It was amazing. We could just walk through this tunnel. There was nothing in the way! It was just like yesterday that I had to dig my way through to the other side. The greatly diminished reptiles were a proof that time had passed, however.

We walked through the tunnel, and I made it clear to the girl my memories were a bit more than clouded. She asked me if I at least still knew her name. I answered yes. She seemed pleased with herself. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I figured it’d be fine. I didn’t really care.

She worked me through the events of that day, going from asking her to fix my clothes, which I now realized were a lot more comfy than I remembered them being. Either way, I thanked her, and she awkwardly told me I’d already thanked her the day before, obviously. During the meal that I promised her, Tess had an emotional breakdown. During this part of the rundown, we had to stand still for a while because she was very reluctant to remind me about the whole thing and her breaking into tears, so I had to keep asking until she finally told me. I somewhat remembered zoning out and thinking about depressing stuff back then. As the memories of that day came back to me, I remembered I helped her out. She motivated me then, to help others.

From that part on, she walked with her arms folded and spoke a bit more nervously. According to her, I just started magically making burrows after that, and after reaching the fifth burrow, I collapsed screaming. Next thing, I was asleep for two days. So she cried and I did something nice? That didn't really resonate with me. Sadly, the tunnel wasn’t long enough to go into details.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I still expected to run into a minotaur when I entered the room. It brought back some nasty memories. The first thing we saw was the other girl that slept there, with Bart and the other girl, stretching her back to wake up. She spoke when she saw us.

‘Well, someone’s blushing a lot. What did you do in that tunnel?’ she eyed us with a smug smirk. Looking at the seamstress, her eyes were about to pop out, but yeah, she did blush quite brightly.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

We walked to the dark shrouds that hung awkwardly from the ceiling, and I knocked, gently rapping the shadows. The darkness twitched at the impact and fell away like curtains. From within, the monster rat emerged like a mirage. King, this time more surprised than before, looked me in the eyes, which was confusing since I didn’t know which of his four eyes I’d look back at. There was also a strange thumping sound in the background, which I hardly noticed at first. This...

Soon enough the big guy spoke, but by then I couldn't pay attention as I was too bothered.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

‘Ah, Anite, how wonderf-’

He couldn't finish his sentence. The sound reached a climax.

THUMP!! THUMP!! THUUUMP!!

The wall on our left burst inside.

Stones the size of King soared in our direction.

I ducked over the seamstress as the debris slammed us across the room, straight into the wall.

All was black then. My ears rang as I struggled to get to my knees and on my feet. In between moments of sight and blackness, I could see the girl lie unconscious at my feet. If she’d gone and died on me, I’d be pissed. The thought left me as I stumbled back, only to fall down after seeing what brought about such destruction. There was a slight distance between us, and it didn’t so much seem to pay attention to me, but in my front, stood the same gray behemoth as I had seen days prior. Its horns swayed as it THUMPED around the room, shaking my legs when its hooves cracked the stone. Steam exited its nostrils as it breathed in rage, its eyes bloodshot. It wasn’t holding its massive axe, which was still slung around its back, but an eager hand hovered around a giant dagger. Its scars seemed to throb on its face and chest.

I couldn’t move. Paralyzed by fear, I spectated, hoping to live through this again.

The black bull violently moved to the tunnel, kicking up large stones as it barged through, disappearing into the shadows only to reappear soon after, seemingly more enraged. It looked around frantically. A shock went through me as it barged at King. Exploding with noise. The big rat’s size seemed pitiful when the minotaur raised him from the ground with a single arm, roaring, slowly unsheathing its dagger. Its breathed steam from its snout, moving the metal ring. Each moist spray seemed to tense the room like a rope about to snap.

I could hear a rasping noise that reached through and reached my ears. The beast stirred for a fragment of a second. It heard too. It came from the large rat it was crushing by its hand. His already unnatural voice sounded even more rasped than usual and betrayed a difficulty in breathing.

‘Witness me, beast. All of this belongs to me. You know this.’

The minotaur kept spraying steam into King’s face as he breathed. I could see the air distorting due to the heat it emitted. It didn’t unsheathe the dagger any further, neither did it let go of our grimacing leader, until King passed out from either the heat or the vice grip around his neck. Then the minotaur went almost limp, like all anger evaporated.

King's body dropped to the floor powerlessly as the giant hand released its grip around the thick neck. The bull walked off and punched a crater into the wall before leaving the room into the dark beyond.

He laid there.

Frail.

I started laughing.

I couldn't stop.

---

The affair had been somewhat anticlimactic. He had come and then had gone. The whole place had been destroyed, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed as everything was made of stone and magic. It took me less effort to regain myself this time. It took me a minute or ten. I was still not great, but the shaking had left me sooner, at least.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The period it took me to get myself together gave me time to think, or reflect maybe. I remembered why I built the dens. The ratgirl’s story had been sad; it had been a catalyst for my problems. It reminded me how afraid I was when I first witnessed that monster.

That obviously wasn’t what I told her, but that was the truth and I couldn’t imagine how this was for them. Brynn and I simply weren’t in the same boat as them. We knew how to deal with the fear of death. It was edged into our minds. It had been a part of us, but not of them. If we were scared, I knew they were terrified.

Their fear was fresh. A permanent state of life. So I wanted them to have a place of safety, an escape from the mysterious green rock, though the big guy had done a far greater job.

Right now, all rats were unconscious. Tess had probably passed out from the impact. A quick pulse check gave away that she was, in fact, not dead. Bart and the other guy hadn’t even woken up, though I really thought they should have. Or they did and simply passed out again. King’s round body was more horizontally positioned than I’d ever seen him before. Actually, I hadn’t seen him in any other position than sitting against a wall, grinning, which made me wonder how he managed to get to this room.

Did he walk?

No, I refuse.

I wasn’t confident I could wake him up, so it was a good thing that Brynn was too smart to follow me, or she might’ve had her chance to rid her of our leader figure.

In a way, it surprised me how resilient the Ratfolk were. Not that I’d seen evidence to convince me otherwise, but the knowledge in my brain that insistently lingered told me Ratmen tribes were masses of chaos and dysfunction. Although the frightened rats were unable to properly control their bodies, it took them just about an hour to regain consciousness and get to work. The minotaur had left a hot mess in its wake. Maybe their sense of duty pushed them to. Maybe this was their way to cope. I wouldn’t ask, so I wouldn’t know, but I wondered.

The four rats I could see in the second room all started doing different things. Bart cleaned up rubble with some help from Tess, or attempted to, would be a better phrasing. I shook him by the shoulder and asked him how he was doing, but he just stumbled a bit, looked at me with a dead expression, and continued clearing more rubble. The other guy just walked off without saying a word. And the other girl started inspecting… roots? She had some collected on the floor of which a few had the bark stripped off of them. The sticks were pretty spread out through the room.

Meanwhile, I kept the big guy company. He’d been very happy I managed to get him awake, frightenedly muttering something about Brynn. Right now, he was aiming his attention at the smashed wall.

‘So you really did finish your research?’ I asked him, and he nodded absently. Then he began to ramble on in a low rumble.

‘I did. Luckily, I was almost there just before you managed to incapacitate yourself. Still, it is quite strange what prevailed. I can not imagine what factors must have weighed to make you react like that, so many factors, body, soul, mana, magic circuits, the specific element. I swear I could speculate about it for hours, and maybe I will at another time, but I have more important matters to address.’

‘The wall.’

‘The wall. And moving mother for that matter. Speaking of which, I hope my passing out has not undone the spell on her body to keep her from rotting. Getting it to be permanent so I could move to this room was definitely worth the effort, but my connection with the spell is not of the nature that I can feel it, which has a whole array of benefits and drawbacks, but that is a whole other discussion. The point is the difficulty of redoing the spell.’

King seemed to be in a whole other place while he pondered, but then again, the four eyes made it hard to read him.

‘Don’t you sleep?’

‘I do, but I’ve accounted for that. What I hadn’t accounted for was a giant Minotaur barging in uninvited and nearly choking me to my end. It would have helped if you had been able to report back about it, but oh well. You could not have known.’

I giggled nervously. My… I’ve never giggled before.

‘I did tell you it was a labyrinth.’

‘So you did.’

He kept frowning, undoubtedly wondering how it knew of this place. For now I’ll keep quiet, actually, I don’t think I’ll ever tell. Brynn would surely agree.

‘You’ve sure managed to do a lot these days.’

He looked down from the rock he was staring at and postponed his musings to continue the conversation.

‘Oh well, your assistance allowed me to get a head start on the manipulation of earth, so I could work on the preservation magic for mother.’

‘Preservation magic is its own kind of magic?’

‘Oh certainly, though you really should have knowledge in different fields before you jump into it. Since it’s a peculiar kind, one that only a few use as a starting point, there’s little information on the original methods. Still, whatever you specialize in gives you different options on how to work on the matter, to cast the same spell in different ways, you could say. For example, I would find it impossible to use a rune variation of the spell I put on mother’s body since I know hardly anything about runes, except for the meager basics. What I have done now is use the shadows to… well, it’s a complicated matter really. The point here is, I could only pull off the preservation due to my vast experience with shadow magic, so it’s not something to start with for aspiring mages, not to mention, very limited in its usability.’

While he talked he prepared for the restoration of the wall. While that amount of mass might be way out of my range, he casually continued the lecture as if the task barely needed his attention.

‘So not like earth magic? Since I was able to use that early and it’s very practical.’ This question put a pondering frown on his face.

‘Earth magic, oh no, you mean manipulation of earth, like I’m doing now. There is a vast difference, although what you mean is right in essence since you probably refer to what you have been learning the last days. It is indeed what you learn in advance. It is even possible for someone with the gift to develop the ability by himself, usually with a talent for that specific field of magic, but it is still manipulation of – let’s say the elements. True magic is far more complicated and takes study to grasp, even for the basics. It’s more of a science than it is a talent. You were exceptionally quick picking up on manipulation though. It can take years before one reaches even that height.’

Seemingly effortlessly, he pulled the stone up from the ground and slowly made it reach the ceiling. Perhaps the most concentration went into not going too fast.

‘You see, by manipulation, which uses a lot less energy, I pull up the earth and stone. The only thing that is happening now is that the earth is changing shape. But see what happens when I reach the ceiling and sides of the walls, they don’t mend. With manipulation, I can only push it against each other, but now watch. Congeal. ’

As he commanded me to look at the edges, I could see the stone walls moving even more unnatural, and somehow the stone at all edges turned into tendrils that slowly reached out for each other and intertwined, leaving a perfectly sealed-off wall.

‘And that is true magic, Anite.’

We witnessed his work for a moment. He seemed really shocked by the recent events, and seemed lost in thoughts.

'Anite, I might not always be around. There might be a time when I'm gone, or even deceased. It is important, I think, to tell you I've not been fully honest with all of you. It seemed best to me at the time and I would appreciate you would keep what I'm going to tell you to yourself. Someone needs to know, at least someone. Do you understand?'

I did not understand in the least, but I haven't heard him speak so sincerely, so I nodded. He continued.

'The thing is, we are all of us descendents of a long lost country. Actually, to call us descendents would be slightly incorrect. The souls of all the inhabitants were preserved, their souls ripped from their bodies to be sealed in a magical container until the right time. It turns out, this was a large green gem. On the first day when you woke up, I told you about the blessings I could give you. However, these were never my blessings to bestow. They weren't blessings at all. In fact, I just made you remember. All you visions, all your dreams, they were all real. You're not actually a rat, Anite. You're human.'