"Demon Rat Vercingetorix" by Ursula Vernon

Being, of course, an exceptionally common food source, there is not much available to mice in the way of divine retribution. No one is haunted by mice. A cat may kill a thousand mice in a year and sleep untroubled by ghostly scamperings. The sluggish brains of snakes would not register an eldritch squeaking from beyond the grave, even if they weren't stone deaf. Mice live, die, and return to the vast mousy unconscious without much pause along the way.

But.

Every now and again--rarely, terribly rarely--a mouse will suffer some injustice above and beyond merely being eaten, and in the tiny furry breast, something unfamiliar will wake. With a rage and determination generally lacking in rodent kind, the mouse will set out, sideways, into the crawlspaces of existence, behind the baseboard of the World We Know, seeking that last, great arbiter of mousey existence, the one being who can aid it. And if the mouse (or the mousey ghost) is very lucky, and quick, and braver than mice generally are, they may come at last to the home of the great Demon Rat of Vercingetorix, a monsterous rodent of gimlet eye and grim demeanor, kindly disposed towards its tiny brothers, but generally unpleasant to everyone else. Before this final judge, the courageous mouse may plead its case. And if the Demon Rat agrees, then it will return to earth with the mouse, and then Bad Things Go Down, the details of which we'll leave to the reader's imagination. The Demon Rat doesn't mind people eating mice, but he gets downright testy if somebody mistreats 'em, because in a well run universe, even the lowest of the low have at least one defender.*

I enjoyed painting Azezaelbunny so much that he got me thinking about other animals--it seemed unlikely that bunnies would be the ONLY monsterous demon-animal out there. And that got me think about what such creatures would do, what role they'd have in the universe, and one thing led to another...

*For reasons that no one is entirely clear on, flatworms have seven. Since flatworms are just barely above 'stimulus-response' and are hardly ever ambitious enough to go seeking vengeance, the Seven Monsterous Flatworms of Cibola play a lot of card games and have been taking a lot of classes at the community college lately.