‘She who was soft and slippery’ loved this city. It was full of life, full of humans and their tasty food, and most of all, almost free of predators in their streets. The dusty air of the night made a bad place to live for almost all kinds of animals, rats included. But their ancestors, seasons and seasons ago, had slowly adapted to the air and now almost all of the newborns had some kind of affinity with coal dust, making it way less of a detriment and, like in her case, a plus. Tonight was dark as always, the cloud of fumes and ashes overhanging the city filtered the light of the waning moon and blacked all the light from the stars. This, to her black eyes, made the world all the more vibrant. No one was outside this deep in the night, save for some other rats of her species. They were the best of the race. How could it be otherwise? No other rat survived. The others were always lesser and had problems breathing when passing here, and had to get stuck living in places where the coal dust did not linger, like stables and shops, risking to be caught by humans. They were prettier too, with their shining grey fur, even if they all seemed black to a superficial observer. Tonight was all hers. This was the night she would show her colony, the great colony of the place of wood and clothes, that she was the best at what she did and was better than the posh rodents filling their bellies in the enormous palace of the big boss man of the humans. They all knew they just lingered in its kitchens and became slow and dumb drinking the spicy water, without ever going outside. She even suspected they lost the ability to breathe the air of their city. They were surely inbred too, since they never let any rat come into the colony. Well, until some days ago. More than ten rats from her colony went scouting near the palace, since a group of humans with lots of tissues and food and wood came into the city (probably bringing provisions for the humans of the palace), but they never came back.

She who was soft and slippery was going to the palace to ask the residents if they’d seen them. The air was getting warmer nearing the palace, and the smell of coal was diminishing. She did not like it. The coal dust was her protection, so she took a minute to get a lot of it in her fur, before starting to move again. She found a nice crack in the walls circling the big building, traversed the internal court unseen, trying so hard not to climb one of the apple trees to get a bite (they smelled so good…) and avoided the humans doing rounds inside of it by sticking to the shadows and the small bushes. She could smell food in the air: the kitchens must be near. She spotted a window that seemed half closed, and moved to see it better. It had indeed enough space to pass, so she climbed the stone wall as fast as she could and jumped inside. The kitchen, at this time of the night, was empty. There were some unwashed pots and buckets of leftovers that smelled divine, but she also caught a weird whiff of something… She started smelling the air that had the horrible taste of rosemary. Ehw. How were the rats living here able to function being near this stench everyday? Still, there was something else. It wasn’t the smell of butchered animals. It wasn’t the sweet rusty taste of blood. It was the smell of…

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A paw pinned her on the ground. An enormous white cat was standing over her, and she squeaked in terror. All the dust coal in her fur seemed to melt and become oily, and she used that to run away like the wind. The cat was hot on her tail, but the oily substance secreted by the rat made it slip, lose its balance and fall against a table. It made a big ruckus, and human voices seemed to come from out of the kitchen. She bolted, following a familiar smell of rodents, and got into a hole in one of the pantries.The pantry was full of grain dust in burlap sacks, and behind one of them, she saw a passage. She decided to follow it. The passage was narrow, and she couldn’t really understand how the adult rats of the palace could use it. It was probably for the younglings of the colony. The smell was getting stronger the more she went down the passage, which seemed to be going down in the ground. She came out to something resembling a cave. It had rocky walls, and there were also wood planks on the roof. A lot of wooden boxes were scattered around and piled up. And there was a strange sound coming from…

“Come live with us in the palace,” sang a voice, coming from the surroundings. No, it wasn’t a single voice, nor was it human. It sounded like squeaks, but also like… cries? She who was soft and slippery knew that something was very, very wrong, and the weird smell got stronger. It was almost like…

“There’s a room waiting for you”, sang the voice again, the volume growing, while the pink eyes of countless rats opened. It looked like a sky full of stars, something she had seen only when she was little and went on the high walls of the city. It looked mesmerizing, and she felt herself slipping away. The rats started coming out of the darkest places, and they weren’t chubby as she expected. They were small, and gaunt, like they were starving. All of them were a sickly gray color.

“Come on”, they chorused. She recognized two of them as her colony mates, the one that had come here scouting.

“He who runs fast, she who likes grapes, what are you doing? Why didn’t you come back? What’s going on?”

The two rats started slowly walking toward her. They weren’t smelling the air, they weren’t scuttling or cleaning themselves. They walked like they were sleeping, and they blocked her path. Behind her, three other rodents had blocked the path back. She looked around for a way to escape, but found none, and she was feeling tired and sleepy now.

Her two colony mates accosted her to the let and to the right, with their snouts against her ears. She recognized the spell now, weird as it was. She remembered her sire brought one of them inside the colony from out the city, and got his current moniker from the endeavor. It was the smell of a snake.

The words, that she could somehow understand, were drilling in her brain, and she heard one last thing as she fell asleep on the ground.

“Just let us adore you.”