Friends, family, and fans have all asked me, over the years, to write a sequel to The Last Unicorn. To each in turn I have responded with some variant of the following: “It can't be done. The Last Unicorn is a one-shot, meant from the beginning as a kind of spoof/tribute to the classic European fairytale, an homage to such beloved influences of mine as James Stephens, Lord Dunsany, T. H. White and James Thurber. Writing it was a nightmarish, seemingly endless labor, and when it was done I vowed never to attempt such a balancing act again. So thank you for asking, but no.”

It wasn't a hard vow to keep: there were other books I wanted to write, and I have always had a real horror of repeating myself. Besides, like everyone else (and quite against my own personal wishes), I grew older. The Last Unicorn is a young man's work, and I am not quite him anymore in so many different ways.

Yet here I am, writing an introduction for a sequel to The Last Unicorn.

I blame Connor Cochran entirely for the existence of “Two Hearts”. He proposed it as a bonus gift for the first 3,000 buyers of the audiobook of The Last Unicorn, and wheedled me into going along by assuring me that I needn't bring back a single one of the original cast—only the world of the novel, nothing more. So, of course, I presented him with four of the major characters, and references to a couple of others, and had an astonishingly fine time doing it. The trouble now, of course, is that I can't abandon Sooz, my young narrator. I'm going to have to bring her back and see where she wants to go … which will be, as I already know, into the real full-novel sequel to The Last Unicorn. Which I never wanted to write. Bozhe moy, as my Russian uncles used to say. Heaven help me….