The full moon washed everything in ghostly, white light. The ivy shone black with the shadows even darker; the entire glade monochromatic. Penny hugged herself tightly against the early autumn night while keeping her phone out in front of her for some meager light.

She had to wait nearly a week until the full moon. There was no telling if this was the right glade, or if the unicorn colt was still there. The extra light from above was a non-negotiable for her midnight escapade. Not just for searching the glade, but for navigating the yards and smaller streets where the streetlights did not go.

Her breath caught as rustling reached her ears. She spun around, but her phone light was not strong enough to reach the ivy curtains. She took a breath and tucked her phone away, shutting her eyes.

The woods beyond crackled and chirped. There was rustling again, but there was a skittish quality that called to mind rabbits. A larger, more careful swish of the ivy and undergrowth reached her ears. The steps sounded more deliberate, closer to how a deer would move.

The glade looked brighter when she opened her eyes. She could see the ivy swaying as something passed through, but couldn’t see the creature. She crept nearer and an outline started to appear. 

It was roughly the size of a pony, but slimmer. It must’ve been grayish. The moonlight would not reflect off it, and it blended into the scenery too much to be either black or white.

She extracted a molasses cookie from her pocket, set it on a rock, and backed off. She waited, and waited. And waited.

Her head snapped up. She blinked drowsily, rubbing her eyes as she staggered up to her feet. She was damp with dew. The moon was not as high and the glade was now washed in soft gray as pre-dawn broke. Cold dread washed over her. The caretakers at the home would’ve noticed she was missing by now.

The cookie was gone. She stared at the spot with disappointment seeping into the pit of her stomach. She had missed it, unicorn or otherwise.

A snort behind her froze her solid.

The colt was the most magnificent animal she had ever seen. True, his knees were still knobbly, more like a horse foal compared to a two-year-old, and his slate gray coat, mane, and tail tuft were frizzy. Even still, his deep brown eyes had an intelligence greater than any animal she’d encountered. His black, spiraled horn was short but looked carved from obsidian. A lion-like tail flicked lazily, and he pawed the grass with cloven hooves.

Penny slowly stretched her hand out, inching nearer and nearer as he continued to stand still.

---

Her caseworker had pink streaks in her hair. Penny could not decide if she liked it or not, and always circled back to herself having dark hair. She would have to bleach it to change colors, and that extra step always put her off hair dying.

“Hmm… I don’t know, Penny, the home does have a good point….”

“It was once,” Penny said blandly.

“Yes, but you really freaked them out. Disappearing in the middle of the night is serious. They had to file a report.” She signed heavily, and fiddled with one of the pink locks in her blonde hair. “If this happened at a placement with a family, then you’d be relocated.”

“It was a full moon,” Penny said. “I wanted to see how my phone would do with night pictures. It won’t happen again. I swear!”

“They want to send you back to New York… That might be too extreme.” She shuffled through Penny’s file. “Your other group home exists, but—.”

“But it’s not the same people in charge,” Penny finished. “It’s even more for problem kids than this one.” She leaned forward. “You can’t send me away! I won’t disappear again.”

“It would suck to move right after starting junior high… You could end up at a really populated middle school, and that could lead to bullying or something….” The caseworker mumbled under her breath, checking different notes. “Your last placement was just a town over. Did you get to reconnect with old elementary friends?”

Penny nodded, her throat now too dry to respond. 

She suspected some type of fallout from sleeping outside, but the caretakers at the home had been subdued after screaming at her, and she thought she was in the clear. It didn’t occur to her that they had filed a police report, contacted the caseworker, and started the process of moving her elsewhere.

She had only managed to get back to the glade once between meeting the colt and this meeting, and he had not been around. She left him two molasses cookies and was itching to get back there to see if he would come out of hiding this time.

“There’s no red flags in your file other than the fighting with the other kids, and whatever it was that Lambert family was talking about. Which, to me, sounded like you were stressed because of what was going on with your friend, so I don’t know how much weight that really has.” She hummed, searching the file. “Yeah, nothing that suggests you’re getting into drugs, or self-harm, or sex… Which also means you’ve been safe from abuse according to what I learned in class….” She blinked and looked up quizzically. “You had a request to go to church? Really?”

“I was raised by nuns.”

“Oh. True. …Still, little weird, but if it keeps you grounded….” The caseworker shut the file. “How about I beg the home to keep you until winter break? I can try finding a placement in the same school district.” She shrugged. “Either they’ll decide you can stay, or you’ll get placed. You got to keep in line though, Penny. If you stray, they’ll flip out and I’ll be forced to move you. Got it?”

Penny sputtered her thanks repeatedly, keeping up the stream as she was ushered from the office.

She took the bus towards Colton’s rather than back to the group home. There was still time before dinner, and surely being slightly late could be chalked up to her meeting with the caseworker.

The cookies were gone. There were slight indents around the rock she had left them on, too big to be deer prints. She looked around but saw no other signs of the colt. She sat on the rock and dug out a thin book about horses from her backpack.

Movement caught her attention as the sky started darkening. Her heart blipped as the colt nosed through the curtain of ivy. He raised his head, staring, and silently walked nearer.

Penny carefully put her book away and took out the squashed, plastic-wrapped cookie from the bottom of her bag. She held it out to him, barely daring to breathe. Her face hurt from how wide her smile was when he took the cookie, bobbing his head in approval as he munched.

“I should bring you healthier snacks,” Penny murmured, “but I figured you eat enough grass and stuff.”

She tenderly stroked his nose with her fingertips; his dark, intelligent eyes half closed at her touch. She pet his smooth cheek with her other hand, marveling that he was allowing her to be so close and hold his face.

“I’ll try coming back tomorrow,” she told him. “It’s the weekend. I can spend all day here without anyone caring.”

It took several minutes for Penny to tear herself from him. The sky was now fully deep red with no hint of the sun left. She couldn’t risk angering the home further. She couldn’t risk them sending her far from this unicorn colt, especially with the knowledge that he would be all alone.

It was a relatable feeling punctuated by lapses with companions. Unlike her friends–with the expectation of Brooke–this colt also lacked a family to provide some feeling of comfort or safety, same as her.

Penny stared at the ceiling listening to the easy breathing of her roommates. Her eyelids were heavy. She smiled as a name flitted through her mind right before she fell asleep.

---

The leaves were starting to turn. It was cool and sunny, perfect for one of Penny’s favorite Goodwill sweaters (red and orange maple leaves falling across a sage green sweater). She sat on her usual rock in the now browning ivy glade, a book with different horse braids open on her knees. A red, plastic bucket was placed nearby. It had three different types of horse brushes and a large, metal comb for manes and tails.

“Hodge,” Penny called. She repeatedly clicked her tongue until the colt raised his head. “Come over here.”

She stroked his nose as he greeted her. She went to work gently using the metal curry comb and slicker on his slate gray body. He stood still, rotating between munching strands of grass and nodding sleepily.

This had been her ritual every Saturday for the last month and a half. She had slowly purchased the bucket and combs from the meager allowance the home let her have from the stipend they were paid. It took ridiculously long for her to convince the administrators to allow her a library card, citing the homeless and drug addicts that typically hung around the area, but they eventually caved to her pleas. She put on a show of having her nose in an age appropriate chapter book whenever one of the adults was around. She kept her actual borrows–history, folklore, horse and horse related books–under her bed.

Hodge’s mane and tail tuft were beginning to smooth the colder the weather became, but they were still too short for Penny to do much more than fuss over. She was noticing lighter grays and whites starting to appear, some being wavy. He was also growing silky, wavy hair on his lower legs above his hooves, which Penny knew from her books was referred to as feathers.

“I wish I’d gotten to see your mother,” Penny said. “I’ve only seen pictures of old tapestries. I don’t really know what to expect with you.” She searched her backpack for the molasses cookie stashed inside. “I bet you still miss your mother. Even if only a little. …I think I miss mine, and I never really met her. Here you go, handsome boy.”

Penny found her mind wandering often to Keena Fox since meeting Hodge. It may have been the knowledge that his mother was gone, or just because he was a stronger connection to the Realm than random gnomes and fairies. It may have also been that her hopes of Aisling finding her had started to wane considerably, partly because of time and partly because she didn't want to leave Hodge.

She had no one she could ask about her mother now. Even as reluctant as Aisling had been at times, she would still try to answer any questions about Keena.

The group home smelt of overcooked hamburger when she slipped through the front. She tiptoed up the steps but was blocked from the landing by a bulky boy at least four years older. He snatched the bucket from her hand.

“Give it back, Nick!”

He searched through the bucket, and then dumped it before tossing it aside. He grabbed at her backpack, but she was ready and tightened her grip. She was yanked onto the landing, one hand pressed against her face while he kept pulling with the other.

She lost her balance with one good yank. She released the backpack to grab the railing to avoid falling backwards down the stairs.

Nick ripped apart her backpack, dumping out books, pens, and some loose homework worksheets she did on the bus rides. He finally held up her wallet with a wicked smirk, and took out the few dollars tucked inside before throwing it down the stairs.

“You don’t mind, d'you, Penny? You're due for allowance on Monday.”

He knocked into her, causing her to fall another step down, on his way down the stairs.

Penny grabbed the heavy, rubber curry comb and aimed it at the back of Nick’s head. Her short nails bit into it, her arm shaking the longer she stayed frozen, ready to throw. Hot, angry tears fell from her eyes as she lowered her arm, growling out a sigh. She went up and down the stairs, and around the landing, repacking her bucket and bag, completely ignored by the other kids hurrying to and from dinner.

----------------------------

This one is pretty short too. Penny's story starts with early years like this, but then will go beyond Nellie's, so I'm getting to the point where some time skips are happening more.

I thought molasses cookies would be an approriate unicorn snack. Sugar cubes are kind of unusal to have in a house, same with hard peppermints/spearmints, and I figured Penny would gravitate to something sweeter for a mythical animal with unicorns accosiated with sparkles and sugar. (Come to think of it, we only had sugar cubes, peppermints, and spearmints when I had a horse.)

The combs I have in mind for the bucket are two curry combs, one rubber and one metal (metal works better but you always buy the rubber on first, lol, the metal is sharp and throws you off a bit if it's the first time grooming) and a slicker which is also metal. The good ones you can unhook the handle to turn into one long strip of metal with short teeth to clear out all the fur and dirt loosened by the curry.

I also fugured that unicorns would age a little differently than horses since they're not really horses. Hodge's mother was probably in her 70s, so Hodge being 2 is closer to under a year minus all the drawbacks of actually being under a year (needing mother). He's probably slightly stunted too since he's the last foal; it'd take him a bit longer to mature with his mother's lifeforce not anywhere near peak. He probably would've hung around his mother until she died both because she would be too werry to be stern and send him off, and because as he grew he would've offered her some protection.

I no longer have a lot of the drawings from the "olden days" of the Elemental Guardians (back when they were called the Super Pokefriends... *sigh* I was in middle school, I thought that name sounded awesome...) due to random tossing over the years - but I was kinda shocked at how little I still had 😅 It's basically all stuff from the brief period of 'overlap' with Ace starting off on his own.

The Castle of the Sunbird, September 2005

According to my notes on the back of this, I drew this 2 years after I wrote this story. Castle of the Sunbird marked a big shift in process and in storyline. 

• It was the last story to use the "Super Pokefriends" title (before switching to "The Elemental Guardians")
• It was the last I drew as a comic booklet (paper folded and stapled between a construction paper cover (before switching to typing)
• It marked where the ever-growing group of power-wielding teenagers split up. Part of it was for writer reasons - there were SO many characters because I couldn't stop adding more lol. The other part was plot related, it just flowed to a point where a lot of them wanted to be a leader and that was problematic for one big group.

Much of it was based on and inspired by a summer trip to Colorado where we visited cliff dwelings, learned about other native American stuff in the area, and an actual rock near Colorado Springs called Castle Rock (go figure).

But the basics (that I can remember) were the group goes to help this tribe of people whose brother and sister duo are kinda duking it out on who gets to lead their people, and some of the 'guardians' side with one and some with the other. Ultimately, the sister flippantly evokes their deity, the Sunbird, and then it actually shows up and brings the justice she was calling for - on her. In my memory, it feels like the first "grown-up" story I wrote and started me on more compelling/plot-driven pieces more than just "what fun thing someone else made can I throw in today" :D

Where the Fault Lies, Part II, 2006

I'm almost positive I had a drawing for Part I... I feel like I have to have another stash of drawings somewhere... But yes - you may recognize a few people here (namely one Gallagher). I honestly cannot remember much about this one other than it focuses mostly on the "Hylian" groups of Guardians who live/work in Hyrule. The "Triforce," made up of Link, Jill, and Jim (from Treasure Planet) teams up with a few loners (mostly my real life friends - one of whom becomes Cloud from Final Fantasty when he wears a special pendant lol) which include newly allied Ace, who has become BFFs with Henri. The Triforce takes in a young boy they believe is just a Hylian boy, but somehow or another they find out he's actually Link's ancestor who has travelled through time for some reason. I think it was me trying to link (HA) together the various Zelda timelines in my own way. Or something. I don't remember much more than that... I should try to re-read some of these, lol.

Ace is cute in his little random armor (and elbow pads still aparently). He never ends up with any sort of power, he just hangs out with everybody.

Mioko Del Mar, 2007?

Mioko had been around a while before he finally starred in his own story, Mioko del Mar! I think I mentioned bits of this story before, but he finds a wounded leviathan in Lake Hylia. The leviathan is kind and gentle and they both immediately trust each other. Mioko tells Link about the leviathan, but Link doesn't believe a dragon could be living in the lake unnoticed this long and doesn't believe him. Mioko's roommate, Clopin (from Hunchback of Notre Dame) is a potions master, and Mioko tries to convince him to help him help the leviathan, but Clopin also refuses with some other sort of excuse. So, Mioko tries to brew a very dangerous magical potion on his own... and it explodes and binds him to it/a crystal that forms from the explosion.

Somehow, while this is going on, the Zora discover the leviathan's presence and show up in force to capture/kill it. This inadvertently proves to Link (and Clopin) that the leviathan is indeed real, and there's some sort of battle that Mioko stops by using his newfound power (I don't remember those speciifics...). He then uses the crystal and his power to heal the leviathan, learning the give-and-take qualities in the process, but knowing he would rather bear the kind dragon's pain.

Anyway, this little breakout for him is what made me realize he needed to come hang out with Ace... haha.

Mioko, Sept 2002

Speaking of, here's Mioko from almost exactly 24 years ago! ........wow.

He began as a Zelda fan character (where his long ears REALLY came from...) and there was some sort of mini plot with him training for the Hylian army and he gets severely wounded and ends up unable to fight/stay in the army, so he goes through a bit of healing on multiple fronts. He does always kinda wish he could serve his country, through, and I think that's where this pseudo-angsty piece came from, heh.

Fire & Steel, 2005

A pretty cool drawing of Jill (you can see where both Athena AND Gemini come from lol) the fire guardian battling Kyle (a rare OC not based on an existing charaacter or friend) the steel guardian/villain. If you know anything about Pokemon, you know who has the advantage at this moment, haha. I always thougth the poses and style were cool for this one.

What's fun is I made this outfit once (not the slits up the thighs though; I'm not sure why I thought that was such a cool fashion choice then, lol). I wish I had kept that little black dress, haha.

The ATV roared beneath her. She tightened her grip around Colton’s waist as she eyed the large drip in the trail. Her butt left the seat as they soared into the air, and crashed down with laughs. They swerved, two of the wheels inching off the trail, as Garrett swerved towards them with a whoop before speeding off.

“Challenge,” Colton declared over the engine. “Hold on!”

She readjusted her grip, tightened it again, and braced to stop her head from snapping back as the ATV shot forward. The familiar woods whipped by; the oaks and ash trees blurring together in a brown-gray and green monotony. Penny’s eyes widened as they zoomed straight at a large, rotting tree.

“Col—!”

She shut her eyes before impact, peeking when the crash didn’t come. Her breath caught.

Ivy covered everything in the sunlit clearing. It was so thick and green that it was difficult at first to see the browned path that cut though. It looked like a valley of all ivy as it blanketed the large trees and tangled together to create walls.

Her hands loosened as she soaked the scene in. This place needed a picture. She needed to revisit it, make sure she remembered each detail of it.

A movement near the farthest curtain of ivy drew her attention. Something was there, something extraordinary, but the ATV crashed back into the dark, typical woods seconds later.

They landed with a couple rough bumps right in front of Garrett, and sped off.

Back at Colton’s house, Penny sipped a soda while Garrett challenged Levi to the next race. (Colton’s parents accepted that their boys would ATV, the rule was Garraett had to always be on hand during the trail rides. Never having to share his ATV suited him fine.) Colton plopped next to her, took a swig of Coke, and pulled out his phone.

“Gage says his girlfriend is keeping him,” he said, rolling his eyes. He waved his drink at the disappearing ATVs. “Want me to show you how to drive?”

“Yeah… when we aren’t racing,” Penny said. 

She pulled out her new, sleek white smartphone courtesy of her new caseworker. It fit in her pocket well enough, but didn’t have the compactness of her old phone. It felt more breakable, and with the screen exposed and tapable to activate, it felt almost too simple after being used to a phone that flipped into a full keyboard. The camera was miles better, and it could take some video, although the quality of those were much less than the still pictures. She smirked at the little, sepia camera tucked in the corner of her screen.

“What was that place we drove through,” Penny asked. “The one with all the ivy? I’d love a few pictures for my Instagram.”

“I don’t get Instagram,” Colton muttered.

“You aren’t really the photographer type,” Penny teased. “So… all that ivy?”

He shrugged. “Just a shortcut. I never really noticed it was full of ivy.”

“...How? It was everywhere.”

He gave another shrug. “It was just green to me.” He laughed at his phone. “Suddenly, Gage’s girlfriend is too busy to come. There’s no way she’s real. I ain’t buying this other school bs.”

“If she’s close enough they’re dating, then she’ll be in our class once we hit junior high,” Penny said. “He won’t be able to say she goes somewhere else. It won’t make sense.”

“Watch that they break up before summer ends, and he's too angry to point her out in the hall,” Colton said. “I'll bet you anything; when school starts up next week, he'll mysteriously be single.”

Colton’s mom pulled up in her small SUV. She climbed out with her purse and a plastic bag of groceries. She ordered Colton to help with the other bags on her way in, giving Penny a polite but warm smile as she passed.

Penny held her phone, staring beyond it, going back to that ivy covered glade. There was something there. She couldn’t explain it, but there was something pulling her back there. Something had moved, she was positive. The scene had been too quick to register anything beyond that it definitely moved.

She checked her Instagram account, smiling at the stream of comments on her newest bigfoot footprint picture. Most expressed doubt, a few believed, but the general consensus was that it was a great shot.

She needed to get back to that glade.

---

Garratt dropped her off downtown after ATVing. Penny had decided against him taking her all the way back to her bus stop in the next town. She had a few bucks for an after lunch snack, and decided to upload some pictures in peace before returning to sheltering in her room.

She munched on a pastrami and rye sandwich while looking through her newest pictures. None of them had anything fantastical about them, but there were a few in the forest that had great shadows. It was a matter of picking which one served best as appeasement until she found a fairy or something else more interesting.

The chime above the diner door sounded. Penny straightened when she recognized the woman in the set as the mage she had met a few months earlier. There was a severe, dark-skinned man with her that gave off a distinctly foreign air from the way he walked, looked around, and wore his clothes.

The pair took a seat in the booth behind hers with the mage sitting with her back to Penny. She thought of saying something, but the man’s deep, dark eyes bore into her a moment before continuing their surveying of the small diner. It was enough to get her back to her phone. It was highly likely that mage forgot about her anyway.

“Stop it,” the mage hissed. “You’ll make people nervous.”

He gave her a plain face that clearly indicated that he did not care, and continued looking around.

Penny didn’t bother looking up when the bell chimed again. She narrowed her choice down to two photos, and was having a tough time deciding if the fallen log or the shimmering stream was the better option.

She jumped at the sudden slamming of hands on the table behind her. The newcomers were a tall woman with brassy skin and dark hair, and a twitchy, petite woman that looked as if she decided to give herself a pixie cut. It was the tall woman who was bearing down at the mage and her companion, glaring daggers at them.

“You!”

“K-Keeper Yardley…,” her companion tried, her frail voice dying away.

“How dare you,” Yardley snarled, throwing off her companion’s touch before it fully landed on her elbow.

“Please, sit,” the mage said hastily. “We’ll explain—.”

“Explain? Explain!” Yardley laughed cruelly. “Why don’t you explain it outside. In private.”

The mage's colleague shrugged and started to stand.

“And give you a chance to attack us,” the mage said coolly. “I think not. Please, just… let me explain. And keep your voice low.”

The warning was unnecessary. Yardley had surprised several diners with her entrance, but she had been keeping her tone down, leaving them to quickly lose interest.

“You slaughtered a unicorn,” Yardley said in a low rumble. “Explain that.”

Penny froze, hardly daring to breathe. She couldn’t risk missing this explanation all while dealing with the excitement, and sadness, in learning that there had been a unicorn so close. Anger bubbled within her stomach. Yardley was justified in her fury.

“She wasn’t slaughtered,” the mage said. “We—.”

“Murdered her.”

“Alicorn,” the mage’s companion said thickly. “The alicorn.”

Yardley was visibly shaking. Her hands were so tight her bony knuckles were white, ready to cleave through the two sitting in increasing agitation in the booth.

“You harvested her,” Yardley seethed.

Penny was no longer pretending to be preoccupied with her phone. It sat on the table, the screen now black.

Alicorn had powerful healing properties. She learned that when she was young but it hadn’t occurred to her that getting alicorn was harmful to unicorns. She assumed the horns shedded the way antlers did.

“They must live during gather,” the mage’s companion said. “You know this.”

“She was on her last leg,” the mage said quickly. “We’d been observing her for months. She was so far gone that her colt hasn’t left her, and he must be nearing two judging by his color.”

“And so, you take it into your hands to end her life? Did you spare her colt, or force him to watch,” Yardley asked, her dark eyes slits.

“We had little choice,” the mage said. “That mare was too close to people. If we just waited for her to die, she could’ve been found. The Auctorita is protecting the Realm and the creature in it by humanely euthanizing—.”

“You play gods with creatures that walked the earth when we were still finger painting caves!”

“Should we have waited until she naturally died,” the mage asked, raising her voice. “The alicorn would be useless then!”

“Maybe we should all calm—,” Yardley’s companion tried.

“You boil down a life to a horn!”

“We need to calm down,” Yardley’s companion pleaded again. “Outside? Perhaps? Too many ears here."

Penny ducked her head towards her phone, turning slightly as the group passed. She left her crusts and cash on the table, grabbing her phone and hurrying after them.

They hadn’t walked far, just to the corner, only a building down. Their angry voices drifted among the buildings, still arguing over if it was right to harvest alicorn, and if it was, then was the Auctorita right in killing the unicorn rather than hovering until right before her last breath.

Yardley was immoveable. The mage plead the case the most, often hushing or clarifying her stern companion’s words. The second keeper simply appeared to want to evaporate on the spot.

Her ears caught the word “glade” and her mind shot back to ATVing with Colton. She saw the curtains of ivy, the shine of it in the dazzling sun.

The two members of the Auctorita and the keepers split in separate directions, neither party walking away relaxed or satisfied. Penny hesitated where she stood for too long as they both vanished from sight, forcing her to retreat to her bus stop. 

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of glades between her town, Colton’s, and the other more rural towns that neighbored them. But, Penny couldn’t shake that something was in that ivy glade. She knew it, and would prove it.

---------------------

This one is pretty short, but I didn't want to end with Hodge (spoiler...I guess, lol). It felt like too much to jumo from 'oh pretty ivy' to 'there's the unicorn' with Penny being as restricted in her movements as she is right now.

Penny's new phone is a Moto G, probably first gen for the cheaper option. And she hasn't bought a colored shell since her home would be like ...why waste the money (~$15).