Chance Hares

Overview

Chance Hares live on the Shifting Path and at the zone of the Forking Road that opens from it on the Material Plane. Whatever fork a traveller takes, the hare is on the other one. To catch one by chance is luck; to chase one is the surest way to get lost.

Appearance

A Chance Hare is a long-legged hare the size of a brown hare of Caeldon, with tall ears and a coat that shifts like the plane's light, through gold, violet, and prismatic sheen, so that no two watchers agree on its colour. Its shadow falls in several directions at once. It sits up tall at the mouth of a fork, ears turning, and bolts in a long, zigzag run. It is silent, though the plane's whispers seem louder around it. It smells of rain before a storm.

Habitat and Range

They live wherever the Path's roads fork, which is everywhere, and in smaller numbers on the Forking Road, which shows them most often at the first fork a traveller meets.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Chance Hare is always on the branch the traveller did not take. Turn back and take that branch, and it is on the other one, sitting up, watching. It does not flee from people; it simply is never where they are. It feeds, as far as anyone knows, on the paths themselves, and is seen at the moment a choice is made.

Abilities

It lives on probability as other hares live on grass. A hare is never caught by hunting. Now and then, very rarely, a traveller who has stopped looking for one finds it in their arms, as a coin lands on its edge.

Life Cycle

No one knows. Wayfinders say the hares are as many as the forks and that a new one runs from every choice ever made.

Uses and Dangers

A hare caught by chance is held to bring luck, and the luck is said to be real: on the Path, where probability is a visible haze, a traveller carrying one walks under a brighter glow. A hare chased is a hazard. Travellers who change course again and again after one fall into the plane's Loop, a cycle of choices that never ends, and the Wayfinders say the first rule of the Path is never to follow a hare.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane, at crossroads and junctions, a hare crossing the road is good luck in some places and an ill omen in others, and the saying "chasing the other hare" means regretting the choice not made. Gamblers carry hare's-foot charms; most are the feet of ordinary hares, and do nothing (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes