The Hunger Beneath the Warrens
To save their way of life from undead hordes, a band of rabbits will pick up their swords.
The first sign came with the wind, though Vetch would not understand its meaning until the dead began to walk.
He had been sharpening his bone-tipped spear with the other rabbit warriors when the breeze had shifted without reason, carrying with it a scent that made his ears flatten against his skull. Not the familiar musk of fox or the sharp tang of hawk but something else entirely. Something that reminded him of the red fever that had swept the eastern warrens two seasons past, when he’d held Willow as her breath grew shallow and her eyes lost their shine. But this was worse. It was sweeter, and far more corrupt.
He tested the air again, whiskers trembling. The other rabbits in Thornburrow continued their evening routines: Bracken mending chain mail with her nimble claws, Old Sage counting arrows in the communal armory, younglings practicing their leaps between the practice posts. None of them had caught it, not yet.
But Vetch had always been blessed—or cursed—with the keenest nose in the warren. It had made him Captain at thirty seasons, what had saved them during the great fox siege when he’d smelled the tunnelers three chambers away. It was also what had made him smell the fever on Willow’s fur days before the healers could name it…
“Captain?” Bracken’s voice carried the musical lilt of their burrowfolk, though worry threaded through it like a minor key. “Your ears are doing that thing, sir.”
Vetch’s paws went to his ears, finding them rigid as winter bark. He forced them to relax. Around them, Thornburrow hummed with the gentle rhythms of home. The great oak’s roots formed natural chambers that their ancestors had carved and expanded over generations, smooth-worn tunnels connecting sleeping chambers to the great hall where the Heartstone pulsed with mystical, amber light. Here, sixty families made their lives in the deep places, connected by the deep magics, following the Burrow-bond that linked every rabbit to the sacred earth.
The Burrow-bond. That was the rabbit way, to know that every tunnel connected to every other, that no rabbit stood alone, that the earth itself held memory and wisdom for those who learned to listen and trust in the Heartstone. Tonight, the bond carried whispers of wrongness on the wind.
“Just listening to what the deep paths tell us,” Vetch said, only half-lying.
Bracken studied his face with eyes like polished jet. She’d fought beside him through two fox sieges and the terrible winter when the great hawk Razorclaw had hunted them to the edge of extinction. More than that, she’d been the one to argue they should send healers to the fever-struck warrens, even when Vetch had wanted to seal their borders. She’d been right then. He wondered what she would counsel now.
“The younglings are restless,” she said quietly. “Little Dewdrop keeps asking why we practice combat forms if the world is ‘so safe.’ Smart kit.”
Too smart, Vetch thought. Seven-season-old Dewdrop had her mother’s quick mind and her father’s stubborn streak, both lost to Razorclaw three seasons past. The kit had long looked to Vetch with expectation in her bright eyes, believing he could keep the darkness at bay through will and steel alone.
The wrongness in the wind grew stronger as night settled over the meadow, forcing Vetch to make his decision. “Bracken, gather the scouts. Tell them to double the watch, but keep it quiet so as to avoid panic and separation.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
Before he could answer, the screaming started. It came from the Eastward Burrows, a collection of smaller warrens that dotted the hillside like scattered seeds. The sound cut through the evening air, far different from the clean death-cry of a rabbit taken by predator and likely worse. The sound spoke of torment beyond the veil of death. Then it stopped completely.
The silence that followed was heavier than stone, and in it, Vetch heard the faint whisper of the Burrow-bond breaking. Somewhere in the darkness, warrens were being severed from the Heartstone, the great network that connected all rabbit-kind. And protected them.
“Arm the soldiers,” Vetch whispered. “Now.”
The messenger arrived as the moon crested the treeline. Young Reed from Sunset Warren, her flanks heaving and foam speckling her muzzle. She collapsed at the outer gates, her mail torn and bloody, words tumbling from her lips like water from a burst dam.
“Gone,” she gasped, before Vetch could even offer water. “Moonhaven Warren…all of them…but some still move. Still—”
Her voice cracked, and Vetch saw what the journey had cost her. Reed was hardly nineteen seasons, a scout chosen for her speed and keen eyes. Now those eyes held the hollow look of a creature who’d seen the world’s foundations crack at the edges.
“Slow now, child.” Sage knelt beside her, offering water from his personal flask of heartroot water that would steady her nerves. “The dead can wait for truth to be told.”
She drank deeply, then met Vetch’s gaze. “Captain, it started with Elder Moss. We found him outside our borders this morning, sleeping in the sun. Thought nothing of it, as elders doze where they will. But when young Pepper tried to wake him…”
She shuddered, and water spilled from her trembling paws.
“Go on,” Vetch said gently.
“His eyes were white as winter frost, and there were holes. In his chest, his throat. Wounds that should have put him in the earth, but he stood anyway. Stood and grabbed…Pepper’s throat.” Reed’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The sound when his teeth met bone…and underneath it all, words in the lost tongue. Join us. The burrow waits. The burrow is vast.”
Murmurs rippled through the assembled rabbits. Old Sage’s ears flicked with perhaps a memory, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of their burrow’s deep lore.“In the time before the warrens, when our people lived wild on the surface, there were tales of such things. The Whispering Dead, we called them. Rabbits whose spirits found no rest, trapped between the living world and the Long Burrow where all paths end.”
“Stories to frighten kits,” Bracken said, but her paw rested on her sword hilt.
“Elder Moss bit Pepper while we tried to help him,” Reed continued, as if she hadn’t heard. “Just clamped down and wouldn’t let go until we drove spears through his spine. She…she turned within the hour. Same frost-white eyes, same impossible wounds. And when she spoke…” Reed covered her ears with both paws. “It wasn’t her voice anymore. It was the sound the earth makes when it hungers deep.”
Ice began to form in Vetch’s gut. “How many turned?”
“Almost all of Moonhaven by sunset. Thirty souls at least, walking with wounds that should have killed them, speaking with voices like wind through dirt. They were moving toward Sunset Warren when I…” Her voice broke completely. “When I ran. Left my own burrowfolk to save word for you.”
The weight of leadership settled on Vetch’s shoulders like a burial shroud. Thirty souls gone, and three hundred more looking to him for guidance, from grey-muzzled Sage to young kit Dewdrop with her bright, trusting gaze.
“You did right,” he said firmly. “Hard choices make hard lives.”
But even as he spoke the words, he wondered if he believed them. How many hard choices lay ahead for him, for Thornburrow? And what would be left when the choosing was done?
Dawn brought refugees and impossible choices. They came in scattered groups throughout the morning, most of them survivors from Sunset Warren, Greenvale, and Little Hazel, all with the same tale of loved ones rising from fatal wounds and the infection spreading with every bite. By midday, nearly a hundred displaced rabbits huddled in Thornburrow’s great hall, seeking protection from the Heartstone, their eyes haunted by the shock and denial of astounding loss.
The hall erupted in angry voices when the debate began. Captain Birch, once-proud leader of Greenvale Warren, stepped forward. His left ear hung in tatters, and dried blood crusted his whiskers. “We need to help Fernhaven,” he said. “They’re only three miles west, and their defenses are weak. If we move now—”
“We cannot,” Vetch cut him off. “We must instead seal our borders and defend what we have.”
Birch’s remaining eye blazed. “There are younglings in Fernhaven, Vetch. Families who looked to us for protection. You would truly abandon them?”
“I would keep the living alive,” Vetch replied steadily. “And the living are here, in this room, behind our defenses.”
“The Burrow-bond connects us all!” The voice belonged to Holly of Little Hazel, her silver fur streaked with mud and worse. “We do not abandon our own!”
Vetch’s jaw tightened. “The bond is broken, Holly. Did you not feel it when your warren fell? That snapping, like roots pulled from the earth like teeth? Whatever these creatures are, they sever us from the deep paths. Every warren that falls weakens the network.”
“All the more reason to fight together,” Birch snarled.
“All the more reason not to die separately,” Vetch shot back. Then, more quietly, “I know what I am asking, and I know the cost. But dead heroes save none.”
Bracken had remained silent through the argument, sharpening her blades with quiet attention. Now she looked up, her black eyes unreadable. “And if you’re wrong, sir?” she asked. “If running and hiding only delays the inevitable, what then?”
Vetch met her gaze and saw doubt there. In his judgment, even his courage. It cut deeper than her blade ever could.
But before he could answer, young Dewdrop spoke from where she sat among the other kits. Her voice was small but clear as a bell. “Captain Vetch, my ma said the Burrow-bond meant we never have to be afraid. Because somewhere in the deep paths, every rabbit who ever lived remains with us.” She looked up at Vetch with enormous eyes. “If that is true, Captain, then why are you so scared?”
Out of the mouths of kits came the hardest truths, Vetch knew. He was afraid. Terrified that his careful plans would crumble, that his leadership would fail, that he’d lose everyone he’d sworn to protect, who trusted him as their shield.
Just as Willow had trusted him.
“I am scared,” Vetch said finally, “because being brave is easier to say than to do. And right now, acting means staying alive long enough to find the answer outside the pressures of fear.”
He held on to those words for an entire day and into the night, until halfway through the moon’s ascent, runners brought word that made all the previous day’s arguments moot. Fernhaven had already gone silent, cut off from the Heartstone’s light. The infection was spreading faster than anyone could flee.
“Captain,” Reed called from her post at the Listening Stone. Her young face was pale with concentration. “Something’s coming. From the east. A horde of them, no doubt.”
Vetch climbed to the observation dome, Bracken close behind. Far across the meadow, shapes moved through the morning mist. Too many shapes, hopping and crawling with crooked gaits.
“How many?” Bracken asked.
Vetch’s enhanced hearing caught the whisper of feet on grass, the soft scrape of claws on stone. His nose detected the sweet-sick scent of corruption, now so strong it made his eyes water.
“All of them,” he said quietly. All those I refused to save.
The host of the Whispering Dead reached Thornburrow as the sun touched the western hills.
They came with the terrible patience of the grave, spreading across the meadow in a loose crescent that made Vetch’s tactical mind race with possibilities, all of them grim. Dozens of them, maybe more. Rabbits from every fallen warren, united now in their ravenous, mindless march.
At their center walked someone who made Vetch’s blood freeze. Captain Flint of Greenvale Warren. His star-steel armor hung in tatters, and a great wound split his skull from ear to muzzle, revealing the white bone beneath. But he moved with the same confident stride Vetch remembered from training, from council meetings, from their united defense against Razorclaw. Flint carried the same famous blade that had drunk deep in a dozen battles, including the very neck of the great hawk herself.
“Vetch!” Flint called across the meadow, his undead voice carrying the hollow echo of wind through empty caves. “Old pupil! Why do you cower behind your thorns when the Long Burrow calls for you?”
The defenders of Thornburrow lined the barriers. Three hundred warriors with arrows nocked and spears leveled. But Vetch could see the fear in their stance, the tremor in their paws. How does one fight their heroes once risen from the grave?
“You are dead, Flint,” Vetch called back. “Find your rest in the deep paths.”
Flint let out a grisly laughter like grinding stone. “The deep paths led me here, brother. Beneath your feet, beneath every stone you stand upon. We are the paths’ voice now, and they hunger for the warmth of the living.”
The dead began to spread out, testing the barriers, probing for weakness. Some terrible intelligence guided them, as if it knew rabbit tactics as well as any captain.
“They’re going for the tunnel mouths,” Bracken observed. “The north entrances where the barriers are weakest.”
Vetch cursed their fates. Every weakness of Thornburrow was known to these abominations, every secret path mapped in minds that death had not yet silenced.
“Fall back to the second ring,” Vetch ordered, “and seal the outer tunnels behind us!”
As his warriors moved to obey, Captain Birch approached with murder in his one good eye. “This is your doing,” he snarled. “If we had moved with haste when I asked, struck together while we had the chance—”
“We’d all be dead, ever still,” Vetch finished.
“Look around you!” Birch gestured at the encroaching host. “Half those faces are from Fernhaven. The warren you refused to aid. Your precious strategy doomed us all.”
His harsh words carried truth. Among the advancing dead, Vetch could see small shapes that made his heart clench, many of them kits who should have lived to see another spring, now walking with winter in their milky eyes.
“I know,” he said quietly. “And I’ll carry that to my end.”
“Will you?” Birch’s voice cracked. “Because I see my nephew out there, and my sister, and the baker who made honeycakes for festival days. What will you tell them when they come calling?”
Vetch had no answer. Below them, the sound of digging began, of claws against stone, methodical and patient. The dead knew they couldn’t storm Thornburrow by force, not with the Heartstone’s protection. They would do what rabbits did best.
They would dig.
The siege lasted three days, and each one carved seasons from Vetch’s life. The dead had worked with inhuman persistence, their claws scraping through stone and root with supernatural strength. They dug precise excavations, following the old maintenance shafts that honeycombed the earth beneath Thornburrow. Every warren had them, these forgotten passages used by the first diggers, now remembered by minds that should have been ash.
On the first day, they lost the outer defenses.
“Captain!” The cry came from Scout Fern, her voice tight with panic. “They’ve broken through at the north cistern!”
Vetch raced through twisting passages he’d known since kithood, Bracken and a dozen warriors at his heels. They reached the cistern chamber just as the floor erupted upward, pale claws thrusting through stone in shapes of grotesque flowers.
The battle was brief and bloody. Elder Patchfur, who’d taught Vetch sword work as a kit, held the narrow passage alone against five of the dead. His blade work was still beautiful, still perfect form and flawless technique, everything he’d drilled into multiple generations of young warriors.
But it wasn’t close to enough. Claws found the gaps in his mail, and teeth met the great vein in his throat. He fell defending younglings he’d never see grow up, and rose again within the hour to hunt them.
“The nursery chambers are lost,” Bracken reported as they sealed the passage behind them. Her voice was steady, but Vetch caught the tremor beneath. “Nineteen chambers flooded, including the deepest sanctuaries.”
They fell back to the second ring, then the third. Each retreat cost them ground, lives, and fleeting hope. And always the sound of digging, closer and more insistent.
On the second day, Reed volunteered for reconnaissance. “I’m the fastest,” she said simply. “If anyone can map their positions and get back alive, it’s me.”
Vetch wanted to refuse her, but tactical necessity was a cruel master. They needed intelligence, and Reed had already proven her courage. He gave her his personal blade—star-steel forged from the heart of a fallen comet—and watched her disappear into the maintenance tunnels.
She never returned.
They found her body at sunset, dumped at the third ring’s main gate as a grim gift. Her throat was torn, her eyes the color of winter frost. When she spoke, it was with that voice of wind through vast depths. The star-steel blade was nowhere to be seen, claimed by whatever darkness now guided her.
“Captain,” she whispered, clinging to what remained of her senses. “The paths…they go so deep. Deeper than any rabbit has ever dug. And in the darkness…such wonderful things. Such hungry things.”
Sage wept then, the first tears Vetch had ever seen from the gruff old warrior. Reed had been like a granddaughter to him, one of the few survivors of his original scout company. Now she stood before the gates, promising eternal reunion in the dark beneath.
“I know you are in there, grandfather,” she called, her young voice hollow and sweet. “The burrow misses you. I miss you. Won’t you come home?”
She turned completely a moment later, and Vetch hesitated to send his blade into her chest, giving her a moment to escape. They sealed that gate with blessed stone and moved deeper into the warren’s heart.
By the third dawn, they had fallen back to the great hall itself. Fifty rabbits remained of Thornburrow’s three hundred souls. They huddled around the Heartstone, its amber light flickering like a candle in a hurricane. The dead pressed close on all sides, their scraping claws a constant whisper against sealed stone.
“The emergency tunnel to Farmeadow,” Bracken said quietly, running a whetstone along her notched blade. “We could still get some of them out. The younglings, at least.”
“To what end?” Vetch gestured toward the sealed entrances, where shadows moved beyond the barriers. “This corruption spreads with every bite, every scratch. Soon there will be nowhere left to run.”
“So then…”
“We make our last stand here,” he finished for her. But even as he said it, Vetch’s mind raced through possibilities. There had to be something they were missing, some weakness in their enemies that—
The scratching stopped. In the sudden silence, every ear in the great hall swiveled toward the main entrance. The blessed stones that sealed it were two feet thick, carved with protective sigils that had guarded Thornburrow for two hundred seasons, if not more.
From beyond them came a voice that stopped Vetch’s heart.
“My love,” Willow whispered, soft as summer rain. “Why won’t you let me in?”
The great hall spun around him. Willow had been dead for two seasons, claimed by the red fever that swept the eastern warrens. He had held her as her breath grew shallow, had sung the deep songs over her grave, had carved her name into his heart with every beat since.
“It’s not her,” Bracken said fiercely, her blade half-drawn. “Whatever’s out there wearing her voice, it is not—”
“I know.” The words scraped his throat like broken glass. “I know it is not her.”
But his paws were already moving toward the barrier stones. Each one weighed as much as a full-grown rabbit, but they could be moved. They were meant to be moved, in case of siege or flood or the dozen other disasters that could trap a warren.
“Vetch, my heart,” Willow’s voice carried all the warmth of their fever dreams, all the love they’d shared in too-brief seasons. “I’ve been so cold in the deep places. So alone. But if you join me…we could dig new burrows together. In the dark beneath, where nothing changes, where nothing dies, where the fever can never touch us again.”
His claws found purchase on the blessed stone. It shifted slightly, just enough to let in a whisper of that sweet corruption from beyond. The scent made him remember their last night together, how she’d pressed close despite the fever’s heat, how she’d made him promise to find happiness after she was gone. A promise he’d broken long ago. For what was the point of living when everything that mattered was already dead?
“Captain.” Old Sage appeared at his shoulder, ancient and battle-scarred and suddenly gentle. “That is not the Burrow-bond, that is not the rabbit way.”
“What do you know of love, old claw?” The words came out harsh as winter wind. “You’ve had your battles, your victories, your long life. What do you know of losing all that matters?”
Sage was quiet for a moment, his grey muzzle thoughtful. “I know that love isn’t about holding on, lad. It’s about letting go when you must.”
The simple words felt like cold raindrops on Vetch’s whiskers that he knew were small, yet they weighed him down ever still. He looked around the great hall, at Bracken preparing for a battle she knew she couldn’t win, at little Dewdrop huddled with the other kits, at the handful of warriors who still believed he could save them.
Before all this, Vetch considered the rabbit way to be many things all at once. It was a dedication to cleverness and bravery, the Burrow-bond that connected them to the deep paths, to the Heartstone, to their very ancestors who sacrificed so much to see them now at ruin’s door. Because now the cold voice of old death had come calling with new debts. Vetch had to wonder if the rabbit way could be more. Could be choosing life over death, hope over despair, no matter how sweet the alternative whispered.
“I’m sorry, love,” he said softly, pressing his forehead to the blessed stone. “But my place is here. With the ones who need me.”
Willow’s voice changed then, became something hollow and vast and terribly hungry. “You will join us soon enough, fool. And when you do, you will understand. The deep places have such wonders, Vetch. Such terrible, beautiful wonders, far greater than you.”
The assault began mere moments later.
The whispering dead burst through the walls in wild droves. The blessed stones that had stood for centuries cracked like eggs as unnatural strength pressed against them from beyond. The enemy poured into the great hall like a tide of rainwater, dozens of them, every familiar face from friends to enemies twisted by the grave’s hunger.
Vetch met Captain Flint in the chamber’s center, star-steel ringing against star-steel, the sparks mixing with the amber light of the Heartstone behind them. The dead captain was faster than any corpse had any right to be, his ruined face split by a grin of perfect malice.
“You always were too clever for your own good,” Flint said conversationally, his blade work still flawless despite the gaping wound in his skull. “Always thinking three moves ahead, always sure you knew better than the rest of us.”
Vetch parried a killing thrust, spun away from claws that sought his throat. Around them, the battle raged with desperate fury. Bracken danced between four attackers, her twin blades weaving patterns of silver death. Old Sage stood over little Dewdrop and the other kits like a mountain of scarred fury, his war-hammer crushing skulls that should have stayed crushed.
But for every dead rabbit that fell, two more pressed forward. And the fallen rose again within moments, joining their killers in the horde.
“You were right about one thing,” Flint continued, pressing his attack with immortal persistence. “Running would have gotten us all killed faster. But staying together? Ah, that just made the dead angrier, didn’t it? And now you get to watch everyone you tried to save die anyway.”
Vetch’s blade found the gap where Flint’s gorget had torn away, drove deep into the throat. For a heartbeat, hope flared—
Then Flint smiled with ruined lips and kept fighting on. “What you don’t understand about the dead, old friend—” he whispered, “—is that we do not need the parts you think we do.”
Around them, Thornburrow fell one defender at a time. Brave rabbits and true, each one fighting to the last breath, each one rising again to turn that courage against their former comrades.
Captain Birch died with a curse on his lips and rose with winter in his eyes. Holly of Little Hazel fell defending the Heartstone itself, then turned to drag down the warriors who’d fought beside her. This was no battle. It was a harvest. And they were the grain.
Flint’s blade took Vetch in the shoulder, spinning him around. He hit the floor hard, tasting blood and earth. Above him, the dead captain raised his star-steel sword for the killing blow.
“Any last words for the ones you failed?”
Vetch’s eyes fell upon the Heartstone, pulsing with its warm amber light just a few yards away. Two hundred seasons of life and death, love and loss, all the hopes and dreams of his people made manifest in crystallized starlight. The old songs said it was a fragment of the celestial sphere, gifted to the first rabbits by the Sky Jumpers themselves. It was no wonder the Whispering Dead wanted its power. But what if…Vetch considered something painful. That if the old songs were true, if the deep lore held even a grain of truth…
“Bracken!” he called across the chaos. “The Heartstone! If we can shatter it with them close—”
Flint’s blade pierced his chest, but the wound was shallow, turned aside by the remnants of his mail. Pain exploded through his fur, but he managed to keep talking.
“The network,” he gasped. “It’s powered by the stones…all of the dead are connected…we must destroy what is connecting them…break the connection…”
Understanding dawned in Bracken’s eyes. She cut down the dead rabbit clawing at her back, then sprinted toward the chamber’s heart where Old Sage still fought.
“Are you mad?” the ancient warrior roared, crushing another skull with his war-hammer. “That stone is the heart of our warren, the soul of our people! Without it, we lose everything! Our connection to the deep paths, our link to every rabbit who came before, our very identity!”
“And if it falls into their hands?” Bracken pointed with weakening strength at the advancing corpses. “What happens when they corrupt the very source of our power? When they use it to spread their hunger to every warren in the network?”
The terrible logic of it filled Sage’s eyes. Around the great hall, the few remaining defenders fell one by one. Soon the dead would overwhelm the Heartstone’s protective circle, and then… Then the corruption would spread through the deep paths like poison through veins, carrying the whispers of the Long Burrow to every rabbit settlement from here to the Sunset Cliffs, perhaps even further.
“The network dies with us,” Sage said quietly. “Everything we were. Everything we might have been.”
“Everything except the chance to begin again,” Vetch replied weakly, Flint still pushing his blade against the rabbit’s shallow wound.
Without another word, the grizzled warrior raised his hammer high and brought it down on the Heartstone with all his considerable strength, a single shout, close to a moan, erupting with full force.
The crystal cracked, and light blazed from the fracture like a newborn star. The Whispering Dead recoiled with shrieks of agony, their corrupted forms smoking in the radiance. Where the light touched them, frost-white eyes cleared for just an instant, just long enough for Vetch to see fear, then gratitude, then peace in Captain Flint’s gaze before his misshapen body crumbled to ash.
“Again!” Vetch roared, though the effort sent fresh pain through his pierced chest.
Three more blows, each one sending fresh cracks through the ancient crystal. With each strike, the light grew brighter, more pure, more final. The dead tried to flee, but the radiance followed them, touching every corner of the great hall with cleansing fire. Reed was the last to fall, her young face peaceful as the corruption burned away and left only empty air behind.
On the fourth blow, the Heartstone shattered completely.
The explosion of light was like watching the birth of stars. It washed over the great hall in a wave of purifying flame, then raced outward through every tunnel, passage, and hidden path that connected Thornburrow to the greater warrens. Where it passed, the whispers of the Long Burrow fell silent, and the deep connections that had bound rabbit to rabbit for a thousand generations simply…ended.
Darkness reached the warrens. An empty, final darkness.
When Vetch’s vision cleared, he lay in a hall full of silent ash. The Heartstone was gone, its amber light extinguished for good. Around him, twenty-three survivors picked themselves up from the rubble, their faces hollow with the weight of what they’d lost.
The Burrow-bond was broken. The deep paths were silent. For the first time in recorded history, the rabbits of Thornburrow stood alone.
The sun found them sitting in the ruins of everything they’d ever known.
Thornburrow was no more, its tunnels collapsed when the Heartstone’s power failed. The ancient wards that had held back earth and water for centuries crumbled in moments, leaving only a crater where their home had been. They sat in a rough circle on the grass above their buried lives, sharing what little food remained and trying not to think about the future.
Twenty-three rabbits remained of Thornburrow’s three hundred souls. Among them sat little Dewdrop, her bright eyes dimmed by loss but still stubborn, still alive.
“What now?” young Fernpaw asked. She was barely old enough for her first mail, but the night had aged her beyond her seasons. “Where do we go when there’s nowhere left that remembers us?”
Vetch looked around the circle of survivors. They were broken, scattered, cut off from everything that had defined them. The deep paths were silent. The Burrow-bond was severed. Even their ability to sense each other across distance—a gift as fundamental as breathing—was gone.
But they were also alive. Against all odds, despite every mistake, in the face of certain death, they were breathing new air.
“We will now do what our ancestors did,” he said quietly, surprised by the steadiness in his own voice. “Before the great network, before the Heartstone, before the deep paths connected us all. We will dig new burrows. We will remember our dead. We will choose to keep living. And find new life for the burrow to come.”
“But without the bond…” Bracken’s voice trailed off. She sat sharpening her notched blade, a habit that had become meditation. “We’re just…alone.”
“The bond was old magic,” Sage said firmly, though his voice carried grief for all they’d lost. “Useful and powerful magic, yes, but mere magic all the same. What made it precious was what we brought to it. Our love for each other, our determination to build a life worth defending, our choice to stand together when the darkness fell.” He gestured at the survivors. “That magic remains as memory. In us. In every kit who will learn to dig, to every warrior standing guard. And to every elder who’ll remember the old stories and teach them to the next.”
Vetch nodded slowly. “Thornburrow is no more, but we remain. And somewhere out there, other survivors are probably sitting in circles just like this one, wondering if they’re alone as we are.” He managed a small smile. “Well, they are not alone, are they? Not once we find each other again. Different than before, indeed, and perhaps weaker in some ways. But also stronger. Because we’ll build our new connections by choice, unbound by ancient magic.”
Little Dewdrop spoke up, her voice small but determined. “Will the bad ones come back? The whispery dead?”
Vetch considered the question seriously. She deserved truth, not comfortable lies. “I don’t know, kit. Maybe. The world is full of dark things and worse hungers. But if they do come back, we will be ready. We know how to fight them now. More importantly, we know the cost of fighting them. And that it’s a cost worth paying.”
As if in response to his words, the morning breeze shifted, carrying with it the scent of leaves and other growing truths. Not the corruption that had brought death to their door, but the clean smell of earth waiting for new seeds, of spring following winter, and life insisting on itself against all odds.
“There are fresh meadows beyond the eastern hills,” Vetch continued, getting to his feet despite the ache in his chest where Flint’s blade had found its mark. “Places where rabbits haven’t dug for generations. The soil will be rich, the dangers unknown. A clean start.”
“And if we fail again?” Fernpaw asked. “If we make the same mistakes?”
“Then we shall make new solutions,” Bracken said, rising to stand beside her captain. “And keep learning from newer mistakes. Keep trying. Keep choosing life over the easy sleep of death.”
Vetch looked around the circle one last time. At faces marked by loss but not defeat, younglings who would carry forward what they’d learned, eventually becoming warriors to watch over new burrows with the wisdom of hard-won battles.
The rabbit way endured. Changed, perhaps. Scarred, certainly. But endured all the same.
“Come,” Vetch said, shouldering his pack. “Let us go and build.”
As they walked east toward the rising sun, little Dewdrop fell into step beside him. Her small paw slipped into his larger one, trusting and warm.
“Captain?” she said quietly. “I can’t feel the deep paths anymore.”
“I know, kit.”
“But I can still feel you. And Bracken, and Sage, and all the others.” She looked up at him with eyes bright as stars. “Maybe that is what the bond really was all along.”
Vetch squeezed her paw gently. In the distance, a lark began to sing. The same species that had sung over these meadows for a thousand seasons, unchanged by the rise and fall of warrens, by the whispers of the dead or the dreams of the living.
Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.
Author’s Note
Two words inspired this story: Zombie rabbits. I worked backward from there.
And look, stories with animals as characters are always a cheat. They’re never really about the animals. They’re about us. Our doomed schemes, our tendernesses, our astonishing knack for turning paradise into a charnel pit. You put a spear in a rabbit’s paw, or give it a name like Vetch or Bracken, and what you’ve really done is build a mirror: a small fur-coated stand-in to carry the unbearable weight of our own fears and make it “cute.”
To tell a zombie story like this, I knew I had to center it around community, that fragile filament that ties us to each other and what happens when it snaps. The warrens are a stand-in for every tight-knit circle I’ve ever known in life, from families and towns to fandoms and nations. We think they’re eternal. They’re not. They break. They’re broken by plague, betrayal, bad luck, the simple passage of time.
But rabbits are stubborn, as you just read. They dig new holes. That’s the trick of it. You lose everything and somehow, inexplicably, you keep going. You stand ankle-deep in ash and decide, Fine, we’ll build again, even if we have no map, even if we have to pretend we know what we’re doing.
Of course, as I was writing, a voice in the back of my head kept saying, “Really? Zombie rabbits? This is what you’re spending your limited mortal hours on?” And the answer was, “YES, DUH, because zombie rabbits will tell the truth about the rest of us better than another grandiloquent story about kings.” (Though I do like stories about kings, don’t get me wrong).
And if you’ve made it this far, then that means you were indeed open to reading about rabbits with armor, rabbits with grief, rabbits who smell corruption in the wind and fight on anyway. They’re us at our most ridiculous and our most noble, which is to say, they’re us exactly.
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