Jamie hopped up onto a mossy wall with cat-like grace. His muscles bunched like a cat’s. He did a little crouch and wiggle before leaping, just like a cat. His self-satisfied purr sounded just like a cat. He demanded attention in a way that screamed ‘needy cat’. He even paused to lick his butthole with his back leg stretched out with the kind of shamelessness that only cats could exude.
But he wasn’t a cat.
Three days after the initial discovery of this fact, Lucas still hadn’t managed to wrap his head around it. When he looked at Jamie with mortal sight, he saw an average tabby cat with pretty green-gold eyes. But in his vitality sense, he saw-slash-felt a confusing mess of vitality, like a hundred animals had been mashed together and shoved into a container that was far too small to physically hold that much mass.
That mightn’t have been so bad, on its own. If he didn’t want to deal with the existential questions and instead wished to go on living with the delusion that Jamie was a cat and nothing more, surely he just had to retract his external vitality back into himself and stop sensing the problem, right?
Unfortunately not.
Ever since the moment Lucas’ vitality had sunk into Jamie’s body and the creature’s whisker had brushed against his heart, a connection had formed. No matter how far they went from each other, Lucas could feel Jamie’s vitality channels as if they were his own. He always knew where the creature was and what it was doing.
Take this very moment for example: Lucas was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree and munching on some kind of fleshy fruit he’d found growing in a grey bush a little while back, and he was absently misting the air with his vitality, letting it seep into the nearby plants and cataloguing the information it provided him. Jamie’s wall—a haphazard pile of rocks seemingly in the middle of nowhere presumably marking a boundary between two gently sloped hills—was well outside the range of his vitality, and still he could sense the little orange creature’s contentedness after snatching a fruit from Lucas’ stash and gobbling it up.
They had a bond. An unbreakable one, as far as Lucas could tell. Not that he’d tried particularly hard to break it—partly because he couldn’t guess how Jamie would react to the betrayal, but also because… he had insight into the creature’s mind, assuming he wasn’t being duped somehow, and it wasn’t a malicious being, particularly. While its form clearly wasn’t a cat, it had, if nothing else, adopted the mind of one, to some degree.
If it looked like a cat, moved like a cat, and thought like a cat, then surely it was a cat?
Jamie had settled down to bask in the sun, stretching out and blinking languidly right at the celestial body with no apparent damage to his eyes. There was nothing in his vitality or emotions to suggest ocular pain.
The thing was, there was no reason to distrust the creature aside from basic prejudice, and further than that there was always the possibility that Jamie could feel Lucas’ emotions in turn. What would he think if Lucas was constantly trepidatious at the not-cat’s presence? Jamie wasn’t trying deliberately to be deceitful, as far as he could tell. He was just… existing. In the way he knew how.
At the end of the day, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. He didn’t want the creature to be an enemy, so it was probably better not to go and recklessly make it one, surely? Even without the literal bond they’d formed, he’d grown attached. It was the only living thing he’d seen in days, aside from the beast that had literally attacked him. Jamie had never attacked him, which was a point in his favour. Unless you counted harassing him for food and tripping him up by winding between his legs as he was walking.
Lucas sighed. Nothing could be easy around here.
Finishing off the last of his midday meal, Lucas pushed himself to his feet and got back to walking. That was pretty much the story of his life since he’d left the overgrown city: walk west. Walk west, and hope he happened across people eventually. He hadn’t come up with any better plans.
Jamie hopped off the wall and followed as soon as he noticed Lucas was moving on, trotting along in his general vicinity, creeping closer to weave between Lucas’ legs every now and then for reasons that made sense only to the false feline.
Watching the way the ‘cat’ moved was actually kind of interesting, when he got past the mild instinctual horror of it. The mass of bones and flesh and disparate vitality channels shifted around beneath his skin, acting in some vague facsimile of a coherent body and somehow managing to give, to Lucas’ eyes, the outward appearance of a cat. It was uncanny. He’d never be able to tell there was anything amiss if not for the bond.
“So fucking bizarre,” Lucas muttered to himself. But wasn’t everything around here?
Picking his way through the valleys between rolling hills as the hours went by, Lucas mostly focused on his vitality channels. His work with his sub-channels was bordering on obsessive, but he couldn’t help it. It occupied most of his attention when nothing else was pressing, and very rarely was anything pressing.
His progress seemed exponential; he was opening sub-channels at a faster and faster rate as he gained more vitality to devote to the task. He was up to thirty now when he’d been at twenty just a few days before. Furthermore, he felt he’d barely made a dent in mapping out the full system, which was both an exciting and frustrating prospect. How long would it take to map out his entire network? His bottleneck at this point was finding the bloody things in the first place, tiny as they were. The ache was bordering on pleasant at this point. He worried that'd he'd developed a masochistic streak.
All of the sub-channels he’d opened so far were in his arms. A hunch had told him it was best to do them in order, making sure he didn’t skip or miss any. In retrospect, he wondered if that was the Gift steering him on the optimal course, or if it was his own logic. Maybe it didn’t even matter, and he could open them up anywhere in any order without issue. But he’d already started this way, so he figured he might as well continue it.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Aside from increasing his overall vitality capacity, which was a big boon in and of itself, the warmth of vitality spreading out from his bones and through his muscles was soothing. The sub-channels were thinner than a hair, and spread vitality right up to his skin. The permeating vitality was a calming, comfortable sensation, like his biceps were constantly being massaged, and he was eager to feel it spread through his entire body, however long that would take.
Lost in thought as he typically tended to be when he was seeing to his sub-channels, it came as quite the shock when he noticed an aberrant movement of vitality he didn’t consciously command. He froze mid-step and stumbled, hardly bothering to catch himself as he toppled over. His vitality was far more important than his body.
Frantic with sudden panic, he zoomed out from the sub-channel he was working on to take in the full breadth of his body, watching like a hawk as the gold aurora flowed through his channels. A hundred fluttering heartbeats passed by, and he saw nothing amiss there. But the feeling still persisted.
It took far too long for Lucas to comprehend the problem, and the realisation just filled him with more dread. He zoomed out even further, taking in Jamie’s system and… Lucas blinked, even though the abnormality wasn’t something he was seeing with his eyes.
Jamie’s vitality system was a mind-bending labyrinth. Trying to understand it felt like he was reading a foreign language while cross-eyed. But he didn’t need to comprehend it in full.
What Jamie was evidently doing made perfect sense to him. He’d been doing it himself for weeks.
Within Jamie’s false front leg was a mass of bones floating aimlessly and a tangled mess of vitality channels. Over the last few days, he’d never seen Jamie’s vitality do anything other than flow like normal. It had never once sped up or slowed down.
Now, a whisker-thin trickle of vitality had deviated from its course and was slowly threading itself outwards. Within moments, as Lucas watched on dumbly, it teased its way to the edge of Jamie’s false feline body. At that point, he expected it to turn around and begin the process of returning to the main vitality channel to form a small loop. Instead, it started… wiggling. Without rhyme or reason, it squirmed and wobbled a writhing path through Jamie’s leg, forming a chaotic bundle just as bad if not worse than the primary channels.
Lucas stared down at the creature. “Are you ever going to stop being weird?”
Jamie had settled down to wait, his legs huddled underneath him as he dug his claws into the ground. Meeting Lucas’ eyes, he meowed. It was horrifically cute, for an eldritch abomination.
“I didn’t think so,” Lucas muttered. “At least you’re keeping things interesting for me, I guess.”
By mid-afternoon, Jamie had opened five sub-channels of his own in the time it took Lucas to finish one. It was terribly unfair, and Lucas was trying not to feel jealous. Mostly failing. He told himself that he had access to magical abilities the cat lacked, but that didn’t make him feel better. Quite apart from the fact he was still dealing with how unearned his new skills felt, there was always the possibility that Jamie would hop up and perform plant magic at any moment. There was now proof that the bond was a two way street, after all. He wouldn’t put it past the impertinent little shit, after that earlier display.
Of course, just as Lucas was in the midst of wrestling with those feelings, Jamie had to go and display another ability entirely.
One moment, he was happily trotting along at Lucas’ side—with stamina that was rather abnormal for a cat; he probably should have picked up on the creature’s strangeness a long time ago—and the next he was frozen in place, staring at the hillside ahead of them with unerring focus. His ears pricked up. His pupils dilated. His back arched, and his lips peeled back to reveal sharp fangs. He hissed.
Through the bond, Lucas picked up on Jamie’s alarm, and snapped to alertness himself. There was no indication of what had set the cat off, just the resulting emotions: fear, anxiety, and, above all and most strangely… nakedness? What?
Before Lucas could parse that last emotion, Jamie’s vitality flared in his senses. In seconds, it was almost too bright to look at but simultaneously overpowering his mundane sight until it was all he could see, blazing until the channels and bones and everything else faded away into an indistinct glowing form. It started shifting like a molten liquid, and the bond itself started to burn like it was a channel itself. Lucas let out a gasp as the creature’s vitality flowed through the bond, flooding right for his heart.
His heart caught fire. He fell to one knee, wracked with pain. He grit his teeth, but a low scream tore from his throat anyway. Tears gathered in his eyes. It was too much. It was burning him inside out. He desperately clawed at his chest, but there was nothing to be done. The flow turned to a torrent turned to a deluge.
And then it was done as abruptly as it had started. The pain vanished in an instant. Not a hint of what he’d been feeling before lingered, though he still found himself gasping for air. Lucas patted himself down, especially around his chest, but found no injury.
“What the fuck was that?!” he ground out, his voice raspy, his throat sandpaper.
Looking around, there was no sign of Jamie, so no answers were forthcoming there. But he didn’t need to search. Turning his attention inwards, he found the answers to his questions before he could think to ask them.
Nothing in his vitality system had changed save for one rather glaring anomaly. Nestled in a pocket of space within his heart as if it was the most natural thing in the world, a miniature replication of Jamie’s vitality system had made itself at home. Feelings of relief and safety emanated from the creature, and he could tell it was feeling drowsy. He mentally poked at it, and it swiped back with sharp claws at the thing daring to interrupt its impending nap.
Lucas couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would’ve been more baffled. It would’ve been less shocking if the ‘cat’ had transformed into a teacup. Seriously, what was this thing? What had he bloody attached himself to?
As if sensing his confusion, a spike of exasperation emanated from the cat. With the air of an adult scolding an unruly child, it transmitted a pulse of vitality that thrummed through Lucas’ system, making straight for his brain.
When it hit, his senses expanded. Sound turned crisper, louder, granting him the ability to pick out blades of grass swaying on the other side of the hills, insects burrowing through the dirt, his own blood thrumming through his veins as his heart hammered.
And the thing Jamie was really trying to show him. Carried on the wind came a collection of distant sounds that Lucas briefly struggled to understand: a deep rumble, a melodious tinkle, a breathy whisper, and a husky reply. They mingled together into unintelligibility, distance rendering them faint echoes.
But he soon realised what they were.
Voices.
People.
Lucas broke into a sprint.