Lucky Rabbit

“Every type of elemental is formed under different conditions,” Professor Beeswick said, handing Pandy a golden cookie off the plate he’d produced from the inside of his robe. It was literally golden, with bits of glittering metal foil dusted across the top, but Pandy shrugged and took a bite. A little gold definitely wasn’t going to kill her, and she was almost certain really rich people ate gold in her world anyway, which meant it probably wouldn’t have hurt her even if she was ali- human.

They were on the third floor of the library, at the table where the librarian went when he wanted to hold a private conversation. Hazel was sitting on the table, tail curled beneath her, her duck beside her, gripping her own cookie in all four paws as she nommed on it. The confection was at least half the size of the little Dragon’s body, which was why it took so many feet to hold it still, but when Pandy offered to break it into smaller, easier to handle pieces, Hazel just hissed at her.

“Dragons, being one of the most powerful of Air elementals, are born under extremely rare circumstances,” the Dragon librarian continued, taking a delicate nibble of his own cookie. “I watch for those circumstances, and, when possible, locate and… mentor, if you will, any new Dragons that might appear. Hazel is the most recent of those, and is still extremely young, at only twenty-seven years old.”

Twenty-seven? Pandy stared at the little elemental, who gave her a beady-eyed glare over her cookie in return. How was this tiny creature three years older than Pandy? Well, two and a bit, because it was almost Pandy’s birthday, or she was pretty sure it was, and then she’d be twenty-five. Did elementals celebrate birthdays, or were things like that meaningless to beings who could theoretically live forever?

“Do elementals live forever?” Pandy asked, curiosity overcoming whatever good sense she had.

Beeswick had just taken a bite of his cookie, and when he choked, crumbs sprayed from his mouth. It wasn’t a large bite, as bites went, but he looked distinctly displeased as he brushed away the evidence. “Maybe,” he finally said. “I haven’t met any older than a few hundred years, however. Not ones who understood what time meant.”

Well, that was an interesting statement, but now that they were talking about it, Pandy had another question, one that had been stewing in her brain for a while now. “Where do elementals come from? I mean, before they appear under their very specific circumstances,” she asked.

He sighed, setting his cookie down on the edge of the plate with a small, quiet click. “No one knows,” he admitted. “I have spent almost the entirety of my existence around humans, so the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’ life are ones with which I am familiar, but they hold no true meaning. I wasn’t, and then I was. Someday, I will no longer be.”

Pandy winced. She already knew there was something after life, which seemed to flow automatically into ‘before life’ as well, though most people didn’t remember the process, so maybe that was how it worked for elementals, too. “Do you know what Hell is, for elementals?” she persisted.

Both Dragons stared at her blankly, and Hazel even paused long enough to actually swallow some of her cookie, not just keep shoving more of it into her gullet. “Hell?” asked Beeswick. “That’s not a word with which I am familiar.”

Huh. Okay, so did Ismara not have a Hell? She did seem like a pretty chill goddess, so maybe not. Pandy waved her hands around aimlessly, trailing cookie crumbs. “Where bad people go when they die. Or maybe… bad elementals?”

Professor Beeswick frowned. “Bad? You mean… evil?” She nodded, and he sighed, gesturing for her to take a seat at the table, rather than hovering nearby as she waited for the dinner bell. “Good and evil are not ideas that come naturally to elementals.” He raised a hand, and a book slid from a shelf nearby, settling into his palm as easily as if it had been there all along. He showed Pandy the title: On the Nature of Elementals.

“I believe this book comes as close as any to understanding us,” he said, passing it to her. “Though it likens elementals to animals, which we most certainly are not.” He bared pointed teeth at Pandy, as if daring her to challenge this statement. Not yet having abandoned the last scraps of her sense of self-preservation, Pandy refrained from doing so.

“We are beings of magic and instinct,” the professor went on. “Without outside intervention, the simplest of us will exist until we do not, doing only the things that seem right to us in each moment. With intervention, we become other, stretching to encompass what is needed and expected of us. But no matter how long we live, what tasks we are set, we are always beings of the now, with little care for either the past or the present, ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Unless, of course, we are given some reason to care.”

He paused to hand Hazel another cookie. The tiny Dragon’s belly was bulging noticeably, but not as much as it should have, given she’d just eaten something half her size. Still, she turned the cookie over and over in her paws before nodding with satisfaction and biting into it. Only then did Professor Beeswick focus on Pandy again.

“The answer to the question you didn’t ask, but should have, is that humans are the reason we elementals change. We see them, and sometimes we form what they call contracts with them. Only then do matters of time and morality begin to matter to us. Only then would the concept of existence or what might happen after death occur to us,” he said, watching Pandy carefully as she mulled over his words. He’d definitely wandered off topic, but she thought he’d given her at least a partial answer anyway.

The System threatened to send Pandy to Hell whenever she ran out of Corruption Points or became too disconnected from her physical body. But as far as she could tell, many, even most, elementals didn’t have a body, and Professor Beeswick said they didn’t have a Hell, either. So why was she – or rather, Ascyra the Demon Queen – different? Was it because of the System? If so, why didn’t Keros know what ‘Hell’ was? Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

Both of them looked up as the bell rang, and a sudden bustle came from below. Pandy and Professor Beeswick stood, while Hazel continued munching on her cookie as if nothing had happened. The librarian picked up Hazel’s duck, ignoring the small hiss she released around the edges of her mouthful. Showing the little Dragon the wooden toy, he said, “I’m going to put Gus away. You can have it back tomorrow. And next time, use words, not claws.”

Gus? But Pandy had a bigger question to ask first. “How can she use words? She’s a-” She gestured at the small, reptilian form, whose relatively long jaw, forked tongue, and sharp teeth would definitely make using any human language difficult.

A powerful gust of wind blew through the space in which they stood, emanating from the little table. Pandy closed her eyes, blinking against the sudden sharp sting of hot air. She smelled something that reminded her of the ozone left behind when Isidor and Tempest used their powers, but also a bit like the scent that filled the air right after the rain.

When she managed to open her eyes again, there was a diminutive child in place of the small Dragon on the table. A wild tangle of impossibly silver curls sprang from her head like dandelion fluff, and her eyes were a deep red above the cookie dangling from her mouth. Miniature wings flapped lazily behind her, coated in silver and yellow scales. She used a pudgy little hand to shove the cookie the rest of the way in, where she crunched into it with disturbingly sharp teeth. More silver and yellow scales spread over her cheeks, down her neck, and under the little orange romper she wore.

Staring straight at Pandy, she opened her still-full mouth and said, “Sowwy.” Then she grabbed another cookie and began to eat it.

With a sigh, Professor Beeswick picked up the rest of the plate of cookies and tucked it back into the front of his robe. Then he set the duck back on the table beside the scaly moppet, and said, “Very well. And keep better track of Gus, if you please. I know you’re supposed to be learning to find him, but it’s best if you let me do the hiding.”

The silver curls bobbed in a nod, and the wind returned, this time pulling in, tugging on Pandy’s clothes and making her stumble forward, as the child condensed into a Lilliputian lizard again. Professor Beeswick’s long, pale lilac tresses remained undisturbed, however, and he turned to Pandy, saying, “Most people believe Hazel is my granddaughter, and I would like that belief to continue.”

Granddaughter? But then Pandy remembered most people apparently saw him as a fairly normal older man, so she supposed he might well have a grandchild the age of Hazel’s human shape. Which led to a lot of other questions, including whether or not elementals actually aged, or if Hazel had chosen to be a Very Small Child, and if she’d consciously taken that form knowing that it was absolutely, utterly adorable.

Professor Beeswick was still watching her, his eyes narrowing as the silence stretched on without Pandy doing… what? Oh! “Of course I won’t tell anyone,” she assured them both, and the two Dragons nodded, at which point Pandy realized the prickling between her shoulderblades wasn’t because she had a dried leaf down her shirt, but because her instincts were telling her she had been much closer to being eaten than she should be comfortable with.

“Well,” Pandy said, edging back toward the stairs. “I’ll just be going, then. Thaniel will be expecting me, and, um, he said I could have his cake.” A complete fabrication, but one which, she realized, she might have gotten him to agree to if she’d let him ‘cast’ Spark. As it turned out, that might have been the safer bet anyway.

The usual sly amusement returned to Professor Beeswick’s eyes, and he said, “I believe they’re having carrot cake tonight. What a fortunate coincidence.”

Pandy could have groaned. She didn’t even know they had carrot cake here, and she desperately wanted to try it. If she hurried, maybe she could still catch Thaniel in his room and request some cake? Unless it had raisins in it. Pandy was almost certain raisins were something even her bunny-body couldn’t convince her to like.

Hazel let out a hiss, and they both turned to look at her. She was standing upright on her back legs now, and a half-eaten cookie lay on the table beside her. Staring at Professor Beeswick, she hissed again, and he shook his head. “You wouldn’t like it. It has vegetables in it.” Another hiss, louder this time, and he threw up his hands. “Fine, I’ll get you some, but you won’t eat it.” Hazel shoved the rejected cookie with a hindfoot, and folded her arms.

Turning back to Pandy, the older Dragon actually rolled his eyes and said, “We might as well both go. I won’t hear the end of it until she tries the cake. Hazel loves baked goods almost as much as she loves Gus.”

This time, Pandy couldn’t ignore it. “Gus?”

One side of Professor Beeswick’s mouth curved up in what she would have called a mischievous grin if there hadn’t been quite so many teeth involved. “Yes. That’s what she decided to name her duck.” He shrugged. “I’m afraid Augustus doesn’t appreciate it, but what could I do?”

Pandy glanced back at the little Dragon, who was now lying on her side, limbs wrapped around the wooden duck as she very gently gnawed on its wing. When Pandy handed over the duck, she’d noticed many small scratches and dimpled tooth marks, much like a puppy might leave on its favorite toy. “You let her chew on… Gus?”

Another shrug. “As long as she doesn’t actually eat him, it’s fine.” Leaning over the banister that was all that prevented the unwary from plummeting three stories to the library floor, he looked around, probably searching for any stragglers. Seeing none, he vaulted over, spreading his wings to circle gently downward. The space was exactly the right size for him to do this, as if it had been made for him, which it probably had. It was the first time she’d seen his wings in full extension, and they were glorious, like hummingbird or butterfly wings in an intricate mosaic of scales almost too small to discern.

Pandy leaned over, looking down at him as he landed with a gentle step before striding out of the library, presumably to acquire cake. For the briefest moment, she considered copying him – just throwing herself over the edge, using Wings of Glory to spiral to the floor. With her luck, though, she’d bump into a bookshelf, which would fall and knock over another bookshelf, like three stories of dominoes, and then she’d either be eaten or never be allowed to leave the library again while she reshelved everything. Either way, probably best to take the stairs.

she thought, and did the cottontail hop.