I'm uploading this ahead of my schedule; it shouldn't knock me off too far because the fifth chapter is nearly finished anyway. I would just like to say i did warn you all that updates would be few and far between, and that goes double now that i've actually started my apprenticeship at the hospital; no more than once a month. Granted this one might actually be a little overdue . . .
That being said, I love that you all seem to be enjoying this fic so much you keep pestering me to update. I'm not sure whether to grin or to frown, so i think i'll settle for a smile for now. ^.^
Thanks to all who have reviewed so far, even if only in an attempt to get a faster update. I hope you enjoy this chapter. I'll warn you now that sometimes the four will refer to each other by odd names; it will be explained eventually so don't worry, and i'll include full translations when that chapter rolls around. Now enjoy.
Eb x
E. Aster Bunnymund's first port of call was a ruined city called Carona. It had been around for centuries, once had its own royal family, though the line had faded since those days of kingdoms and magick, and the island it was built on was abandoned a few hundred or so years ago by superstitious locals who believed it was now cursed. The medieval city, though ruined, was beautiful to look at.
More specifically, he was looking for a particular dryad in the forest that bordered one side of the lake that surrounded the island ruins. He remembered something she had once told him about a hidden part of the forest, but needed his memory confirmed.
He arrived to find the forest in chaos, and the dryad was surprisingly easy to locate.
"Liana!" he had to shout to be heard over the din. The petite brown and green sprite looked over immediately, and relief broke out over her face.
"Aster!" she fought her way over to him through a herd of frightened deer and little woodland spirits. Even as Bunny watched, trees swayed alarmingly without the aid of wind.
"What's going on? Why's everything so-"
"The forest's treasure has been taken. The trees are angry, some are even dying! Everyone is terrified Aster. This is a peaceful place, but evil came here and took away its heart!"
"I thought you said this place was protected?" he asked as his eyebrows hit what on a human would have been a hairline.
"It is. Was. We don't know how it got in." Liana's big brown eyes were wide and scared. "The forest protected that treasure as much as they protected us. How could they be stolen?"
"Where was it hidden?"
"In the sacred part of the forest, the one I told you about last time you were here."
There were times when Bunny understood completely what North meant about feelings in the pit of his stomach, feelings so strong and so terrible that there was no choice but to act on them, and a terrible certainty that one's gut was correct about some horrible disaster. This was one of them. The feeling was so fierce it was almost crippling. A determined expression stole onto his face and his eyes hardened.
"Take me there. Now."
o.O.o
"So let me get this straight," Hiccup said after listening patiently to Jack's story, "Pitch Black is the name of the King of Nightmares, otherwise known as The Boogeyman. He tried once before to destroy you guys and bring darkness into the world, actually succeeded in destroying one of you for a little while, but you managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and defeat him. Have I got that right so far?"
"Yeah, pretty much." In a condensed, less cool sort of way than he had been telling the story. They were lucky that Bunnymund wasn't there to listen; he probably wouldn't have appreciated the metaphor, especially considering the state he was in at the time.
"In doing so you regained your memories of your human life, found your centre, became a Guardian, yatta yatta yatta. Still right?"
"Yep."
"So how's he come back? And why?" Hiccup leant back now. He and Jack were sitting in a quiet corner of the main workshop, near Phil the Yeti. To avoid answering those questions, both because he couldn't and because he didn't want to, Jack watched the deceptively large hands of the Yeti painting a small wooden doll.
"The banishment was only temporary, we all knew that." Toothiana announced her presence, and they watched as she floated sadly over and sat behind and a little above them on top of a shelf.
"How so?" One thing Jack had already learnt about the Viking spirit; he was curious, and not just in the way humans were naturally either. Even while listening to Jack, pumping him for every detail no matter how small, he had watched Phil carefully and quickly assemble each of those dolls, and Jack could see his mind cataloguing the little toys; how they were built, what of, how they worked and so on. It lent a slightly alarming quality to the boy's personality, as though he saw much more than he let on in everything he looked at. His gaze wasn't penetrating, exactly, but it was assessing and that in itself could make it an extremely uncomfortable gaze to bear.
"Because his power comes from fear." Toothiana explained quietly. "He was correct about one thing. You can't destroy fear, and so you can't destroy Pitch. Not really. You can only hold him at bay." she looked up from watching the dolls also, and her eyes were as sad as her voice. "I bet that's how he must have gotten to Gaia. Even a goddess fears something, they're just better at hiding it than most people."
Hiccup nodded; he'd been afraid of that. It meant that anything they did to get rid of him would only last so long; he would come back regardless. It was a problem, but one that he was itching to solve. Preferably in a way that gave these guys several hundred years of peace.
"So why Gaia?" He asked instead of the myriad of useless questions that were whirling in his head. "I don't know about you guys, but in my culture pissing off a deity was extremely dangerous." And usually resulted in severe storms, mass plagues, giant wolves attacking, the usual melodramatic drama.
"We don't know." Toothy sighed, and her whole body shook with it. "She's powerful, even with belief in her dwindling. She controlled nature, which I suppose could be an advantage to Pitch."
"It would certainly instil a lot of fear in a populace if nature got out of control." Hiccup agreed. "And he could make the world a very dark place to live in. Literally." in several nasty ways.
Jack stayed silent.
"And then there's you guys." continued Toothiana. "You're each powerful in your own right, and for him to have control of even one of you would be a disaster for us, but together the four of you are almost invincible. Your power would be off the scale. When I even think of him having access to that sort of power . . ."
"It just gets grimmer and grimmer." Hiccup finished for her. He glanced at Jack, who had been quiet throughout all of this. "What do you think?"
"Four to hold hands in the cycle of one." the white-haired male whispered.
"Come again?" blinked the brunet.
But instead of answering Hiccup, Jack turned to Toothiana. "When we're all together," ignoring for the moment that he was still trying to ignore the fact that it was looking ever more likely that he was, quite literally, Winter itself, "you said that our strength increases dramatically. What do we do, exactly?"
"Well," Toothy appeared to be thinking hard. "You control the seasons for a start. And through that the weather in some ways. When you're happy for instance it snows, but when you're angry you might cause a blizzard." she paused, then, "And each of you controls an element. Sort of. You can call upon it for help, at least."
Jack nodded; he knew about that already; his affinity with wind and Hiccup had already admitted to having some measure of control over stone and trees, though he claimed his speciality lay in natural metals. "And if he disrupts the cycle, what would happen then?"
Her eyes widened dramatically as the implication set in. "It could destroy everything." she whispered, horrified at the mere thought. "The balance would be completely gone. It would throw everything into chaos. You don't just represent the seasons, you each represent qualities, like the Guardians do. It would put so much in danger that it wouldn't bear thinking about." she swallowed heavily
"Mind letting me in on this thought process buddy?" Hiccup asked curiously, mossy green gaze on Jack's face.
"He doesn't just want Gaia." Jack stated firmly. "She controls nature as a whole, which is a start, but she doesn't control it all. She gave away portions of her powers when we were formed. He needs the Four Seasons to make the power complete and to control the cycle." he looked grimly at both of them. "He needs us."
"But he couldn't just take that power could he?" Hiccup asked warily, looking to Toothiana for support. "He would need our co-operation to use our powers, and I know I wouldn't give in. I'd try and bury it so deep he'd never find it!"
Toothy shivered, her voice small and sorrowful, wrapping her arms around herself for comfort. "He could," she said quietly, "if he killed you." she looked up. "If he broke you."
"I collapsed when he took Gaia." Jack added. He turned to the Viking. "North said something about a . . . a bond that had backlashed and that it was the connection between my spirit and Mother Nature. You must have felt something too." he added desperately. He didn't want to be the only one.
Thinking hard, Hiccup thought back to a few days ago. He had been visiting the town near his forest again, watching a local festival. He had felt overwhelming sadness, could have sworn he'd heard screaming. He'd heard a name that he didn't know but that felt familiar as his own heartbeat had been when he was alive. The next thing he'd known was waking up in the cavern the dragons lived in up in the cliffs, with many pairs of eyes watching him curiously, and Toothless had been agitated for hours. He paled. "I blacked out." he said at last, worry staining his voice. "I have no memory of the other afternoon. One minute I was watching the people in the town and the next I was back in the forest surrounded by dragons."
"The others had to have felt this too." Jack declared triumphantly; so it wasn't just him, it made him feel less like a freak and more like he belonged. "If we're connected the way you claim then they must have felt something. If they-" he broke off suddenly, sitting up perfectly straight and his head cocked to one side, like he was listening.
A few seconds later, Hiccup reacted to something in exactly the same way, though he appeared to be straining harder to hear.
Disturbed, Toothiana fluttered her wings. "What? What is it?" she asked anxiously.
It was Jack that finally answered, but what he said was just as confusing as the way they were acting. He uttered only a single word, "Vah," and they both leapt up so suddenly it startled all the yetis in the area and the Tooth Fairy. Together they pelted into the room that contained the Guardian plaque, where the Book of Seasons still rested on the pedestal, startling North and Sandy along the way.
"Where is fire?" the burly Russian yelled after them. Sandy formed an urgent exclamation and question mark as Toothy came up to them.
"I have no idea." she responded breathlessly; they'd nearly frightened the life out of her they'd moved so suddenly! "They just suddenly went quiet and then they exploded into this frenzy." she gestured wildly with her arms.
When they entered the room they found both boys staring at the Book of Seasons, and with good reason. The cover was embossed with the same image from the oracle pillar; the quartered circle and its symbols. And the quarter for Spring was glowing urgently. Flickering.
"Something is wrong." North spoke immediately. He was backed up by Hiccup, who was mumbling under his breath "This is bad, this is very, very bad." over and over.
"But what could it be?" Toothy asked anxiously. Sanderson formed a book and a question mark above his head, which North only just noticed from the corner of his eye.
"It has never done this before." he replied, running a hand over his beard.
o.O.o
Bunny stood on the other side of a tunnel into a cliff that was hidden by a curtain of vines. He was looking at a clearing surrounded by more of the cliffs, with a waterfall and a pool. Towards the back stood a tall stone tower that looked like it belonged to a time long since gone.
But something was very much wrong; the sensation was so sharp his ears twitched every second in time with his whiskers. The clearing looked like it must have once been beautiful, idyllic even, but right now it reminded him horribly of the garden he had visited just a few days ago. Everything was dead or dying, the pool of water was already stagnant. Even the waterfall was slowly becoming lifeless.
It was as though a great shadow had fallen over the landscape.
"Is there a way in?" Bunny asked, for there was no door that he could see.
"Sometimes you can get in through the window, but now the only way is the door round the back of the tower." she whispered. Her body language reeked of fear and anxiety; she was huddling into herself, wrapping her arms around her middle as though to protect herself or as if she was in pain, and her large doe eyes were never still, always flicking this way and that like she was terrified that something would jump out at them any second now.
He didn't say anything more and moved forward. Liana hesitated at first, but followed him slowly. When he reached the doorway in question, he paused too; the ground before it was littered with stones.
"It was blocked up once, long ago." Liana began, her tone quiet and distant. "To keep the treasure locked within. But you cannot cage a wild bird." her voice became hard with that last sentence, as she remembered something unpleasant.
So far, Liana had refrained from mentioning any pronouns, had only called this being 'treasure', but he knew that this was the home of a girl. He could smell it. Bunny headed through the doorway – more an open arch than a true door – and up the winding stairs in the gloom beyond. Eventually, his senses informed him of a dead end, and a trap door above. He gave it a shove but it barely budged, so he put all his weight and strength beneath it and gave an almighty heave up. With a heavy grating sound of stone on stone, the panel lifted and weak sunlight filtered down to them.
Already he could smell fear.
Cautiously, he poked his head through the gap.
The room above was tidy. Wooden table and chairs, a small stove, bookshelves filled with books, a big bay window he recognised as being the one he had seen from outside was the source of light. But despite how bright he knew the sun to be outside that day, inside was still murky. Dust motes floated through the weak light.
Pulling himself up, he surveyed the surroundings some more. Stairs led up to a curtained doorway; a bedroom perhaps? Even spirits needed to rest sometimes. Candle stubs lined the banister and the stairs. The walls were covered with paintings; every inch a work of art.
If he had needed proof that a girl lived here, that would be it; no male he knew would paint these images.
"The animals only say that they heard a scream." Liana carried on, staring around with the most heartbroken expression on her face. "By the time anyone could get in here, it was too late."
Her words caught his attention. "What do you mean? Did something stop you?"
She shrugged. "Whenever somebody tried, they were barred by a wall of darkness on this side of the tunnel." she shivered. "It was horrible, like you could touch it, but it moved and made the most frightening sounds."
Bunny moved to head upstairs, but stopped when his paw brushed over something odd. He glanced at the wall again. The painting looked newer than the others, and in fact looked only half finished. Tiny black particles were caught in the bright paint.
"No." he whispered, looking over the room again. What he had taken to be a fine coat of dust was in fact something worse. "Oh no." Much worse.
"I need to get back." he declared suddenly, hopping over the banister and landing firmly on the stone tiled floor.
"But our treasure-"
"We'll get her back, Liana, promise." He ruffled the dryad's hair for a moment before turning abruptly away. "But this is urgent. Thank you, you've been a great help, little cookie. You'll never know how much." he tapped the floor, creating a hole, and jumped, leaving the dryad alone in the lofty tower
He didn't waste any time when he arrived at the North Pole. Phil saw him before he began yelling and pointed him in the right direction, and with a grateful nod he bounded into the room the others were in.
"We have a big problem mates."
"We know." North commented dryly, casting a sideways glance at the two young men who were still staring at the book. "But we're not certain what it is yet so-"
"I do." Bunnymund interrupted him swiftly. "I got bad news folks." his eyes met those of Jack and Hiccup and regret darkened them. "Pitch has Spring."
Jack felt as though the floor had just dropped out from under him. Hiccup unconsciously put a hand on the wintry spirit's arm.
"How can you be sure?" North demanded.
"I know this girl. Have done for a long time. I'd be more surprised if she wasn't Spring. Her tower is covered with black sand. I'm tellin' ya it was just like looking at Gaia's garden all over again! The forest she protected is dying."
"Y-you don't think he's . . ." Toothiana couldn't make the words form, and neither of the boys wanted to hear them.
"I ain't certain. It's dying slow, so I think she's alive. I think he's tainted the place somehow, and because she ain't there to stop it . . ." he trailed off hopelessly.
There was a heavy silence as they all considered the possibilities.
"Spring is new life, innocence, she is creativity and compassion. She is light. We have to find her." North announced at last.
"But where could he have taken her?" Toothy retorted. "This world is so big! Not to mention she could be anywhere in Gaia's realm or in his own."
"He would have taken her somewhere her powers would be of little to no use." Hiccup interrupted loudly, "That narrows it down at least a little."
"Plants and animals." Toothiana recited. "Her element was water, the element of emotions and feeling."
"So where could he take her that had no plants that she could use, no animals that she could summon? No water for her to call?" prompted the Viking.
"Desert?"
"No, too risky. The ritual to take another's power, is too delicate, he must do it correctly." North waved away the suggestion. "Spring can be very delicate season. Desert might . . . be too much."
"Mountain top?"
"I doubt he'd risk an eagle or a dragon lad." Bunnymund told the brunet wryly. "He just ain't that brave."
"The Antarctic." Jack announced, his voice breaking through the chatter like a swift winter chill. When he only received stares he continued nonchalantly. "He can't take her to the Arctic, North lives here and he'd notice. The South Pole is quiet, nobody will be there, the animals, and the few people who dare to go there, stay near the water. If he takes her to the centre he can isolate her. The water is frozen, and being Spring she probably can't use it, especially if he's cut her off from it somehow. But it means we don't have a lot of time."
"Then what're we waitin' for mates? Let's go get 'er!" Bunny punched air.
"Antarctic is big place, Jack." North reminded the spirit.
"True." Jack grinned. "But I spend a lot of time there now." In fact it was starting to become like Bunny's Warren and North's workshop. He'd discovered that the more kids who believed in him and the more he visited that place, the more it changed. It now had the beginnings of an icy roller coaster right at its heart; he was amazed the adults hadn't discovered it yet, and he wasn't even sure what it was becoming. But the lake would always be his first home.
"Then before we go, we must find one more spirit. Then we can really start this off with bang." grinned the jolly old Russian.