How The Princess Learned the Morals of the Past No Longer Apply to the Present
Chapter 5 of the Princess and the Zebra Unicorn
Hello Friends!
As promised, I’ve finally finished another chapter of my Zebra Unicorn fantasy story. On Monday, I finished up another manuscript that I’d been working on for my daughters.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve settled into a nice habit of creating 3 chapters a week on a novel for my kids. As a result, I’m sitting on 5 completed manuscripts. The last one came in at just under 200,000 words.
When I dusted off the first chapter of the Zebra Unicorn (I’m capitalizing that because it pleases me), I thought I might turn it into a book. But I soon realized I couldn’t do two books for my kids at the same time and still keep up with my other professional obligations. So, I switched gears and decided to continue this story after I finished up with the other book.
Now that the other book is done, I should be able to do 2-3 chapters of this per week. The chapters of this tend to be longer than the other stories I’ve been writing. We’ll see if that continues, or if I’ll revert to my regular routine (I don’t completely control these things).
If you’ve forgotten how this story goes, or you just haven’t heard of it, here’s the first chapter:
I’ve been playing around with the podcast feature a little more, so I expect I’ll release this series there, maybe in the next few weeks. I’ll be re-recording the voiceover so it’s only the chapters without the introductions. It’s a good way to funnel my election anxiety into something more positive.
Enjoy!
Chapter 5. How The Princess Learned the Morals of the Past No Longer Apply to the Present
Princess found that the primal scream therapy made her feel better, but her instincts told her it was only a temporary reprieve. The underlying cause of her agitation still lingered in the shadows. She recognized it would have to be addressed at some point.
But not right then.
She mounted Artemix and urged him on towards the hills.
They were going cross-country now, away from the roads that were too often populated by fanatical devotees to outdated religions who thought they had the right to stick their nose in other people's business.
“Princess,” Artemix said, once their voices had recovered from screaming so much. “There's something I've been meaning to ask.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” the zebra unicorn continued. “I mentioned that I'm very old before, right?”
“I think you said something to that effect.”
“I told you about that time a couple thousand years ago when I spent a few centuries as an avenging unicorn on a murderous rampage?”
“Uh, I think so,” Princess said.
Artemix laughed, “Those were the days. I had so much blood on me that you couldn't even see my stripes. My eyeballs vented fire. It was a good look.”
“Who did you kill?”
“Just people that deserved it,” Artemix said. “And people they were related to, and their friends, and...” his voice trailed off. “Other people too.”
“Ah,” Princess said with less certainty.
Artemix laughed. “Good thing there wasn't social media back then right? I don't know how kids these days do it. Imagine having all these photos of yourself covered in blood and the entrails of your victims, that must lead to some embarrassing moments during job interviews. Think about having to explain a video. A video! Can you imagine? I mean, in my case there are a few frescoes and crude mosaics, but nobody thinks those are based on reality!” He began to chuckle quietly.
“What's social media?” Princess asked.
“Ah,” Artemix said. “I keep forgetting that unicorns perceive time differently than you do. What century is it again? Actually, it doesn't matter. I wanted to ask you about something else.”
“Well, get on with it.”
“The other people I see tend to wither and die before my very eyes. It's because they're mortal. It's actually quite funny to watch that happen to the individuals I don't like. But on the rare instance when I do make friends, it can become disconcerting.”
“I imagine.”
“But that brings me to you. You aren't aging that I can perceive. Why is that?”
Princess leaned to the side to get a better look at Artemix. She didn't want to lean too far because she knew he was capable of turning his head completely around and that freaked her out. But she wanted a better perspective on one of his eyeballs, so she leaned. “Don't you think that question might be a little personal?” she asked.
“Is it? A unicorn wouldn't have any problem answering something like that.”
“Well, I'm not a unicorn.”
“Okay, fine, then tell me who put you in that crystal coffin, and how long you were in there?”
At this, Princess patted Artemix on the neck and began to laugh.
“What?” he asked.
“Is this interrogation Tuesday or something?” Princess asked.
Artemix gave her his famous side-eye. “It's Thursday. Are you saying you'll answer all these questions on Tuesday?”
“I'm saying you shouldn't be asking.”
Artemix nodded in comprehension. He went silent for a moment and then tried to laugh it off. “I guess it's like the old saying, 'curiosity killed the unicorn.' Have you ever heard anyone say that?”
“No,” Princess said flatly.
Artemix fell into silence and for a while Princess thought that would be the end of the discussion, but then Artemix started grumbling with a renewed energy. “Now, wait one minute. I hardly claim to be an expert in human etiquette. In fact, I don't understand humans very much at all. Most of them are quite awful. The kids are okay, but I digress. Suffice it to say that I have a basic comprehension of how your species functions, but that's just because I've gutted so many of you.”
Princess let out a long sigh. “Is this going anywhere?”
Artemix ignored her. “Yes, as a matter of fact it is. You're not going to convince me that when you free somebody from a crystalline coffin in the middle of the enchanted woods, it's somehow considered 'inappropriate' to ask her how she got there.”
“So, basically you're saying you're not going to take my hint?”
“What hint?”
“The hint that you shouldn't ask.”
“When did you hint that? It seems to me you've only said it directly.”
Princess smiled to herself, not certain whether or not Artemix could see her, but she guessed that he probably could with his around-the-corner vision. She changed tactics, “Even after all your centuries, you've never come to accept that there are some things that are better off not knowing?”
“N...” Artemix began, then he hesitated. “Well, you've got me there. There are certainly some smells I've discovered that I could have done without. And I'm also haunted by the screams of the guilty.”
“Screams of the guilty, those are bad?” Princess asked.
“Surprisingly so,” Artemix admitted. “I get no pleasure from them.”
“But what about the screams of the innocent?”
“What about them?”
“How do they sound?”
“How do you expect them to sound, like a children's choir?”
“Well... yes, I suppose.”
Artemix snorted, “Ha! They could sound like that I guess, if you locked the choir in a building and then set the building on fire.”
“Oh my goodness, is that the type of thing you used to do?”
“No, I'm only speculating. You asked me to make an educated guess about the screams of the innocent and that's what I came up with.”
“Oh,” Princess said, not liking where this was going.
“I never used to lock people in buildings and burn them alive. I can assure you that anyone I locked in a building and burned was already dead... or at least unconscious.”
“I'm glad to hear that... I guess.”
“Most of the time I simply skewered my enemies on my horn,” he waved his horn around for emphasis. “That thing is pretty dangerous you know. Or I'd brain them with my hooves. Unicorn hooves are pretty fierce. I even bit the faces off a few. Unicorns don't have teeth like tigers, but you'd be surprised at how effective these are.”
Then he chomped at the air a few times.
“You bit people's faces off?”
“Sometimes it can't be avoided.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like when?” Princess asked, thinking that it actually seemed pretty likely that you could go through your whole life never biting somebody's face off.
Artemix swiveled to look at her. “Now, now, you aren't going to trick me into getting into an involved conversation about biting off people's faces.”
“Believe me that's not what I want,” Princess replied. “It sounds perfectly awful and I'm shocked to hear it's something you used to do.”
Artemix eyed her warily, “Civilization didn't pop up out of nothing you know. It took a heck of a lot of suffering for people to recognize they had to treat each other with the minimal amount of decency you see today. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go.”
“But biting people's faces off? You couldn't have guessed that was inappropriate?”
“No!” Artemix said. “You have to accept that things were awful in the past. There's no sugar coating it. People did terrible things to each other.”
“Unicorns too based on what I'm hearing.”
“Keep in mind that it takes a lot to provoke a unicorn. Anyone who got his face bitten off probably had it coming.”
“Probably?”
“Definitely.”
They fell into silence as Artemix kept trotting along. He'd accelerated briefly, and from that the Princess could guess he'd become agitated. But it didn't take long to work out his feelings, and he soon slowed.
“I think I've figured out what's going on,” he said.
“What?” Princess asked, skeptically.
“You haven't yet come to accept that the morals of the past can't be applied to the present,” Artemix explained. “Perhaps it's because you're too young to have experienced those horrors directly.”
Princess scrunched up her face in confusion at that. “Don't you mean that we can't judge the people of the past by the morals of today? I've heard that argument before.”
“Yes, that's true,” Artemix replied. “But your statement is also incomplete. You have to understand that if the morals of the present don't apply to the past it suggests, in turn, that the morals of the past don't apply to the present. You have to mention both sides or you're not being truthful.”
“What are you talking about?” Princess asked, her brain felt like it was spinning in circles.
Now Artemix swiveled to look at her in his odd way and uttered, “We can't go back.”
“I don't like it when you look at me while I'm riding,” Princess said, disconcerted. “Please look forward.”
“I'll turn half way,” he said, turning so that his neck jutted out at a right angle to the direction they were walking. He continued. “We're having a serious discussion. You've just tapped into something everybody gets wrong about history.”
“Oh, and what's that?”
“This nonsense about not judging people of the past.”
“What's wrong that with that?”
“Well, we absolutely should judge them. Most of them were awful and deserved to have their faces bitten off. To suggest otherwise is nothing but a thought terminating cliché.”
“A what? Are you just making things up?”
“No! A thought terminating cliché is a generalized statement that sounds reasonable, but which is really designed to stop critical thought. It's sort of like a form of hypnosis, or a magical spell. Nefarious people use them all the time.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay, I will,” Artemix said. “Consider any historical figure who owned human slaves. If you try to say, 'Well, he owned slaves, that makes him evil.' Then somebody will trot along and say...”
Princess completed the thought, “You can't judge historical figures by the morals of today.”
“Right, they'll say that. But in saying that, they also indicate that the morals of the past are no longer valid in modern times. The things historical figures believed can no longer be applied to the modern era. Those awful people walked around in a cloud of toxic ideology, and their cruel ideas spilled out into every document they penned and every other thing they left behind. We have to scrub the world of their traces.”
Princess inclined her head. “But that's not the argument that's being made. The purpose is to emphasize the decent things about the people of the past.”
“It's not like separating peas and carrots,” Artemix said. “It's more like separating water into Hydrogen and Oxygen.”
“What?” Princess asked.
“It's all mixed up together. Their essence is a combination of the sum of their parts. You can't focus on the components you like and pretend the others don't exist. The bad influences the good. If the bad is extracted, you have to add in something new to support the structure that remains. Chances are that there will be flaws in whatever substitute material you choose to build with, and sooner or later you'll have to attend to that as well.”
“I've never thought about it that way before,” Princess said.
“That's because there are forces that labor in service of the bad parts. They use tactics like thought terminating clichés to prevent you from noticing the corruption that's all around us.”
“Go through it again,” Princess said, her eyes narrowing, “but more slowly this time, and give me another example.”
Artemix sighed. “We were talking about all the people I used to kill in the past.”
“Yes.”
“A lot of them were these religious jerks who came to power by exploiting and manipulating the vulnerable masses.”
“Okay.”
“The vast majority of them ended up succumbing to a common form of corruption.”
“And what form of corruption was that?”
“Well, it's a fact of nature that no matter how rich you become or how powerful you think you are, you're going to wither and die.” He gave her a wry look, “Except you apparently.”
“And you too, but I said I wasn't going to talk about that, so don't get distracted.”
“Fine! Where was I...
“The rich and powerful religious leaders of history.”
“Right! Do you know what they did, just about every single one of them?”
“What?”
“As their bodies failed and their strength left and their sense of sight faded away and their...
“I get it, I get it, they got old.”
“Yup! Like everyone. It's a totally normal and natural thing. But these guys had developed such a toxic and entitled attitude about their power and wealth that they became obsessed with restoring their youth.”
“That sounds rational enough.”
At this, Artemix had to turn the whole way around again. “No! No it doesn't! Maturity is recognizing that the universe has a plan for you and that plan is limited. It's accepting that there are some things you cannot change. It's about developing your sense of humility and appreciation and compassion for your fellow living things.”
Princess overcame her discomfort of Artemix's weird head turn enough to come up with a response, “Well, with a good diet and the right sort of exercise a person can feel very young again.”
Artemix just looked at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you seriously think I'd impale people on my beautiful horn, and rip open their stomachs with my teeth, and stomp their brains into mush with my hooves, and tear off their faces, because they decided to eat well and do exercise?”
Princess bit her lip. “I'm not sure what the right answer to that is?”
“No! I wouldn't do that!”
“Then why did you do those things?”
“Because these awful men would gather up children and try to extract their youth from them. They weren't content to die, so they'd try to consume the life of another. They tried to steal life. Are you hearing me?”
“Oh.”
“Double 'oh,'” Artemix said. “I don't want to go into the details because it's horrific, but they'd try to make something called 'essence of youth,' which required squeezing little kids into juice and... come to think of it, I have heard the cries of the innocent.”
“I'm beginning to get the picture, no need to go on...”
“They tried it on dead kids first, when that didn't work, they experimented with the living. They used limbs and hearts and brains and full bodies. Then they'd take the essence of youth and drink it, or eat it, or bake it in a pie and...”
“Okay, okay!” Princess said.
Artemix turned back around. “You should do some research. Human history is filled with awful episodes like this. It's tale after tale of powerful people attempting to reach beyond the limitations of nature and creating abomination. That was the morality of the past. That's the true history upon which modern society is based. As I said before, times have changed, the fundamental ignorance of days gone by can no longer apply to the present.”
This comment left Princess thoughtful. “But what did you learn from living through that period, through having your own era of carnage?”
“That was back when I was young and I didn't know any better,” Artemix said. “Eventually I, and others like me, realized that all that destruction isn't worth the cost. You end up with less than you started with every single time. There's always a better way to proceed than indulging in violence, even if it doesn't seem better at the time. So, the thinking creatures evolved. Unfortunately, the non-thinking creatures seem to make up about half the population, and they tend to linger in the nooks and crannies. It's irritating.”
Princess nodded. “And what happened to those that tried to extract the elixir of permanent youth from the innocent?”
“They were the first necromancers,” Artemix said. “They too have refined their craft. It's more secretive today, but no less brutal than it ever was. Perhaps more so,” his voice trailed of into silence.
That left Princess reflective, because she knew they still had a necromancer to deal with.
Perhaps it would come to light that they had several.
“But enough about me,” Artemix said. “I've given you my whole history, now how about sharing a bit of yours?”
“A bit of my what?”
Artemix laughed. “Now, now, don't try and deflect. How about telling me how you got in that crystalline coffin?”
Princess bit her lip, but after thinking about it for a moment, she realized that Artemix wasn't going to let the matter drop. She decided, therefore, to employ a tactic other than direct obstruction. “Fine,” she said. “I'll give you a partial answer.”
“Let's hear it.”
“I was trapped in the crystalline coffin because of the glass ceiling.”
“The glass ceiling? What's that?”
“Something I must break.”
“Ah,” Artemix sighed. He thought for a moment. “But won't that cause jagged, razor-sharp shards to come raining down all around us, perhaps inflicting terrible wounds?”
“Maybe,” Princess said with a smirk.
“Then perhaps you'll hear the cries of the innocent too,” Artemix said.
“Then again,” Princess countered, “maybe I can hear them already. Maybe they're screaming right now because the glass ceiling is still in place. Maybe when I break it, I will set them free.”
“Hm,” Artemix said. “I guess we'll see.”
“I guess we'll see,” Princess repeated with a smirk. Then she added, “Does that make everything clear?”
“No,” Artemix said instantly.
“Well, maybe it's because you're trying to impose the morals of today on the future? Maybe that's a kind of abomination you hadn't considered before.”
“Maybe,” Artemix said. “But I can tell you this much, I'm considering it now.”
“Good,” Princess said.
“What's that?” Artemix replied, gesturing to the road up ahead with his horn.
Princess squinted. It looked as if some sort of sign had been placed next to their path. “Let's see what it says.”
They trotted up.
The sign had white lettering on a blue background. Gigantic block letters read, “Vote for candidate Cruel, he's the only one who can protect you from ludicrous proposals of Candidate Kind.”
Artemix looked at Princess.
Princess looked at Artemix. “Just for once,” she said, “wouldn't it be nice to go somewhere that wasn't populated by psychopaths?”
Artemix snorted. “Haven't you been listening to me? I spent centuries killing all the ones I found. That just makes them pop up even faster.”
“I wasn't suggesting we should kill anyone.”
“No? Because it kind of sounded like you were.”
Princess rolled her eyes and urged Artemix forward with her knees. “Come on, let's see what the next adventure has in store.
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"You can't judge historical figures by the morals of today.”
How, then, do you explain statues of said historical figures being vandalized, toppled or otherwise taken out of sight? Those are based on contemporary judgements, done by people who are not historians and have no wider knowledge context, but just in the heat of the moment...
I second Elizabeth’s statement .. very thought provoking and another excellent story .. keep writing .. please .. I love this story !!!!