Lucky Rabbit

Pandy hopped along on Augustus’s heels, keeping a close eye out for any notifications that she was in danger of being Purified. <Wait, if I saved Thaniel, how would that free Ismara? Isn’t that what this is supposedly all about?> Pandy asked Keros as she hopped after the running chancellor.

That is one of the things I haven’t figured out yet.

It may be that she has been gathering power for the last few years and believes she will be able to free herself eventually.

Perhaps she thought you would find out about the heartstone, or Thaniel and Lian would ask for help when they got older.

The main thing is that if Thaniel didn’t die, the heartstone would remain with him, so the demon army would never arise.

As I said, we gods can’t actually see the future, only guide a world down a path that makes it look like we can.

So Ismara wouldn’t know that Zhery would use your interference as an excuse to challenge her claim to be the World God.

…

To be honest, if my magic wasn’t spread all over this world, he might never have noticed your presence at all.

If I just hadn’t broken the rules and tried to help you, you would have been incarnated exactly as Ismara planned, and my magic wouldn’t be trying to force this world back onto a path Ismara was doing everything in her power to prevent.

I deserve to have my liver eaten by that eagle for all of eternity.

Or at least a century.

A decade.

This is her fault, too.

Keros turned that around quickly, but Pandy supposed he was at least partially right. He’d done something kind, and his reward was being stuck in her head and possibly being de-livered by a god-icidal avian for all eternity. As for how much of this was Ismara’s fault, Pandy wasn’t sure. She also didn’t believe that Keros had interpreted the clues perfectly. There was something right about the idea that Pandy was originally from this world, but she didn’t think any part of her had ever been Grace Conroy, nor that Ismara was the conniving and manipulative goddess Keros believed she was.

“Halt!” a voice called, causing Augustus to slow just long enough to wiggle his fingers at the guard standing in the door ahead. This gave Pandy a chance to focus on what was actually happening, and she propelled herself forward with a few long bounds.

The finger-wiggling had quite an effect on the guard, who stiffened and fell back a few steps, moving out of Augustus’s way. Augustus shouldered past, and Pandy followed before the guard could decide to boot the bonus bunny. She came to a screeching halt just inside the door, however, feeling something like heat rolling out of the room.

-1 Corruption Point for entering Light Aura I

-1 Corruption Point for entering Light Aura I

Scrambling backward, Pandy exited the room post haste, barely daring to peek back around the doorframe to see if Augustus had noticed her departure. The guard stared down at her, clearly considering ejecting her more thoroughly, but the chancellor glanced back and snapped, “Leave her,” and the guard did.

The room was filled with Light. Not just light, though there was that, too, sunlight flooding through three tall windows, but also a soft luminescence that illuminated every surface and most especially the strange man standing in the center of the room. He was wearing the robe-and-sandals ensemble, and his hands were held out in front of him, palms up, just like every statue of Ismara Pandy had seen. A tiny creature floated over those hands, its body a perfect miniature of a human, Light washing from it in waves.

“Priest,” Augustus said, causing the man to blink. The elemental flickered, its Light fading down to something like Pandy’s Radiant Presence, and the priest swayed. Augustus reached out and clasped the other man’s bicep, holding him up, and Pandy stuck a paw back into the room, finding that the heat and pressure had vanished along with the Light Aura.

“What happened here?” Augustus demanded, and the priest straightened, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid I cannot discuss-”

Again with the finger flicks, though the priest only frowned until Augustus glanced back at the guard, who moved into the room, practically stepping on Pandy. “He’s a Knight, Priest Jule. An important one.”

Now that Pandy was closer, and the Light elemental wasn’t making it look like someone had overexposed the room, she could tell the priest was probably around her own age. Her real age, that was. He still looked uncertain, until Augustus said, “What happened to the man who was here?”

That smidgen of knowledge was enough to crack the priest’s defense, and he spoke swiftly, as if trying to rid himself of some part of his own knowledge by sharing it with someone else. “A man came. He said he was looking for the petitioner in this room. He described him perfectly, though he knew him by another name. Of course, we couldn’t disturb someone as they prayed to Ismara, but we agreed to take a message. I… He must have followed… He struck Priestess Mildred!”

It was clear that this was Priest Jule’s greatest concern, and he glanced toward a table which – now that Pandy looked – had a dark stain along one edge. “She hit her head, and when she woke, the door was open, the petitioner was gone, and there was this… this miasma of Dark within the room. She went to fetch help, and I have been Cleansing the room ever since.”

“Cleansing the evidence, you mean,” Augustus growled, stalking toward the wall with the windows. There was one tall one, probably at least six feet high, with two slightly shorter ones bracketing it. He thrust his hand through the space where the window glass should have been, and Pandy finally noticed the glass scattered across the floor. She would be a terrible detective, so it was a good thing Augustus was here to do that bit.

“Describe the man,” Augustus said, not looking at the priest.

The man swallowed hard. “Black and silver hair, very blue eyes, perhaps fifty or fifty-five years of age-”

“Not the petitioner, the man who came looking for him!” Augustus said sharply.

“I… I am. The man in here was blonde, of no particular note. Average height and weight, maybe thirty years old. The only reason I even remember him is that he didn’t look pleased to be here,” the priest stammered.

Augustus briefly closed his eyes. “Bailey used a disguise charm to hide Bryan, and then Daedelus came in here looking like his own quarry. He always had a questionable sense of humor.” Focusing on the priest again, he motioned for the man to continue.

“No one saw or heard anything,” Priest Jule said helplessly. “We had no idea anything was wrong until Mildred came out, covered in blood…” He swallowed hard, gaze fixed on the stained wooden table.

Dismissing him, Augustus spun in place, scanning every inch of the small room. “This isn’t where Sir Bailey was injured,” he said with certainty. Leaning out through the broken window, he stared downward. Pandy hopped over to him – circling cautiously around the priest, who now cupped his elemental in his hands – and jumped up to the windowsill.

-1 HP

Yanking her paw up, she stared accusingly at the single drop of blood oozing from one fuzzy toebean. Augustus shook his head, picking her up again. The blood smeared on his shirt, and Pandy cast what felt like the most unnecessary Minor Heal ever.

“What do you see, Rabbit?” Augustus murmured, gazing down into the courtyard below. To Pandy’s surprise, they were actually on the second floor of the building, which put the face of the enormous statue of Ismara right at her eye level. Pandy had seen several smaller versions of the face that stared back at her, and now she knew just how accurate that image was. Even from ten feet away, there was no mistaking that this statue was the spitting image of the typing woman from her vision. Ismara really must make a habit of popping in to chat with her priests in order for every feature to be so precise.

The carved figure wore the same kind of dress-robe as her priests, though Ismara’s was a bit more fitted and her sandals more elaborate. Around her feet and in her extended hands were objects that were probably offerings – mostly food, like bread and cheese, but Pandy also caught the glint of gold and silver, and the sheen of rich fabric, all mixed into a heaping pile of abundance.

Together, Pandy and Augustus examined the round courtyard and its contents. Other windows – all intact, and all in the short-tall-short pattern of the ones in this room – ringed the open area. No people stood in the space below, and there didn’t seem to be any doors on the first floor, either, which begged the question of how the offerings got there, because bread and cheese didn’t last that long.

A swirl of breeze swept in through the window, carrying the scent of sunshine and warm bread. Pandy sniffed deeply, closing her eyes as she tried to block out everything else. How were they supposed to track a man who- Her eyes popped open, and her nostrils flared. That wasn’t bread, and the coins she’d handled in this world didn’t smell like that, either. That was the scent of copper pennies. Or blood.

Bracing her back paws against Augustus’s arm, Pandy launched herself into open air with the gentlest Hop she could manage. She arched through the air, landing neatly atop Ismara’s shoulder. Of course, her paws immediately started to slip, and she quickly found herself splayed out, all four paws desperately clinging to smooth stone as she slid one way, then the other. But the tantalizing smell was close now, and she looked around, scanning the polished gray surface until she found a single dark spot just above Ismara’s ear.

Knowing she would probably regret this, Pandy used Scratch to dig her claws into the stone, hearing tiny cracking sounds as chips popped out beneath the pressure. She scrambled up onto the shoulder just as the arm broke off, tumbling to the ground, where it shattered. Yeah, she was going to be paying that off for the next century at least, but now the alluring scent was right in front of her nose. She licked it.

+10 Corruption Points for Drinking the Blood of a Fallen Knight

Shouts were beginning to come from the rooms surrounding her, so Pandy was barely able to make out the soft scuff of Augustus’s shoe as he landed on the ground below her. “What is it?” he asked.

She couldn’t answer. There was no way she was changing into Eurydice right now. For one thing, they couldn’t bill a rabbit for vandalism. For another, she was afraid she would lose the scent if she used Shifting Faces. Her human form just wasn’t as sensitive as this one.

Getting down from the statue was quite a lot easier than staying up had been. She just let her claws slip from the divots and cracks she’d made, and felt herself fall. Augustus caught her, but she didn’t remain in his arms. Instead, she scrambled onto her back paws, bracing one front paw on his shoulder so she could point with the other one.

<That way,> she thought as hard as she could, and Augustus jerked in startlement.

“Did you…? No, never mind. All right, let’s go, then. Zephra!” An Air elemental whirled into being, visibly agitated as she pulled on Augustus’s hair, tugging it upwards toward the open sky until he looked like he’d stuck his finger on an electric tortoise.

Augustus frowned. “Cieris? Where’s Zephra?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I need you to go and get Bailey’s Cloudmane.” The elemental didn’t leave, just grabbed hold of a particularly long lock of his hair and hauled on it. “What’s wrong? Cieris, I promise I’ll give you ten grains of pollen if you just-”

The sky darkened, day turning to dusk between one moment and the next. Pandy, Augustus, and Cieris all stopped and looked upward. At first, Pandy couldn’t fathom how an airplane had appeared in this world, but then the shadowy shape resolved into that of a reptile, fully thirty feet long and just as wide from wingtip to wingtip. Even if Pandy hadn’t known who it must be, the silvery blue and violet of his scales would have given his identity away.

“Elarion?” Augustus breathed. “What in Ismara’s name?”

The courtyard and the Dragon were approximately the same size, and in spite of the fact that Professor Beeswick sometimes reminded Pandy of a cat, he apparently wasn’t made of liquid like a feline. He circled above them, mostly gliding, his enormous wings beating only as often as it took to keep him aloft. From within the shelter of his shadow came a dozen smaller elementals, looking like babies next to a parent as they dove toward Pandy and Augustus.

Talons wrapped around Pandy’s body, and this time there was no convenient sling to ride in, nor any attempt at gentleness. A Skyril carried her aloft, barely missing the wall of the building as it banked sharply back and forth, rising in the narrow space, and behind her she heard Augustus swearing as the rest of the swarm picked him up by his clothes and limbs.

A dizzying climb was followed by a sharp drop as the Skyril holding Pandy opened its claws and released her in midair. She was just about to cast Wings of Glory when she thumped hard against something warm and smooth. For the second time in ten minutes, she started to lose her grip and quickly dug in her claws. A dragonish sort of growl reached her, and she immediately regretted the instinctive action, releasing her grip and beginning to slide from the glossy scales once again.

With a grunt, Augustus landed beside her, his arms and legs just long enough to grasp Beeswick’s neck and ribs respectively. He somehow managed to snatch Pandy back just before she tumbled loose, then they were flying on the back of a Dragon, as enormous wings caught the wind.

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