Demon Core - Chapter 32: Lucky Rabbit's Foot (1/2)

~ [Akrasia] ~

Human | ♂ | Classless (Child) LOCATION: The Human Capital, The Secret Garden LEVEL: 02

“What is this place?” mutters the boy to himself, peeking through the hedge in confusion. He pulls his head back out, looking around himself at the busy street in the middle of the human capital. He’s out here on errands. His shoulders are laden with a heavy, wax coated sack of flour. All around him are people, running around in their usual panics. They say that the Demon-King is coming and that he’s almost here. A lot of people have left the city, but just as many have come, thinking that this is the safest place to be.

He doesn’t know anything about all of that. He’s a young man, not yet on the cusp of adulthood but past his formative years.

A large patrol of soldiers in uniform, water running down their armor, marches through the city in order to keep an established presence within the minds of the people, who are likely to fall into anarchy. There are rumors that monsters, shadows, and creatures of the like have managed to sneak into the capital city despite its formidable defenses — both physical and magical — but he doesn’t know if he believes that.

Still, the stories persist, particularly in the nightmare riddled dreams of the citizenry.

Akrasia turns his head back around, looking where the flush, green hedge was just a moment ago on the side of the street. He’s walked this road a thousand times. There was never such a thing here.

However, now that he looks back, there is nothing there except for a stone wall.

Confused, the boy blinks, looking around himself. But he sees nothing out of the ordinary anymore.

Water runs down the wax coated sack of flour, stamped with the logo of a rabbit. Akrasia fusses in a panic and runs off. He needs to hurry back home before the coating breaks through from the rain and makes the flour wet, or he’s going to get in trouble.

Hurrying, he runs down the road to make up for lost time.

A small, green leaf falls out of his hair as he goes.

Would he stay or would he leave the city if given the choice?

Akrasia winces, sitting down on a wet, broken crate, as he looks around the street. It is the next day. The boy stretches out his throbbing leg, covered in sharp red welts.

The flour got wet yesterday before he made it home.

If he could, he’d leave the city. But not because of the Demon-King. He’d just always leave, no matter what. Some of his very first memories of life are scenes of his own mind telling him that he has to go. His very first sentence to himself was something along the lines of ‘run’. However, he didn’t, and he’s still here.

Where would he even go?

Besides…

Akrasia leans with his back against the stone wall behind himself, just outside of an alley, as he looks up and toward the blackened sky.

A barrier covers the city. Magical sigils the size of houses float overhead, projected into the sky by the shield around the human capital that is held up by thousands of priests and casters from all around the nation who have come here. It still lets the rain through, but everything else is blocked from leaving or entering. The entire human-capital looks as if it were trapped in an ornamental globe.

He sighs, relaxing his shoulders.

Then, a second later, he lets out a terrified yelp as his balance shifts. The solid wall that he was sitting against gives way, and he pushes through it, as it becomes oddly soft all of a sudden. Sharp twigs and branches scratch at him as the weight of his body falls through the changed barrier, and a moment later, he finds himself lying on his back and looking around in confusion.

A hedge?

Lifting his gaze, his legs still sticking through to the other side where he just was, Akrasia stares at the verdantly green hedge that he had fallen through.

“Huh?” He blinks, staring at it and then around himself. The boy pulls his legs in, wincing again as he gets up and brushes himself off. Confused, he looks around himself.

It’s the place he saw yesterday, the garden.

His wide, confused eyes examine the space that is entirely the opposite of the city he had just been in. It stands in full contrast. The air is… fresh and dry. There is a crispness and cleanliness to it that the grimy city couldn’t ever contain within itself. The grass below him, blowing in an impossibly soft spring wind, is so vividly green that it almost hurts to look at it. It looks fake, like oil paint. However, as he bends down and plucks a blade free to examine, he finds that it is very real. The garden looks not like a tended, well kept park — like a garden one could see through the fences of the estates of the wealthy.

Rather, it looks more organic and wild. There are flowers in bloom, but they don’t look as if they had been planted but rather as if they had simply grown. There are trees, but they are not in clusters or in singular rows, but rather in misshapen bunches here and there, as one would expect to find in the wilds.

However, what has stolen his eyes and his breath the most is the sight of the unfettered, bright sapphire sky above his head.

There is no barrier blocking his sight. It’s not dark, like it has been for weeks and weeks now. It’s… the sky. It’s like he remembers it being before this all began. It’s not raining. The ground is as wet as one would expect a healthy meadow to be in spring time.

Akrasia turns around, looking at the hedge behind himself that is still there, and then back into the garden. Deeply curious, he wanders, looking around, trying to understand how exactly this could exist.

He doesn’t see the city at all. He doesn’t see any houses, any masonry, or any sign of a street or a road other than a meek desire-path that ekes on up a slight incline and around a little bend that is hidden by large stones covered in moss and growths of wood, soil, and mushrooms.

Lost in his curiosity, Akrasia wanders down through the garden that seems to be confined to a strange space. He can’t see the horizon; rather, it’s like there’s a fog at the distant edge of the area that, while being transparent in a way, is not transparent enough to allow him to see through. At least not more than a few misty details. It’s like being inside an overturned, scratched glass bauble.

There is a chattering of glassware.

Holding the large rock, he curiously peeks around the side.

A face is looking straight at him; however, something is clearly wrong with its features. Its eyes are where its mouth should be, its mouth is where its eyes should be, its…

– Oh.

It’s actually just upside down.

Akrasia screams, stumbling backward and swiping with his arms instinctively, as if he had seen a spider inches from his face.

“Lucky, lucky,” says a girl’s voice from behind the large stone as something drops down and rustles in the underbrush. A black shadow, something that stands in contrast with the rest of the garden, hides in the overgrowth before him, pieces of it sticking out in many places.

— He runs away, scrambling back through the hedge. He lands out on the other side, covered in scratches from the bramble. By the time he looks back from the wet stone paving he’s sitting down on, the greenery is all gone.

There is only a brick wall there.

He told the city guards about what happened.

They inspected the area and found nothing and then escorted him back to his home, warning his parents that he had wasted their time.

He got the belt again, more severely today than the day before when he let the flour get wet. Sometimes they use different spots — his back, his arms, his legs — to spread it out. But other times, they’ll focus on one area for a week or two, to make him feel it more. They don’t really seem to be able to decide which strategy of punishment they prefer, so they switch it up every now and then. Currently, they’re fixated on his left leg.

It is the next day.

Akrasia hobbles down the road on his errands again, looking around at the many windows of the many shops all around him. The influx of goods into the city has come to a total standstill, and as such, so has most of the commerce. There is a dungeon at the core of the city, so the adventurers and the city guard supply most of the food and necessitates hunting in there. However, it is a significant downgrade in luxury and abundance compared to a few months ago.

Still, it’s enough for the city to survive on heavy rations for now. However, they’ve had to adapt to things like eating monster meat instead of just animals. Before all of this, that was extremely taboo and seen as very uncouth.

His left leg isn’t broken, but an outside observer would assume that someone had done their best to try and make it that way. The welts and marks are layered over one another, the raw skin having blistered and opened where old marks had been lashed to create new ones. The area is red and bleeding.

The boy walks, needing to go to the market.

Whatever that place was, whatever that thing that he saw was, nobody believed him about it. The city explicitly asked everyone to mention any oddity, any strange thing, to the guards immediately. But he did, and this is what he gets for it.

Sighing, he looks away from the shops he can’t afford anything in anyway and keeps going toward the market, even if he sees a flash of green out of the side of his eye where one of the windows for a store should be.

Akrasia looks at the hedge that is quite literally growing in the place of a pane of glass, but nobody seems to even care. Everyone is just walking by the shop as if it had always been that way, as if it weren’t interesting.

Metal rattles as three soldiers in armor walk by on their patrol. He almost reaches out to grab one of them, to point out the strange store, but his fingers stop in midair, and he quietly drops his palm, turning his gaze back toward the hedge.

…What should he do?

Is this… is this something he should be worried about? Some magic of the Demon-King?

The glass around him glows, reflecting the aura of the bubble over the city.

No, how could it be? They’re safe in here. But what is it, then? Is it dangerous? Should he keep trying to warn someone, anyone?

His mind goes to the garden, which, compared to this place, was beautiful beyond comparison. However, what about that thing… There was something in there with him — someone, maybe.

Quietly, he stands there for a time before looking around himself and then back toward the window.

The hedge is gone.

Akrasia lies in his bed. It is night, and he closes his eyes, ready to sleep. He didn’t mess up his errands today, so he wasn’t physically punished. However, his growling stomach and aching leg are enough to make him continue to feel it. He won’t be allowed to eat for another day.

His eyes fall shut despite all of that, his weak and hurting body thankful for the feast of sleep, if nothing more than that.

— His body spasms, immediately having the sensation of falling inside his bed. His eyes shoot open, his fingers grabbing the blanket as he falls through the hedge that had replaced his mattress.

He lands down on soft grass with a light thud, his eyes staring up toward the ceiling of his room, only to find it missing. Instead, he’s staring at a bright, vivid canopy of stars. They shine with an intensity that he has never quite seen before. They’re so impossibly bright. The lights of the city usually dim them for the human eye.

In a panic, he sits upright and looks around himself at the garden.

“So lucky. Wow…” says a voice from the darkness.

Akrasia jumps to his feet in surprise, but puts too much weight at once on his hurt leg and falls down again. Instinctively, he instead grabs his blanket that had come with him and pulls it over himself, like a child hiding under their covers at night from a monster — which he essentially is in this moment.

He huddles himself together, the fabric draping over him as he lays in the grass, listening to the sounds from outside of the blanket. The blades crunch lightly as something walks over their rustling bodies. Soft, wet snaps give credence to the presence of some other thing here with him. There is a smell in the air that is lightly floral and pleasant — a soft perfume that reminds him of gentle teas.

Whatever it is, it walks around him. He can hear it within touching distance as it makes a small circle around him with a very odd gate. “So lucky; this is your fourth time now,” says the woman’s voice.

“LEAVE ME ALONE!” yells Akrasia, not really having anything better to shout than that as he clutches the blanket in fear.

He feels something press against his back on the other side of the blanket. A presence. A weight crawls over his side, pressing down on him from above as it crawls over and reaches toward the direction that he’s facing, grabbing the blanket.

“But you’re so lucky!” she argues. A second later, pale fingers yank on the edge of the fabric, pulling it up and away from his grip to expose him to the night. Vivid, yellow eyes look at him from up close, like a human face that twitches its nose. The smell of perfume comes his way. Large, black furred rabbit ears are pressed against the grass, flattened as her head rests upside down to look at him. “Such a lucky boy,” says the black rabbit, flopping off the top of the blanket and then crawling inside.

Akrasia screams.

Akrasia wakes up.

He sits upright in his bed, looking around the area. His body is covered in sweat, and his blanket is sticking to him because of it. The boy peels it off, looking around his bedroom. It’s exactly as it should be.

He’s exactly as he should be.

It was just a bad dream.

His heart begins to slow down as his breathing calms.

After a minute, he rustles his hair because it feels off and pulls out a twig.

He’s carrying a knife with him.

He’s not allowed to have it, but he has it tucked away in his trousers. He doesn’t know what that thing is or why it’s haunting him — the black rabbit. But he’s going to defend himself if it tries to get him again.

— Not that he’s really even sure what happened.

He was there under his blanket in the garden, and then it, she, crawled in toward him, and that’s the last thing that he remembers.

Is she some kind of monster? Some spirit or something? Maybe it’s some kind of creature that escaped from the dungeon? That happens from time to time. Usually it’s just some odd goblin or something that slips past the guards. But it could be that something more unusual breaks free from its underground confines, or? It’s possible, right?

It can’t be because of the Demon-King. The shield keeps the city safe from him.

Akrasia stops in the middle of the busy street as he looks around himself. The smell hits him. The perfume.

In between the smells of mud and filth, past the smoke and the smell of alchemists at work, past the odors of leather-workers and smiths, bakers, and everything else within the city, comes a single note, creeping its way through all of that toward him.

He looks around himself but sees nothing.

Quietly, Akrasia keeps walking, his hand hovering over his belt so that he’s ready.

It is an hour later.

The city guards thought the way he was walking was suspicious, so they stopped him and found the knife that he’s not allowed to have and certainly not allowed to have in public.

They’re taking him home to his family now.

Out of the corner of his eyes, the boy sees the familiar hedge growing in the iron-rod fence of a local graveyard this time. A part of him wants to run and jump into either of them, honestly. But the strong hands holding his shoulder firmly won’t allow any escape.

The door slams and locks behind him seconds after he roughly tumbles over the wooden floors in a heap, having quite literally been thrown into his room.

It takes a moment for him to recover and orient himself, with throbbing pain shooting through him from the beating. His leg moves between states of numbness and pain.

His trembling hand reaches down for the fabric of his trousers, causing him to scream and hold it down at the same time. Tenderly, he pulls the fabric around his leg up. The crusted blood that had fused the fabric together with the mangled wound covering his shin and calf cracking as he peels it away. Red ooze, a mixture of blood and thick wound fluid, runs down his leg as he cries, exposing it to the night air.

The limb is raw and essentially flayed. There isn’t a single free spot left anywhere that hasn’t been marked, scarred, or whipped with the belt. There are deep imprints and tears where the metal buckle had struck. Tenderly, he tries to touch his shin bone, but is unable to do so for more than a second as he pushes around a small fragment of bone shard.

It hurts so much. He hates this place. He hates them. He hates this stupid city and his stupid home, and he hates his stupid family.

Akrasia pulls the fabric up to around his knee, exposing the leg fully. Any adventurer with wounds like this would be taken to a fainting priest. But as a child, he is essentially just the property of his family and can be treated as such. Nobody cares, and anyone who might is too busy with their own problems brought on by the incursion of the Demon-King.

Quietly sniffling, he breathes in deeply, trying to calm himself.

This is all the fault of that stupid rabbit. If she hadn’t…

He turns his head, looking at the hedge that, of course, has taken over the side wall of his room. Full, flush, verdant growths spread from wall to wall. The thick, full leaves billow and move as if there were a breeze in his tiny bedroom. The smell comes his way — the smell of those sweet flowers.

His trembling lips break his words as he cries out. “What do you want?” asks Akrasia, not able to stand anymore. Hands reach through the hedge from the other side. “What do you want?!” he yells.

— A loud thud comes from the other side of the house as someone kicks against a wall. The signal for him to shut up.

A hole opens up in the hedge as she pries it apart, a bright, vivid light shining into his room from her side of the desperation. He looks at her. She’s a woman, like a human, but with the features of an animal. A black rabbit. Is she a vildt?

Black hair, messy hair, and yellow eyes contrast the bright greens and blues around her as she looks at him.

“Hello, lucky boy,” says the creature, as she works away the hedge enough for someone to walk through. He looks at her in terror, not able to run, fight, or even scream. He knows that if he tries to get anyone here, she and the hedge won’t be seen by them, and he’ll get hurt again for making noise.

He grabs hold of his bed frame, trying to pull himself up off the ground. “Why do you keep calling me that?” he asks, looking at her as she works, opening up the hedge some more. The smell of the garden enters into his home.

“Because,” replies the black rabbit, looking his way. She clears the rest of the hedge away, letting him see the body in full now for the first time. She’s missing a foot — it’s gone at the ankle. The stump is covered with a cloth wrap.

“Humans like to take off the feet of lucky rabbits,” she says, lifting the covered stump to show him. She lifts a finger, tapping her sharp nose. “So you must be a really lucky boy,” explains the creature.

“…Huh…?” he asks, looking at her in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?”

She shakes her head, thinking. “No, really. They think they can steal our luck that way.” Her finger taps her chin as she stares toward the ceiling. “You’re super lucky, actually. I lost my foot the first time I got caught,” she explains, waving her fingers at him a moment later. “But look at you, number five now, right?”

“I’m not…” Akrasia looks at her. “This only happened because of you!” he hisses, instinctively lowering his voice.

“…Huh…?” she asks in a somewhat droopy tone, looking his way. Her nose twitches from side to side, her ears changing posture. She lifts a hand, waving him over. “Hey, come over here! Come on,” she says, entirely ignoring his accusation of guilt. The black rabbit nods her head, gesturing for him to follow her into the hedge.

“Leave me alone!” he snaps at her.

She frowns, tilting her head, and then shrugs. “Okay. It’s your loss,” she remarks, closing her eyes and shaking her head as she grabs a stick to balance herself and then hobbles back and away. “Just remember that after they take your foot, they’ll eat you too if they can,” she explains. “Good luck -” The black rabbit taps her nose as the hedge begins to grow closed again, the leaves slowly obscuring her features as the hole closes. The vines that are spread from wall to wall begin to retract, as everything pulls back and away from this place. “- lucky boy.”

Thundering footsteps make themselves heard as someone moves through the house, very likely provoked by the noise of this conversation.

His eyes go wide as the steps come closer and closer, the vibrations moving through the floorboards beneath him as he hangs onto the side of the bed. He can’t… he can’t survive another punishment.

The sound of the approaching danger grows louder and louder, overpowering the fear in his heart.

In terror, he lets go of the bed, hopping on one leg and then falling down, leaving him nothing but the act of crawling forward desperately as the rumbling intensifies. There’s a clinking of metal on the outside of his door as a belt is undone from a waist and a hand begins to fumble with a locked door handle.

Akrasia reaches out for the closing hedge that is closing before his eyes. He’s not going to make it.

— A pale hand reaches out, grabbing his. It’s warm — hot, even. A face lying down on ground level with him looks his way, smiling a strange smile.

“Such a lucky boy,” says the creature again, as he is yanked into the hole just in time as the door opens behind him.

The two of them fall through the hedge, tumbling through the air together in free fall for a moment, having entered the garden from an unusual angle this time — that is, from the sky above. The black rabbit grabs a hold of him in the air as they fall, Akrasia yelling in shock.

She lands down on her one good leg and then bounces off immediately, jumping a few steps to break off the momentum of the movement, and then lets him go. He falls down immediately and rolls onto his back, watching as the hole in the sky grows closed — a looming shadow standing beyond the closing dot.

Akrasia turns his head, looking at the one-footed rabbit who has, after letting him go, hopped one more time and now she’s just floating in the air, her long, frazzled black ears dangling and twitching at the same time.

“What are you?” he asks. “What is this place?”

The creature holds onto her walking stick, placing it into the ground but continuing to float as she holds onto it. “I’m a rabbit,” she explains.

“Huh?” he looks at her, not being able to get up onto his legs. “You’re not!”

She blinks. “I am.” The girl holds her arms out at her side. “And this, you lucky-lucky boy, is a secret place.” She floats upside down now as she climbs down the stick, which is stuck in the soil, her legs dangling up into the air as if she were fighting to not float away. The rabbit holds her finger over her lips. “You can’t tell anyone about it. Ever.” She shrugs. “That is, if you decide to leave.”

“Look, I’m not lucky,” he argues, grabbing a hold of her walking stick and pulling himself up onto his feet. He lifts his gaze, looking at the face hovering over him and smiling a knowing smile. A hand reaches down, touching his nose.

“But you are,” she explains. “Because you,” she starts, her ears flopping down against his head. “You lucky boy, are very special,” says the rabbit. “Because you can leave if you want to.”

“What?” asks Akrasia.

She nods, letting go of the stick, and then slowly drifts away into the air. “That is, if you want to,” she repeats.

“Leave?” replies the boy. “What, the city?” He pulls the walking stick free from the grass, and then he hobbles after her, her mangled leg throbbing. She nods. “How? I don’t have any money or anything,” he explains.

The black rabbit nods. “I have a friend,” she says, twirling a strand of her hair as she watches him from above. “He made me into this,” she explains. “I used to be a normal rabbit. He’s very powerful.” The black rabbit leans her head onto her fist, her elbow outstretched as if she were lazing on a bed. “He can help you. In fact, he wants to help you,” says the entity.

“Why?”

“Because you’re -”

“- I’m not!” argues Akrasia before she can say it again. “If your friend is so powerful, then why don’t you have your foot back?!” he argues, perhaps somewhat offensively.

She shrugs but doesn’t seem too offended. “Because if I did, we wouldn’t be similar,” she says, tapping the side of her head. “I was chosen because you were chosen.” The black rabbit nods. “It’s very simple.”

Akrasia looks around the garden, which is as serene and peaceful as ever — perfect — it may as well be paradise.

His gaze turns back to the sky, but she’s gone now. The rabbit has vanished.

“What do I have to do?” he asks. “And what do I get for it?”

— A pair of hands rest on his shoulder from behind, and a head sits next to his, smelling of floral perfume. “You just have to do a little, tiny favor for him,” she explains. “A small help that only you can do, and then he can give you anything you want,” promises the black rabbit. She grabs the tops of his ears, gently pulling on them as if she were stretching them out into another shape. “Any little thing at all.”

It’s quiet for a while as he thinks, trying to piece together these nonsensical circumstances. The wind blows, the grass rustles, and the smell of flowers surrounds him.

“Unless you want to go back,” she says, letting go of him and gesturing to the edge of the garden, where the hedge, the exit back to the city, his home, sits. “There are many other lucky boys out there.” She sighs. “But it’s a shame.” The black rabbit shakes her head. “I thought you were really the lucky-lucky one,” explains the entity, holding out her nub leg next to his mangled one to show some sort of similarity between the two of them. “…Oh well. I guess then I’ll find someone el -”

“- Okay!” agrees Akrasia, turning to look at her, his fists clenched. “Okay!” he repeats, lifting his gaze to look at the black rabbit. “I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll help.”

The black rabbit beams, grabbing a hold of the walking stick that he’s still bracing himself with. Her shadowed face contrasts the reflection in her off yellow eyes and smile, which seems almost haunting.

She noisily and with great strength thumps her good foot against the ground a few times in quick succession, a deep vibration moving through the soil.

The grass pulls away, peeling back as if it were a layer of skin being removed. It rolls together like a closing scroll in either direction as the ground beneath them, bare, begins to shake and rumble. Dirt and rock shift to the sides, a hole opening up next to them in what looks like a burrow of sorts, a tunnel.

“Hold on,” she says, taking the stick from him and using it herself to walk. Instead, she holds her other arm out his way and lets him brace himself against her body as they walk down an incline into the deep hole, from which a sweltering heat comes out, blasting like from an opened stove door.

“Where are we going?” he asks. “What is this?”

“This tunnel was my favor. I made it for him in exchange for his favor,” she explains. The black rabbit looks down the dark tunnel that indeed looks as if an animal had mad it, her yellow gallu eyes glowing in the subterranean darkness. “We’re going to meet my friend,” she explains, as glowing fires line the edge of the distant darkness below the core of the world. “And he’s going to be your friend too, very, very soon.” She shakes her head, sighing. “Such a lucky, lucky boy,” says the girl, shaking her head, her black rabbit ears flopping from side to side.

What he does not see as they walk through the dark tunnel, because of his poor vision is the many bodies that line the edge of the tunnel, boys and girls of many ages, who were all not quite so lucky-lucky.