I

Izzy’s awakening wasn’t the most pleasant. In fact, one could say that it was rather unpleasant, especially considering how different it was from the average wake-up call. Her awakening was a dish of confusion flavoured with fear, and with existential dread on the side. It all began when the girl felt herself laying belly-flat on the grass, with a mouthful of mud and a large bruise covering her entire left arm, which was already bad. Having a mouthful of mud with her arm being deeply bruised and covered in bacteria-ridden mud, though? Yeah, that was definitely one of the worst kinds of pain she had felt in her life. It hurt like utter Hell. The pain made her open her eyes and grimace.

Oooooooouch! She quickly clenched her hand around her injured arm. Ooooouch, ouchouchouchouch! She pressed her feet against the ground, slowly but surely managing to stand up… only for her legs to wobble and give out, forcing her to fall on the grass. What the heck?!

She tried standing up again, but this time her legs didn’t even twitch. A signal left her brain and spread in her entire body, allowing panic to stir in her stomach. And then, she finally opened her eyes. Something fuzzy polluted her vision, but she didn’t pay it any mind.

She saw a blue, cloudless sky, topping a carpet of trees, bushes and grass, dwarfed by the range of sharp, pointy, teeth-like, snow-covered mountains behind them. Black stripes, like branches of a tree, streaked the rock, looking like nothing she’d ever seen before. She blinked twice. This is not normal. THIS IS NOT NORMAL!

What the heck was happening? Where was she? And most importantly, how the heck did she even got there?! The last thing she could remember was going to bed and-

OF COURSE! She let out a sigh of relief. This is a dream! She slowly closed her eyes, allowing her body to relax. Well, this is cool! Wait, does that mean this is, like, a lucid dream or something? Does that mean I’m basically God now?! HELL YEAH! Now, time for something awesome to happen!

She massaged her temples and squinted her eyes, imagining a magical flying, gatling gun-equipped, rainbow-fire-breathing rabbit to descend from the sky and bring her to a magical adventure of chaos and amusement.

But nothing happened.

…okay, okay, this is normal. I’m not an expert lucid dreamer or something, things like this can happen.

And then, she looked at her hands. And her heart almost skipped a beat. They were covered in brown fur, and each finger was tipped by a small, black claw. Ooooh, this is neat. I’ve got furry hands, it’s… weird. She then proceeded to touch her face. …okay, what the…? It felt so fuzzy and… misshaped, like it belonged to something non-human. Her hair felt messy like a bush. She slowly went to touch her ears, and she almost freaked out. Her auricles were so long, like a rabbit’s. She kept palpating her head until she touched something hard attached to her skin. Slowly, she scraped it with her fingers, moving up, down, left and right; there were two of them. She touched their coarse surface, their ramifications, their pointy extremities. …are these antlers? She couldn’t see them, but she assumed that’d be how antlers felt like. Okay, this… this is a weird dream I’m having-

She grimaced in pain as her focus shifted to her injured arm. It was dirty with mud and bleeding; it looked as if a large portion of skin – from her wrist up to her shoulder – had been peeled from the muscle. And it hurt oh so much. It was worse than that time she’d accidentally burned her hand on a stove!

Okay, okay, gotta do something about this. She closed her eyes and focused. REGENERATE!

She waited and waited, but the pain only seemed to get worse. It clutched her arm and sank in her crimson flesh.

Alright, alright, this… this is to be expected; maybe I’m not versed enough in this. She tried to heave herself on her feet, but her legs felt so… week, and tired. Try as she might, she could only make her legs twitch pathetically. Come to think of it… she felt tired. Completely, undoubtedly exhausted. Was tiredness a thing in dreams? It was, right?

…w-wait, hold up… dreams may have tiredness, but I’m sure as heck they don’t have pain!

And she was in pain. In fact, one could say she was agonizing, mostly due to the wound on her arm. She started evaluating the possibilities.

Okay, okay, if this is not a dream, then maybe… maybe I’m in a coma? Maybe I had some kind of accident? No, no, no, I’m 100% sure I went to bed before… this happened. Which also mean that I didn’t die… well, not in an accident, at least; there could’ve been an earthquake, a tornado, some random psycho breaking into my house to murder me… and in hindsight, maybe it doesn’t matte, because I’m still stranded in this place!

Dryness overcame her tongue. Water. She needed water. And it was pretty much obvious that no magical flying glass was going to appear anytime soon.

Crap, she thought. Forget questions. I need to find water… and food… and shelter… okay, I need to survive.

She shivered as a cold breeze tousled her fur.

…and I’m also stuck in this freakish body. Great. Just great.

Izzy looked around. If she was able to see the treetops, it must’ve meant she was on a relief of some kind, probably a hill. She tried for a third time to get up, but her legs refused to obey. The girl grit her teeth and pushed against the ground with both her arms, moving forward a bit, before letting herself fall on the ground. She did the same thing, advancing another bit. Then, she did it again. And again. And again, until she reached the hillside, steep and covered in grass. Then, she did it again… and lost her balance. She tried to stop, but it was already too late. She started rolling down the slope, her arms and legs flailing helplessly as the sky and the ground switched positions before her brain could get a grasp on where they were. Then, a loud thud and a sudden pain in her back heralded the end of her ride.

She laid in the ground for ten seconds at least before painfully heaving herself up on her arms with a grunt and taking a look around her. She was in a forest. A huge tree appeared to have stopped her descent. The canopy covered everything under a veil of soft semi-darkness, and the booming silence reigned like a king. Izzy’s heart started racing, throbbing in her chest, echoing in her freakishly long ears like the beats of a giant drum, going faster and faster until it felt like it could explode at any moment.

Reality had never felt so scary before.

Izzy took deep breaths, forcing her brain to analyse the situation as calmly as possible. She knew she had to find water. Food and shelter were important, but finding water was her top priority. She then realized that the most effective way to look for a river was to scout the area from an elevated position, and she cursed herself for deciding to climb-… to roll down the hill and lose her positional advantage. And there was no way for her to climb back up – not as exhausted as she was.

Well, no point in crying over spilt milk. She started gathering her thoughts. There’s the devil to pay and no pitch hot, but I need to survive somehow! I can do that; I mean, I was in the scouts!

She tried her hardest not to think about how no amount of training in the scouts could’ve prepared her for that situation – it would’ve probably damaged her morale a lot.

I just need to find water. It’s… easy, I just need some stuff… that I have no way of acquiring…. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus. Crap, crap, crap, where can I find water… wait, fruits contain water! That’s it; if I can find some non-poisonous berries…. This wasn’t going to work, and she knew it. She would probably find some weird fruit she had never seen before, ingest it in the hope it wasn’t poisonous, and die because it was poisonous. That’s how poison works; if you bite it and you die, it’s poisonous. If it bites you and you die, it’s venomous, and why the heck am I even thinking about details?!

Then, there was also the issue with her legs feeling exhausted. Oh, and the wound; she’d have to find a way to make sure it didn’t get infected. Yup, what a great start.

She tried moving her legs for a third time, daring to hope they’d actually move.

…no way…

Surprisingly… they did.

They felt weird, and misshapen, and were probably freaky like the rest of her body, but she did’t care.

The issue with her legs was gone.

She had no idea what caused it, though. Her legs just felt… tired, like when you sleep in an awkward position and you blood needs time to flow correctly again. Maybe… maybe it was just that? After all, she had no idea how long she’d been laying on the ground

But it didn’t matter. She. Could. WALK! Izzy immediately heaved herself on her legs… and fell belly-up on the ground. Okay, so she wasn’t exactly used to her legs’ new shape; the heels was way too far from the toes. She then proceeded to perform a mobility check on said toes. She flexed them. They flexed just fine.

…well, at least I can crawl on all four now, so… yay, I guess? The thought of having become an animal felt degrading, but what could she do about it? And anyway, my first priority is to find water, because I’m thirsty as hell… wait, that came out wrong! Actually, never mind; I need water! FAST!

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She heaved herself on all four and crawled. The vegetation was damp and green, so she was pretty sure there was a source of water somewhere around there – she just opened the entire ecosystem didn’t rely on a subterranean water system that she had no way to reach. That would’ve been the worst possible outcome.

Isabel kept crawling and crawling, her hands getting dirtier and dirtier since she would at the soft soil to drag herself when her legs failed her. Eventually, however, the vegetation got sparser and sparser, until her eyes spot a stripe of naked ground on which no grass flourished.

A path…

Slowly but steadily, she dragged herself towards that primitive street.

If someone… if anyone were to pass… maybe I could-.

She passed out, unable to finish her thought.

II

“No, it doesn’t!”, Wulfric shouted.

“YES, IT DOES! AND YOU WOULD MOST CERTAINLY END UP IN HELL FOR THAT!”, Jello replied.

“No, I wouldn’t!”.

“YES, YOU WOULD!”.

“Why?!”.

“BECAUSE IT’D STILL COUNT AS MURDER!”.

“NO, IT DOESN’T!”.

“…how?!”.

“Listen, I’ll try to explain it as best as I can; if I curse someone with a curse that will kill them, and said curse can only be activated with my death, then I’m not the one killing them – they will kill themselves by killing me”.

“THROUGH THE SPELL YOU CURSED THEM WITH!”.

“…alright, so maybe this isn’t a flawless paradox”, Wulfric admitted. “Well, your turn now”.

Jello frowned as much as his jelly-like body allowed him to, in a deep effort to remember something he had come up with some time ago. “Ah, I’ve got one. Okay, so basically, do you know that saying with roses and violets?”.

“Uh-huh”.

“The one that goes ‘roses are red, violets are blue’?”.

“Mm-hmm”.

“Alright, so hear me out; if violets are blue, then purple and blue are the same colour. And since purple is made from equal quantities of blue and red mixed together, that means red, too, is blue. And since yellow and blue make green, that must mean that yellow, green and blue are the same colour as well. And since blue is the exact same colour as red, then green, too, can be red. Which basically mean that all colours are the same colour”.

“…this is… this is wrong on so many levels, yet it’s also correct…”.

“I know, right? Like, that’s crazy”.

“Also a problem; we’ve been colour-coding magic for ages, and this reasoning throws it all into a trash-can. Magic corporations, wizards and all the people who earn money from magic would go bankrupt, thus dumping our entire economy into a gigantic, ass-crushing dumpster fire, that will eventually lead to the end of the world as we know it”.

“If the Demon Lord doesn’t get there first”.

The Wlkwos shivered upon hearing those words. The Demon Lord. The most powerful Demon to walk the Material Plane. An entity of chaos, destruction and death. Someone who should never be messed with. Someone whose very name should never be pronounced, least you wanted to be cursed until you died and even after that.

Wulfric remembered the times when he was afraid of accidentally saying his name. But that was before learning that Demons’ names are complicated well beyond reason, making them impossible to say by mistake.

“How much time till we reach the Prophets’ City?”, Jello asked, impatiently. “I feel like we’ve been travelling forever”.

“Well, your majesty”, Wulfric teased him, “according to my journal, we’ve been travelling for no less than a year”.

“THAT MUCH TIME HAS PASSED?!”. Jello’s gelatinous jelly eyes widened in apprehension. “HOW?! HOW HAS IT BEEN A YEAR ALREADY?!”.

“…well, we did meet in Shorough. And since there are no roads or routes that connect it to the Prophet’s City, we kind of had to go the other way around. Which should’ve taken us only one-hundred and twenty-six days, but I’m sure you’re fully aware of the… set backs we ran into”. The Wlkwos pulled a wooden tube out of his satchel and unscrewed the cap in order to pull a scroll out of it. “Anyway, according to the map, we’re still… four-hundred and seventy-seven miles away from our destination. It should take us more or less twenty-nine days, maybe thirty”.

“THIRTY DAYS?!”, Jello almost shouted. “But then, we’ll arrive on the 25th of Dragon!”.

“Or the 26th of Dragon”, Wulfric calmly specified. “And there could be even more unforeseen difficulties-”.

“THEN LET’S HURRY AT ONCE!”, the cat-shaped slime screamed. “WHY THE HECK DIDN’T YOU TELL ME SOONER THAT IT HAD BEEN SO LONG?!”.

“…you kind of never asked”.

“…be thankful to the gods that you’re the only adventurer I can rely on”.

“…I’m sorry… it didn’t occur to me how desperately you wanted to-”.

“It’s… alright, we… we’ve been through a lot. It was foolish of me to think such a thought would cross your mind-”.

“No, no, it’s my fault, I should’ve assumed how much you longed for home”.

“…well, then… alright”.

“…has my apology been accepted?”.

“Yes, it has”.

Ominous clouds had gathered above their heads. Electricity bolted through the sky, immediately followed by a booming thunder.

Being genre-savy, Wulfric quickly put the scroll back inside the scroll holder. “Don’t want our map to get wet”.

“My kingdom is going to be such a mess when I come back…”, Jello whispered, rain hitting and sinking into his see-through body. “Once we lift this curse, however…”. He would’ve clenched his fist had he still had them. “…that usurper is going to pay”.

“Alright, so now we have to go through the forest, which should take half a day”, Wulfric announced, pointing at the vegetation ahead of them. “There will probably be lots of wild animals”. He gently stroked his sword’s hilt. “Honestly, I could use some… some… anything’s pelt, honestly”.

“Why the hell would you need an animal’s pelt?”.

“Uh… duh, it’s because people wear them when it’s cold! And we’re near the end of Rabbit; it gets really cold in these regions!”.

“…Wulfric?”.

“Yeah?”.

“You’re a Wlkwos. You have fur. You don’t need to wear a coat of fur, because you’ve already got your own!”.

“I didn’t say that I needed it. I’m warm and fuzzy as hell. I’ll be selling the pelts to those who need them! Like, did you know that some people from the East are cold-blooded and have scales? How the heck are they supposed to stay warm in this weather?”.

“…I’m pretty sure that if a cold-blooded person planned a trip to a cold-weathered environment, they’d bring their own pelts from the start, instead of buying them from some random Wlkwos”.

“Hey!”. Wulfric planted his thumb in his chest. “This ‘random Wlkwos’ is a successful freelance adventurer!”.

“If you say so…”.

At this point, they had entered the forest. And both Jello and Wulfric knew the golden rule of wilderness-crossing; never stray from the path. To stray from the path meant to either get lost or get eaten by a savage beast, or often both, with the first leading to the latter, and the latter leading to a gruesome death.

III

“It’s raining”.

“I know, Wulfric”.

“And it’s getting kind of dark”.

“I know, Wulfric”.

“…should we set up camp? Maybe not on the path, because, like, other people have to use it… but perhaps we can stay just six feet away from it, so that we don’t get lost?”.

“That sounds reasonable”.

“…what are we going to do for the rain?”.

“What can we do?”.

“…I don’t think there’s anything we can do… I’m going to get a cold…”.

“We really didn’t think this whole thing through as we should have”.

“I’m gonna have to agree; this sucks”. The Wlkwos shrugged. “But you’re paying me, so eh, I’ll deal with it. I don’t really mind getting wet, honestly; I just don’t like having mud in my fur”. He shivered. “Like, it gets so… hard, and crust-like…”.

“Oh gods, that sounds awful…”.

“I know, right? A-And if I use my fire magic to heat me dry, the mud just hardens faster”.

“…so, who’s going to hit the sack first?”.

“You. It’s my turn to stay on guard, remember?”.

“Alright”. With that said, Jello curled up and simply plopped on the ground, his jelly form shaking from the slight impact. “Goodnight, then”.

Wulfric envied his client’s ability to simply sleep anywhere. The Wlkwos leaned against a nearby tree, his pointy ears turning in every direction, listening for any kind of noise. And suddenly… he inhaled something different than the night’s moisture. Something alive, breathing, losing blood. He immediately unsheathed his sword; he knew it would’ve been unwise to let Jello alone, but that blood could belong to someone who was injured and in need of help. And as an adventurer, he couldn’t ignore that! Slowly, silently and steadily, he tiptoed away from his sleeping travel companion. Luckily for him, the source of the smell wasn’t too far away; it took him only a minute to reach it. And upon seeing what it was, his jaw dropped wide open.

In front of him, their left arm bruised and stained with mud and blood, and their right horn broken, lied a Jackalope.