human stared in shock.

After a moment the seapony gently added, “It is also very bad at singing.”

For some time the man could only sit there, frozen in time with his hand still in the air holding a sock.

The seapony smugly puffed out her little chest. Then she twisted about to watch a frog hopping along in the grass. “Jerimiah was a bullfrog,” she told the human helpfully.

A hand grasped her chin to keep her focus. “Please. Please, miss, all I want to know is if you’ve seen other people like me. I don’t care what kind, any sort would satisfy me. Just even one you’ve seen sitting by another river or boating upon the sea or living underground? Somewhere. Anywhere! Please, just tell me you’ve seen one and I swear I will believe you and go home and never bother you again.”

"Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling..." The seapony sniffed at the smell of dead trout on his fingers. “Her mind is Tiffany twisted,” she apologized. "Somewhere a queen is weeping. Somewhere a king has no wife. Out there there's a world outside of Yonkers, way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby."

The human began to move away, but two little fins grasped his wrist and refused to release him. She was surprisingly strong.

"There's a slick town, Barnaby! Out there, full of shine and full of sparkles. Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby." The creature snorted a little jet of bubbles. "Listen, Barnaby! Agh! People hearing without listening. Nowhere man please listen! You don't know what you're missing!"

She squeezed her eyes shut in concentration and shook her head as if trying to get something out of her mane.

"Listen. The White Roc soared o'er the sky with all the human beings, all of them, clutched close against its feathered breast."

The human knelt down on the bank to meet the seapony's wide, lavender eyes. "I am listening but I don't understand. Even in these wild lands, surely rocks cannot fly. Can they?"

After a moment he added, "And my name is not Barnaby."

There was a beat of silence as the seapony floated there with her eyes clamped shut. Then in a voice eerily clear and devoid of laughter she recited, "For all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of an enormous size. Cloudy quills twelve paces long and thick in proportion. Bright eyes burning like fire. And oh, it's so strong to seize a man—one and one and one is three—into its claws. And in the naked light I saw ten thousand people, maybe more. There's a place where the light won't find you, holding hands while the walls come tumbling down. Ah, look at all the lonely people! I hear her singing in sighing of the wind blowing in the treetops. All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"

"Little one, where are the others? Where did they go?"

"Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes," she said gravely. "Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes."

“I still don’t understand.”

But the focus in her voice had already unraveled back into songs, disconnected and full of wonder. “Suddenly the sun broke through. I looked around, she was gone. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”

The human suddenly noticed that not only had the seapony’s focus unraveled, but so had her grip upon the rock. She swept away with the current like a butterfly in a high wind, a blur of pink in the distance. Over the water, or perhaps under it, the bell voice called, “Sing a song of fire, lest you fall into the dark!”

Then only sounds of water rushing over rocks and a mockingbird scolding from a tree branch.

“She seemed to know what I was,” the human said to himself. “That’s something at least.” Then again, the seapony could have just been reciting another song she heard somewhere. It could have meant absolutely nothing. “And what was all that about a roc?”

The sun had already dried his wet legs. It was too hot for a cloak and blossoms in the trees had been replaced with unripe fruit. “Summer must be here. Summer already.”

He’d been gone far too long. The human hoped his pigeons were still doing alright. Poor Fines must miss him terribly.

The seapony’s talk wasn’t much to go on but it was better than nothing. The human gathered his things together and went at a brisk pace, leaving behind the leftover berries to shrivel in the sun.

The man only went half a mile before stopping again. It was barely mid-afternoon but it somehow felt as if he’d walked for days. The pack became unbearably heavy and his cloak kept getting in his way. And he could hardly see... had the sun always been this bright?

The human settled down among the reeds, using the pack as a makeshift pillow. The reeds looked healthy and sturdy. He could weave a hat for himself to get the sun out of his eyes and put the time cut from today’s journey to good use.

The brim was only half done when the human’s eyelids became too heavy to lift. He curled his cloak about him and drifted to sleep, strands of reeds still clutched tightly in his hands.


The wheels groaned and a great clatter erupted in the night as the wagons crashed against each other from the sudden stop. A cluster of plovers scattered to the air just before the pony crashed through their nest and a dormouse just barely missed getting trampled underhoof.

In the moonlight, a unicorn’s silhouette cut through reeds until it reached a brown lump. He ran an anxious little half-circle around it once, twice, then took a step forward and sniffed. It was an interesting scent: hints of stag, mud, fishes, honeysuckle and something… else. In a glow of silvery white the brown cloth lifted away to reveal the sleeping creature inside.

“Well.” The copper unicorn’s grin reached for his ears. “Well, well. By the moon above, would you look at that?”

An ear swiveled at the sounds of wheezing, hoofbeats, and an annoying jingle bell. The unicorn glanced at the approaching a donkey and another younger unicorn close behind. “About time you louts caught up.”

“And just what—” the donkey broke into a fit of coughs. “Wh-what’s so important you have to near choke us to death, eh? Pullin’ so hard like that’s dangerous, we could ‘ave died draggin’ yer fool hide! Least ye can do is warn—”

“Hush!” the unicorn hissed. “I can’t tell how long ago it found the nightberries. We might not have much time before it stirs.”

The donkey looked at the figure in the reeds and grimaced. “What can ye even do with a sick, starvin’ ‘squatch anyhow? ‘Twill just die afore the month is out. ‘Prolly give us whatever it has and take all our fur along with it.”

“You’re an idiot. Not that I’m surprised.” The elder unicorn turned to the younger, who was peering over the donkey’s shoulder. “And what of you, soothsayer? Do you recognize this animal from your wanderings through the fabric of time?” The copper stallion smirked and the donkey chuckled nastily in the back of his throat.

But the unicorn stayed quiet, eyes transfixed at the sleeping creature and his ears pricked stiff. He had not even blinked.

The elder’s hoof just missed striking his nose. “Answer when you’re spoken to, jangling whelp!”

The younger pony blinked rapidly, as if to make up for all the blinks he missed earlier. “I-I don’t see anything worth taking. Just a furless ape is all. I... um. I saw a colony of attercop not far back, perhaps we could use those instead?”

“No. No, I want this one. Disassemble the thorn cage and bring it here. I’m not going to risk moving it, just rebuild the cage around it right here.”

The donkey rolled his eyes, “So cast a sleeper and move it yerself. I’m not looking for a cut up mouth.”

“A spell to hold that one has not yet been crafted. Perhaps never will be. Just have to do our best with our hooves and teeth.” The unicorn thought a moment. “Hm. Fetch some rope from the wagons too, while you’re at it. No, on second thought, make that chains. Better safe than sorry. The one who wakes it up gets an eye full of thorns instead of a mouthful.”

A medley of jingling metal and rustling grass mixed with the crickets’ night chorus. In the dark, a horn’s cold light shone like a star by the river. Then, as soon as it began, the sounds fell silent and there was a groan of protesting wheels and creaking wood. The light vanished.

The wind sighed in the reeds in counterpoint for the chorus of crickets. The family of plovers landed to work on rebuilding a destroyed nest, the only evidence anyone had been there at all.