Rabbit Online (Rabbit and Girls Book 1) Read online

Dani nodded and sprinted away. The drowsiness was coming fast. Stars appeared in my vision. I thought of Rozy, who was with the sorcerer Mintuk who intended to sacrifice her so that he can become all powerful. I had vowed to save her and failed.

  Blackness took over my vision. I felt a sharp pain in my chest over my heart, which was quite unlike the fire-like pain that had been on my chest previously and it was the last thing I knew before I lost all consciousness.

  ***

  Chapter 3

  “Get up,” a voice said, that sounded so much like someone I knew, “Please… Get up!”

  Someone I knew. Who could it be? It was definitely someone I was close to. Very close to in fact.

  Lia? Yes, she was my wife, wasn’t she?

  A slap on my face brought me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes to see a rather angry Lia, glaring hard at me. Seeing me conscious her glare softened until she was sobbing. She began to kiss me and I felt more lips on my face and realised even Dani had joined in.

  “Okay,” I said and was glad that my tongue was no longer stiff. “I guess that will be enough.”

  The two of them kissed me only more and it was a while before they let go of me. Their faces were quite red with emotion.

  “So you healed me?” I asked Lia.

  “Couldn’t have done without her,” Lia said, throwing her arm around Dani.

  I looked down at my chest and saw a considerable amount of clotted blood over a large cut over my chest. The sight made the panic alarm go off in my head and I almost stood up, but Lia and Dani pushed me back to the ground.

  “Lie down for a while,” Lia said, “within a day that will be a mere scar and nothing.”

  “What did you exactly do?” I asked my two wives. I saw a bloodied sword—my own—lying not far away and nearby the sword was a dead rabbit with an arrow sticking on its neck. The rabbit’s chest was also covered in blood very much like me.

  Lia looked a bit hesitant, so Dani spoke.

  “The snake’s poison had gotten into your heart,” Dani said and even she looked very hesitant, but she forced the words out of her mouth, “so… she took out your heart.”

  “What!” I gasped, my heart beat spiking in the process. Wait, that made no sense. How could I have a heart beat if Lia had in fact taken out my heart?

  “There was no other way,” Lia said, not looking at my face, “we were losing you. The only sensible thing to do was to remove your heart and to replace it with another.”

  I looked at the rabbit.

  “So… you replaced my heart with the…?”

  “Rabbit’s,” Lia said.

  “I… I never thought such a thing could be done,” I found myself saying. Even though there was enough proof of what had been done, I found it hard to accept it as feasible.

  “I didn’t think such a thing could be done either,” Lia said, “but I did it… to save you.”

  Well, she had a point. I was alive and whatever she had done had been a success. I reckoned I would be better off without questioning it too much.

  “So what did you do to my heart?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see it,” Lia said, “so we buried it.”

  I wished they hadn’t done that though. It felt like I had missed saying a last goodbye to my heart.

  “Why did you go away from us when we were sleeping?” Dani said.

  Her question took me back to the things that had occurred to me before I had been bitten by the snake. The sinking feeling took over me again.

  “I…” I began, but couldn’t find any words to express myself.

  “What? Tell us,” Dani said, “You wouldn’t have left us and gone away for no reason, would you?”

  I sighed and decided I would tell them everything that had happened.

  “At night I woke up wanting to take a piss,” I said, “I went some distance from the clearing we were sleeping in. When I was returning, someone shot a dart at me, which paralysed me for an hour.”

  “And then?” Lia said with a face full of concern. “Who did it?”

  “The Lazaki,” I said reliving yesterday night all over again in my mind’s eye, “they had a magical gemstone, given to them by the sorcerer. They placed the stone on my chest and… and…”

  I couldn’t keep speaking anymore and burst into tears.

  “It’s okay, Rabbi,” Lia said gently, “you can tell us.”

  Neither Lia nor Dani had ever seen me so helpless and they were really worried for me.

  “The magical stone took away all my powers,” I said, “all the spells and skills that I had acquired over my life are gone. I am back to level zero! Can you believe it? I am back to level zero!”

  Dani gasped, while Lia stared at me fixedly as though she didn’t believe what I had said.

  “But… But no sorcerer can make such a powerful gemstone,” Lia said.

  “But Mintuk did,” I told her. “All the work I had put in my entire life has gone to waste. I… I am of no use now.”

  For a few moments all three of us were silent. Lia and Dani seemed to understand why I was acting so miserably. The blow I had received was way too big.

  By now, thanks to the healing magic that Lia had applied on my chest, the cut looked like one that was at least a few weeks old. I pushed myself to a sitting position and then observed the dead rabbit for a while. It lay on the ground unmoving and I couldn’t help but feel a tad sorry for the poor animal that it had to die so I could be saved.

  “I think we should bury him,” I said to Dani and Lia. The rabbit was a male. “Without him I would be quite dead by now.”

  We dug a hole at the base of a tree and put the rabbit into it, laying it down in what I believed was a comfortable position, even though that didn’t really matter. Then we put soil into the hole and a stone over it to mark the spot. Not far away was another freshly covered hole which was the place where Dani and Lia had buried my heart. It was odd to think that my heart would be decaying and turning to soil, while I myself would be alive.

  Dani and Lia next set out to gather fruits. I wanted to help them, but Lia aggressively told me to sit quietly and let them do the work. Even though my chest cut was healing very fast, I still experienced some light pain if I tried to make any abrupt movements which made the skin surrounding the cut stretch too much.

  It was afternoon before I even realised that the morning had passed. We remained at the spot. Lia said that we should resume moving only after I had properly healed.

  “But what would we do next?” I said, “There is little that can be done. I have no powers and you two are far weaker in these parts that in the civilised realm.”

  “Are you saying that you want to give up on rescuing Rozy?” Lia said. For some reason she seemed to be getting more and more irritated with me over the course of the day. Was it because I was leaning too much towards pessimism? But how could you not be pessimistic after all your powers had been taken away from you? Dani on the other hand seemed much calmer than Lia.

  When I remained quiet, Lia shot another question at me.

  “Would you leave Dani and me to our fates too if someone abducted us?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I tried to explain.

  “I am sure you made countless promises to Rozy, as you did to us, but making promises is not enough, you have to stick to them regardless of whatever happens.”

  I kept quiet. I didn’t really know what to do. Without my powers I felt weak, both physically and mentally weak. And then I remembered something.

  Gardening.

  I hadn’t tended to the garden of my mind ever since I had come on the quest to rescue Rozy. My attention fixed on the quest; I had completely ignored the garden over the past few days even though I used to tend to my garden almost every day while at the castle. It was a practise that all members of the royal family were advised to carry out to keep their minds healthy. What more sometimes a tree in a person’s garden could mature and bear fruits and this could make the person level up. However this happened infrequently.

  “You know what,” I said to my wives, and there was something about the renewed energy in my voice that made me happy, “let’s garden.”

  Lia looked into my eyes. Any anger that she had possessed for my pessimistic behaviour vanished. She smiled.

  “That’s the best thing you have said all day.”

  The three of us sat in the gardening position with our legs crossed, our eyes closed and our hands clasped. I let my mind wander away to the garden of my soul. All sounds of the forest faded away and all that existed was my consciousness and my garden. I walked about in the garden and I saw that my tree of determination had greatly shrunk in size. I placed my hand on its trunk.

  “You are going to grow big and strong again,” I whispered to the plant, watering it.

  An ugly plant of considerable size had risen in my garden. It was the plant of despair. It had giant black flowers which had a fragrance that could suck away all hope. I conjured an axe in my hands and cut the plant at the base.

  Some distance away was the plant of desire… desire for Rozy. It had shrunk in size and seeing that I felt quite sad. I whispered good things to the plant and encouraged it to grow tall and strong and watered it. Then I walked about the garden sowing the seeds of little peace plants. These plants acted as fertilizers and enabled the good plants to grow and forced the bad plants to shrivel and die. Of course, it was impossible to completely kill any plant, regardless of whether the plant exhibited a good trait or a bad one, but it was possible to make the good plants big and the bad plants smaller.

  Finally I went over to the plant of anger. The plant had shrunk considerably in size, and even though in a normal situation this would have made me happy, today it didn’t. I was
supposed to feel angry at the sorcerer for abducting Rozy. The anger could help other good plants such as the one of determination to grow.

  “You are going to grow big and strong, you understand?” I said to the plant of anger. “You are going to grow bigger and stronger than any plant in this garden.” I watered the plant. There were a few of the little peace plants growing near the anger plant and I uprooted them.

  After a while, I left the garden and opened my eyes. Dani and Lia still had their eyes closed and were in their respective gardens. Both of them looked so peaceful. Both of them were beautiful women and I couldn’t help but admire the contours of their faces. Dani had a sharper nose than Lia and darker eye brows. Lia had larger lips than Dani and her face was more triangular. Both of them wore the marriage threads that I had bind around their wrists when they had accepted me as their husband.

  A few minutes went by and Dani slowly opened her eyes. She saw me staring at her and smiled.

  “I haven’t felt so peaceful in a while,” she said, “why did we even stop gardening?”

  And then Lia opened her eyes as well.

  “I feel so much better now,” she said. She placed her hands over mine, looking almost apologetic.

  “Sorry, I was angry with you earlier,” Lia said, “what happened to you would have broken down anybody. I should have been more understanding. But I reckon what’s important is that we do not give up. We cannot give up on Rozy by any means.”

  I nodded, strengthening my will.

  “We shall rescue her by all means,” I said.

  “You know,” Dani said, coming closer to me and resting her head on my shoulder, “when I was a little child, my mother would tell me about King Razak, the founder of the civilised realm. He was a nobody from a small tribe. But he had a well of determination unlike anybody. There were many times when he was defeated. Once he was betrayed by a close friend whom he trusted with all his heart and had his kingdom taken away from him. He was an old man at that time, but he never gave up. He rose again, even more powerful and became the legend that the bards sing about. It is said that King Razak could be defeated, but never for long. Like him we must also rise again despite the hardships because they will only make us more powerful.”

  Dani was right. I too had been a sucker for the tales of King Razak when I had been a child. He had been my hero. But after becoming an adult I had cut the connection with the old tales. Maybe I had come down to level zero for a reason; maybe it was only so that I could become more powerful. As long as I could remain determined everything would be all right.

  And even as I was thinking about all the tales that my parents had told me when I was a kid, a notification popped up in my vision.

  It has been ten hours since the heart of the rabbit was installed in you. Rabbit has now been initiated in you.

  Rabbit initiated? What did it mean?

  I spoke about the notification I had received to Lia and Dani. They couldn’t make any head or tail out of it.

  “Why should that even happen?” said Lia.

  I thought about the notification for a minute. Then I decided I needn’t be too concerned. There was nothing I could do. My real heart was now buried in the soil and I was better off keeping the rabbit heart in me. After the gardening session, I felt enough relaxed that I wasn’t worried about the Rabbit initiation thing.

  “It’s okay,” I said to my two wives, “there is nothing we can do about it. And I reckon we will know soon if it’s for good or bad, until then we needn’t think about it too much.”

  Dani and Lia didn’t exactly look convinced with my words. So I decided to change the topic.

  “There are other things we might have to deal with,” I said, “the Lazaki men and the monkeys might return again tonight. We must be prepared for them.” This got their attention. I didn’t really think that the Lazaki men would return. If they had wanted to kill me, they could have done so yesterday night itself, but they hadn’t. They had just wanted to break my spirits by taking away my powers. They hadn’t been interested in causing any harm to Dani and Lia either.

  The night went without any incident. We slept taking turns, such that one of us was always awake and we made sure to keep the fire going all night. Even though the fire could announce our presence to monsters that might be delighted to eat us, still the fire also provided a sense of companionship.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning we had to decide on the course of action that we needed to take. One thing that kept bugging my mind was how the Lazaki tribesmen had been able to find our location the night they took away my powers.

  Were they constantly keeping a watch on us? I wanted to ask Ramda about this. Ramda was the Lazaki tribesman who was pretty much the only good Lazaki that existed. He had always been a good friend of my wife Rozy. I had seen him only once. He had helped Rozy come to the civilised realm and enter my kingdom which was how she had ended up as my wife. Ramda was also the person who had sent me the letter through a bird informing us that a sorcerer called Mintuk had become the leader of their tribe and had abducted Rozy. Without him the sudden disappearance of Rozy would have always remained a mystery to me.

  But contacting Ramda would be very hard, if not impossible. First off, we would need a trained bird. And secondly, even if we had a trained bird, still there was little chance that the bird would be able to make it to Ramda without being killed. Ramda himself had said in his letter that he might not be able to contact us a second time.

  All the same, if the Lazaki were indeed keeping a watch on us, would it be sensible to go towards their village which was located at the top of a mountain? Say, braving all the obstacles, if we were able to get to their village, they would still have the upper hand because they would know of our coming already. Something inside me said that it would be wisest if we somehow used our situation to our advantage instead of letting it cripple us.

  My cut had healed completely over the night. I was able to peel off the blood scab and was happy to see new skin underneath. And then something happened. I had an urge to go towards the civilised realm instead of towards the Lazaki mountain. For some reason I felt that doing so would solve all our problems.

  I debated with myself if I should tell about my hunch to go towards the civilised realm to my wives. There had been times in the past when trusting my gut instincts had successfully pulled me out of grave problems. This particular hunch was rather exceptionally strong, so…

  “Let’s go towards the civilised realms,” I said to Dani and Lia. Their mouths fell open.

  “You are giving up?” Dani said, appalled.

  “No,” I said, making up my mind to have faith on my hunch, "trust me. Let’s go towards the civilised realm.”

  “But, what about Rozy?” Lia protested.

  “I am asking you to trust me,” I said to them, “Can you trust me this once?”

  So it happened that the three of us began to journey towards the civilised realm. Dani and Lia were not at all convinced that what we were doing was the right thing, but I repeatedly kept asking them to trust me such that after a while they stopped protesting.

  It was noon and we had come about five kilometres towards the civilised realms, when suddenly a notification popped up in my vision.

  Congratulations!

  You can now see Sense Screens that are otherwise invisible to the normal individual!

  Would you like to activate this ability?

  Yes/No

  New ability? Well, that was weird, considering I had not really done anything worthy of receiving a new ability. With some hesitation I selected “Yes” before the notification faded.

  The moment I did so that a giant pink screen appeared just a few metres in front of us. It was at least ten metres in height and twenty metres in length. And what more, it was not the only one! As I turned around with wide eyes, much to the confusion of my two wives, I saw quite a few such screens scattered about the forest. What exactly were they?

  As if to answer my question, another notification appeared in my vision.

  Sense Screens are magical screens that are created by sorcerers such that whenever anyone passes through a Sense Screen, the person who created the Sense Screen immediately comes to know the name of whoever passed through the screen. The only way to avoid this is to avoid passing through the screen entirely.