Lucky Rabbit

A figure sat in front of a wide window, humming as they rocked. The chair creaked rhythmically, creating a background accompaniment for the quiet song. Pandy felt her own urgency fade as she took one step into the room, then another. Soft sunlight spread across the room, creating a bright blanket that warmed all it touched. She stopped when her toes touched the edge of the lighted area, noting with faint bemusement that she was wearing her old, dirty sneakers, not her pretty new boots.

“Hello?” Pandy said, and the figure’s head turned, shifting from an anonymous dark silhouette to the gold-limned profile of a familiar face.

“Hello, Pandora,” the goddess said, her voice never rising above the level of the quiet song she’d been singing. She smiled, and the curve of her lips was both gentle and strangely sad. “Come in. Sit down. We need to talk, you and I.”

They did need to talk, Pandy was certain of that. But what about? Something other than the beautiful tranquility of this place, this moment, that was certain, but somehow she couldn’t quite focus on... Her gaze caught on the clear glass of the window, and while she couldn’t actually make out what lay on the other side, the crystalline gleam of it reminded her of-

“Thaniel!” Pandy gasped, finally taking the step that carried her into the light. She cringed, as if sunlight might suddenly burn her, but nothing happened except that her skin tingled and warmed the same way it might if she stepped outside on a perfect summer day.

Even though the chair in which the goddess sat was very much not the swiveling type, she was abruptly sitting at an angle to Pandy, no longer facing the window directly. Now Pandy could see that she held something in her arms, though the object was shrouded in shadow, in spite of the light that flooded through the window.

“Thaniel will be all right for a little while longer,” Ismara said, glancing to the side. Pandy followed her gaze and saw two more figures there, though she was certain they hadn’t been in the room when she’d entered. One was small, with over-sized wings, and even in the light, it seemed to be illuminated from within, making details difficult to make out. Still, Pandy was almost certain it was Flit, Grace Conroy’s Light elemental.

The other figure was new. Tall and thin and cadaverous, it curled into itself, its limbs twisted into tubes that very nearly made it look human. If the human had been dead for quite some time. If a cartoon character had been run over by a steamroller, it might have had the same two-dimensional look as an Apparition, but in the elemental’s current tubular form, it looked more like a haphazard construction of damp black paper straw wrappers.

The Light elemental that was probably Flit and the entirely unfamiliar Dark elemental were held in a sort of stasis. Every now and then, one of Flit’s wings would flap, or a tube would uncurl, gape like a dying fish, then coil up again. Each of them produced their own kind of luminescence, Light and Dark, perfectly balanced, but Pandy had no idea if they were caught up in some eternal, possibly unwinnable battle, or if they were cooperating in order to hold so perfectly still.

It was a struggle to tear her eyes from the tense yet oddly peaceful tableau, and when Pandy finally managed it, she looked back at Ismara and spoke in a whisper. “What are they doing?”

Ismara sighed, sadness rising over gentleness for a moment. “Keeping young Thaniel from death, just as they have done for two years now. Soon, Tyne will fail, and when it does, many things will change. So you’re right, we have only a limited amount of time, and yet this is all the time we will need. Please, sit.”

She tilted her chin toward another chair, which was simply there beside her, filling space that had been empty until that moment. More, it was Pandy’s chair, the one from Augustus’s apartment, which he’d gotten for her because he thought she’d like it, not because it matched anything else in the room.

Pandy sat.

Ismara smiled, and if it was a little wry, one corner edging up a bit higher than the other, who could blame her? “I’ve been watching you, Pandora,” she said, and somehow it wasn’t creepy, even though it probably definitely should have been. Instead, Pandy felt a sense of inner warmth, as if she’d just found out a parent or grandparent was secretly watching out for her, ready to step in if needed. If Ismara was messing with her emotions, the goddess was doing a very good job of it, because Pandy didn’t even mind.

“You know so much now,” the goddess went on, settling back and beginning to rock gently again, her arms still cradling the shadowy thing in her embrace. The soft creak creak of the chair filled the otherwise quiet room. “About Grace and Bryan and Light and Dark, and – and I must admit, I didn’t expect this – even about the way we gods sometimes fight like children unwilling to share our toys.”

Her lips compressed, but she said, “Your Keros didn’t quite get it exactly right, though, at least not in this particular case. I tried to protect this world and those who live on it, setting very specific conditions for winning. Each of us would select one Champion, one servant, and one object. We could only work directly through one of these three, limiting – so I hoped – the amount of damage we would do.”

With another sigh, she looked down into her lap, raising one hand to gently touch the thing she held. As she did, the shadows thinned, and Pandy could barely make out the still and silent face of an infant, dark hair curling thickly around its pale cheeks, eyes closed in sleep or death. As soon as the goddess shifted, darkness engulfed the baby once more, but Ismara continued rocking, soothing an infant that Pandy suspected did not need soothing.

“I even included a two hundred year limit, and put a rule into place that if our original Champions failed to complete the challenge, any further Champions must be of their bloodline. I hoped that would keep the general populace from being drawn into our contest.” The goddess gave a little laugh. “Honestly, my opponent wasn’t known for his patience, so I believed that he would simply tire of the game if it stretched out long enough. And that seemed to work for quite some time. Once he lost his first Champion and, ah, misplaced his stone,” here, her eyes twinkled, “he mostly fell silent and stayed within his own realm. Until Grace.”

Glancing toward the large window that revealed nothing except hazy sunlight, Ismara said, “When she picked up my touchstone, she started the game again. My opponent was instantly aware, and while he had lost track of his own stone, he knew they would be drawn together, as they were meant to be. That meant it was only a matter of time, and so he sent his servant to find his next Champion, an offshoot of the original line. Imagine his glee when he realized that my inadvertent Champion had married his own Champion-in-waiting.”

She shook her head. “But Bryan was no fool. The Dark servant had approached many of his line throughout the years, and the story was well known to him. He knew better than to trust someone offering power, no matter how small or innocent the exchange might seem.”

Pandy’s eyes widened as she remembered the book, Alex and the Dark Magician. Had that been based on some real story from his family’s past? Had the ‘servant’ – who was almost certainly Ascyra – tempted some long-ago Dunning or Conroy into very nearly becoming Zheraphon’s new Champion, stymied only by the fact that the Dark stone was nowhere to be found, and the Light stone was safely lost among the crown jewels, protected within a nearly impenetrable castle?

As if reading Pandy’s mind – and maybe she was – Ismara nodded. “Time passed, slipping through my opponent’s grasp far more quickly than a god usually bothers to notice. Until Grace became pregnant with a child who could also fulfill the role, if only it could be stolen before it learned not to trust easy power. It was almost too late, with only five years remaining before the end of the contest, but we have our ways, and time is more flexible than most people realize. My servant was already in place, of course,” she glanced toward Flit, who was still engaged with the Dark elemental, “but everything else simply… fell apart.”

Ismara stroked the silent infant in her lap again, saying, “Even we gods must bow to chance. As your friend ‘Kappa’ told you, the future can be guided, but not controlled, and an icy road, a broken axle, a drunk carriage driver, even the exact placement of a single branch can destroy plans that took decades or centuries to put into place. So when Grace’s carriage rolled down that hill, when her sons were injured, her daughter born too soon, her own body broken and torn, I had only seconds to react. Even for a god, it was… not enough. I won’t claim that the choices I made were perfect, but I knew four things.”

Raising a hand, she held up four fingers, eerily echoing Augustus’s actions from earlier that day. “First, I had to save Lian and Thaniel. Not only did I owe that to my Champion, but they were the last remaining Light mages from my Champion’s bloodline. If my opponent found a new Champion, and I had none, he would win.” She folded down the first finger.

“Second, I had to save the baby. Grace asked me to help all of her children, not only the two most convenient for me. But,” she lowered the third finger, “I also couldn’t allow that babe to fall into my opponent’s hands, which meant I had to take drastic action.

“Finally, I didn’t have the strength or time to do everything. So I… bent the rules. According to our agreement, neither of us can move directly against each other’s Champion or their families. Our servants and Champions may do so, or influence others to act, but we cannot. But I had no need or desire to harm Grace’s child, simply remove her from the playing field long enough for her to reach adulthood, to be able to make her own choice about whose side she wanted to be on, if she wished to choose either side at all.”

Lowering her hand, the goddess once again stroked the soft curls of the baby hidden within the cocoon of Darkness resting in her lap. She smiled down at the infant, and if there was as much puzzlement as affection in it, well, Pandy wasn’t going to comment on it.

“You sent Lian home,” Pandy said, when it seemed that Ismara was done speaking for now, “and brought the baby here.” That was simple enough to see, though she wasn’t certain why or how the infant was wrapped in Darkness. Maybe it cried too much? Maybe the best way to hide Zheraphon’s Champion was inside his own element? But could Ismara even manipulate Darkness in order to create the cocoon? Her eyes flicked to the Dark elemental, and she wondered if it was protecting two of Grace’s children, not just one.

“Bryan used the Dark stone to save Thaniel, creating a sort of stasis that froze him at the moment he died,” Pandy went on, feeling her way toward the truth. “But that wasn’t all, was it? You sent your stone with Thaniel too. After all, you couldn’t leave it for Asc- for the Dark servant to find. With Flit there to help, Bryan was able to use both stones. While the Dark stone kept Thaniel from dying any more than he already had, the Light stone allowed him to keep going, even though his heart was too damaged to function.”

Ismara’s look was proud, as if Pandy was a child who had correctly solved a riddle. “Exactly so. Both stones have been inside Nathaniel Conroy this entire time, but they can’t remain there any longer. As my servant, Flit shares my power, and could continue on for some time yet, but Tyne is contracted to Bryan Conroy, and while he is powerful for a human, once Bryan’s element was bound, Tyne, too, began to fade very quickly. Besides, it’s time to set Thaniel free as well.”

Pandy nodded, but her eyes were drawn back to the shadowy bundle in Ismara’s arms. “What about the baby?”

The goddess’s lips curved into a secretive smile. “This child also has a role to play. Whether as Champion or background player or something else entirely is up to her.”

Pandy squinted at the scrunched little face wrapped in Darkness like a swaddling cloth. She didn’t know a lot about babies, though she’d been around some in her foster homes, but this one looked very young. Like Thaniel, it seemed like the baby was also being held in some kind of stasis. Which was definitely better than being a sort of perfectly preserved mummy. “Ah, I don’t want to argue with you, your, um, goddessliness? But she doesn’t really look like she’s going to be making deep moral decisions any time soon.”

Now Ismara’s smile grew to a grin, and that twinkle returned to her eye as well. “As I said, time is more flexible than most people believe. A minute in one place may be an hour elsewhere. An hour here may be a single heartbeat at home. Speaking of which…”

She turned her head, looking out through the window, which was suddenly, intensely, perfectly clear. The scene outside was a familiar one, and Pandy saw her own Eurydice-face leaning down toward the stone, while Sinnett stood to her right, and Augustus hovered behind her, his hands extended, ready to catch her if she fell.

“You have one heartbeat in which to succeed, Pandora. Starting right now,” Ismara said, her voice echoing oddly as the squeak of her rocking chair transformed into a huge, swooshing thump.