Pat Pending

When children stopped believing in enchanted forests after highways cut through them and farmers no longer preserved fairy rings but instead chose to pave over them to make way for outlet malls. Then wizards lost their influence to accounting software and predictive analytics as compute took the place of miracles and spells. Immortality itself became economically noncompetitive once health insurance providers learned how to monetize chronic survival. The creatures that endured were not the...

Nobody could remember when the last dragon was seen; there was no final battle, no noble knight drove a spear through the last great wyrm. They simply decided to quit hoarding gold. For centuries, humans misunderstood dragon hoards. We assumed dragons loved gold because they were greedy. In truth, dragons collected whatever civilization considered its greatest store of value. During the Bronze Age, it was bronze weapons. During the Roman Empire, it was coin. During the Renaissance,...

What about unicorns, you ask? Surely, they exist today, or at least existed at some point in history: Encyclopedia Brittanica, The Travels of Marco Polo, The King James Bible and other works proudly proclaimed unicorns existed. For thousands of years, unicorns were sustained by a peculiar kind of magic – not simply belief alone, but certainty. A traveler glimpsed one at dawn and knew, beyond question, what they had seen. Monks illuminated them in manuscripts. Kings hunted them. Natural...