His teeth sunk into Yanus’ neck, and he chittered, positioning his teeth between the cervical spine and skull on one of the heads. His teeth sunk in further breaking the flesh, he could feel downy rabbit fur against his tongue, and hot coppery blood overflowed between his teeth. The other head screamed, the sound of it was ear splitting, sending a piercing, ringing pain deep in his ears. Novem flattened his ears against his skull as a guttural growl worked its way out past clenched teeth. He could feel the rabbit’s jaw clenching and teeth grinding on the head he was grasping, and its whole body shuddered as he bit even deeper, blood gushing past his teeth down his throat, filling his mouth and his nose. He blinked, trying to clear it from his eyes, the hot viscous feeling of it scalding in his sinuses, metallic and bitter. He shook his head rapidly back and forth, using the momentum to bite down even harder and shear through the meat, his canines tearing through muscles, ligands, and tendons, all the way down until he could feel the clack of bone. He felt something twang, the taut spinal cord snapping as he severed between the facets of the first two vertebrae behind the skull.

His heart beat rapidly, adrenalin surging as elation over a successful capture flushed through him. And then, pop! Suddenly they were no longer in the forest. They weren’t anywhere. Rushing glimpses of greens and blues and grays and browns. Flickering in and out as they rapidly shifted locations over and over, faster and faster. Until everything bled together, finally still. Still like twilight, like the stillness of the darkest forest under a new moon. Like the deep dark alien stillness of space. Like the ultimate and complete stillness of death.

But he felt very much alive.

He remembered when he had become a ghost so so long ago. Death had been more of a deep bone wracking pain and the excruciating torture of organ failure, followed by an airy sort of lightness and the slow steady swirl of consciousness as he manifested as a ghost.

This was different.

Intense pressure was the first thing he noted, as he took inventory of his body. But also a simultaneous weightlessness. Like being submerged in a deep endless body of water. An awful penetrating pain in the back of his skull. The tinny ring of tinnitus in his ears. It…hurt. A type of pain he had never encountered before, atomic. It felt as if his every atom was rearranging, writhing in agonizing contortions as the nausea boiled in his stomach. His skin tingled, like his entire epidermis was burning, crawling with vicious fire ants. And his body like it was not solely his own, it was merged, somehow, interlocking, twisting with the rabbit god’s and yet somehow still intact. It felt vile, corrupted. He writhed, trying to dislodge the other being to no effect.

Someone was laughing, a loud shrieking terrifying laugh.

A head lolled bonelessly on one of his shoulders. He chanced a glance. The dead rabbit’s mouth gaped blood trickling from its mouth, its eyes had turned milky and vacant. He looked away, trying to focus on his breath. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Breathe in. Don’t think about the lifeless head emerging like a tumor from your shoulder. Breathe out.

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‘Finally!’ A voice to his other shoulder said, cackling. ‘I’ve been waiting for her to die for years, the voice said.

Novem was still focused on keeping his increasing panic at bay and his breathing steady. This had not been a situation he had accounted for.

‘I can finally reabsorb her! I’ve been saddled with that vile cyst of a daughter for a millenia, I had managed to reabsorb her siblings when they died in my womb, but that stubborn little bulbous pimple refused to die!’

‘I should thank you. No, wait! I should punish you. You were hunting me, weren’t you!’ She cackled maddly.

Novem was failing at getting his breathing under control. His heart was beating so frantically it felt like it might fracture his chest, spill out right through his ribs. His throat felt tight and his tongue was swollen and dry in his mouth, he desperately wanted a drink of water, anything to soothe the rawness.

‘I know, I’ll take your pretty eye as punishment.’ Novem felt his opal eye sink back beneath his eyelid, creating a hollow crater in the socket once again. It sunk down, squeezing through his sinus, he felt a slick, congested choked feeling as it slid down the back of his throat.

‘Oh! How lovely!’ He could see the pretty twinkle of his eye taking residence in the rabbit’s socket. He was unsure where her old eye had gotten to. She was looking around now, apparently enjoying the dimensional perception the eye imparted. ‘What a lovely gift, thank you! I should reciprocate.’ He felt a trickle of blood trail down his tear line from his empty socket.

And then it wasn’t empty. And he could see. Not like he could with his opal eye, but like before. Back before he lost his eye. He licked his lips nervously. The rabbit seemed to be waiting for something. ‘Thank you?’ He managed to rasp, his throat raw. ‘I’m not done yet.’ The rabbit god shot back ominously.

An agonizing pressure seemed to be building behind his other eye. Building and straining and… it popped out, slopping heavily down his face and at his feet, writhing like a fish on land, trailing the optic nerve behind it messily. He stilled, stunned and uncomprehending. Horror and disgust wriggled in his stomach. He vomited, bile spewing up and out of his already tender throat. Gagging again and again until there was nothing left. He looked down at the mess. It blinked out of existence, presumably whisked away from whatever non-space they were currently in to something more tangible. But he could see it all clearly, because another eye had taken its place. He blinked. ‘One eye from me and one from her.’ The rabbit said. She seemed delighted by the symmetry. This eye seemed to see through a milky veil. Perhaps a vestige from the dead. ‘One for the future and one for the past. One from Yanus and one from Yuno!’

He blinked heavily, there seemed to be some sort of film beneath his eyelids. Another eyelid. He blinked with it, experimentally. A sheer membrane flexed out, covering his corneas. And through it, he watched his eye pop out again on the milky eye’s side, and a whirl of plants come into focus on the other side. The rabbit watched him. ‘One for the future and one for the past!’ She cackled, again. He felt an unfamiliar strain on his side. Something was emerging from his shoulder, a bulbous mass, heavy and awkward as it detached from his body. One rabbit with one head stared back at him. And as suddenly as before. They popped back into the glade. The ferns wafted gently in the breeze. Aligning perfectly with the apparition he had just seen through his new eye moments ago.

‘I knew I’d be free of her one day. I could see it. She could only see the past, but I knew. I knew she wouldn’t be around forever, I just had to wait.’ Yanus seemed content, she flopped down on her side with a happy sigh. ‘The future will always come. It’s as assured as the past.’ She winked her new eye. It sparkled, as if waving him goodbye. And then Yanus winked out of existence.