Why??

Winter had come once more. And Lilac the bunny was out in the cold.

She was freezing; it was a particularly harsh winter. Lilac hopped around a snowbank and shivered as a cold breeze cut through her thin, ripped jacket like a throwing knife. Her battered snowshoes barely kept the frostbite from gripping her toes in its cruel jaws. Lilac's scarf was close to a few strands of yarn wrapped around her neck.

Lilac yanked her ratted hood down further over her painfully cold ears as she did her best to sidestep particularly large snowbanks. As a frigid wind hit the poor bunny like a slap across the face, she felt tears welling in her stinging eyes.

Lilac scrubbed her numbing paws across her face, trying to get rid of the tears before they froze to her fur and made things even worse. Eventually she found an alley. Shivering, Lilac pressed herself against the ice-coated brick wall.

The wall froze her back to the point where she was numb and shaking uncontrollably, but she didn't care. It offered her the slightest bit of protection from the sub-zero winds.

Shaking, Lilac slid down the wall and curled into her freezing bunny fur to sleep for the night. She had no home, so to her the alley was home, at least for the night.

Suddenly, she heard cheery laughter accompanied by a shout. "Found one!" Lilac perked her head up. She saw a pack consisting of an arctic wolf at the lead and wolves and arctic foxes at his heels. "Hey! You!" called an arctic fox, beckoning for her to come to them.

Lilac rose, shivering, to her numb legs and attempted to walk towards them. "We'll help ya find a warm place to be!" chirped a friendly-looking arctic fox,

"Yeah! You can stay there even after you die..." warned a wolf that stood next to the fox, smacking her back with his tail. "Come on, you can ride with me. I'll carry you," offered the arctic wolf, unzipping his black parka and scooping up the bunny. Lilac nodded gratefully as she was tucked into his fuzzy parka, embracing the warmth of the fake fur pressing against her frigid body.

"Whoa, holy Zios! You're a cold little one, aren't you?" said the arctic wolf, twitching ever so slightly away from Lilac as she snuggled against his furry chest. Her tiny paws grasped the top of the zipped parka and her head poked up just so that she could see where they were. The pack was headed towards a large and cozy-looking hut.

As the animals settled into the hut with steaming mugs of hot chocolate grasped in their paws, the arctic wolf said, "We haven't properly introduced ourselves! How rude of me!" He face-palmed, then said, "I'm Henrik." The friendly arctic fox piped up, "Zara!" with a paw pointed at her chest.

The arctic fox who had called to her earlier when he saw her in the alley said, "My name is Jason." The wolf who said something about death earlier muttered, "'m Dominick."

A wolf who sat in the corner signaled with her paws. An arctic fox sat next to her and said, "She said that her name is Liana. And my name is Flute."

"I'm Lilac," said the small bunny with a shy wave from Henrik's still-zipped parka.

After hours of conversations, laughter, and hot chocolate chugging contests accompanied by more laughter, everyone decided to call it a day.

But in the middle of the night, it all went down in flames.

Dominick seized her with a paw firmly clasped over her mouth. The wolf dragged Lilac outside into a blizzard, digging a deep hole in a tall snowbank. He threw the rabbit in, piling snow onto her.

"Good night forever, spoiled street rat," he snarled.

The cold seized Lilac's body as he kicked snow over her face.

The last thing she could do as it all went dark was ask,

"Why??"