Rebirth15 min read
I rode a time-horse and fell through worlds — and I refused to be eaten
ButterPicks15 views
"I can read the old books," Fletcher said, tongue flicking the air like a silly mare. "But there are so many words I do not like."
I watched him curl his little golden eyes and wag a tail of silver light. Fletcher Friedrich looked like a pony out of a child's rhyme: white coat, red mane, and eyes like burnished coins. He lay on the chair like he belonged to the sun.
"I don't understand," I said. "Tell me the story again."
"You always say the same thing," he tapped his hoof on the arm of my mind-space. "You shall be the one who lives a thousand years, Imogen. Tonight you break a seal. Tonight you either rise to shine or fall to snow."
"I am not afraid," I put my small human hands on my knees and puffed my chest. "For five hundred years they called me silver fox, for five hundred I answered. I will not go to the mountain to die like a story."
Fletcher honked. "You are dramatic," he said. "Also delicious when you eat peach pastries. Bring me more peach pastries."
"One step at a time," I told him and laughed.
The master—my master—had warned me with a different tone. He wore red fur like old autumn and his voice wrapped around the courtyard like wind.
"Imogen," he said when he stood before me as a fox stained with time. "A thousand years is an uneven gate. You hurry, but thunder will test you."
"I am ready," I answered. "If I must break a seal to walk the long road, I shall do so."
"You are proud," he said, "and good. But the heavens are not always kind."
"You say that," I told him, "but the worst that can happen is I fail, and then I die for a while. I have tasted sleeping before. I can sleep more."
That night I sat in my cave breathing in the peaches and the petals Fletcher had insisted upon. I held the Talisman of the White Beasts, the old picture-scroll, and the ribbon that showed a silver fox spun in thread. I felt my inner core warm like the glow of a pine ember.
The wind changed like a knife. Hot waves rolled inside my ribs. I coughed and clutched the talisman.
"Fletcher," I barely breathed.
"You are doing well," he said. "Be steady."
A bolt of foreign white leaped down like a spear from the sky. The cave shivered. I threw my tongue out to taste the air and the light, and then everything—my thousand years, my memory of small leaves and long winters—crumbled like thin bread.
I woke up to cool air and the smell of wet wool.
"Who are you?" I sat bolt upright and grabbed at a small horse face.
"My name is Fletcher Friedrich, temporal beast," the little horse sniffed, unbothered. "You hit me."
"You're a talking pony," I blinked. "This is not in the book."
He glanced at me, one eye half-lidded. "Books are lies. I am a being sent by sky-lords to choose souls. You, fox, have the nearest spark."
"So you saved me?" My ribs still hummed.
"Saved is dramatic. I drew the short straw." Fletcher rolled his eyes. "I lost the lot and got you. I suppose you could be special."
"I will be special." I laughed, loud and high. "I will go to other lives, fix the broken stories, and become a true form again!"
Fletcher coughed. "You will earn merit, little fox. Commendations are counted. Fifty percent change is what you aim for, but the ledger is… confusing." He waved a hoof and a small map shimmered inside our little shared space. "We travel. You shall attach to bodies. You will persuade villains to be less villainous. You shall collect merit points. And then we take the rewards."
"Attach to bodies?" I tested the word like a new candy. "That sounds fun. Who are we starting with?"
Fletcher clicked his teeth. "This world is rotten with reek, but its story fits you. Zombies. The man you will follow is called Logan Robertson. He is brave and noisy. The heroine? She dies early. You will do things different."
I liked Logan's teeth. "Show me."
We blinked and the world re-made itself. I opened my eyes into a cramped, cold room. A man held a rifle in the doorway and someone—my new borrowed body's—memory slid into me like thread.
"Don't make sound," Fletcher whispered.
Logan burst out of the corridor, shouting. "Get down!" He shouldered the gun and his voice felt like nerve-wire. Beside him, a thin girl with short hair—my host—shook her head and reached for something.
A crash, the scream of a thing outside, and the iron-handed smell of rot.
I had lived a thousand years. I had learned to be clever. I placed my hands on the bottle of orange drink, pried the lid, and did something very trivial that felt like a strategy: I poured the juice. I opened a bottle, rubbed it across my clothes, and mimed courage.
"Why would you do that?" Logan hissed.
"Zombies hate certain smells. They have hearing, yes, but their scent-sense is as simple as a child's drum," I told him. "If they can't find us by bright meat smell, they get confused."
Logan looked at me with the confusion of a man who has shot at wolves and survived. "That's… odd, but it might work."
Three bottles later we were both sticky and alive. Fletcher hummed, proud.
"You earned one merit point," he crowed.
"One?" I spat a little, feeling cheated. "I nearly died."
"Small points add," Fletcher said, fluffing. "We must not despair."
Outside a truck sped past and a woman's cry split the cold. Logan swore. "She needs help." He grabbed my hand and I was pulled into a scene I did not expect: a pregnant woman, face pale, panting for breath.
"Stop!" Logan pulled us into the open. "Stay back! We will help you—move!"
"Logan! Don't!" I wanted to run, to leave, but something hammered inside me. My instrument of judgment—my fox-heart—flagged the child in the womb like a bell.
"Move!" He was adamant, but I was louder. "You will move. I will help the baby." Fletcher pressed close, eyes big and bright.
We pushed. The woman screamed and then—like any scene I've seen in odd plays—the water broke. A ragged call and then roars outside.
"Give me the meds!" Logan pulled the woman. "Get the supplies!"
We ran. The guards at the checkpoint grunted. The baby slid out with a wet, stubborn cry. A new life. Fletcher spit golden sparks.
"Merit, plus one!" he shouted.
I counted the dots on our small map. One. Big. Sputtering. The ledger blinked: -15.
"What?" I cried. "How did we lose fifteen?"
"Large villains reduce others' merit. They looked at you, Imogen. You burned by being noticed. Also, sometimes the great eyes make the small coin drop," Fletcher explained, tongue in cheek.
Logan folded his mouth. "You heard me praise you, and you saved a life. Good. But we don't have time for this."
Those were my first steps. I learned to be small and quiet. I learned that merits were not always fair, that the world starred at not only the acts but at the eyes that saw them. I learned how people smelled when they were frightened and how a single kindness could make a man stop and look at a woman like she was not a thing to be used.
Weeks passed in a hush that was not allowed to be described with the phrase "months passed." We fought, we took refuge, and we learned about the people who made the mess—those who had mixed a serum in glass vials. Someone had a hand on the strings.
"Fletcher," I whispered one night in the makeshift infirmary, "what sort of person makes machines out of people?"
Fletcher's mane ruffled. "Someone lonely, maybe. Someone who thinks love is begging to be obeyed."
In the laboratory of Frost Cowan—Frost, the scientist with clean nails and hands that smelled faintly of cold lilies—we met a different kind of cruelty. Frost kept me in a glass cylinder at first. He called me "Specimen Nine" and put a little name tag on my arm.
"Sit," he said. He wanted to touch. He told me stories of medicines and of revenge, and then he poked and prodded my skin as though I was his singing kettle.
"Who are you?" I croaked. My borrowed body's throat felt like plastic.
"Frost Cowan," he said calmly. "You're useful."
"I am not a toy," I told him. "If you believe in anything, believe in my eyes when they look at you."
He smiled, a small, cold smile. He had the face that made men thoughtful and the hands of men who hid knives. He would teach me a type of fear I had not yet catalogued. He would call himself a scientist and act like God.
"You are someone who tastes like defiance," Frost murmured. He said things the books warn against. "I will perfect the idea of a thinking husk. If I can make puppets that remember enough to obey, I will no longer be alone."
"Frost," Fletcher hissed from the corner of my inner space. "Do not be alone."
I stayed conscious inside a glass box and watched the world outside—and Frost—pull at its seams. That first night he injected me with a needle and some chemical burned my skin like a rented sun.
I pretended to be small-toy obedient because the world hated sudden violence. I learned to nod when he said "sleep" and to offer him a plate when he said "eat." In return he let me learn lab arithmetic and the names of chemicals. He called it "training," but I called it inventory.
"You're 0 tonight," he said once. "But within a week... I will have metrics."
Fletcher, ever the show-off, made himself comfortable in a little corner and whispered, "Merits! Merits!" He liked the sound of the coin counter. I liked his hair.
I learned about Frost's tragedy slowly. He was a man who had been betrayed by love. He used his loneliness to tie other people like birds to his walls. He said he wanted to make better things but he made cages. He had been kind once, or believed himself kind, and he had been ruined by men who left him with nothing but a ledger.
It made me oddly angry. I did not want to be the cure. I wanted to be a mirror.
One night, while he slept with his pale face turned to the lab's ceiling, I made a careful plan. My hands could move a little when he was absent; I had learned when he was not looking. I found the formula to poison the serum in small ways and to delay it in others. I put a dose aside.
"Imogen, if you get caught," Fletcher breathed, "I'll... well, I will show you my mane."
"Do something more useful," I snapped. "Help me take into account the ledger and the maps."
The next day a truck came for survivors and Logan appeared, ragged and steady. He pounded at the glass. The laboratory door opened. Frost saw the man and something in his face moved. A memory. A moment. Frost made a mistake: he turned from the scope and Logan lunged.
Everything happened fast. A bottle smashed. Green mist rolled like a slow wave. The vials sang. I ran forward and poured the dosage I had prepared into the air. It smelled of herbs and of burned paper.
"Stop!" Frost shouted. "You idiot!"
"The world does not choose the thing you design to hold grief," I said.
Frost's mouth clamped shut as his devices beeped and the monitors shrieked. The glass shield we were in buzzed for a moment. Outside, the infected shuffled like puppets waiting for music.
"You think you are clever," Frost said, and for a second his face was a child's: frightened and small. "You can not change what they are."
"You made this," I said. "You took people's fear and used it like a recipe. That is your doing."
He moved toward me, hand shaking. "You will obey me. I make life. I control it."
"No," I said. "You control nothing."
Then, as if moved by a script not written by him, Frost did a thing I had not expected. He reached to the desk, his fingers went for the drawer, and he pulled out a weapon. The crowd outside pushed forward when the glass broke: hands, faces, the weight of many small grievances that had been stored. They did not want to be turned to husks. They wanted someone—anyone—to answer.
Frost raised the metal and spoke a word that carried the old hurt. "If I cannot be the sun, no one will get the warmth."
He put the gun to his head and the sound cut through the lab like a bell. Fletcher wailed and I felt my own lungs empty.
"Fletcher!" I screamed.
He did not die cleanly, though. The video would be scraped and examined later. For me, the scene stayed in glass and in the rehearsed acts of the killers. He fell, and perhaps it was a sort of punishment, but it did not feel like justice then. It felt like the end of a sad story.
Later, I discovered there were other villains waiting for me in other lives: men who used and left, women who pushed and looked away, those who set fires and then clapped when the curtains burned. I thought the ledger would be rigid and fair. It was messy. But the world had a strange taste for exposure.
I learned later, in a different life where the stage was a high school and the players were youth and the stakes were a mother's life, how public truth could bring a kind of satisfaction the ledger never did.
"Imogen," Fletcher said softly, "this will be a test of your heart."
"I will pass," I answered. "I will not let an old woman fall and be called blame."
We stepped into that life clumsily. The borrowed body belonged to a girl called—by her papers—Jess Curry elsewhere, but in this life she was named "Chen Jiu." The school's gossip was a web and we were part of it: a mother who loved too loudly; a girl who seemed to be courting a popular man's father; a ring of cruel boys and girls who had decided once that cruelty was salvation.
Bianca Ferguson led them: polished shoes, a laugh that sounded like a coin being tossed, and eyes that loved the effect of looking down.
One day, it all came to the rooftop like a slow bad dream.
"You pushed her," Bianca said, smiling like a judge as our mother, Florence Bruce, stood at the edge. "You got what you deserved."
"Stop!" I cried. My voice went out like a small bell. "Everyone, stop this—"
"Shut up," Bianca snapped. She and the others closed in. They had been testing me for weeks, and their cruel ritual had a pattern: whisper, corner, laugh. I had walked it a thousand times, but my fox-blood had no patience for being pressed.
Florence stepped between them and me. She always had a way of looking like someone who'd given up time to keep other people warm.
"Please," she said. She spoke with a voice like an old radio—warm but tired. "This is too much."
Bianca's hand moved in the way that makes a scene happen. A shove, small as a thought.
Florence fell. She did not scream anymore. She fell like someone who had been told by the world to stop trying.
I watched her leave the world and something like a bell cracked inside me.
"I will not let this be the end," I told Fletcher. He breathed and his eyes made small stars.
We fought the storm that followed. The school erupted. Parents argued. People turned on each other until the air tasted of iron.
Authorities could have been swift and quiet, but this is a story that loves spectacle. The footage was found—security, the cell phone that someone had lifted too quickly—the fall captured in an angle like a terrible postcard.
I remember the night the school organized the meeting as if it was meant to burn the villains' pride at once.
They made Bianca stand at the front of the assembly hall, lit like an insect under a glass. The principal's voice cracked when he began to speak.
"Students," he said, "we have looked at the footage. We have interviews. We do not tolerate violence."
Bianca stood tall, the kind of arrogance that had served as a shield. She smiled into the cameras, the sparkle of self-belief making people uneasy.
"You will not like what they do next," I told Fletcher. He pranced in our small space, ears forward.
The lights shifted. The principal played the video. The room went very quiet—the kind of quiet where you can hear a pair of lungs struggling.
They screened the footage three times.
At first Bianca's smile held. She leaned on the lectern, chin high. "They cannot prove—"
The room moved like a tide. First a murmur: "Is that—?" Cameras lifted phones. Someone filmed. A teacher gasped. A mother clutched a handkerchief.
Then, as the image replayed and slowed on the angle where Florence's feet left the ground, the crowd changed.
"I didn't mean—" Bianca's voice was at first the same commanding sound that pushed children into corners. "I didn't push her."
Shock had not yet reached every face. Shock formed like a small stone under Bianca's feet and then rolled. The principal asked a question and the microphone amplified her breathing.
"You left her near the edge and the shove—" the principal's words were precise. "Where were you? You were with your friends. You were watching her."
"That is false. I—" Bianca's denial began.
But the footage had become a thousand witnesses. A dozen phones had recorded angles. A teacher who had once been on the rooftop saw what she wanted to see. A student in the crowd—Jaylee Edwards—suddenly stepped forward and pressed her face to the camera.
"She said I should laugh," Jaylee said, voice small. "She told us it would be fun." Her knuckles were white.
Bianca's face changed. The smugness drained. Her hands shook like a child's.
"No," she said. "This is edited. They cut—"
"Who edited?" someone shouted from the back. "You had them laughing. You told them to push. You told them if she cried they'd make a show about her."
People murmured. A little group of boys who had stood close to the door shifted uneasily. The principal's office had a folder with the records. A mother from the front row had a recording on her phone. Her voice, once protected, now called out like a judge.
Bianca's mask crumbled. Her eyes went wide.
"Wait, you cannot—" she began to bargain, voice high and thin. "It was an accident. She fell—"
"Is it an accident to shove a human?" a man in the crowd asked, and the hall was full.
The change took no time but felt like a long surrender. Bianca's face went from triumph to confusion, from confusion to angry denial. She stumbled with words. "This is not—"
"Look at the footage," a teacher urged. "This is your own voice laughing in the background. You said it would be 'a test' and you joked about her not being 'real family.'"
The hall exploded into sound. Phones raised. Videos uploaded. Someone started live-streaming. The comments rose like flying sparks: "She pushed her!!!" "I saw this!" "How could you—"
Spectators moved in the classic rhythm of the internet: shock that becomes curiosity that becomes outrage. Some students whispered and stared. Some teachers clenched fists. The principal's face was pale. Parents made calls.
Bianca's face turned to stone as if it were being melted by the heat of all those eyes. She faltered and then, for the first time, she spoke in a whisper I had never heard. "No…this is a lie. It is a lie."
A few students began to clap—not in approval but in a strange release. It was not comfortable. It was not pretty. It was a chorus of people refusing to pretend any longer.
"Bianca Ferguson," the principal said with a calm that cut like glass. "You will be suspended. We are handing this to the police."
Bianca's lips moved. "You can't—"
The first crack of real panic came when a teacher handed a phone to the principal, playing a message where Bianca's own planning was recorded. The girl's denial turned to a quiet, blank-eyed panic. She backed away, fingers over mouth. Her smile vanished entirely.
"Please!" she cried then, the voice raw. "Please—don't—"
Some from the back held out their phones and recorded as if the world needed proof the villain could fall. A woman near the front began to cry, wrenching. A young man who had once been Bianca's admirer turned away and dropped his head.
Bianca's reactions were a study: first, the smug tilt of a queen; then the slack jaw of someone hearing thunder for the first time; then a frantic string of denials; and finally, the collapse of her knees as she fell into the corner of the stage and wrapped her arms around herself.
"No! No! It was a joke! We didn't mean—" The begging arrived like rain. "Please! I didn't plan to—I'm sorry—I'm sorry—"
The crowd—students, mothers, fathers, teachers—watched. Some covered their mouths; some whispered; one tall boy started clapping slowly as if to mark the end. Several people filmed. Two girls in the second row held each other. A teacher took a step forward but didn't leave his post. No one lifted Bianca from the floor. The cameras kept rolling.
"She's falling," Fletcher said in my head, and his little voice was not triumphant; it was simply relieved to see an imbalance corrected.
Later, when the police took statements and the school released a statement about bullying and violence, Bianca's face was in every recorder, a study in someone who had been found out. She screamed and then went quiet. She begged. She called names; she waved her hands. Then she accepted the cordoned-off place. The crowd dispersed with the slow finality of a tide.
The punishment was not just legal. It was public humiliation, and it was a small public healing. People gathered in clusters outside and watched short clips that would haunt them for a week. The hashtag trended. The principal's office had to answer queries. The school organized counseling.
From an outsider, there is a grim satisfaction in watching a liar exposed. It felt like a balm for the bone-deep hurt of Florence's death. But I never celebrated the falling of another human wholly. I only recognized that the world sometimes needed to see the truth to stop the rot.
Bianca's expression had moved through the sequence the sky had taught me: smug, shocked, denial, implosion, plea. Around us the crowd's reaction was the proper theater for modern life: shock, whisper, video, applause that felt more like a release than endorsement. People took pictures as proof that cruelty can be seen, and not allowed to sleep.
I felt the merit counter on Fletcher's map blink, as if the ledger accepted this kind of public truth with an odd clap. We gained points—not enough for a throne, but enough for a step. The ledger liked steps; the sky-lords liked momentum.
But the world is stubborn. Punishment is only part of a story. After the crowd dispersed, the police left, Bianca was delivered into the system, and the mother—the true cost—could not be brought back.
"Do you feel lighter?" Fletcher asked me as we sat on the steps of the school, the bitter air heavy with rain.
"No," I said. "I feel like I know better how small and cruel things come together. But I also feel like someone opened a window."
Fletcher nudged me. "Then let's go fill the world with more windows."
So we traveled on. I stepped into more skins, more days, more dangers. I learned briefly to be a handsome young man called Anders Alvarado, sick with ideas and with a body that demanded rest, and there I found a hand that kissed me before we sank—a hand that taught me how vulnerable a heart can be and how destructive the world can make it.
I learned to be a boy who burned rice and later served a warlord called Fergus Brooks, who had more scars than smiles. He taught me that men who look like mountains hide their own fractures.
I learned that every world is written by small choices and by the people who press them: a shove on a rooftop, a pill in a vial, a lie told in class. I learned that being a fox is not about the glamour of the form, but the cunning in the soul. I learned that Fletcher's silly jokes kept my heart tethered.
"One day," Fletcher said on a night when the sky was an honest blue and the ledger glowed full, "we will sit at the top. The heavens will nod, and you will have your thousand years and the fur you once coveted."
"I will eat my peach pastries with both hands," I told him. "And I will not bend to cruelty. I will hold the ledger and make new rules."
We keep going. The map is never finished. The ledger always blinks and demands more. I do not know how many worlds I will cross, how many scorned hands I will touch, who will regret and who will beg. I only know this:
I will not be a silent thing.
I will not be a story that ends on a cold rooftop.
I will wind the small watch that Fletcher insists is important. It ticks like a tiny drum. I hold it and feel a promise.
"Tick," I say to myself, and Fletcher hears me, and the world folds open like a door.
The End
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