It watched her. It watched her emerge from her burrow and simply stared at her as it sat perched atop many metal tree-drones. It simply sat there, eating red and bloody flesh from some creature she had never seen. The creature stared at her as she froze on the spot. Never in her life did she think that there was a creature so powerful, so abhorrently dominant, that it could take away her will to live by just looking at it. She sat there, frozen and terrified, for who knows how long. She was only released from its terrifying gaze once the bloody flesh it had been gripping was fully consumed, when it flew away.
She immediately ran into her burrow. She had no conscious say in the matter; it was all instinct that drove her to burrow and hide. She felt the creatures leave, one by one, until they had all eventually left. She could not recall for how long she stayed in that burrow. It may have been weeks or months or even years for all she knew, but there was one thing that drove her to leave: hunger. She tried to ignore her desires for as long as possible, but she eventually caved into her base urges. She spent a long time lingering at the entrance to the burrow, working up the courage to exit her burrow.
‘Oh! That’s when it started!’ She cried out in her mind. ‘Wait… W-What’s going on? I feel… different. It’s like my mind just… grew.’
She had never been able to develop a solid train of thought, as her mind never truly had the capability of introspection, only understanding of her body’s state of being. In short it meant that now she was able to have more complex thoughts that involved abstract concepts and using her knowledge to answer questions, among other things.
‘So… what is this? In fact, how am I even thinking right now? I have only been thinking by using pictures like grass and those green creatures.’
She began to assign meanings to various forms of mental stimuli. The process was long and complicated, but it was done all in her dreams. By the end of it, she was as capable of complex thinking as most humans are able to.
‘I’ve sorted my mind out, but I still need to remember it all. But I remember that my mind first began to change around the time I left my home after the land was… torn? Taken? Evicted? I dunno…’
When she finally left her burrow, her eyes met a whole different view than the one she had thought she would see. During her first excursion, she was so terrified of the one-eyed creature that she could not remember anything else about the environment around her. The sky was meant to be blue, she knew that. It was also meant to have a sun and clouds. Her new sky did not have a sun or a moon. All that her new sky possessed was a murky blue fog that obscured her vision if she looked far enough away and many, many floating islands dotting the sky. Above her, there was an island that was bigger than anything she had ever seen before. It had many miles of rock and stone underneath the surface. She was unable to see the top, but she knew that the stone color was too unique, as it glowed an eerie blue.
‘I ran after that, didn’t I? I kinda wish I could go back to sunny skies though…’
After running from the site of her old burrow, she noticed that she was stuck on an island similar to the ones that floated above her. She did not really mind because she remained in the forest that she lived her entire life in. She knew every route and escape route by heart, and she used her abilities to continue to live in the new world.
She had no idea how long she had spent in the new world. She knew that it had been a very, very long time. She also knew that it was so long that she should have died at some point. But, for some reason, she did not die of either old age nor of being eaten. The latter, though, came from her innate talent of running. Throughout her long new life, she saw the forest she called home become more and more blue over time, and with the forest becoming more blue, more energy seeped into the land and its inhabitants. Eventually every creature became stronger, more resilient, and more able to control the energy of the forest; some, however, were never truly able to control the energy in most ways, so they simply became stronger and tougher. Along the way, the rabbit became able to project the power into the air at some point along the way, using it as a smokescreen of sorts to escape. At the same time as the ‘evolution’ of both the rabbit and her surroundings, her mind had become sharper and more complex. Slowly. Over the span of what could have been hundreds of years, her mind evolved and became more advanced than her peers, allowing her to survive in this new world even better. Eventually, all of the other rabbits in the forest could achieve the same feats as she could. This did not stop at rabbits, however, as every creature in the woods became just as strong as any other member of their species. This led to general wisdom becoming more dominant in the forest, as there was no innate difference in power; and in terms of wisdom, the rabbit reigned supreme.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The rabbit, however, was only able to use her wisdom to escape danger, as the fact that she was still a rabbit, despite her slowly increasing wisdom, hampered her ability to hunt. She would have likely stayed her course, slowly accruing intelligence over centuries, were it not for the arrival of the human, Kain.
‘That human made my mind become even smarter. It was probably the human’s blood.’
The first time she saw the human, he was walking down from the top of the local mountain. For some reason she felt energy flowing unnaturally around there, but assumed that it was a larger beast or something. By this point, her mind was quite complex, but was nowhere near a human’s mind, and when she saw Kain walking near the stream that she drank from, she began to smell a scent that seemed to attract her attention, and she noticed that it came from Kain. When he drank the river water and began his violent evolution, she found the strangely sweet scent coming from Kain’s blood. During his body’s changes, she quickly hopped over to Kains bleeding body and licked some of the sweet blood from the ground. She immediately felt a sharp pain from her forehead and darted back into her temporary burrow. It took so long for that headache to subside that the little rabbit began to feel the same level of hunger that she had felt after her encounter with the black-eyed monster. She began to eat and eat and eat until her stomach finally stopped sending pangs of hunger through her mind. Even after her hunger was sated, the human had still not finished his evolution, so the rabbit looked at the human’s possessions. There were a few metal tubes with what looked like sculpted branches on the sides of them, a sharp, pointy metal slab, and a turtle shell made of metal. She looked around and found nothing else, so only took the turtle shell of metal to live in which, along with his other possessions, the rabbit noted as having more energy soaked into it than before.
Eventually the human woke up and went on his way, but the headaches assaulted the little rabbit once more. After it subsided, she felt her mind become bigger in a short timeframe. Luckily, the headache lasted for a much shorter time than previously, so she was able to rest after a while. She would have rested were it not for a sweet smell that permeated the air from down the mountain, which was the way the human traveled. The smell was stronger and more alluring than before. She was tempted, and traversed the mountain to reach the human.
After her movement toward the human, she had never been far from him. At first, she wanted to test his strength, a habit formed due to her recent mind developments. The two had a skirmish, where she acknowledged him as a stronger opponent than her, and decided to simply take some blood while he slept, which she avoided because of his seeming alertness. After his encounter with the green ape and subsequent dismantling of such, she followed him to wherever his destination was. She almost lost track of him several times as her headaches had gotten worse and more frequent, coming and going like the wind. Eventually, she caught up with him at some clearing in the forest, but by this point the headaches became too much. She knew her only sense of relief was from hunting the human and taking his blood like such a measure was ingrained in her soul. They fought once more, and due to her rapidly increasing mental capabilities, she was able to get close enough to bite him. By this point, however, the aching spread to her entire body and she was assaulted by constant pain as she fought. She was only able to tackle him and was unable to take any of his sweet blood.
Her vision dimmed, but she saw him hold her in front of his face, looking at her. She was sure that she was about to be eaten, as it was the way of her existence for her whole life that the weak were eaten. She saw him reach his finger to her and she regained a spark, as if his taunting of her would finally sate her condition. Despite her best efforts, though, she was unable to break skin, leaving the blood in Kain’s veins. She once again resigned herself to her fate and as her vision became almost too dark to see when she tasted something metallic, warm, and very sweet. She drank the blood without hesitation and she finally found relief. Her last image before sleep took her was the face of a young man with blue skin and red eyes with the same color hair gently smiling at her.
‘That was nice of him… I hope we can become friends…’