Downtown Druid

Jacopo moved with practiced ease through the narrow crevices within the walls. This was his home, and he knew its paths and temperament better than even his ancestors had. He peered out of a crack to observe the nearby room. He saw a number of pointy eared creatures, elves Dantes had called them. He sniffed the air twice, counting around ten of them gathered, along with the smell of old bread and alcohol. There would be crumbs and puddles to sip from aplenty when they were done. Jacopo was after a different prize though, and slipped through more narrow cracks. He would tell a cousin of the bounty that awaited there if one was careful. After a few more narrow tunnels, he reached another crack wide enough to exit through.

He inhaled again, this time he could smell something sweet. Looking through the crack he saw fewer elves, maybe three. Two were sleeping, and one was sitting at a stone desk, making marks on a piece of paper in that strange ritual the creatures with two legs seemed to enjoy. On top of that desk, was a glint, a fist sized chunk of mirror reflecting candlelight. Jacopo had located his target.

He slid out of the hole, making a soft thud as he landed. It was almost too quiet for an elf to hear… almost.

The elf at the desk’s ear twitched and he turned to where Jacopo had been only a moment before, but he’d already hidden himself in the shadows of a nearby bed. Elf eyes could see in the dark well enough, but they had difficulty in rooms full of light and shadow in equal proportion. Jacopo looked up at the crack and, with a subtle twitch of his whiskers, called Sister and Brother from it.

Sister dropped down and swiftly made for a small pile of books near the elf. It was a bold move, but it paid off when the Elf looked at the crack in the wall again rather than the pile of books near his feet.

Brother hesitated at the hole, waiting for the elf to drop his guard again.

Jacopo moved slowly, but surely to the stone desk. It wasn’t smoothly carved, thankfully. The hairy short ones in the tunnels at the far end from these elves tended to carve stone too smoothly for him to climb, but this was full of the little imperfections that seemed almost made for his paws as he slowly scaled it. Getting into the room and locating the shard was the easy part, getting out with the shard would be a different story.

He reached the top of the desk, and peered slowly over it. The Elf still hadn’t taken notice of him or Sister, and had returned to his writing. His face was lined heavily, which seemed strange to Jacopo, who had only ever seen those with pointed ears have smooth, unlined faces.

Jacopo needed a distraction. He slid back down to the side of the desk and twitched his whiskers at Brother, encouraging him to leap down.

Brother was foolish, and complied.

This time, the elf took full notice, seeing Brother before he could hide. The elf stood up from his desk and moved quickly toward him.

While he was distracted, Jacopo moved quickly, but silently, locking his feet into the stone as he slid the mirror shard off the desk.

Sister was below him, and caught it as it fell. The edges were wrapped in leather aside from a single half inch of its edge that was uncovered and seemed to have been sharpened into a rough blade. Brother joined sister, and they began moving along the edge of the wall with their prize, sister moving backward with the leather in her teeth, and Jacopo moving forward.

They reached the doorway just in time to watch as Brother was smashed by the old Elf’s black boots.

Jacopo didn’t stop moving. He had other brothers, and besides, this meant less meat he’d need to share. He and his sister moved along the edges of the series of rooms the Elfland Kings called home. At this time of night, most of them were sleeping, drunk, or focused on other pursuits. If Jacopo encountered any real trouble, he would simply drop the mirror, and run. Better hungry and alive, than dead, it wasn’t worth dying over some meat, though clearly Brother had had a different opinion. Luckily, he and Sister made it out of the Elfland Kings territory without any more trouble, and skittered through the dark toward their reward.

…

Dantes awoke in the usual dank gloom of his cave. He could see well in the dark, as a benefit of his mixed heritage, but for some reason that day it took his eyes several moments longer to adjust. He looked down at his hands. They were no longer small and pink with long delicate fingers, but were back to normal. Light gray the color of concrete, with slender, but strong fingers perfect for climbing up walls, or carefully removing a coin purse.

There were no longer whiskers in his field of vision either, and the stream of consciousness that included thoughts that both were, and were not his had ended. That dream had been strange. Both of them had. One had felt ethereal and disconnected as dreams always do, but the other had been vivid and clear. He could still even picture the writing the elf had been doing that Jacopo had ignored. It had been in elvish, which he could not read, but the symbols on the paper were still crystal clear to him. He took a sharp stone and carved them as best he could into the wall before they left his mind.

Had it been stress that had brought on those strange dreams, or did they mean something else? He’d been able to feel what the plants around him needed, and talk to Jacopo as if he were a man. He turned his attention to the plants again, but felt only mild contentment aside from a desire for sunlight which he could not provide, though he empathized with. If that ability was still there, that further solidified the fact that he had not yet succumbed to madness. He looked at the plants again. He wasn’t certain, but it seemed as if the moss had crept a full inch further along the ground than where it had been when he’d gone to sleep.

He went to examine it more closely, but before he reached it he heard something moving through the narrow entrance to his cave. He turned to see Jacopo, his dark brown fur glistening slightly with the condensation of the walls, and Jacopo’s sister, just as he’d seen her in his dreams, carrying the mirror between them. Dantes added dreaming through the eyes of rats to his rapidly expanding list of strange powers he had no understanding of.

“You have it?” he asked, crouching down to look more closely at the mirror. He reached for it, but Jacopo and his sister hurriedly moved it out of his reach.

“Meat first.”

Dantes nodded. He had never seen one of the mirrors in person, but given where it had been when Jacopo had stolen it, and what he’d heard, it matched his expectations. He went over to where he stored his food, removed the heavy rock, and gathered a fraction of the meat he’d promised, placing it on the ground between them.

“Your payment.”

Jacopo’s whiskers twitched at the meat, but he gave no indication he’d realized that it was less than promised.

“Your half,” he said, sliding some of it over to his sister.

She made a noise that Dantes recognized as a confirmation, took her half, and skittered away into the darkness.

Jacopo turned his attention to Dantes. “The rest of my payment.”

Dantes nodded, returned to the store, and laid another small portion of meat in front of him.

Jacopo didn’t move toward it, instead fixing Dantes with a stare that somehow reminded him of the face his mother would make when a client tried to short her. He felt a pang of guilt for comparing her to a rat, but returned to the food storage and brought out the rest of the meat he owed. It was silly, he realized, to be making a deal with a rat. He could simply smash him with a rock and keep the meat for himself, but that wasn’t how he liked to do business. Sure he’d try to short payment, but offering none at all and betraying the person with whom he’d made the deal? That was a good way to build a bad rep, and now that he could talk to rats, he definitely wanted them on his side.

This time Jacopo accepted. He’d been keeping track of the amount of food Dantes had in his store for a long time, and so knew exactly how much meat he’d stored. He’d half expected him to attack and betray him, it was what another rat may have done, but this was better. He enjoyed the arrangement he had with Dantes. Easy sources of food were hard to come by.

Dantes lifted the mirror, looking at his gray skinned reflection. He was a midtown mutt all the way through. Gray skin, small tusks fighting to get past his lips, pointed ears, average looks overall. The only thing that set him apart were his gold eyes, and even those weren’t too uncommon. His mother had told him they came from his father’s orcish side, but he’d met him so few times he couldn’t remember what he’d looked like at all, much less the color of his eyes. He looked into the mirror again. He was gaunt, frail compared to how he’d been the last time he’d seen a clear reflection of himself.

He felt the weight of the mirror in his hand. The weight of his life in his hands.