I awoke slumped against the trunk of a gnarled old tree, at the side of a stone path long overgrown.
How had I come to this place?
I looked around to try and get my bearings. A cluster of grey leaves leapt from my head as I did so.
A line of craters ran from where I sat to the horizon, I saw, the river running next to them a trail of blood under the rising sun.
Blood. I remembered now. I’d been bleeding. I’d been shot.
Almost instinctively I put a hand to my chest, to see if the bullet was still there.
That’s not my hand, I noticed. It wasn’t a hand at all, in fact; it was a paw.
The bullet was gone, leaving only a small gap in the brown fur that now covered my chest. But how had that got there?
It then grew apparent to me that my eyes were rather farther apart than usual. I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed before; perhaps I thought I’d gone cross-eyed. I felt about my face, though with these new limbs it was rather cumbersome. I had grown a short snout, and a set of whiskers. And as I reached the top of my head I found a pair of long ears.
A rabbit, I concluded. Why am I rabbit?
These words came from my own head, yet I knew they were not mine somehow. At last I decided to rise, in the hopes of finding the source, shaking the rest of the leaves from my body.
The motions came quite naturally. Though this body was unfamiliar to me, it seemed to know itself rather well.
I didn’t need to move very far in any case. As soon as I’d left the cover of the tree I turned to see a great beast on the other side of it, big as the horizon. Those craters I’d identified a moment ago were its footprints. Yet its long, ponderous strides were eerily silent as it marched on. I began to give chase, and it alighted as I did so that the colours of the sky appeared to bleed through the creature’s body, as if it were some kind of ghost. The shell on its back was quite solid, however, clouds dancing around it as it passed.
And the flowers wilted around its feet, and its eyes were an empty black. And each scale on its vast legs was another kind of skull, and its shell was made of dust and covered in a sea of stone statues greater than any city, where no two were alike. I knew these things. I knew this thing.
Not a rabbit, the beast repeated, twisting its long neck to look back and remind me, but a hare.
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