Chương 22: Does a Cat Dream

She hadn't found anywhere worth calling a den yet. Every spot she'd tried so far had some problem she couldn't quite settle with, too open, too close to something's territory she hadn't finished mapping, too far from water to feel safe closing her eyes over. Tonight's spot was a small dug-out hole at the base of an old, half-fallen tree, dry enough and close enough to fit her properly, though she still wasn't sure it counted as anywhere real. It was just where her legs had finally given out.

She was asleep before she'd properly finished deciding whether the spot was actually safe. She was back at the guild almost immediately, except the guild had changed. Every door in the hall stood open for her specifically. Every table had already been cleared to make room for wherever she wanted to walk next.

She sat in the middle of the floor and gave a single short meow, more announcement than request, and Bram came out of the kitchen at a near run, already carrying something that smelled exactly the way she wanted it to smell. She meowed again, a different shape this time, sharper, and Garr knelt where he stood, not out of exhaustion, but because kneeling was simply the correct response to that particular sound. Nobody looked at her strangely for it. Nobody paused to wonder what she meant.

Every voice she made landed exactly the way she intended it to land, understood completely and acted on immediately, and not one person in that hall had ever once needed her to try twice. Ren appeared at her side without needing to be called, ledgers already set aside, scratching exactly the spot behind her ear that had only just started to want scratching. She meowed a third time, low and satisfied, just to hear the whole room respond to it at once.

It was, she would have said if she'd had the words for it, exactly how things should have always been. She sat in the center of her own hall, fed, obeyed, correctly understood in every direction at once, and felt something swell warm and proud under her ribs that had nothing humble left in it anywhere. The dream held that shape for a long while before it started falling apart.

The hall thinned at the edges, went soft and unfocused, right on the verge of stopping being real, and Garr's kneeling shape blurred into something she couldn't hold onto no matter how hard some sleeping part of her tried. Her paws twitched. Something that might have been a purr rose in her throat and died there, half-shaped, gone before it ever fully sounded. She woke up on the beam. The wood was warm under her, the fireplace flue beneath it doing what it always did, and she stretched out long across the beam.

Bram was banging around in the kitchen below. Morning, and the guild, and her own spot in it. She got up to stretch properly, same as always, and the beam groaned under her before she'd finished the motion. It hadn't creaked like that in years. She looked down at herself, at legs that filled the whole width of the beam now instead of leaving room to spare, and understood with the particular slow horror of dreams that something about this didn't fit anymore. The wood gave out from under her a heartbeat later.

She fell the way you fall in dreams, too long, too slow, the kitchen rushing up to meet her without ever quite arriving, and somewhere in the middle of that fall the kitchen wasn't there at all anymore. Just dark, and cold bark against her side, and her own gasping breath loud in her ears. Whether any of it meant anything, she had no way of knowing, and right now, heart still going too fast from a fall that hadn't actually happened, she had no real interest in finding out either.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Morning came gray first, then gold, then simply daylight, and she opened her eyes to the smell of damp bark and old grass rather than anything the night had promised her. She lay there a moment without moving, waiting to see if any of it, the hall, the meowing, the guild that had wanted her exactly as she was, would still feel true now that she was properly awake.

The warmth of the dream faded fast against the cold bark at her back, gone entirely by the time she got her legs under her and climbed out of the hollow. The rain started before she'd gone twenty steps. This wasn't a warning drizzle she could shake off her fur and forget about. It was a real, steady fall that had her drenched through in the time it took to decide she hated it. She hated water on principle, had hated it since long before any of this started.

This particular kind, cold and relentless and coming from directly above with nowhere to angle away from it, ranked somewhere near the top of every wet thing she'd ever suffered through. She tried the trees first. It made sense in the moment, right up until it didn't. She found the thickest canopy she could and pressed herself close against a trunk, and within a few minutes the leaves above her had soaked clean through regardless, fat drops finding new paths downward every time she thought she'd found a dry patch.

Worse than open ground, if anything. At least open ground didn't trick her into thinking she was covered. The trees weren't going to work. She gave up on them and started actually looking, walking straight into the open rain rather than trusting any more cover that would only fail her again. Something almost slipped past her entirely. A shape half-sunk in the mud, skin gone pale, hair plastered dark with mud though it looked like it might run silver-white underneath.

Nothing about it moved the whole time she stood there watching, not once, rain hammering down on it the same as it hammered down on everything else. She got closer regardless, curiosity outweighing the part of her that already wanted to look away. It was a child.

Or shaped like one, human, a girl by the look of the ragged dress plastered to her, curled tight on her side in the mud with her knees drawn up close to her chest, a posture she recognized from every small thing she'd ever seen try to hold its own warmth in against the cold. She leaned in close enough to press her nose against the girl's arm, and the cold of her hit like touching stone left out all winter.

Something in her was already moving before any real thought caught up to it, some instinct that had nothing to do with reasoning and everything to do with small and cold and needing to be carried somewhere safer. Her mouth found the loose fabric at the back of the girl's collar, gripped the way her whole body already seemed to know how to grip without ever having practiced it, and she lifted. Lighter than she expected, given the size of her.

Everything with a body that big should have pulled harder against her jaw than this one did. She started walking, the girl hanging low enough that her legs dragged a shallow trench through the mud with every step, no shelter in mind yet beyond somewhere the rain wasn't finding either of them, and no plan beyond the same one that had gotten her this far since the day this whole mess started.

A leaf tumbled past her, quick and low, blown sideways by the wind, and every muscle in her tightened toward chasing it before some slower, more responsible part of her caught up and reminded her what was currently hanging from her mouth. She let the leaf go. The girl hung still and quiet from her mouth the whole way, gone properly limp the moment the collar tightened, no resistance in her at all to begin with.

Small and helpless meant carry, and nothing about growing this size had changed what her body already knew to do about it without ever once being taught. It gave her an idea, the kind that arrived fully formed and immediately felt correct. If Garr ever tried leaving again, or Bram, or any of them, she wouldn't have to just watch this time.

She could grab the whole lot of them by the collar one at a time and carry them straight back through the guild gate herself, complaints and kicking be damned, whether they liked being handled that way or not. It was, without question, the best plan she'd had in weeks. She found the shelter almost by accident, a shallow cave cut into the hillside, dry ground tucked well back from the rain. Nothing fancy.

Just enough space to keep the worst of the wet off two bodies instead of one, which after everything the trees had failed to do, felt like more than she had any right to expect. She set the girl down carefully, the same care she'd have used on anything small enough to break, and sat back to actually look at what she'd been carrying. Younger than any adventurer she'd ever watched come through the guild doors.

Skin pale in a way that went past the ordinary paleness of cold, closer to something bloodless, and two points at the corners of her mouth that didn't belong on any human face she'd ever seen. She settled for pressing herself close against the girl's side instead, the same way she'd have curled up next to anything cold that needed warming, and let her own body do whatever thinking the rest of her hadn't managed yet.