Chapter 23: Souls

The willow tea didn’t much help with Violet’s headache and instead left a bitter, mucky aftertaste in the back of her throat. Fortunately, walking did make her feel a little better and soon enough she was learning how to ignore the hot, sullen throb that lingered behind her eyes.

The lilacs she’d spotted earlier proved a portent and soon enough Violet found herself walking between tall, sweet smelling hedgerows that shone with blossoms, amethyst and citrine and ruby all at once. It was not any one specific kind of plant that grew dominant, for Violet could see roses and honeysuckle, morning glories like pale bursts of starry flame, and lilac blooming in long strands. Sunflowers poked up here and there, broad leaves fanning out to shade her as she walked. Every so often she spotted places where the hedges followed a fence or a wall, or sat bunched and high, grown immensely tall around the shaft of a telephone pole or a streetlamp, like a tower removed from some grand floral fortress.

Honeybees hummed industriously throughout the whole tableau and Violet, though she wasn’t seeking it out, caught an edge of the invisible all consuming direction that pulled each bee along in its duties. She gave her head a sharp shake and broke the feeling with a suddenness that felt like a thread being snapped. When she looked upon the bees next, their hum was sedate and she could feel nothing more creeping in from beneath it.

Vines studded with honeysuckle blossom curled gently along the length of the overarching sunflowers and Violet found a place where they were near to the ground and easily reachable, each flower like a noble courtier done up in yellow and peach and white fineries. She gathered a handful of blossoms as she went, licked the sweetness from each flower and left them scattered in her wake, the cat watching with some bemusement.

“Typically, I wait for the bees to do their work for me.” It remarked, but did not eschew the very last honeysuckle blossom when Violet offered, though it only chewed on the petals for a moment before sticking out its tongue.

“What?” Violet asked. “Was that a bad one?”

“Much too vegetative,” the cat complained. “…Pardon me a moment’s absence, I believe I’m in need of a palate cleanser.”

Violet cocked her head, about to ask what a palate even was in the first place, but the cat had already slipped into the shadows and was gone. She rolled her eyes and kept walking. Ahead was a delicate archway of morning glory vines, all laced around the sagging remnants of an old iron gateway, though the gate itself had long since fallen to pieces.

Stepping through the gateway, she found herself in a garden pavilion, framed by trees and vividly flowering hedgerows. It was a circular space, perhaps twenty meters from side to side, floored with great marble tiles which had survived mostly intact beneath a velvety skin of moss. Under her feet, Violet could see that each tile had been engraved with a strangely familiar symbol.

ɣ

In the pavilion’s center sat the crumbled remains of an old fountain, once multi-tiered and very grand but long since reduced to the central spout, from which had dripped great frozen cascades of crimson fungi, like a spray of blood halted in place.

The sun had not yet fully risen and that left half of the pavilion under shadow. In that shadowed space, on the edge of which Violet stood, she realized that she was not alone.

A doe stood upon the tiles not too far away, its gaze blank. Before it, closer still, was a gangly fawn, only a few days old. It turned a slow circle in place, movements frightened and hesitant. For a moment Violet wasn’t sure what it was afraid of, then she caught a flame orange flash of fur and saw a fox edge forward, crouched low as if in play.

The fox was toying with the fawn, keeping it from reaching the doe, which stood and stared, a slow, faint unease swirling behind the blankness clouding its eyes. It seemed to realize that something was wrong, but only in the most distant possible way.

The fawn bleated, a small, high noise, then stood still, trembling. Its sides were slick with blood, a complicated pattern of tiny crimson droplets marking where the fox had chased its prey to and fro.

Before she could truly process any of this the fox had risen fully up and was staring at her, blood gleaming wetly on its muzzle. Its features were shadowed, but as it stepped forward, jaws falling open, Violet saw that the fox was missing its right eye, the socket filled with a clot of black ichor.

“Human. Girl. A…girl, my god, my god. I can see you.” The fox’s voice was bubbly with blood. It grinned.

Violet took a sharp step back, jolted away from the shadows by an almost electrical surge of unease. The fox began to wag its tail, but the motion was stiff and unnatural, as though it had seen such an action before but did not know exactly how it was done.

“You talk.” She said slowly, but her eyes were drawn to the fawn, which had taken the opportunity to retreat to its mother’s side. The doe stood still, unresponsive to the frantic attentions of its offspring.

The fox, which had stopped at the edge of the shadows, nodded and grinned ever wider, seeming to show every tooth in its head. Violet waited to see if it would come any further but the fox seemed loathe to step into the sunlight and she glanced quickly behind her. The first thought to enter her head was that she should bolt. The second, overtaking its predecessor, was that if she left the light the fox would almost certainly come after her. All around her, along the hedgerows and beneath the trees, stretched avenues of darkness upon which the fox could run.

“Yes,” the fox said, not seeming to notice the rising dread that froze her in place. “I talk just the same as girl—as you. Queen’s English.”

Violet had heard that before, something the cat had said, and the uncomfortable familiarity made her squirm. In front of her, the fox shifted.

“You must be warm,” it continued. “Perhaps we could talk more in the shade. The flowers here smell sweeter, and their petals are soft as silk.”

“So you could do to me what you did to the fawn?” Violet asked, all too aware that a tremor had invaded her voice.

The fox’s smile stuttered, like it had forgotten how to correctly emote, and in the void beneath its faux cheer came a cold, numb curl of something else.

Violet anxiously fingered one corner of her notebook. She had the sigil pressed against her chest, out of sight. It would only take her a moment to turn it around…yet she couldn’t help but wonder what would happen even if she were to show it. The horse skull beast had barely reacted. What was to say this new monster would be any different?

And then the fox was shaking its head, the motion broad almost to the point of incomprehension, like its denial was too vast to ever be fully expressed.

“No…no, why. Why would I hurt you? You talk. You speak.”

There was a space that could be described as fox, as that which was an animal…but in its middle lay a hole that led to someplace beyond. It wasn’t visible yet, but Violet could feel the corners of its influence beginning to grow. It felt cold. It felt like the end of all things. She wanted to caper and squirm and brush herself off, as though the fox’s gaze and its words were something physical she could clean away.

“Everything talks.” She mumbled.

“We…I won’t hurt you. I promise. I. Now come clos e r . ”

Violet recoiled, the sunlight turning to ice around her. She could hear it now, demon noise swirling into the front of her mind and attaining physicality beyond that, like a thought becoming sound. The voices intertwined, fox and demon, demon and fox, one and the same now.

“It’s okay, you can stop. Take one step closer. P l e a s e . And we can talk and you will s e e . It will be fine. I pr o m i se. W e promise. Please. Please do what we say right now rig h t n o w n o w n o wnownownow—”

She brought the sigil up and the fox screamed, flipping back over itself before landing hard on the tile, remaining eye wild with pain. Yet through that agony erupted a frothing nonsense of demonic jabber, sharp as needles, speckling Violet’s mind with patches of dark so complete that they circled around from being lightless and turned to nothing instead.

Violet tried to step back but caught her heel on the edge of a tile and tumbled over, landing on her rucksack before rolling to one side, losing view of the fox. She writhed and struggled like a turtle flipped onto its back, then forced one arm out of its strap and managed to sit partially up.

The fox was standing again but stumbled to one side, keeping its head down like a boxer. There was something wrong with its stance and it seemed to be cringing away from the demon as much as it was from her. Strings of reddish saliva hung from the corners of its mouth, matting the fur there, and when the fox exhaled its breath came as a wheeze.

Still, it was edging forward again, missing eye turned her way like a shield. And from beneath its pained breathing Violet could hear the demon again, its words pouring forth like floodwaters from a broken dam.

o w w hur t† rt owwwwwwwww

ki l l ll kl klilkilki « -º-

f†∆

l i ttl e b i tc h t a k e y o urr e y es

b® e å kk y ou r f ing e rs

h u r ts

n o fa ir

s tø ¶

w e k n o w y o u n o w

Intermingled were the fox’s snarls, terror and fury jittering out from beyond its half broken form, and though Violet couldn’t see the demon directly, its host’s stance had gone skewed, legs trembling and fur bristling in clumps and puffs.

An unreality took hold, the fox itself was no longer comfortable to behold as a physical concept, its frame, the space it occupied in reality standing contrary to everything else.

A wordless panic swelled within Violet and she squirmed back against her fallen rucksack, the fire poker grating against tile. She knew she could go for it, that the wisest course of action would be to pick up a weapon, but that would take a few seconds and in that time the fox could be on top of her. It wasn’t very big, not much larger than the cat, but its teeth were sharp and the demon behind its face shrieked for release. If it found her throat, if it found her eyes….

And then the cat was in front of her, so suddenly it seemed as though the world itself had skipped a moment. Her companion stood stiff legged and crackling with righteous fury, fur darker than anything, eyes alight.

The fox fell back, legs ceding usefulness, and it lay silently upon the tile, a helpless, terrified shiver rolling from head to tail. The demon keened, a high, broken noise, and then was silent too. The fox remained perfectly still, like a rabbit cowering beneath the sudden and immense shadow of a diving hawk.

“Get away from her, you degenerate thing.” The cat hissed, and the fox found motion, dragging itself away like a broken toy, tail tucked between its legs.

“Please….” It whimpered.

The cat glanced quickly back, a cursory examination to make sure that Violet was not hurt.

“Get up and get out of here.” It ordered her.

Violet stared, then slowly began to obey. There was a numbness pooling over top of her fear now, and it made everything feel slow and slightly unreal. She put on her rucksack and looked again to the false doe and the tiny shape of the fawn trembling beneath it, nearly lost amidst the shadows.

“What…what about the baby deer?” She asked.

The cat gave her an incredulous, almost contemptuous look, then glared back at the fox, which cowered lower.

“Go.” It growled, and Violet knew there was to be no arguing. Swallowing her objections, she hurried from the pavilion and, though it hurt to do so, didn’t look back.

Violet walked for a long time, stumbling through ferns and stinging clumps of nettles. She hadn’t taken the time to orient herself and did not know if she was even headed north anymore. Everything was too scrambled. She felt sick with dread, the initial jolt of adrenaline beginning to fade.

It wasn’t long before the cat rejoined her, falling back to provide a rearguard. Violet thought about speaking to her companion but had no idea what purpose that would serve, or what she would even say.

Eventually she came to a halt next to the open foundations of a small house, long since crumbled to nothing. The brick spine of a chimney stack stood like a sentry over the decaying rubble, woven over by pale vines of morning glory. Violet sat on the edge of the foundation and took off her rucksack. She stayed very still, keeping her notebook clutched tight against her chest. Through it she could feel the tiny, fast shiver of her heartbeat, and its fragility only made her feel worse. This wasn’t like her encounter with the drainpipe demon. That one had resulted in a definite outcome; she’d won. The demon had been bricked up and trapped completely. Her encounter with the fox had left her only uncertainty and a slowly intensifying sensation of dread.

“We should keep going.” The cat said. It still hadn’t lost its authoritative coldness.

Violet hunched her shoulders and did not move.

“Why didn’t you rescue the fawn?” She asked instead.

Again came that same, blank, uncomprehending look from the cat, tinged with perhaps a little bit of pity.

“This is your biggest concern right now?” It asked.

Violet looked away, feeling slow and stupid and hating both the cat and herself in equal measures for it. After a moment the cat blew out a breath and continued.

“That…thing back there,” her companion’s voice had gone acidy with dislike. “It wanted something to hurt and possess. And now it has the fawn. If I’d left it with nothing then it would have come after us no matter the consequences. Do you understand? I did this to keep you safe.”

“Why didn’t you kill it?”

The cat blinked. Violet looked down to her notebook and the sigil, now very much smudged and almost unrecognizable. She’d need to redraw it at some point.

“You scared the fox. You scared the demon, same as you did back home. You could have done anything.”

In front of her, the cat shuffled its front paws, scratching tiny patterns into the stone.

“You kill things all the time.” Violet pressed.

This time her companion responded, eyes kept firmly downcast.

“Small things.” It said.

Violet knit her brows. By itself the cat’s statement made no sense, but….

“Small?” She repeated shrilly.

“For example,” the cat continued, still refusing to meet her gaze. Its tone had gone brittle and strange. “I am much more frightening than the fox, but it is twice my size and quite a bit stronger. If we fought, I would probably lose, and I’m not willing to take a risk like that for the sake of one small deer.”

“But couldn’t you…?” Violet wasn’t sure what she could possibly say, her mind had gone blank. She’d assumed that the cat had some sort of mystical ability tucked up its sleeve, something that could blow the fox to ash or stop its heart or something. To be stripped of that comfort (that false comfort, as it turned out) made her feel more vulnerable than ever.

“Couldn’t I what?” The cat asked, looking up to meet her gaze, eyes hard. “This clearly doesn’t work the way you think it does.”

“You could have at least told me.” Violet muttered, giving the cat an accusing look. The fur between its shoulders had begun to bristle and, despite herself, Violet felt a tiny prickle of fear, something she’d never felt from the cat before. Suddenly she was very aware of just how alone she was in the forest. How isolated.

“Don’t act like I hid something from you,” the cat growled. “You never asked. You assumed, and you should never, ever assume things out here. It will get you killed or maimed or taken over, do you understand?”

“Is there a sigil that kills demons?” Violet muttered in lieu of an answer to the cat’s rhetorical question.

At this some of her companion’s ruffled fur began to settle.

“No,” it said quietly. “And even if there were, I would not teach it to you.”

Violet threw her hands up. She wasn’t particularly surprised by the cat’s initial answer, but the chaser it had given made her feel even angrier and more helpless than before.

“Why not?” She demanded, incensed.

The cat sighed. Its gaze had gone indirect once more and its shoulders were hunched into a high, black peak of unhappiness.

“Why not?” Violet repeated.

“Because it would kill you. It would kill anyone that looked at it.”

Violet grimaced, perfectly confused. She didn’t think the cat was being gruesome for no reason, its voice had sounded serious.

“But I’m not….” She trailed off, eyes finding the cat once more. It was giving her a very serious look, not quite a glare but clearly displeased, like it had been forced to admit something deep and evil.

“I’m not a demon.” Violet said.

“You’re made of the same stuff.”

“No I’m not!” Her words came quickly, more an impulse than anything well thought out or even halfway reasoned. The full meaning of what the cat had said was weighing upon the back of her mind but she couldn’t make herself acknowledge it. Not in full.

She watched the pale, milky sphere of an orb weaver’s abdomen bob seemingly in midair, the rest of the spider’s spindly frame and the silken thread it was clinging onto rendered almost invisible by the daylight. It was building a gigantic triangular web, like a ship’s sail, from one edge of the chimney stack to the ground. Each thread swayed gently, shifted by tiny breezes and shifts in the air that Violet could not feel. It was only by looking very carefully that she could see which parts of the space around her were empty and which parts were spiderweb.

“That thing back there wasn’t a person. It couldn’t be.” She insisted.

The cat regarded her with something that might have been sympathy.

“Not flesh and blood, no,” it said with a tiny shrug. “But the deeper stuff, the very core of a demon, that’s all human…or started out that way at least. Something very big happened here a long time ago. Whatever it was, it broke the spine of the world.”

“Entropy?” Violet asked.

The cat shook its head.

“Entropy is slow. You would never notice it happening, because your life is too short to comprehend the gradual separation of matter. This was quick, I think. It shattered the souls of a great many people. Imagine a glass bowl falling onto stone. It’ll explode into countless sharp slivers, but they’ll all go off in different directions. Some might collide with another broken piece, or even a great many, and they could bind together and perhaps form some stunted semblance of personality. But they’re alone even when pooled, for they might have some warm memory of words and expressions and glimpses of the past—things that once belonged to humans when all of this ruin we’re passing through was shiny and new—but it’s not enough to fill the void that they know is there. Because they’re human after all, and it’s human nature to want things. And when they see you or any other complete being, they aren’t going to consider that you’d like to keep your eyes and your memories and the ability to say the word ‘cat’ and know what it means. They’re going to talk to you, because they need to know what it’s like to speak to another person. Then they’re going to paralyze you, because they don’t want you to run away. And then they’re going to pierce your eyes because they’re bright and full of tears…and they’re going to take whatever’s behind them. And they’re going to be made of the same stuff as you all the while, until they have the brightest parts of your soul, at which point they will be made of you as well. This is the true nature of a demon. They seek and long and yearn for things no longer realized, and they will never stop because they do not know how.”

The cat’s words, the entirety of its explanation, had the feel of a trance, like the surrounding world had become slightly less real just by her having listened. Violet began to shake her head, reflexively dismissing everything she’d just heard, but arrested the motion even before it could be completed.

What reason would the cat have for lying to her in such a way? Indeed, she could suddenly remember it sidestepping similar questions she’d asked before they’d left, before they’d crossed the river. Had it been worried about frightening her in such an irreparable way?

Violet sat quietly for a long time, wrestling with the implications of this revelation.

“Will I become a demon when I die?” She asked at last. The question came as a whisper.

“No.” The cat answered without hesitation. It didn’t sound like it was lying for the sake of making her feel better, but the worry had reached up to squeeze Violet’s heart and she no longer felt sure of anything.

“Cat….” She began.

Her companion cut her off with a sharp shake of its head.

“You’re fine,” it insisted. “…Unless you yourself are consumed by a demon, which I won’t let happen, your soul will remain intact. Think about it, if everybody who died turned into a demon, your island would have been overrun a long time ago.”

That logic was sound enough that Violet could only nod, anxious requests for reassurance strangled before they could even form.

“It was only the people who were caught up in….” She waved a hand vaguely around herself, encompassing the scope of the world in much the same way the cat had. “Only they turned into demons.”

The cat began to nod, then hesitated and grew suddenly thoughtful.

“Not all. Some puffed away into nothingness. I’ve seen demons do that before.”

“And others became spirits? Like we saw back on the island?”

“No,” the cat shook its head. “I’ve told you this before. Demons and spirits are very distinct entities.”

Violet wasn’t quite sure what an entity was but cocked her head, brows knitting once more.

“Then what are they?” She asked. “They behave a lot like demons.”

What had the cat said about them? She could no longer fully remember, it felt as though entire years had passed since the beginning of her journey.

“They behave similarly, but they don’t use words. They don’t speak like humans.” The cat said, and now there was a familiar, prodding feel to its words again, like it was trying to shepherd her to a specific conclusion.

“I don’t know.” Violet sighed.

The cat rolled its eyes, the motion so exaggerated that it swayed in place, physically aggrieved.

“Going through a recent trauma is no excuse to take leave of your deductive reasoning. All of the pieces are in front of you. Think of this as a riddle if it makes you feel better: what speaks but uses no words?”

“I….” Violet trailed off. She knew what the answer must be but it only made her feel even more confused than before.

“What?” The cat asked.

“I didn’t realize animals had souls.”

The cat gave her a look, mildly offended.

“Wow.” It said.

Immediately, Violet realized what she’d just said and shook her head.

“I didn’t mean it like….”

But her companion was already smirking. It offered her a curt shake of its head.

“I can’t blame you for arrogance, it’s part of being a human.”

Violet said nothing, just fidgeted uncomfortably in place, unsure if she ought to apologize or not.

“Personally,” the cat continued. “I blame the advent of opposable thumbs. Anyone who can pick up a rock and throw it with any reasonable degree of accuracy is bound to get a swelled head.”

“I don’t think I’m better than you,” Violet said after a moment, finding her words. “…Even if you really didn’t have a soul.”

“If I didn’t have a soul I’d be closer to a doll than a real animal.”

“Like the deer we saw.” Violet said.

The cat began to nod, then reconsidered.

“Similar,” it allowed. “The false animals we’ve seen, they still have their souls, only they cannot connect. Not really. Think of if a wire in your lantern was cut. The lantern would still have all of its same components, only it could no longer produce light.”

“Oh.”

“A soulless me, a cat without candor, I would be even more lost than the falsest of animals. At least they’re afflicted by something, I would be nothing more than an empty vessel, like a balloon. Scratch me and I’d puddle into nothingness.”

“And all animals have souls?”

“Yes.” The cat said, a trace of impatience entering its voice, like this should have been abundantly clear by now. “All animals have souls. Really, most living things in general have souls.”

“Bugs?” Violet asked.

“Yes. Spiders too.”

Violet, who had always considered spiders to be bugs, didn’t ask what the cat meant. She was deep in thought now, trying to order all of this new information.

“What about plants?” She asked.

The cat turned thoughtful and said nothing at all.

“Or trees,” Violet continued. “Or…um, funguses. Do mushrooms have souls?”

“No idea. I’ve never been able to have a conversation with a mushroom, so my personal inclination would be to say no. However, don’t take my word for it. You can never be certain.”

For a time the two of them sat silently atop the crumbled foundation. Again Violet watched the orb weaver, which was busily casting down a long, dangling thread of silk. It gleamed faintly in the sunlight, tiny rainbows of color rolling along its length as it was shivered by the breeze. In time the spider would make the long, laborious journey down to a lower thread, seize the end of its newest silk strand and secure it in place. Violet had never really considered exactly how spiderwebs were made. They seemed to pop suddenly into existence, festooned across dark corners and other places where she rarely looked.

To see a tiny creature, a tiny ensouled creature, working so very hard at its craft, made her feel strange. More than that….

“I feel…bad.” She said at last.

“Why?”

“I always thought animals didn’t…well….” She gave the cat a small, guilty look.

“It can be hard learning you’re not the center of the universe.” Her companion said with a small, lofty shake of its head.

“It’s not just you and a few others, it’s all animals. All animals have souls and can talk and, I…I had chicken for dinner the night before last.”

“Yes. And I had mice.” The cat answered.

Violet stared hard at the ground. Suddenly she felt quite sick, unnerved and guilty and ashamed all at once. It had been a while since she’d learned about the basic concept of speaking to animals, yet somehow she’d never fully put that together with the idea that they might be aware and intelligent and quite similar to herself.

The cat sat back and observed, faintly disgruntled, though by what Violet could not tell. After a moment it shuffled into a more upright position, formal and intensely feline.

“The places this conversation has gone….” It sighed to itself, then looked Violet hard in the eyes and continued. “I’m going to tell you a story now. About a hunter.”

"A story? But—” Violet began to protest, confused and dismayed.

“Once upon a time there was a human hunter,” the cat plowed her objections aside. “…Just like I said. He was poor and very hungry and so went tromping off into the woods to find prey. He came across a plump, tasty looking deer and aimed his gun, but the deer cried out for mercy and the hunter felt bad enough that he let the deer go. A little while later he found a rabbit and the same thing happened; it cowered and begged for its life and so the hunter, faint with hunger, staggered on. Later in the day he found a grouse, and….” The cat looked expectantly to Violet, who said nothing.

“Goodness, child,” her companion sighed, disappointed. “The grouse froze, framed by the hunter’s gunsights, and begged for its life. The hunter was moved by the little bird’s pleas and let it fly away. He decided instead to eat some mint. Yet even as he grasped the plant’s stem he heard a tiny, pitiable voice drifting up from the leaves, begging for mercy. The hunter granted the mint clemency…and promptly died of hunger. The end.”

There was a moment of silence, Violet fiddling uncomfortably with a loose thread at the hem of her blouse.

“Does mint have a soul?” She asked at last.

The cat heaved a long-suffering sigh.

“That was not the message you were supposed to take from the story,” it said, alight with sudden irritation. “It doesn’t matter whether anything has a soul or not. Think of the state of nature, full of ensouled creatures trapping and eating one another. To not take part because of some sense of benighted morality is to inflict suffering upon yourself for no good reason.”

Violet suddenly felt quite besieged.

“It would be wrong to kill something that talks and thinks like a person,” she insisted. “That’s reason enough.”

“Like a person….” The cat fixed her with an unamused look. “You can’t place human features onto animals, we’re all quite different from one another, and certainly from you. Bees are different from butterflies are different from cats are different from deer…and so on until the end of the world.”

“That doesn’t change anything!” Violet stubbornly insisted.

“Because it’s wrong?” The cat asked, but already Violet knew it wasn’t a real question.

“Yes.” She growled anyway, and indeed her companion spoke almost over top of her.

“By living here amongst nature, you must expect that certain creatures will want to kill and eat you, just as others will expect you to kill and eat them. Moralizing at a wolf will no more stay its teeth than shouting at the sun will stop it from setting. Bloodshed is inevitable.”

“That’s horrible.” Violet said.

“If you are properly equipped and resourceful then you will have very little to truly fear.”

“And if I’m not then I’ll be eaten?” Violet had meant to sound accusatory but the cat only nodded, unfazed by the intensity of her glare.

“Yes,” it said. “The unprepared, the unwary and the weak will be devoured.”

“That’s….” Violet just barely stopped herself from saying ‘horrible’ again. That word only had so much mileage. “That’s not fair.” She muttered instead.

“It’s very fair.” Said the cat.

“What about people like Maud?” Violet countered.

The cat gave her a knowing look capped with a faint but very teasing smile.

“I can’t speak for everyone, but I wouldn’t hunt anything that could not run. Not unless it was exceptionally tasty.”

At this Violet could only grimace. She knew what the cat was doing, carefully stoking outrage in order to make her forget about some recent source of upset, but this was far too big to ignore or bury. An ugly, sick feeling had curdled at the bottom of her stomach and Violet felt faintly panicky, completely unsure what to do.

She wanted to get angry, to give in to the cat’s provocations, but did not rise to the bait.

“You can’t accuse me of being unwilling to change and then refuse to consider that I might be right.” She said.

“And if you are? So what. Who would enforce this very particular doctrine upon me? Your Glow doesn’t seem very interested in dropping from the sky and correcting my savage ways. Really, I haven’t noticed any sort of indication from an all powerful source telling me that hunting mice is abominable. It hasn’t been written across the sky in fire, and it certainly hasn’t been etched along the fabric of my very being. I won’t stand in the way of your remorse but, frankly, the fact that souls are more common than you realized should point you in directions other than some vainglorious declaration that all life is fated to be special.”

The cat hadn’t sounded angry, exactly, but there was a sternness to its tone that brooked no disagreement. Violet shook her head slightly. When at last she spoke her voice was quiet.

“I’m not asking you to stop hunting.”

“You’re doing it again.” The cat sighed.

Violet blinked.

“…Doing what?” She asked reluctantly, knowing already that she wouldn’t like her companion’s answer.

“Asking, no, demanding everyone be just as scared as you. Why should I cower when there’s no need to? And, for that matter, why should you?”

“If I’m so weak then why are you even bothering with me?” Violet glared, knowing she was missing the point of what the cat was saying but not caring one bit.

For a moment the cat said nothing, only fixed her with an appraising stare.

“Because I like you,” it said at last. “And because most things are weak to begin with. In a certain way I could be considered a mother cat, and you my ward.”

“I already have a mother.” Violet mumbled.

“A father cat then, safeguarding an exceptionally large and ungainly kitten.”

Slowly, Violet buckled forward and buried her head in her hands.

“You’re doing quite well,” the cat said helpfully from behind her fingers. “There’s strength in you.”

“I don’t feel strong.” Violet said miserably. Her voice was muffled.

The cat bit back a sigh and shuffled in place, thinking of something to say. A moment later Violet felt one paw land atop her knee, her companion attempting reassurance.

“I think I know what it is,” the cat said. “You want to relate to everyone. You have empathy.”

“That’s not a bad thing.” Violet mumbled, worried about what her companion might say next. But rather than dismissal or anything of the sort, Violet felt the cat pat her affectionately on the leg.

“Of course not,” it agreed. “And perhaps we’re talking past one another just a bit. Would you believe that when I come across prey out in the world, I talk to them far more often than I….” Violet heard the cat’s claws scrape across stone and knew it was simulating a killing stroke. She looked through her fingers, just in time to see her companion’s claws slip back into their sheaths, hidden in an instant by soft, black fur.

The cat settled itself very primly, meeting her gaze with a serious look in its silver eyes.

“I may kill smaller creatures and consume their flesh, but that does not erase the things they tell me, nor the value I find in them. I suppose, if we’re being very, very maudlin, you could say that even if I rip their bodies asunder and eat the choice bits, there’s still the soul left over.”

“And then what?” Violet asked. “What happens to a soul if it doesn’t turn into a demon or a spirit?” She looked uncertainly to her companion, not liking just how large and uncomfortable the questions she was dealing with had become.

The cat only continued its gaze, cool and serious.

“I guess there’d be heaven,” Violet stumbled onto the nearest, most familiar answer she could think of. “Or…do animals go to heaven?”

Her companion considered this for all of a second before shrugging, utterly disinterested.

“I have no idea.” It said, then looked to the north, as if sizing up the remainder of their journey. “…Anyway, daylight is burning and I think we’d be better off walking than not.”

Violet couldn’t fault that and stood up with a sigh. It was barely the end of the morning but already she felt drained. Only adding to the fatigue was a dully persistent feeling of guilt. Lurking just behind every thought seemed to be the fawn and its empty eyed mother.

Yet, what could she possibly do about any of it?

Sighing, resisting an urge to look back, Violet went after the cat, heading ever further north.