A black bird with a featherless head wheeled around in the sky above. Normally, this was behavior for condors who sighted victims or corpses. Here, though, all it meant was that the condor had a message for us, and maybe some non-murderous business to attend to.

The cloud cover of the night before had fled to the south. What remained was a beautiful sun that’d convinced Reed to serve breakfast outside, on towels and cushions.

The black bird’s path obscured the sun, and that was when we saw him. Granted. Bayce had been on the alert for almost a minute now, feeling what she could only describe as “a presence.” But once she saw who it was, she no longer seemed worried. Only on alert.

Reed and Bayce stood at attention, and when they saw Murder coming in for a landing, they hurried to meet him. I followed.

Was he here to give us another mission, like the first time I’d encountered him? My throat tightened at the idea. Sure, Reed had dealt with the evil spirit that time, with some mysterious help from Murder, but there was no telling what passed through the Vencian Wood, or how strong it was, or what it desired.

Or maybe he’d be giving us a mission that wasn’t entirely new, that involved Logy. It wouldn’t be surprising. And yet I was just sympathetic enough toward her that killing her—if that was what had to happen—wouldn’t be “a relief.”

Both cabinmates held an arm out to Murder. He looked at one, then the other, with silence and the shaking of an old man. Then, roughly and with great talons, he jumped up onto Reed’s arm. Fluttering his enormous wings to gain balance, he forced Bayce backward. When he was steady, I noticed that the color had drained from Reed’s eyes, just as that ranger Donovan’s eyes had been.

It was hard not to worry about someone when they looked like that. Almost like Murder was an old, small god.

Now Reed and Murder were simply…there, fidgeting every now and then but otherwise unresponsive to the world.

Bayce sidled over to me, kneeled down, and whispered, “This is Murder. He looks and sounds really dangerous, but that’s only to intimidate evil.”

“WEVE MET,” I spelled out.

“Oh?”

“WHAT REALLY IS HE? …ALSO IS THAT RUDE?”

“It’s extremely rude, but it’s fine,” Bayce said with a twitch of a smirk. “He knows that a mythical beast like you might have different norms. Murder guards the Wood and the village. If something’s amiss, he generally knows about it.”

“DEGALLE?”

“Yeah!”

He and Reed still stood eerily in place, their four eyes distant. “UM…SORRY IF THIS IS JUST TOO RUDE, BUT DOES MURDER DO ANYTHING HIMSELF?”

Bayce furrowed her brows for a moment. It was actually a little scary.

“Yeah, that’s even more rude,” she admitted. “It’s the classical role of a Vencian guardian. He gathers information and shares what he deems helpful so that the humans who consider themselves custodians of this land can act. If he used too much of his power, he’d die.”

“OH”

Suddenly a caw escaped the condor’s beak. He fluttered off of Reed’s arm and back onto the grass. Reed spent several moments wiping her eyes and blinking something away.

Then she turned to us. “First of all, Chora’s coming. She should be here soon, in about an hour or two.” She held a hand to her temple and seemed to be staring beyond the forest. “…Wow, that’s a lot of people.”

Bayce made a “come on” motion. “Let’s maybe help Taipha out? She’s scared and confused.”

Hey, I wouldn’t deny it. It was always weird and instinctively frightening, seeing this condor interact with and leave his mark on humans.

“Oh, right… When someone communicates directly with Murder, they don’t exactly use words. They can pass along images, and he sent a few images to me, some of which I…didn’t open up and examine until now.”

“NOW IM MORE SCARED,” I said.

“S-sorry! It’s nothing like that, w-whatever you’re thinking.” She brushed her hair back. “Alright, so there was a big assembly at Outlast, and DeGalle was there. Things grew heated, but it’s all under control now. They might even be…cooperating?” She shook her head. “Chora can tell us more specifically. But there’s something, um, more important, right now.”

Reed turned to me, all while the condor patiently waited, shifting and running a beak through his feathers like any bird. “Murder asked me questions about you that I couldn’t answer.”

That gave my imagination way too much free rein. What kinds of ominous questions did he ask her?

“To talk to Murder, you don’t need to hold out a wrist. You just…well, you need to be prepared for it to hurt.”

“That’s how it happens with holy things,” Bayce said.

“It used to be blood sacrifices.”

“Actually, in some places it still is that…”

Nothing about their chatter was helping! At all! In fact, the more they talked and the longer I stood here watching them, the more my nerves screamed.

Wait, said my Wisdom. Calm down and face the condor.

Instead of replying to my friends, I looked straight ahead. I pushed away the thought of get it over with and tried to fill myself with the solemnity that dealing with a guardian like a god seemed to require.

A solemnity that, funny enough, I’d never given the actual minor gods in my life. You just felt more awe with the creatures and things that were deeper mysteries.

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I wasn’t quite sure what those talons would grab onto, or even could. Then I kneeled as well as a cat could, sitting and lowering my head. I closed my eyes. Feathers ruffled past and then around me. Any moment now I would feel talons grip me, leaving the dark marks of old aura he’d surely left on Donovan and Reed’s skin.

Instead of feeling the grip, I felt a stinging pain all over. Only for an instant.

Then I felt nothing.

I might as well have blacked out, except that my consciousness was still fully awake. In fact, I could even “look around.” Like my head was a camera, only with nothing to see.

And I was also aware that another entity was in here with me, a second camera with nothing to see.

Unless he could read my thoughts.

Murder sensed my anxiety immediately.

Speaking to me in impressions and feelings, he said that my anxiety was of no consequence.

Which, um…was one way to try to reassure someone.

Reassurance (Murder said) was of no importance. Assurances and anxiety came and went, like leaves on a tree. It is the role of the living (Murder said) to stand firm like trees. A full-body impression of myself as a tree—a hallucination—a cohesive dream—played out within my mind and myself. One so overwhelming that I felt certain my body outside of this mindscape was trembling.

The tree of the dream became a sprout, sheltered by the mightier shade of an oak that had lived five hundred years. That protective tree, obviously, was Murder.

But the dream dissolved. Murder had questions.

The questions were about me, but…they were so general, and words so inadequate in a mental connection like this, that I saw no better way to answer it all than to simply play back the movie of my life in fast motion. I had no secrets to hide. If anyone at all asked me what I’d done or who’d I’d been, I’d tell them freely, wouldn’t I?

And I also thought about all things supernatural. Vencia was a world that knew of gods. No way he would be surprised at all by Arkmagi, endangered Makers or hidden blades. He would also have to know about Logy. In fact, he really should have known sooner. And here doubts about Murder started to emerge. Why didn’t he do anything or summon any fellow humans to interfere?

Because he was (he said) aware that the two of us had similar spiritual sources and natures. We were like the sun and the coming moon.

Was that (I said in disbelief) really all there was to it? He would let the people of his own domain suffer like that?

A fearsome turn, like the crack of a whip, came upon Murder. A fury at me. He had been watching this forest for five centuries, and in his younger years he’d interfered too much and brought ruin without purpose, or that destroyed purpose. (Startling impressions of blood on the snow.)

There were things guardians didn’t do. Namely, they did not interfere when there was a prophecy beyond their ken.

But this brought him to his most important question. And he couldn’t answer that question while I was here shrinking, partly guilty at my accusation and raging because guardians and gods never did anything that made sense.

Then again (Murder said) that was for heroes to do. He bathed the mindscape in a calming light, making me feel that I myself was the sun.

It was too overwhelming, a feeling that seared my inner eye and made me feel so abstractly, galactically huge that my atoms had flown apart and disconnected. That dream stopped as soon as it started, and the light I emanated became a light pouring into the mindscape from somewhere else, pulsing and somehow cooling.

It was soothing. So soothing that I almost didn’t want to admit it. It annoyed me that my very justified questions could just be smothered like this with a…a metaphysical blanket. But I couldn’t stay angry, and there was a deeper reason for that than the blanket of light itself.

To some extent, I could find my own answers. I was strong enough, and smart enough. Yes, maybe cocky enough… I could make things better.

Murder nudged me on to his final question. I could only talk to him in this mindscape when I was sufficiently open to him—a fact which, when it dawned on me, actually brought a bit of relief. If I’d reacted to his rage more harshly, I could have made like a bull at the rodeo and bucked him out.

Somewhere in my playback memories, there’d been a brief recap of me going to Cornutopia. There, I’d spotted the Vencian version of a marked-off crime scene, where apparently Logy had murdered a human.

As much as I felt for an innocent victim, I was also a cat, and mostly a carnivore. It was hard to forget that. Murder understood.

But he was a sworn guardian of human ways just as much as the ways of other animals. Not only had an innocent human been killed—which was, for the village, a tragedy on its face—but Logy had done it in human skin.

Now, Murder hadn’t had a clear idea of what kind of entity Logy was until he’d peered through my memories today. A guardian could be confused and searching too, though they might have a method. Even that couldn’t answer his question with certainty:

How should Logy be judged and punished?

…How could he even think to ask me that?!

First off, Logy had done so much more. She’d terrorized me and the people I cared about, evidently without remorse. Second, what would make me, a tiny little cat who needed protection under Murder’s oh-so-mighty tree arms, the right person to ask about her judgment? Were guardians just lazy, could they not even be trusted to make their own decisions?!

The general light pulsed. Murder redoubled his focus on me—I felt it. On me, not because I was the greatest judge, but because I was an interesting judge. Like he was genuinely curious about what a witless nekomata had to say.

That last sentence was me trying to be sarcastic and failing. I sensed no mockery or irony in him.

Murder’s question for me was simpler and more primal than “should she be charged and imprisoned for this one thing.” It was about her nature, which was very close to my nature.

If I had been a reincarnated wolf, at a high level, with that kind of power, maybe I would have devoured a human. Just the capacity to Morph and a storeroom of phantom knowledge wouldn’t have been enough to “make the wolf human.”

So no, I guessed Logy shouldn’t be judged as a human, but it riled me up to think that just being outside of human law might mean she “didn’t deserve” any punishment at all.

It was (Murder said) up to me to punish her, being of her nature. There were guardians of other places (I saw broad scrublands, stunning rainforests, a twisting ravine of kaleidoscopic stone stairs—the camps and villages of Vencia) whose ways were more brutal than Murder’s, but for Murder to punish Logy would be a betrayal of the code he and Outlast had set together ages ago.

When he put the vengeance on my shoulders…the desire and drive to do anything brutal slipped away. I guessed I did have my own personal forms of vengeance, even if they were more like beating someone in a footrace. Cats could be tricky, but I only had one, maybe two tricky bones in my body.

I wondered if Murder would at least keep a strict eye on Logy. He was the only one who could.

He communicated that he’d do his best without hesitation. Butterflies were much harder to spot and track than humans, though, and the limits of the guardians were, in the end, their mortal forms. I felt how vast he was beyond the condor body, the swirling, galaxy-colored aura that reached beyond time.

Murder suggested that I might actually be better at tracking her.

Oh, right. I literally was.

I changed my wondering to wonder if he could keep a closer eye on me, in that case, or even peer into my System, assuming that was even possible. Again, he proposed to do his best, though the Wood was busy and he could only be in one place at one time.

With a reaffirmation of our twinned natures, Murder withdrew and disappeared.

Suddenly I was no longer a disembodied camera in outer space above—I was Taipha’s mind’s eye sitting still in my brain. I felt like I would on any lazy morning as I struggled to leave my sleep.

Gradually I opened my eyes and became aware of the world again. The haze in my eyes looked like a veil of tears, but my eyes were dry, and they stung.

I squeezed them closed again. It felt like smoke was escaping them—somehow—and leaving behind the same dull pain that I now realized had branded my back. There must’ve been loads of talon marks on that.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, I thought. Then I felt odd and guilty. I’d just described a transcendental holy experience as “not so bad.”

In front of me and Reed and Bayce, the condor staggered away, then took off, beating wings so loud that they shivered the leaves. He wheeled in the sky once, then was gone.