Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 
They were cute, at first.

Night was coming on in a hurry, the way it did in winter. Sarkan lay on a soft carpet of red needles beneath a grove of shortleaf pines, idly carving a stick into a smaller, pointier stick. Despite the cold, there would be no fire; he knew better than to draw attention to himself. And this copse of trees made a wilderness shelter, anyway, and he listened to the music of the wind high above in the canopy and the steady scrape of his knife as it slivered off wood.

Then a shadow broke from the other shadows that crowded the undergrowth, moving toward him in uneven gait. His eye caught the motion first, and he fell still as a carving himself with the knife in his grip. Into the fading gray light hopped a rabbit, and the Percheron huffed a soft laugh. His smile was loose and lazy until he saw the pale scroll and the ribbon, and then it was replaced by a thin line and knit brow.

“Hullo,” he said to the rabbit, who was now sitting up before him, dark eyes glistening. It flicked an ear, but he couldn’t say whether that was a response. Still, it didn’t move until he tugged the scroll from it, and then it was gone at once into the night. Sarkan squinted down at the curling letters, now frowning. He had never been much for reading, and the gloom made it no easier.

The forest is watching.

Slowly he lowered the paper, and listened to the night. It was still silent, all the frogs and insects that made up the warm-weather chorus dead or sleeping, and he did not like the feeling of listening for footsteps that never sounded, or the way invisible eyes turned up the hairs along his back. The first true sound he heard was the rustling of dead leaves, and now he clambered to his feet, and saw another rabbit bound forward like a loose piece of the dark. It, too, had a message.

I know what you have done.

Now he was truly uneasy (and a bit confused), but lit like a glowering ember was an anger, too. This was not a game he would have chosen. Now two rabbits came forward, and would not leave until he accepted their messages. Then they scattered like birds. And neither were they the last.

In the end there were six messages, and it was full dark, and Sarkan, alone again, had a choice to make.



There had been no time suggested. Maybe there was supposed to be a seventh rabbit, but there was a fox with a full belly instead. Sarkan cared for none of what had happened, but most of all he didn’t care for hanging around a crime scene indefinitely, waiting for a stranger who sent creative threats. But by now he’d introduced himself to some of the other searchers, and it was easy enough to walk the area and call it looking for clues. In a way, that’s exactly what he was doing.

He knew there was a good chance the threat-maker would just kill him outright and unseen; why, then, should he come? Well, he was curious, and a little arrogant with his magical cloak around him and his magical knife at his side. It was a gray dawn, all the light the same color as him, his mottled cloak further camouflage against the uneven ground of the forest. Only a couple hundred yards away, the ground was still blood-stained under patches of fading snow. Sarkan wondered what had happened to the body. He wondered a lot of things, as he stood mostly hidden beside an old fallen tree furry with moss, and waited for a rabbit, or a voice, or an arrow out of the gloaming.

@Emersyn happy to be your back door man ;)