Chapter 35: Tadpoles

Past the end of the next block was an empty space which seemed almost an aberration next to the banks of glass spires they’d been passing all day.

The space had not been the site of a fire or some other calamity, for Violet could see no ruins or old foundations. Instead it seemed to be nothing more than blank concrete beneath squiggles of grass and brush. On the other side of the uncanny space, directly opposite where Violet stood, she could see a square, two storied building with its front wall done up in blue tile, at least where rose and hollyhock vines had not already claimed dominance.

There had once been a grand floor to ceiling window all along the lefthand side of the building’s front wall, encompassing both floors, but it had long since cascaded into splinters, leaving a ragged curtain of dangling greenery to try and obscure the interior instead.

“Is this it?” Violet asked, looking to the beast.

i n s i d e ---- The beast specified.

Now that she’d had some time to look at it, Violet found herself reminded of the lamppost studded concrete field she’d come across on the very edge of town only a few days before.

This new space had no lampposts, though occasionally Violet had to dodge around raised concrete curbs that rose like artificial promontories from of a sea of mint and nettles and columbine flowers. Violet had seen columbines before and paused to examine these new ones, finding them mercifully normal. They bloomed in two tiers, blue and white petals unfolded around a spray of saffron stamens like stars at the heart of a new nebula.

The columbines looked like nothing less than little stars speckling the ground and the cat plucked one with its teeth before rising up to press the flower into Violet’s hand.

She accepted her companion’s gift with a wan smile.

“Columbine blossoms are edible,” the cat informed her. “And quite sweet.”

Violet grew thoughtful, rolling the flower’s stem between her fingers like a little parasol.

“I wonder if adding some to willow tea would make it taste any better.” She said.

“Perhaps,” the cat answered with an ambivalent shrug. “Only use the flower itself. The roots will give you a stomach ache.”

Violet nodded at her companion’s advice, checked the blossom over to make sure it wasn’t playing host to any cleverly disguised spiders, then delicately bit the flower from its stem.

The flavor was cool and fresh and, as the cat had said, refreshingly sweet, in the same way a not quite ripe strawberry was.

“Verdict?” The cat asked.

“It’s good,” Violet said. “Thank you.”

They walked in silence for a little bit before the cat spoke again.

“We may argue sometimes, and see the world in very different ways…and I might even, on very rare occasions, brush the outer edges of what might be considered pushiness, or that very broad human concept known as jealousy. No matter what, at the end of the day I will always be here for you, Violet.”

Violet dropped the columbine stem and looked down to where her companion was half swallowed by the grass. Its silver eyed gaze was very earnest. A warm, pleasant feeling had begun to bubble up within her.

“Can I hug you?” She asked.

The cat blinked, momentarily nonplussed, then managed a firm but incredibly bashful nod.

“Yes,” it said. “I—”

Violet scooped the cat into her arms before it could say any more and hugged it tight, her companion’s tail twitching frenetically against the fronts of her knees, as though searching for the ground.

“…I’m not built in exactly the right way to hug you back,” the cat said after a moment, front legs wriggling where they were folded against Violet’s chest. “But this is nice.”

Violet couldn’t contain a smile, for in addition to everything else the cat’s whiskers were tickling the side of her neck and she could feel the comforting regularity of its heartbeat thrumming out from beneath soft, warm fur.

Then, a moment later, the cat vanished out from her arms, leaving her holding air and the edges of something cold and blank.

“That being said,” the cat continued from where it had relocated itself atop her rucksack, voice very suddenly purring into her left ear. “I can hug you from here.”

Her companion dropped onto its stomach and laced a pair of velvety feline paws gently around her neck. It was a very delicate sort of hug, for the cat’s position was precarious, but it still managed to pull the gesture off.

Violet squirmed and giggled, the cat’s whiskers tickling her ear, then her companion pulled back and was seated on stabler ground, the tip of its tail swishing back and forth across the top of her right shoulder.

Moving with care, Violet reached out and grabbed the enticingly twitching appendage. The cat chuckled, then flickered in place, effortlessly freeing itself as Violet’s fingers closed on air.

“Tonight,” her companion said, moving its tail well beyond her reach. “I’ll show you how to talk to something completely nonhuman, and then after that, if you’re feeling up to it, we’ll go night walking.”

Violet recalled nighttime jaunts through the woods near her village, back before she’d crossed the river and started on her journey proper. It hadn’t been frightening, exactly, for the cat had always been close, but that had been back on her island, well removed from demons and monsters and….

“Do I need to know how to night walk?” Violet asked, the question tugged free by an uneasy burst of fear. “Didn’t you say it was best for me to hole up somewhere defensible and wait for dawn?”

“I did,” the cat admitted. “But, let’s say you can’t find somewhere to make camp. And your lantern is also broken, so you have no light.”

“Then I’d make a fire,” Violet said. “I have my spark lighter.”

“You’ve also lost your spark lighter,” the cat amended. “You have no way of making any sort of artificial light. This could very easily happen.”

Violet sighed but decided to play along. As much as she didn’t like envisioning any of this, the cat was right.

“Just so long as we don’t go too far away from camp.” She said at last.

The cat gave her a sharp toothed smile.

“We’ll just go over the basics,” it said, very deliberately side stepping her concern. “…In any case, your friend over there is staring at us.”

Violet looked up. Sure enough, the beast had stopped a few meters short of the vine choked building and was gazing expectantly back at her, the edges of its fabric fluttering gently in place.

“Ah.” Violet said to herself, then hurried to catch up.

The beast brightened at her alacrity and swept smoothly over to hold a thorny curtain of vines aside, allowing Violet to get a good look at the building’s interior. Her first impression was of high ceilings and a green tinged dimness that rendered the exact geography of the space strange and indistinct. Still, Violet could see that the whole left side of the building was one big room, perhaps twenty meters across.

Then her eyes adjusted enough to put the floor of the room together and she realized what she was seeing. Across the length of the whole room, punctuating ground Violet had assumed was flat and solid, were a number of abandoned swimming pools. The ones closest to her were small and perfectly round, perhaps chest high if she were to jump into them.

The tile lining their sides had once been a soothing blue, but time and neglect had long since muddied their vibrancy and now shapeless trickles of pale fungus drooled out from the cracks that had riven each pool’s decorative facade.

Beyond them, the center of the room was dominated by a winding, oddly shaped pool that had probably been picturesque in its prime, but now resembled nothing more than an old, mossy canyon, its sides chipped and bottom filled with inky silt.

Along the walls were hints of past infrastructure; old water fountains entirely consumed by toadstools and unsettlingly fleshy attempts at fungal flowers. Ahead of her, the cat stepped suddenly out from behind a sagging metal rack filled with heaps of a mildewy mulch that might have once been fabric.

“A hole in the ground,” it marveled, flashing the beast a look. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

The beast didn’t seem to notice that the cat had spoken at all, and Violet only rolled her eyes. The cat, quietly miffed by the non-response, stalked off investigate the nearest corner and its promontories of flowery lichen.

Violet cautiously advanced. There was a distinct scent of decay to the air, wet and sour, but neither the cat nor the beast seemed concerned. Whatever dangers the building held, they were not making themselves apparent.

“What is this place?” Violet asked, turning to look at the beast, which had paused in the window, halfway through the vines. She could see thin streamers of daylight passing diagonally through the space behind its jaws and out through its eye sockets, giving them a faintly reddish cast.

Suddenly, Violet became very aware that the beast as she knew it, the horse skull and the billowing shroud of white fabric, were only a material construction stretched tight over the unknown presence of something else. The realization had probably always been there, right on the edge of obviousness, yet somehow it had never occurred to her before.

A chilly shiver of unease tingled at the edges of her mind, but it was momentary and unmoored. Violet blinked the worry away, feeling slightly foolish for having had it in the first place. It didn’t matter if the beast’s physical body held no relation to its true form. After all, couldn’t the same thing be said about a human body and a human soul?

No useless fear.

The beast ducked its head and skirted delicately past her, drifting into the open air over top of the nearest pool. It hadn’t answered her question.

o v e r -- h e r e ---- Said the beast, and set to drifting in the direction of the room’s far side, keeping a careful eye out to ensure that she was staying close.

Violet took a slow step forward, thick pads of waterlogged moss squishing beneath her feet. Her eyes were adjusting further as she left the window behind, and as they did so Violet became suddenly aware of a curious illumination tracing the edges of the room, entirely separate from what isolated rays of sunlight managed to pierce the vine choked windows.

At first she wasn’t sure if she was even seeing anything unusual, for the illumination was so pale as to be colorless, a subtle glow rendering some spaces slightly more visible than others. Spidery drips of fungus had been lifted from their surroundings as though elevated, freed from the fuzzy dimness that consumed all else.

Their luminescence wasn’t of the sort that actively lit up great swathes of ground, but rather a catch to the air, as though certain corners had simply forgotten to be dark. But this wasn’t what the beast had wanted to show her, for it paid the fungus no attention and continued on to the very back of the room, to a wide, rectangular pool that was much deeper than all the others. Its bottom was sloped, Violet saw, perhaps two meters at the shallowest, then….

Violet hesitated in approaching the very edge, for the pool’s floor was sloped, dirty tile disappearing into an inky tide of water that had collected in the deep end. There was no telling how much water was down there, for her depth perception had been crippled by the dim and suddenly all she could think about was the river and how cold it had been.

Before she could worry any further, the beast did a curious thing. Smoothly, silent as ever, it lifted a few meters into the air, as though climbing an invisible ladder, then executed a graceful dive into the pool below, fabric sleekly fluttering.

It pulled up just before hitting the bottom, and beneath the trailing edges of its fabric, the water lit in streamers of brilliant color. And it really was color; reds and blues and vivid sun bright yellows exploding along ribbons and silently sparkling explosions of indigo and white. It bled through a patchwork of silt and algae, the debris sending light spiraling haphazardly in all directions, printing vivid fractals across the walls of the pool, restoring some modicum of their old form.

Violet jolted back and very nearly stepped on the cat, which had zipped over to investigate. Her companion was visibly surprised, ears pinned back and whiskers fluttering. Its eyes, huge and silver, were filled with spinning dazzles of reflected light.

As the initial shock of color faded Violet realized that the water itself was not glowing, but rather playing host to things that did. Tiny wriggling forms swam and darted and squirmed across the bottom of the pool, spooked by the beast’s low pass, and their luminance ignited once more as it swooped down again like a diving hawk, air whistling through the more ragged edges of its fabric.

The beast was grinning quite broadly, Violet realized, and when it settled back next to her, as though nothing had happened, Violet could only stare, her gaze swinging from the pool to the beast and back again.

She didn’t know what to say.

“Tadpoles.” The cat broke the silence after a moment, voice light with surprise.

And indeed there were, every single one aglow, tiny bodies rippling with pulses and flares of light. Some were more mature than others, Violet could see tiny legs kicking here and there, but for the most part they were fat little dots attached to extravagantly finned tails, some several inches long, swirling over top of one another in patterns and spirals, the glow of their dance spangling the ceiling high above.

Slowly, Violet sat down, legs crossed, and stared into the bottom of the pool. The very edges of the tadpole swarm had begun to dim, some of them realizing that the beast had left, but the panic, so incandescent as to be exhilarating all by itself, sang across the edges of the air. Properly cultivated, Violet thought it could be self perpetuating, for it felt as though some of the tadpoles rather liked being scared, if only because it made them immensely, indescribably beautiful.

“How did you find this?” She asked the beast.

The beast offered only a humble shrug, clearly enjoying her reaction.

“I will admit,” the cat said. “There is a possibility that I have underestimated this particular hole in the ground.”

Violet smiled and shrugged off her rucksack, the beast settling next to her. Sandwiched between her companions, the amphibian light-show still ongoing, she felt newly comfortable. Even the moldering decrepitude of the building couldn’t take that away from her.

“Why do you think they’re glowing?” She asked, looking to the cat.

“Why do you think?” The cat asked in turn.

“Can’t you just tell….” Violet began to say, wondering why the cat had to turn even this into some sort of lesson or demonstration, but the answer came to her even before she could become properly annoyed. “Is this the same glowing stuff the herons were using back home?”

The cat nodded.

“A variant,” it confirmed. “Though the way the tadpoles are using it is very different.”

Violet considered. The herons had rubbed their beaks with luminescent algae and used it to lure frogs while hunting at night. That clearly wasn’t the case here, for the tadpoles were entirely submerged, yet not losing even a hint of their brilliance.

“They must be eating it.” She said.

“Indeed,” the cat agreed. “I think that this type isn’t set off by motion so much as stimuli from the body. Once consumed, it becomes a part of the tadpole.”

Violet stared into the chaotic swirl at the bottom of the pool once more, trying to imagine what it would be like for her to glow. It would be convenient for keeping demons away, she thought, even if….

“They’re still frogs, right?” She asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well….” Violet had to take a moment to order her thoughts. “I guess it’s like the flowers and the false animals and all that. At what point does something stop being what it started out as?”

The cat stood and then placed itself in front of her, its back to the very edge of the pool. Lit from behind, her companion suddenly lost every bit of detail the dimness had afforded it. Now it was simply a cat shaped pool of shadow but for the silvery glow of its eyes.

“Now we’re getting into very complicated questions that I cannot answer,” her companion said. “The only thing I can say is that the world will keep spinning, and everything in it will continue to change and adapt, learn and…sometimes find terror in those changes.”

“I’m not scared of the tadpoles.” Violet said.

The cat laughed, and she could see its teeth flashing in the darkness.

“I know. You’re not scared of a lot of things anymore, specifically because you’ve changed as a person. Otherwise you would have been eaten by now.”

The beast shifted uncomfortably and placed itself closer to Violet, the move quietly protective. The cat’s eyes went lazily over but it paid the beast no mind.

“There is no default state to the world,” the cat continued. “A million years ago things were so different as to be unrecognizable, just as they will be a million years from now. Across time I’m sure there were always little girls and cats and beasts searching for answers amidst the flux, but I can be certain in saying that whatever they found was only ever appropriate for their time. I can tell you all about willows and yarrow root, but my advice will only hold relevance for as long as willow trees exist in the world.”

“But willow trees have always been around.” Violet said. A strange, tight feeling had risen within her. It was fear, but not directed at anything specific.

“Not always,” the cat said. “Nor will they be. A million years ago there might not have been anything like a spark lighter, a sigil, or even a demon. There may have been little girls and cats, but back then I would have been more likely to pounce on you than say hello.”

Violet furrowed her brows.

“What are you saying?” She asked. “That none of this will matter?”

“It will matter to us,” the cat said, its tone gentle. “Even if nobody else notices.”

“But of course they will. The Glow will get rid of the demons, and….” Violet knew better than to go any further, especially with the cat right there. She sighed, the noise small and harsh.

Her companion was silent for a moment, then placed a paw upon Violet’s knee.

“Eventually there will be no Glow, no little girls or cats, no forest or sky or sun. Eventually all things will stand still, but not for a very long time.”

“Entropy?” Violet asked bleakly.

“Entropy.” The cat confirmed.

“…Then why bother doing anything?” She asked.

The cat gave her a surprised look, ears twitching.

“Were you not listening? I thought I made all of this perfectly clear.”

Violet stared. The cat’s eyes rolled extravagantly.

“Even if the end of the world were coming next Tuesday at about noon, it would still be worth doing all sorts of things,” the cat continued. “Because the end of the world, no matter how close, is never quite now.”

Violet could think of nothing to say and so instead opened the top of her rucksack and withdrew another of the cardboard cartons. This one featured a fat green frog most prominently upon its labeling.

“Do tadpoles eat crackers?” She asked, supposing that it was time for the conversation to fall upon easier themes for a little while.

“Probably,” said the cat. “You may need to break them into smaller pieces….”

The beast’s jaws fell slightly open as it contemplated the cracker carton.

w h a t -- d o e s .. .

w h a t -- d o e s -- t h a t -- o n e -- s a y ? ---- It asked.

Violet turned the carton over and squinted at the animal facts, their lettering illuminated by discordant ripples of amphibian light.

“Did you know….” She began. “Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.”

“Yes, actually,” the cat said. “That hummingbird this morning did a very lively backwards hop when you tried to talk to it.”

“So did you.” Violet countered, and at this the cat shuffled in place, acutely embarrassed.

“I may have been a bit startled,” her companion admitted. “All the same, I know what to expect now, if you try to pull off that particular dialect again.” It nudged her heavily with one shoulder, the glitter of a sharp toothed feline grin apparent in the flickering half-light.

“I won’t.” Violet promised, then took a lion shaped cracker and very carefully crumbled it into little pieces before scattering the crumbs into the pool. They fell in a wide arc, and the tadpoles beneath each tiny splash lit up extra bright for a split second each. It was like watching a flurry of shooting stars, and Violet was quick to do it again.

“These are going to be some exceptionally rotund frogs when they grow up.” The cat observed after another half dozen tosses, and Violet colored, deciding to eat the next cracker herself.

Gently, the beast nudged her shoulder with the very tip of its nose.

a r e -- t h e -- o t h e r s -- a b o u t -- h u m m i n g b i r d s -- t o o ? ?

Violet squinted at the carton. Perhaps the plastic wrapping on this one had not been perfectly airtight, for the text on the lower half of the box was slightly blurred, the ink running in tiny streaks. Still, she could just about put together the words.

“Did you know that ravens can imitate human speech?” She read, glancing up to see the beast’s reaction. It cocked its head, newly contemplative.

“They can do more than that,” the cat said. “I’ve had excellent conversations with ravens before, in all kinds of speech.”

Violet supposed that was true of most animals, at least the ones who shared the cat’s level of knowledge.

“Still,” her companion continued. “That was written back in the days when human arrogance was easy. It’s much more difficult to remain ignorant now.”

“What do the ravens say?” Violet asked.

The cat shrugged lightly.

“Oh…this and that. Lots about flying and seeing the world. Ravens are a species that naturally pool experiences and memories, so every bird knows at least a little about everything.”

“Like you.” Violet said.

The cat glanced at her, momentarily surprised, then seemed to warm to the comparison.

“Yes,” it decided. “Like me.”

“I remember you saying once that if you were to be anything other than a cat, you’d like to be a great blue heron.” Violet said, unable to resist teasing her companion just a little.

“Ravens may be very clever,” the cat said. “But the beak of a great blue heron is a marvelous killing instrument.”

Violet thought back to her recollection of the herons and couldn’t contain a shiver as she remembered how effortlessly one had picked a frog out of the inky water and then skewered the poor thing.

“I think I like you better as a cat.” She said, then threw another cracker to the tadpoles.