The one who called himself Duggan lazed peacefully among the flowers. He was a rabbit today, and that always seemed to calm his mind, even though he could feel his little heart beating a thousand times a minute.

This was nice. This was perfect. Quiet, serene, no worries in the world except which vegetable to eat, and maybe find a nice female rabbit to start another family with.

Then his perfect paradise rippled, and through the fold in reality stepped Apollyon. And all the happy feelings vanished in a puff of fear and mortal dread.

“You were not supposed to come today,” he squeaked in his high rabbit voice, rolling over and staring up at the other. “Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said one of Apollyon’s mouths. “A lich has discovered us.”

“What!?” Duggan leaped to his feet, fountaining up in a spray of blood and viscera into the shape of a gazelle, strong and ready to run. “How? That’s impossible? What’s happening?”

“Calm yourself,” the one called Apollyon said, forming a hand to lay on Duggan’s quivering shoulder. “He does not know all about us. He has made contact with the Failstate, and she is speaking what she knows of us.”

The one called Duggan stared, horrified. “The failstate?” his voice was a whisper. “This is bad, this is a disaster! What are we going to do? She’ll be coming after us! She’ll be coming after all of us!”

“No,” the one called Apollyon said, shaking three of his heads before they dissolved back into his body. “She does not remember all about us. She agreed only to guide the lich to us, that he might attack us in an attempt to absorb our power. The system tracked their words, and fed them to me.”

“Then we must destroy him!” The one who called himself Duggan squealed. “Quickly! I will send all my agents, you must do the same. Liches have been broken since day one, and no one ever—“

There was a soft, wet, almost silken sound, and Duggan’s words stopped suddenly. He looked down to stare at the point in his gazelle chest where one of Apollyon’s hands had entered his flesh, and he looked up at the other being as talons wrapped around his heart and pulled.

“Why?” he asked, resisting, trying to keep his essence within his body. He was one of the five. He was powerful! He could not—

“Because you are the weakest of us,” Apollyon said, drawing Duggan’s power towards his own. “She would have led him to you. And you would have failed to kill him, because you are weak.”

Duggan slid to the floor, his flesh flowing back into itself as his power drained away, sucked out by the being he had thought was his ally.

“Do not be sorrowful,” Apollyon whispered as life fled from Duggan. “I will put your power to good use. I will use your death to point the others to the lich, convince them that he is the larger threat. They will go to war against him. And my plans will continue forward, unhindered.”

“No,” Duggan whimpered.

It was his last word.

The one called Apollyon straightened slowly, waiting for Duggan’s essence to settle within him, for it to become his own. There was always an adjustment period, when one of their kind slew another. But Apollyon was practiced, and it took mere moments to absorb fully.

“Know that I took no pleasure in that,” he whispered to the creature who had been Duggan, and was now only a small sphere of metal laying on a simple white floor. “Goodbye, old friend. Your death will be useful to me.”

He set the scene carefully, leaving traces of the lich’s essence behind from where he had collected it from the creature’s palace. The others would find it, as well as the necromantic energies, and the evidence of a fight he planted with the skill of an old hand. And they would wage war on the lich.

And he would be free to move.

He left, finally, through the same rift through which he had arrived. And so focused was he that, in a most uncharacteristic lapse, he missed the briefest ripple in the power he had absorbed from Duggan. It was so tiny it was as nothing to the power he now held, and he might not have payed attention to it even if he had noticed.

The ripple was there, though. And somewhere beyond space and time, the circle connected to that power flickered. So fast that it would have taken a being watching for thousands of years in unending silence to even notice its existence.

And that being noticed.

And acted.