Every year, on a certain night in early June, the Black Rabbit of Inlé returns to Sandleford.
Half a century of time has changed the place greatly. The surrounding fields are fewer in number than before, and the ground echoes with the scars laid down by the vast hrududil that the humans use to tend their crops. At the end of the lane, one such bright-hued vehicle gleams in the low light of dust, brash and broad. The Black Rabbit wonders, briefly, what Prince Rainbow would make of it... but they rarely encounter one another these days, and Prince Rainbow is less than he once was. Petty emulation of human arrogance had never been a wise choice.
Humbler creatures roam the hedgerows, and the small copses and coverts. The Black Rabbit takes care not to disturb them as he passes by, bestowing blessings on the shrews and field-mice and rabbits - for there are, still, rabbits - that live their lives in these parts. But the taller trees that marked the hedge-line are gone now, and so too is the shallow slope that graced the land, levelled by time and the works of man. It isn't an especially unusual occurrence: he's seen it happen many times before, in countless places and in countless times. The warrens of rabbits, the cities of man: they both rise and fall, and the soil always swallows them back into the ground again, as a doe spares her unborn kits from the trials and suffering of an unkind world. Humanity's ascendance is a temporary thing, and meaningless. There are ruins of a once-bustling human town not fifteen miles east of where he is now. These days, Calleva is home to a thriving community of rabbits, living their lives much as rabbits always have: in fear and in fruitfulness, under Lord Frith's sky.
Here, though, they do not.
The Black Rabbit examines the place where the warren used to be. The ground that his paws never quite touch is hard and dark, streaked with drying mud tracked across from a nearby construction site. Large red-brick houses line the narrow lane, each more than adequate to house a whole warren's-worth of people, though not one of them does. He counts the heartbeats of the humans, house by house: one-two-three here, one there, two, two again, and then the first full hrair. Even if rabbit-kind had no other reasons to number man amongst the Thousand, their antisocial habits would surely be warning enough. At the last house, a small ceramic plate affixed to the wall catches his attention. 9 Warren Road, it reads. Oh yes, they know what they did here. The lane is named in the very memory of their crime.
Should that please him? The Black Rabbit considers the question for a while. They do not remember it as he does: viscerally, in blood and sweat and pain. They cannot feel the tearing fear of asphyxiation, the stunning thump and agony of lead shot, or of a heavy blow. They do not die one by one, all at once, every last soul crying out desperately for the succour that he cannot, will not give.
He wonders if they should.
Before he can make up his mind, he realises that he has company. A tabby-and-white cat, male - no, neutered - and obviously over-fed is walking nonchalantly down the lane, in the manner of all cats everywhere. What is not natural is that it has dared to come within ten yards of his presence. The Black Rabbit is quietly appalled. If his suspicions are correct, the pfeffa is utterly ignorant of the fact that he is there at all! Never before has he seen a pfeffa so blinded in its senses!
The Black Rabbit turns his will upon the pitiful creature, and now the cat becomes aware of him. It turns tail and runs, back to the stifling poison of its domestication. Angered as much by that as by the affrontery of its approach, he calls down a blessing of Frith upon it, equally as rich as the ones he bestowed on the prey-beasts of the fields. The pfeffa pauses in its flight, then turns back, boldly, to regard him once again. Lambent orange eyes blink twice; behind them, the Black Rabbit sees the glorious and restless unpredictability of the pfeffa's ancestors, rekindled to new life.
I do not understand, the cat says, but I thank you. Then, it slopes away into the shadows, never to return.
Later tonight, a rabbit will die beneath that self-same pfeffa's teeth and claws. The Black Rabbit will come for it then, when the time is right, but his grief will be small. The strength of his people depends upon the strength of the Elil who prey upon them, and what must be, must be. It is a hard truth for some - particularly for the rabbits doomed to suffer as they die - but the boundless glory of rabbit-kind would be lessened without it.
The humans though.… The humans are a different matter.
The Black Rabbit moves further up the street. Inside the houses, lights flicker and televisions turn themselves off. He allows himself to drift through the walls, following the curve of age-old burrows and the lingering nightmares of dying rabbits. A man scalds himself on spilled tea as he passes near, while elsewhere an elderly woman stumbles on her stairs. A child, asleep in her bed, stirs fitfully. Later, she will wake screaming at formless terrors that she cannot describe.
But the Black Rabbit also leaves blessings in his wake. A gardener's life is extended by another year. A woman ponders, for the first time, the prospect of resigning her job in the City; a few weeks from now she will do just that. A lonely, traumatised spirit finds a fleeting moment of peace.
The Black Rabbit continues onwards, away from where the warren used to be, following the dying light of dusk towards the thunder of hrududil on the A34, before moving south again aways. His whims often take him out this way, on this very particular June night when he returns to this part of the world. He can hear a tawny owl, somewhere nearby, casting about the sky for prey. On the ground, small creatures press their bellies to the dirt in fear. He casts a shroud of darkness across them, before abandoning the concealment of the undergrowth for the very centre of the slip-road.
The time for lesser predators is past.
The Black Rabbit of Inlé exhales with the chill breath of his own distant kingdom. As he does, an unseasonal fog spools out from beneath his paws. There have been so many senseless deaths, but such is the way of the world, for rabbits, and it has always been thus.
Such is the way of the world for all of its inhabitants.
The fog settles around the place where he stands, where the camber of the road works against its curve. He waits there, a manifestation of death in the darkness.
He doesn't have to wait for long.