by Simon Archer
“We have two more candidates here in front of us,” a fourth voice spoke, referring to Boneclaw and me. “And there are still many lords amongst the cities that would gladly come to fulfill that role.”
“And what of these two, then?” A fifth asked, “Are you suggesting we use these useless dogs who couldn’t even handle fighting a pair of bunnies? Why not just give the Empire over to the Rabbits, save everyone the trouble? These two should be fed to the claw-giants so we can be done with it.”
“They can still prove useful to us,” a sixth proposed, “They were quite the investment of mana, and that is in shorter supply with each Blood Moon. At least we didn’t let them fall out of our hands, yes? The other cities and provinces already grow restless, and we’re losing the power it will take to maintain order. We need every able-bodied Wolf who is loyal to the Empire and its principles with us here and now to subjugate a few key cities. It’d save us a lot of time finding and training such a set of warriors who can guarantee victory over a city’s baron or lord.”
“We don’t need the dead weight,” A seventh intervened, “Especially with a rogue Rabbit lord on the loose who now has the Mana Crusher! We can’t even make more Wolf champions without her. Why are we not preparing an invasion force as we speak to go claim it again!”
“As if we had the Wolves or the mana right now.” An eighth interjected, “We barely had enough to pull that many soldiers out of the Mana Crusher, let alone create another invasion. This Citadel can only be so helpful to us. Are you suggesting we waste more rushing into a battle with the likes of someone who’s taken two cities out from under our noses? And it’s vermin, no less! Imagine the shame! The cities would see us as weak if we attacked and would certainly make an attempt on the Citadel if we failed.”
“What good has the Citadel done us so far?” The fifth voice spoke up again, “We can’t even use any of its powers without depleting our mana reserves! Why don’t we infuse ourselves with what little we have left now and go crush all of them now? We’d still have enough to turn each one of us into a powerful weapon, and the cities would fall back into our laps again, along with this Hunter rodent.”
The Council had stopped speaking one by one, talking over the others to suggest ideas and to say how stupid other ideas were. Only the loudest cut through the fog of sound.
“How dare you suggest that these vermin are a threat to us!” the sixth shouted, “have we all really become so weak that we can’t handle one little slave who thinks he’s too good for the natural order?”
“Then how do you suggest we deal with him, then?” the third retorted, “should we just leave him alone? That has let him take two cities out from under us, completely without our knowledge we bothered to look at him. A feat like that hasn’t been matched by any Wolf, champion defector or otherwise, in the living history of the empire.”
“How would we even know that for sure?” The voices began to blur together, and I couldn’t tell who was talking anymore, “We’re losing more and more of our history each day, and we have less mana upon every Blood Moon to stave off the Forgetting. Why are we wasting our mana away with the Citadel’s power if we don’t even have enough for ourselves?”
“I thought that the Mana Crusher was a solution to that problem? Why did we give Silverfang the resources to implement it if it wasn’t going to help us out?”
“That bunny in the generator was the only thing between us and starvation before the Blood Moon! We’re going to have to ration it. Of all the insults!”
“Why did we only have the one? There are plenty of temple ruins throughout the Empire. We could have used each one to have a bunny! Having only one was just foolish, no matter how well she was bred to be powerful!”
“Why did we only have one bunny in the generator in the first place? Couldn’t we have placed a dozen, a hundred inside of it, and filled our reserves to the brim without so much as a second thought? We’d have never needed a Blood Moon again!”
“Have you forgotten that the network is all but destroyed? The Grand Temple was the only place with a surviving connection to the Citadel, and nothing else was even remotely close! We don’t even have the capability to find the pathways between the temples, let alone fix them!”
“There were a few other temples still intact and connected to the Grand Temple! Are you so uninformed that you overlooked that? We might all be forced into the Forgetting because of your insistence on this Grand Temple!”
“You’ve all truly been so taken by the Forgetting like a grunt if you think that was a solution. It didn’t matter how many temples you connected together if you couldn’t have the bunnies. Even two bunnies strapped to the generator at the same time would destroy both of them, leaving no mana for anyone.
“Even in two separate generators, the same problem occurred. That’s why we had enlisted many of the cities in breeding more mana-potent bunnies in the first place. Their best candidates helped us create the bunny in the Mana Crusher.”
“Look how well that has worked for us! Now we have bunnies with fantastic mana powers that beat our blessed champions even in groups! Was the Mana Crusher not crushing their mana as well? I thought that was why we diverted mana to creating the field as well as supplying our energy! Those bunnies weren’t suppressed in the slightest! They’ve thrived under it! What if it’s feeding them?”
“That’s impossible! It had done wonders in keeping any sort of natural magic from springing about from them. We hadn’t seen a portal or a rune mage in centuries because of it. If the Forgetting has gotten to you, too, then you won’t remember all of the suppressive tactics we had to use to keep them in line before. That’s why we had to suppress the idea of the Hunter in the first place! Without their magical powers and their folk hero, they were powerless.”
“Now they have both! Who is this new Hunter, anyway? How did another one come about like this without anyone seeing it? How could the scryer not have seen it? I thought we ordered the cities to kill any hares that displayed a strength or height above a standard we’d set to prevent this very thing. All of our precautions are turning upside down!”
“No, the Mana Crusher was functioning perfectly right up to its destruction not moments ago. No other bunnies that we’ve kept have displayed anything remotely similar to the power those two wielded. Something must have changed. Maybe it’s this Hunter who’s the real problem. Somehow he’s managed to enhance his bunnies’ mana supplies to break past the Mana Crusher’s suppression fields!”
“Your prattling is inconsequential.”
A voice, coming from deep within the void of shadows as if it exuded them from its being, consumed the cloud of noise that had kept growing like it had never existed at all, leaving the room as silent as death. But death was heavy in the air. I couldn’t smell it, hear it, taste it, touch it, or feel it, but it assaulted all of my senses just the same. The abyssal tone choked any screams I could have let out. No one else dared to speak either. They felt it, too.
When I had been tested to become a champion challenger, long ago as I had been just given my powers, the Regent had me locked in an arena with five blood-crazed claw giants, and I was to kill all of them before they’d unlock the door. I’d bled out after killing the last one, and a vision of a Wolf’s skeleton came to me, beckoning me to pass on. It must have been death itself, and not even the Regent came close to bringing enough terror in me to match that moment. As I trembled in my place, I realized that this presence of the dark ring of words that pressed down upon me had surpassed that moment. This entity commanded death like it was part of its pack. It could only be him.
“Oh, um, Your Utmost Highest,” the voice of the second Councilman shuttered as if it had been pulled out of its throat, “I do not mean to inform you about what you already know, but the current situation does not bode well for us at all. I was merely suggesting that the, um, the Hunter was possibly, um, had possibly, maybe, did something, arguably, to increase his chances of success, had, somehow, maybe
, possibly, incredibly, found a way to augment bunny mana? Is that not something that we should look into, Your Utmost Highest?”
“What about the Mana Crusher, Your Utmost Highest?” The third voice spoke up behind the second, “Our supplies here are limited, and you have just used some of it to bring back the soldiers from the fortress--”
“Do you disagree with my decision?”
Thunder roared through the darkness in short booms, footsteps of a massive being walking forward. The thunderous walk swelled as Gille-- as His Utmost Highest approached, slowly coming into the stream of light that we were in now until he was partially illuminated. We were witnessing him now with our own eyes.
He stood high, higher than me, higher than even Chompfist was back when he worked with us, and he was the tallest I’d ever known before. His fur was a ghostly pale, coating him from top to bottom. He had bare spots over his chest and arms, scars from claws and teeth, including one for a massive set of Wolf teeth that crossed over his expansive chest, stretched and warped with growing. The scars were also upon his face, cutting through his right brow and eye, making it milky grey, and clipping at his ears to make divots out of them.
The majesty of his scars and size was overshadowed by the strangeness of everything else upon him. Interspersed within the white fur were equally ghostly feathers, blending in most places and sticking out in the barer parts of him. They gathered most intensely on his right arm, creating a vambrace of whispering plumage upon it. That hand was adorned with snowy claws more like the talons of a vicious bird than a Wolf, and the hand more like an eagle’s foot. The other hand was bare at the forearm, and the skin was covered in a moist ooze. The fingers on that hand were also replaced, but this time with long tentacles riddled with suction cups, tipped at the end with black spikes. All along his chest were thick scales, the hair growing out of them as well as underneath them, that were the most visible as they shifted and moved around seemingly on their own.
Small insects and arachnids, just as gravely albino as the rest of him, made their homes within these scales, the arachnids sometimes eating what they caught and retreating back under the scales. Instead of one tail, he had three, each a different kind than a Wolf’s regular fluff. One was a long, thick rope with equally thick and short hair upon it, twisting and twirling around itself, the next one a column of leathery skin ending at a spearhead, the last was a sectioned carapace of bug chitin ending in a thin needle. His legs, still bent like a Wolf’s, grew wider as it reached the bottom, also growing more callous the further down it went. One foot ended in a wide stump with sprawling root-like toes coming out of all four sides ending in curved talons. The other foot was an equally broad cloven hoof, though each edge of it was serrated with jagged teeth. The teeth in his snout were scattered in type, ranging from neat arrowheads to Wolf teeth to curved spikes. The snout itself was strong and substantial, like any Wolf of noble dignity would have been, even with its scars, though it had one dark scar perfectly splitting down from his eyes to his snout, down the chin, and back to the neck. Crowning his head was a set of antlers, one shoot sticking back from his head and sprawling out to more points along the shaft. The eye that wasn’t milky white was blacker than the darkest midnight.
Out of his back, three giant cylinders of oryctolagium arranged in a triangle pointing down from his shoulders emerged as if they had grown from it, housing the bases for cables that I could have fit my head inside even if I didn’t have this elastic body. A smaller subset of four cables and bases were bolted into the backs of his elbows and the second bends of his legs, and all seven extended out into the darkness and disappeared.
“W-w-um,” The third Council Wolf was unable to get words out of his snout, or maybe he was trying to keep them in, “I--uh, uh, ca, um, wou, would, ger--”
His Utmost Highest raised his hand slightly, and the tentacle fingers on it lashed out, stretching beyond their original length and into the councilman’s face, choking him. Each tentacle had slithered into a different orifice, two for the nostrils, two for the ears, and one for the mouth, reducing the Council Wolf’s speech further down to guttural clicks. With a flick of his wrist, the shadowy king threw his victim into the light, right in front of us. The tentacles hadn’t released him, still twisting through and stopping his breathing. However, the third of the Council had stopped clutching his neck and face, instead slowly stretching them out, along with his legs, to full extension. Under his skin, the tentacles wormed through the muscles and bones until they reached his paws, the black tips slowly rising out of his palms and soles as they had fully completed their journey.
Then, like pulling a tablecloth off a table in a fancy trick, the tentacles retreated back to His Utmost Highest’s side. However, they had kept their grips on the Council member’s hands and feet, turning him completely inside out in one fell swoop. No one had the time to remark at the brutality of it, as the tentacles had swirled around all of the organs and bones that had spilled out, clutching them in the emperor’s holy grasp. His wrist and forearm swelled as the tentacles curled into a fist, the swelling moving up the arm like a lump and growing smaller until it reached the shoulder. I slowly came to know that the arm itself was consuming the entire body through a hidden mouth in His Utmost Highest’s palm. There was nothing left of what the Wolf of the Council used to be.
“You were all chosen to guide my agent as he acted in my stead.” His Utmost Highest spoke, though his maw moved more in flapping motions rather than simply at angles. “Do not forget that you are all infinitely replaceable.”
“Was Silverfang?” The eighth council member spoke, covering his snout as soon as the words escaped him.
From the plates underneath His fur, a swarm of buzzing insects, spinning like a flurry of snowflakes, rose out of His Utmost Highest’s chest, surrounding the eighth as he ran away screaming. The insects were already upon him, and suddenly he was clothed in a full-body wrap of wispy silk, falling to the ground unconscious. The swarm entered his exposed mouth, hollowing him out from the inside out before exiting him and returning to the scales that housed them.
“The Regent was a traitor.” The Utmost Highest answered the dead. “He had attempted to usurp me by tampering with his toy. If he had succeeded, it would have redirected the mana from his pet to an alternate source within the network that he would have attempted to bolster with the Blood Moon. His herald had warned him of the new Hunter’s presence, and he elected to ignore it and deliberately hide it from me. Neither was enough to interrupt my plans, so I did not bother to accuse him, simply allowing him to incriminate himself.”
“Forgive me, sir!” My mouth spoke without my permission. “May I ask one question?”
“What are you doing?” Boneclaw tried to stop me from making my stupid decision, and I couldn’t tell him to try harder. “Did you see what happened to the last two guys?”
“Speak.”
“Um, I was only curious about what we were going to do from here,” I kept speaking, and my tongue wouldn’t listen to my orders to shut up, “With the Mana Crusher destroyed, the Regent dead, and the mana in low supply, what are we going to do?”
“Nothing consequential has changed.” His Utmost Highest answered cryptically. “These threats are not posed against me or my designs. When the Final Blood Moon comes, I will ascend, and all will be made as it should be. Have faith.”
“What?” the first council Wolf blurted out, “Are you saying there won’t be any Blood Moons after this? How will we get the most of the mana of our bunnies? We need that amplification to keep the regression of the Forgetting from getting any more disastrous than it already is! It’ll be forever crippled without it.”
The tail of chitin shot out from behind His Utmost Highest, the tendinous meat between the sections stretching out to reach the first Wolf. The needle stuck into his chest, sucking out vitality from him. Like a withering plant burning in a furnace, his body curled up, all of the moisture inside him absorbed as he shrunk to a mummified
Wolf raisin.
“The amplification properties of the Blood Moon are a fabrication of my design.” The Utmost Highest revealed a baffling truth about Wolf society to us at His whim. “The populace of Wolves had grown restless, threatening to revolt against me in time, and I grew tired of the nuisance. I required them to occupy the holy sites, and they required a distraction to direct their aggressive instincts away from destroying themselves. They consumed so much mana throughout the Blood Moon’s appearance that they never noticed it wasn’t any different from before. As soon as the fiction was fully established along with its subsequent rituals, I had Regent Silverfang legislate on my behalf so I could focus entirely on my transformation.”
Woah. That was heavy. Our whole reason for existing was about getting more bunnies and consuming more mana. The Blood Moon was the way that we thought we were getting more mana. To learn that our emperor had lied about this to us is daunting. But he must have had a reason. He’s the emperor.
“How can this be?” the fifth council Wolf spoke up, though he seemed to be attempting to close his mouth with his own hands to stop himself. “We have devoted our entire lives to maximizing the effects of the Blood Moon and destroying the Forgetting once and for all. Our entire society is built upon making that happen! Are you saying that was all a lie? You would lie to your own council?”
The Utmost Highest turned His head to look at the fifth behind Him, but His chest had not moved as His neck contorted upon itself. He opened His mouth, revealing the symmetrical scar down His snout to be part of another strange part of His anatomy as it opened up like a blooming flower of teeth. From deep in His body, a funnel ending in leech-like razor teeth shot out from His face, overtaking the top of the fifth’s body and enveloping him completely. Just like the tentacle arm, the lump inside the leech grew smaller and smaller as it made it to the base, disappearing entirely as the leach retreated back into His Utmost Highest’s body. He turned His head back to face us, the snout flower sealing back up to a regular snout.
