Chapter Text
So turn away from the ones
You hurt everyone
I can tell by your smile
You’re coming undone
I could bleed for a smile
I could die for a gun
Walk away from the sun
And kill everyone— Seether, “Walk Away from the Sun”
“Destroyed?”
The word rang in his ears.
“What do you mean, destroyed?”
Pipkin looked away. “It was…we had to end the war,” he stammered.
“By destroying my warren?” Campion demanded. “What did you do?”
“Hazel led an attack,” Pipkin said quietly. “He said it was the best chance we’d ever have to stop the fighting—one last battle.”
End the war with more fighting. That’s exactly what Campion had sided with Hazel to prevent.
“What happened to—”
Campion’s question devolved into violent coughing, his dry throat burning. It had been too long since he’d had water—he’d been hiding from those embleer crows and hadn’t been able to get more than a bite or two of grass.
At Pipkin’s frantic urging, a pair of she-sparrows brought water carried in a leaf. Campion thanked them and hurriedly drank down as much as he was able. Good. This was good. His head throbbed less.
“Go on, Pipkin,” he said at last, though he dreaded the answer. “Tell me what happened after the attack on Efrafa began.”
Pipkin lowered his ears. “Well…lightning came from the sky. The twisted tree split and caught fire. The warren caved in as if the earth just swallowed it.” He looked away. “It was horrible, Captain Campion.”
Collapsed. Destroyed. Everything, everything he’d sought to protect and better—gone. His home. Untold numbers of his people. And—
His heart caught in his throat as he asked his next question.
“And General Woundwort,” Campion forced himself to say, “what happened to him?”
Pipkin’s voice lowered to a whisper. “The Black Rabbit took him.”
And his chief, his general. The protector, the tyrant, the hero, the villain. The one he’d lived for all these years, dedicated his very self to. In whose name he’d fought and bled countless times. But his sacrifice in the caverns had meant nothing: The General was dead and Campion had escaped none of his misery.
Campion barely heard as Pipkin continued, “—and he’ll take you too, if you don’t come back to Watership Down! You’re very ill.”
Woundwort, dead. It felt impossible.
Campion couldn’t help but feel he had done this, that his treachery had brought about such destruction. Such death. He’d fought against his own people in the caverns. Against the General. How many of his Owsla had died in that battle? In the battle at Efrafa? As captain he’d had a responsibility to lead his bucks. Instead he’d brought about their deaths. He hadn’t just betrayed his general, he’d betrayed his troops as well.
But one missing piece in Pipkin’s story stood out to him.
“And this all…this all just happened during the battle? The earth collapsing?” Some cynical part of him found it terribly convenient that Efrafa caved in at exactly the moment Hazel chose to make his assault. It was too perfect, too easy.
“The moles and rats helped with that,” Pipkin responded, missing the wariness in Campion’s tone. “They dug up the roots of the old twisted tree and bit them through. That’s when it started falling, and it tore up the earth with it.”
Campion was silent. So it had been no coincidence. The rabbits of Watership Down had mustered an army to destroy his warren, to dig it up and drag it down and tear it apart entirely. All Hazel’s talk of freedom and saving his people was empty cajolery. A ruse, or just a failed ideal?
It didn’t matter. His warren was gone.
Pipkin continued on obliviously. “You must come back to Watership Down, Campion. Everyone’s so sad, thinking you’re, um, dead and all.”
“I’m not going to go back there, Pipkin.”
“But you’ll die out here!” Pipkin cried. “You’re terribly injured!”
Campion sighed. It wasn’t Pipkin’s fault. He was just the messenger of harrowing news. “Promise me, Pipkin,” he hissed, “no one is to know I’m alive. Promise.”
“But you’ll need Blackberry’s help to—”
“I don’t want anyone’s help!” Campion growled, jumping up and whirling around to glare at Pipkin. His injured hind leg collapsed under him, shooting searing pain through to his bones. His mind flared white with agony and he bit down on a groan of pain. Shadows ate at the edges of his vision. “Promise…”
The darkness took him.
The light was strange when he awoke, sickly yellow-orange like a sunset covered by smoke clouds. He opened his eye further, and gasped and sat bolt upright upon realizing that he was no longer in the woods at the base of Watership Down. He was on a barren cliff, surrounded by twisting stone spires and jagged rocky points in a valley around him, stretching as far as the eye could see. There was no green in sight. There was no life in sight, not even flies. There was not even Frith in the sky—instead, the dull light shone from everywhere and nowhere, undulating in strange waves that made him feel ill.
Was this Inlé? It was like no place on Earth he had ever heard of.
At least that would be a relief, if he didn’t have to go back to the world of the living.
Suddenly, from his own shadow erupted a writhing mass of darkness, shooting up into the sky and casting a great rabbit-shaped shadow that towered over Campion. Dull red eyes gleamed in the black.
Campion leapt back at the sudden appearance, but he had met this figure before. “Have you come to take me, Black Rabbit?” he asked the reaper. “Or do you still torment me with life?”
The Black Rabbit did not respond, instead making an odd gesture with his paw. A searing beam of light hit Campion in his good eye, and he tried to flinch away but was rooted to the spot. The ray clarified into the image of another rabbit, a great dark-furred buck prowling in a marsh.
Miserable relief crashed over him. “Woundwort lives!”
At last the Black Rabbit spoke. “He threatens the world of the living.” His voice reverberated throughout the sky in a rolling, thunderous growl. “He seeks to build an empire of destruction in my name. Stop him.”
Campion’s heart dropped. What sort of demand was this? “Haven’t I done enough?” he implored the spirit. He’d already betrayed his chief so many times—how could he bear to do it again? “I’m tired of war and fear and loss.” Of treachery and deception, of shattering his own heart each time he acted against those he cared for.
The Black Rabbit shifted closer, his red eyes flaring. “There is no rest for you yet, Campion. You must fight him.”
“I can’t.” How could he fight the very rabbit he’d just tried to give his own life for? Did the Black Rabbit expect him to kill his chief?
“You will not fight alone. But fight you must.”
Something vicious sparked deep inside Campion’s gut. “I won’t!” he snarled. “If my chief is alive, I’ll return to him. I won’t fight him. After what I did in the caverns, you should know I’ll never kill him. You have no right to ask that of me.”
The black form of the Lord of Inlé expanded like an owl spreading its wings, darkening the whole sky before Campion. The seething mass of shadows roiled, reaching to surround him.
“This is the order of fate. It cannot be defied.”
“What can you do to me?” Campion demanded. He had no fear of death now—it would be a relief after everything that had happened, everything he had done. “What could you possibly threaten me with? The cruelest thing you could do is leave me alive, and you’ve already done that.”
The Black Rabbit answered calmly. “I take a rabbit’s soul to my realm at the time the Lord Frith commands it. Your time has not come. Woundwort’s time is fast approaching. The choice is not yours.”
The shadow dissolved in a shower of sparks.
“Campion!” cried Pipkin’s voice. “Can you hear me?”
Campion jolted awake, the pain returning to his living body in an awful river of fire. Frith, his eye. His leg.
“I brought healing herbs,” Pipkin continued. “Blackberry told me how to use them. Here, chew this.” Pipkin nudged a pile of bark strips toward him. “It’ll bring down your fever. It’s elm bark.”
Campion groaned as he sat up, something in his hind leg grinding horribly. “I said I didn’t want any help.”
Pipkin scowled fiercely at him. “I don’t care. You’ve got to live, Campion. You’ve got to fight!”
He resented that echo of the Black Rabbit’s command. He was done fighting. “Leave me be,” he hissed.
“If you won’t let me help you, I’ll go fetch Blackberry.”
Hraka! “I told you to—”
“I haven’t promised anything yet,” Pipkin reminded him. “But we can make a deal. I’ll promise to keep your secret if you promise to get better. And you can only do that if you let me help.”
Campion huffed irritably. The last thing he needed was to see Hazel and the others after all this. After what they’d done, after what he’d done. Pipkin, young naive Pipkin who had the decency to name the destruction of Efrafa as horrible, might be the only one of them he could tolerate right now.
“All right, Pipkin. I’ll live.”
Pipkin breathed out a sigh of relief. “Good.”
Campion didn’t know how long he passed in a feverish haze, pain throbbing in the gashes on his chest and the deep scrape on his face, something terribly wrong stabbing and twisting in his hind leg. Sometimes he thought he saw something out of his damaged eye, the shadow of a rabbit when no one was about or a glimmer of moonlight in the midst of day.
Pipkin returned often, keeping his wounds clean and giving him herbs he didn’t care to ask the purpose of. The wounds on Campion’s face and chest soon scabbed over, but he still couldn’t put weight on his leg without it collapsing and sending wrenching spasms through his whole body. And to his greatest horror, his eye didn’t heal. It hadn’t just been swollen or caked with blood—it had been scratched blind, gouged by the sharp point of a shifting rock. And to make matters worse, the ear on that side had been damaged as well. The General made do with one eye, but at least he had both ears. Campion was totally blind on his left side. What sort of Wide Patroller would he be now?
The dreams didn’t stop. Even once the fever died down, the Black Rabbit still tormented him with visions: a smoke-clogged place full of man-things and fire, a voice calling for help, strange vicious rabbits, and the Black Rabbit himself looming over it all.
He regretted accepting Pipkin’s help. He didn’t want to be there for what was coming.
Eventually, his leg was strong enough to walk on. He began to do light exercises, first sitting and standing, then hopping around the heap of stones he’d been taking shelter in since he’d been injured. Before long he moved to more intensive drills, knowing he’d have to get back up to strength if he was going to survive alone as a hlessi—because that’s what he would be, without Efrafa or Watership Down to call a home. It still hurt to move, but it was better than not being able to move at all.
“The old leg’s almost back up to scratch,” he told Pipkin one day as he was running through some jumps. “I’ll be leaving soon, then.”
Pipkin blinked. “You’re not going back to Watership Down? Not even now that you’re better?”
“No.”
“But everyone would be so happy to see you alive and well!” Pipkin exclaimed. “They’re grieving you, Campion. They feel awful thinking you’re dead.”
“I don’t care.”
Pipkin stared at him. “What are you talking about? Of course you care! You’re our friend!”
Campion turned away, anger once again beginning to simmer in his chest. Hazel had rejected any sort of friendship with him when he’d led an army to raze Efrafa. Not to free captives, not to fight for better rule, but cave the entire place in and kill Frith knew how many rabbits. If they had no guilt for what they had done, at least they could suffer some kind of grief, however misplaced.
“Just talk to Hazel and—”
Campion whirled around. “Should I see Hazel again I’ll likely kill him!” he snapped.
He didn’t mean it. The moment he said it, he knew he didn’t mean it. But it had the desired effect: Pipkin quailed, flattening his ears to his back.
“What?” His quiet voice trembled.
“He lied to me, Pipkin.” Campion’s voice was harsh. “Promised peace and freedom and then destroyed my warren. Asked me to save my people by joining him, then turned around and crushed them himself. I’ll have nothing more to do with your warren. I’ll leave here, and I will not return.”
Pipkin could find no words.
Campion left.
He made his way south.
He still didn’t know if he should try to find the General. It was true that his deepest instinct was to find his chief, to seek absolution for his treachery and do what he could to atone. Even if the General simply chose to kill him, there would be a kind of catharsis in that.
But he could not forget the Black Rabbit’s words.
You must fight him.
This is the order of fate. It cannot be defied.
Woundwort’s time is fast approaching. The choice is not yours.
Would his meeting the General bring about some dark fate? Would he truly have no choice but to act against him again? He wouldn’t do it. He had spoken aloud his refusal to the reaper himself, and he had no intention to betray his word again. If he was touched by the Black Rabbit, if his mere presence would bring death to his master, then he could not seek him out.
Instead, he made for Efrafa.
He had to see it for himself. To think of crowded, guarded Efrafa as empty and destroyed felt strange, impossible, antithetical to everything he’d known it to be. The earth just swallowed it —and how many of the thousand rabbits within? Efrafa shouldn’t have been destroyed; it should have held against any attack. A thousand heartbeats in every burrow, every entrance expertly hidden from man, every soldier trained to excellence in the Wide Patrols. He didn’t want to believe it was true. He didn’t want to believe that Hazel had really done something so brutal. It had been his home.
So he went home.
He endeavored to make his journey to Efrafa in utmost secrecy, careful not to leave the slightest hint of a trail. It was simpler alone than it was to conceal the tracks of an entire patrol, but his missing eye and bad leg hampered him. He had to go twice as carefully, twisting around constantly to look and listen on his bad side and checking the ground for drag marks left by his limp whenever he missed a step.
He kept to the undergrowth and hedgerows when possible, wary of the gull Kehaar. He would not be seen and reported back to Hazel. He would not be found alive.
As he crept through Caesar’s Belt, that strip of woodland halfway between the Down and Efrafa, he heard rabbits’ voices. He froze, crouched in a bramble, and listened.
“A bit odd we haven’t found anyone yet,” said a buck. “Just that bit of scent by the pond.”
“They’re crafty,” said another. “If they don’t want to be found I don’t know how much we can do about it.”
A doe spoke next. “The Owsla, maybe, but the Mark rabbits don’t know a thing about surviving in the open. It’s them I’m worried about.”
Campion’s ears shot up, his heart pounding. That voice… He nosed a leaf aside ever so slightly to catch a glimpse of the band of rabbits. There were four of them, two old bucks who he’d first heard and—
The sight hit him like lightning. The two old bucks he didn’t recognize, but Fiver was with them—and so was Primrose. It was her who had last spoken.
He had to get out of here.
Silently, he backed away, sinking deeper into the undergrowth. When he was far from their sight he bolted.
He banked to the west. It made his trek longer, which wasn’t ideal on his half-healed leg, but certainly preferable to facing the outsiders. Facing Primrose. Oh, Frith, Primrose. Did she hate him for saving Woundwort’s life in the caverns? Would she hate him for his half-meant threat to Hazel, if Pipkin told her? What had her role been in the fall of Efrafa? They’d all betrayed one another and it made a vicious, tangled knot of thorns in his gut that would eat him alive if he let it.
But there was no room for such thoughts for a traveling rabbit, particularly one who was half-blind and injured. The Thousand were everywhere, watching and waiting for the slightest mistake that would provide them the opportunity to pounce. He had to use every bit of awareness to survive. The danger focused him, and the focus steadied him.
Dark rain clouds began to close in as he crossed a field south of Caesar’s Belt. He found himself in a marshy area on the edge of a wood, choked with fog. The warmth of the day was beginning to fade.
A shadow glided overhead and Campion crouched to hide in the brush, watching the sky. It was Kehaar and the mouse. He didn’t dare emerge until they had soared far away.
Suddenly he heard a great splash close by, followed by panicked thrashing and a rabbit shouting for help. Perhaps some sort of elil had caught a rabbit and dragged it into the water. A mink?
Warily, he slunk closer. He didn’t fancy his chances of fighting a mink alone, especially in the water, but his stubborn Efrafan pride compelled him forward. This was exactly the sort of thing the Wide Patrols were meant to investigate, and he didn’t like the idea of leaving another rabbit to die.
Maybe that was ironic, given how many deaths his treachery had led to.
“Help me!” shouted the rabbit. “Somebody!”
Campion stopped in his tracks at the edge of the wood, his stomach dropping. He knew that voice.
Vervain!
At a gap in the underbrush, he could see the scene clearly. There was no elil. Instead, Vervain struggled alone to stay afloat in a murky slough, trapped in a tangle of wire. Thrashing and kicking and gasping for air, he fought against the grasping wire, heedless of being watched. It was clear enough that he didn’t have the strength or the leverage to get out on his own. Once he ran out of stamina, he would drown.
Campion shouldn’t be watching. He knew he shouldn’t be watching, letting it drag out. He should either help him or finish it.
For a long while he didn’t move.
Vervain went under. For several seconds the slough was eerily silent, the surface of the water rippling fatefully, until suddenly he broke the surface, coughing. “My life has amounted to nothing,” he seethed. “I betrayed General Woundwort—I betray everyone—” He spat out a mouthful of water. “Let the Black Rabbit take me!”
Campion stepped out onto the bank.