It had been roughly twenty years since the world went to hell. It's been described any number of ways, but no matter how people try to explain it there's no way to really bring the chaos and horror into focus. Some people say that the pendulum of science and magic finally swung back the other way. Others theorize that our universe crashed into a parallel and another reality bled into ours. As far-fetched as the explanations sound, they still make too much sense. All anyone knows is that one night, when Jason was ten years old, the world flipped while he were sleeping. When he woke up, the world wasn't the world any more. It was some entirely different place.
Looking back on the past two decades, he still found it incredible he survived. Most of humanity couldn't cope with what went down. People changed into walking, talking animals in flashes of light. Entire cities disappeared, only to be replaced by miles of primitive forest. The dinosaurs that populated these alien stretches of land were sentient, with their own cultures. Unfortunately, most of them viewed people only as food. Technology either went haywire or stopped working entirely. The people that were left either couldn't find a way to make it on their own or got taken out quickly by all of these...things they couldn't understand. There were reports that Buffalo had vanished entirely when a person found out they could make nuclear explosions simply by snapping their fingers.
The new society that he found himself in had just started, and even then it had happened in fits and starts. He lived in the western foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and a fairly eclectic town had sprung up in the valley below. People came up to barter for venison jerky or an ever-burning lantern that he had learned to make, and he found himself heading into town twice a month to spend a night at the pub that had just opened, or take care of business that needed to happen. For the most part, though, Jason left the town alone and they left him alone. He liked it that way. It was the first real quiet he had gotten in several years.
Which is why the sorceror was getting ready to blast someone to Kingdom come one night when he heard the most awful, terrified shriek sounding in the darkness. It roused him from a dead sleep just in time for him to hear something scrabbling on the front porch of his one-room cabin. He leaped out of bed and grabbed his wand for focus; he technically didn't need it to cast spells, but it helped when he was running on nothing but adrenaline. He ran to the front window to see if he could make out anything. Just as suddenly as it arose, the sound died. There was nothing out there but trees, the lit spiral of the Milky Way in the sky and the wide grassy field he kept around his property.
Jason opened the door slowly. As soon as he did, something solid and fuzzy slid against his leg. He jumped back and pointed his want at it, felt his will immediately center in his chest and bolt from his fingertips into the wand. The tip of it glowed and sparked before he called it back again, dispelling the fireball he was going to hurl but letting the wand become his light source. Once he discovered what was on his doorstep, he couldn't blast it. It was a person, after all.
More accurately, it was a Rabbit. It was bipedal, probably stood around five feet tall, and covered in white fur. At least, it would have been white if its pelt hadn't been matted with blood. It was completely naked and wheezing, its claws scraping against the wooden floor as it tried to crawl its way inside. One huge, dark eye wavered as it looked up at Jason. He couldn't tell if there was sentience there, or any kind of recognition. But it was clear that help was needed.
"Help...me..." it croaked, then collapsed in the threshold of his house.
A bright pinpoint of light grabbed Jason's attention from the treeline twenty yards away. That speck of fire grew in size and intensity until he could feel the heat of it. That fireball collided with a tree stump in his front yard. A geyser of dirt and splinters roared up from the ground and came crashing back down on his porch, through his front door. All that was left of the stump was a few smoldering roots inside a crater five feet wide and three deep.
Just like that, adrenaline shot through Jason for the second time tonight. He pulled the unconscious rabbit into his cabin and stepped out onto the porch, his wand already vibrating with his will. Whoever these people were, they weren't going to get this Rabbit. They certainly weren't going to get away with blasting away part of his property, either...
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