Tim stood still, listening to the sounds of distant rats grow closer. They squeezed through the gaps in the stones of the walls, poured in from the open cell door, and rose from the drains like a flood.

The entire cell filled with the constant sounds of squeaking, melding together into one continuous din as countless numbers of rats swarmed towards their master. The black tide, only deviating from its path to swerve around Tim’s feet, pooled around their king and stopped. Newcoming rats pushed into spaces between still rats until they were nipped. Some rats even clung to the walls, and yet rats kept pouring in.

“Are they… praying?” Tim questioned Philbert, as he watched the rats closest to the rat king make eerily human gestures with their paws and lay their heads on the ground, eyes shut. They raised and lowered their heads synchronously. He shook a rat off his pant leg, suddenly afraid he might be buried.

“Why would we not?” Philbert replied with contempt, alert on Tim’s shoulder. He had eyes only for the rat king, which lay on the ground breathing weakly with its eyes shut.

Suddenly, the walls began to rumble and quake, disrupting the rats which fell from the walls, and Tim could hear screams and the clashing of metal echoing from the insides of the Bastille.

“Wow,” Tim laughed, “they actually managed to break a hero’s defense?”

Then, Tim’s eyes widened as the implications of that sentence fully sank into his brain.

“Shit! Philbert, we gotta get out of here before the fighting gets any further!” Tim said. Philbert had no response but sank his claws deeper into Tim’s clothes. “Philbert?” Tim followed his gaze back to the rat king.

While Tim was distracted, the rat king had dragged itself unsteadily to all four of its feet. It trembled and shook its body as the closest rats put their paws on their master. Tim’s eyes widened as the definition of those rats softened and blurred to merge with the rat king’s body. They slowly disappeared, leaving no traces of the smaller rats behind.

The king appeared slightly larger, now slightly larger than a housecat. Though it still seemed exhausted its fur was no longer patchy, and its eyes shone with intelligence. It approached Tim and looked at him.

“Bow, Tim,” Philbert said urgently, sounding afraid for the first time since Tim had known him. Knowing what was best for him, Tim knelt low enough for his short hair to brush the ground. He flinched involuntarily as a warm paw touched his neck. Warm breath whispered into Tim’s ear and its whiskers tickled his face as the king’s weight settled onto his shoulders.

“Sheesh. I should start charging for transportation services,” Tim said, and laughed nervously as he stood and left the cell.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

A few minutes later, Tim found himself slumped against a doorframe in exhaustion and despair. “Not only are there soldiers and monsters fighting in the hallway leading to my sewer route, but there is fighting going on everywhere! This whole place is a warzone! Why can’t I just catch a break?” he despaired, conveniently forgetting that he had chosen to enter a warzone himself.

From his spot in the eye of the storm, Tim could just barely see into the courtyard, and could hear many of the surrounding hallways. No matter where he looked, all that could be seen were individuals and groups fighting and dying in frenzied aggression. Of course, he did count himself lucky to be able to spectate the most impressive fight happening in the courtyard, one between the great hero Elena and a demon with an odd mark on his forehead, obviously a leader. But what he wanted most at the moment was to be not there. The shockwaves from the battle between hero and demon were starting to upset his stomach.

Tim sighed with a slight hint of depression. “Philbert, are you sure that your friend can’t just bust out some badass powers or something to get us out of this mess?”

From the usual spot on his shoulder, an almost immediate reply rang out, tinged with exasperation. “Tim. Five times now, Tim. No. My friend, my good friend, is tired. Too tired.”

“Yeah, yeah. Something about being trapped there for who knows how long. My point, also for the fifth time, is how in the name of everything that is still holy in this world are we gonna get out of this alive? Honestly, it’s a miracle we haven’t been murdered by that group of giants over there already. Fuck!” he shouted, and leapt around a corner as one enthusiastically hurled a boulder in his direction.

Tim shivered and flinched as the hallway he had just been in collapsed. Right. It’s pretty obvious that I’m between a rock and a hard place. Either I become collateral damage in the battle, or the winning side kills me because I’m trespassing, or they hate humans.

Even after finding out the truth of many of the heroes he had once held so dear to his heart, Tim had still fallen back on old habits of listing out the facts in his head to set priorities.

Well that first fact is certainly motivating, but all I’ve got to work with right now is my head and some strange rat ‘king’ or whatever the fuck this thing curled around my neck is. It doesn’t even talk, for heroes sake! Well, I suppose Philbert, the destroyer of quiet lives, can talk to it, but I don’t even know if that fully counts, Tim grumbled in his head. Think, you stupid piece of shit! What can we do? Try and sneak around the boundaries of the courtyard to escape in the confusion? No, the giants would eat me first. They don’t dare go to close to Elena, but they wouldn’t have to in order to grab me if I’m near the sides… wait… Tim tapped his chin with his fingers. He could feel a small nugget of an idea forming, deranged as it was.

“Philbert, the rat king is a pretty powerful being, right?”

“Of course, Tim.”

Tim was silent for a few moments, and then carefully replied. “Those rats, the ones you call ‘lesser beings’, do they listen to him?”

“Of course, of course. They, while lesser and still slaves to their survival instincts, do indeed.” Philbert replied, staring at Tim with beady little eyes.

Tim stared back with a wicked grin, meeting the strange rat’s gaze head on. “Well, it’s pretty obvious that if this continues, I will be killed, and at the very least their king will be imprisoned once again. They might even try to kill him! I can’t imagine they would like that, would they?”

Without even waiting for Philbert’s response, Tim continued, ignoring the stares of the smaller rats on the ground turning to look at him.

“The only way I can see out of this is for something… unexpected to happen,” Tim said, his idea blooming like a beautiful flower in his mind’s eye.

“Philbert, can you ask the rat king to do something?”

With a nod from the talking rat, Tim leaned his head close to the rat’s ear, and whispered his idea, completely unable to keep a straight face at the results he was already imagining.