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All I Have to Give

-Vendru 12, New Calendar-

For uncounted centuries, the known world slept.

The horned beast of the north was a fatted boar of ice, gorging itself upon the land until there was nothing left but raging blizzards and a wasteland of white. It devoured Barzan, toppling her spires and sending her survivors scattering in all directions. When it had made the already inhospitable northlands into a brutish pall it turned its attention south, and the Great Wood was no match. Soon the downs became too as white, and the emerald straits became a landbridge between them. Entire species fled across solid oceans to far off places in the west and east, never to be heard from again. The hardiest of prey buried themselves in deep burrows to dream of better times, while starving predators turned upon their own for every scrap of bloodied flesh.

So came upon the land this age of ice, which gave no quarter until the sun broke through fifteen hundred years later. For four decades thereafter life sought to reassert itself, and the seas churned anew.

When last we engaged with them, Rulatani the Wildbun and Barzan Quip had each met their doom in the service of something beyond themselves. If you think them gone from this world by the simple turn of millennia, remember the prayers offered to the darkened moon on their behalf:

“My light and my life for you, o darkened moon, if my own but shines for me.”

Those tender few who sought to love when no one else would paid an ultimate sacrifice, but blinded by affection, they could not know the pain their wishes would cause. There is a certain cycle of rebirth in which souls are renewed from one existence to the next; re-shelled in life to leave new marks upon the world. While life everlasting in the same form may sound like the most precious of gifts, it is in fact a most fetid stagnation. To linger too long is to watch everything around us become unrecognizable as we are thrust towards an existence in which we do not belong.

Such was the way for Rulatani and Quip.

On the first day of the first vendru of the new millennia, Rulatani the Wildbun, confused and disoriented, emerged from the deepest part of the Underwood where sane life no longer made its home. Creatures great and small were unrecognizable to him, as was he to them, for the elderbuns and their kits had fled to their destiny centuries ago. They spoke of his strange ears and powderpuff tail, inquiring of him what he was, but when he talked about the legendary beings called ‘rabbit’ they recoiled in fear. Surely nothing could actually be alive in the underwood, and anything that would lurch forth from it must therefore be an abomination of dark sorcery.

He wandered, lost and alone, for twelve more days, until chancing upon a group of shrews in panicked flight who spoke to him thus:

“There is fanged beast on the path ahead! Oh save us, save us! It gnashes its jaws and is hungrier than the dead season!”

Rulatani, whose gentle heart outstripped his oafish frame by many times, wanted only to be of use again, and was obliged to investigate. In a golden clearing, where the rays of a newborn sun peeled back the icy grip of a glacier one finger at a time by patient inches every year, he came upon an elegant creature with a long muzzle and windswept core, partially frozen in a block of solid ice. At first he saw her not, for stunned was he by the red mantle she wore.

“Mother…?” said he, his voice hoarse, for he had but scarcely made use of it these past thousand years.

The creature, whose coat was as red as her hood, tried in vain to bite ice from her toes. She perked her floppy ears at the strange utterance and paused to reply. “I am a canine. We come in b(i)tches and dogs, but invariably are referred to as the latter. What are you?”

“I am a bun—a hopper,” Rulatani replied. “We come in does and bucks, of which I am the latter. I stand for my people.”

Barzan Quip offered her name, as was polite to, then looked all around. “Where are your people now?”

Rulatani offered his name in return, then hung his head low. “I don’t know.”

“Then we are the same Hopper Rulatani, for neither do I know where my people have gone, and when last I saw them they were in suffering. I am no less lonesome for it.”

With the one unable to go and the other nowhere to be, the pair found themselves in conversation. True to her name Quip spoke on and on, telling him of the goblinfolk, her bearded prince, and the icy tomb which bore her at merciful rest through the whole age of ice. Rulatani, who was a taciturn sort, said less, for mysteriously he could remember little of his wanderings beyond the time he fell in battle so many generations ago. At length Quip’s stomach growled, and she let out a whine of distress.

“I have not eaten in so many years,” she lamented. “I fear I will starve before this ice lets me go.”

Rulatani brought her fresh forage and berries, but as a carnivore these could not sate her. She grew emaciated, her features sunken, and feared perhaps she would finally meet her end.

“I would have fallen gratefully at the feet of my master, but he chased me out, and now I will never know why.” She reached out weakly to Rulatani, who stepped closer to allow their cheeks to touch. “I thank you, my friend, for trying, but it is my time. If there is another life for me across the bridge of rainbows, I hope only to find him there waiting.”

But Rulatani the Wildbun, who had saved his people from the raging stoats, was a stubborn sort when it came to those few he could call friends. He fell then and there at her feet, and had this to say: “This house is not my home anymore and I have wandered it too long. The land is strange and I am every day afraid to be here. Take my strength for your own, dear friend, as it is all I have to give.”

Quip, touched beyond words, wept. When she could cry no more she said unto him: “You can pledge to me your life, Hopper Rulatani, but it means very little should you lose it in the process. Life can be sometimes frightening, but it is worth every moment. Do not die for me. Instead I ask you to live.”

They pledged their final moments together to each other, and huddled for warmth that night until sleep took them. The creatures of the Great Wood gathered round, amazed by the spectacle of predator and prey. Moved by an affection that transcended the natural order, creatures great and small worked through the night. In the morning they were gone, and Barzan Quip was free.

Rulatani the Wildbun and Barzan Quip left that place together to wander the wilds, never checking to see if their hearts still beat. The forage they ate and the tracks they left stood to say they were there, but what truly defined them was their friendship.