We sat in the snow with the pixies and talked. Well, talked is a bit of a stretch - Hush, Wuot and I talked, while there was a lot of pantomime, dress up and squeaking from the Small Folk, all of it orchestrated and encouraged by Berryman Devil-lad. They had a surprising number of outfits and props (made from twigs and leaves and small stolen things), and seemed particularly fond of dramatic death scenes. The majority of these made jubilant use of the corpse rats, and from this we were able to understand they were seeking protection.

They wanted to use my cottage as a base, with me as their guardian. In return they would… well, I was still not entirely sure what they would offer, but they were certainly going to do whatever it was with great gusto.

The fact that they hated the rats was good enough for me.

“Why did they stay?” asked Wuot, curiously. The big goose yawned. She was finding the whole business very annoying, having to rely on Hush and myself for intelligence. “In the forest, I mean? Why did they not leave with Montadie? I thought lots of the Small Folk left then.”

“Not all,” said Hush.

“Obviously,” said Wuot.

“Ay up, duck,” said Berryman, positioning himself in front of her, grinning, tiny brown arms akimbo. He was wearing a vest made of withered, brown moss, and a tiny red hat on top of his pinecone head. Or was it a berry?

“Goose,” said Hush, “Wuot is a goose.”

“Duck,” said Berryman, very earnestly, before bursting into peals of laughter.

“Why did you stay?” I asked him, after the little pixie had regained his equilibrium. Berryman Devil-lad exchanged a look with Polly-wally who shrugged.

“Home,” he said, spreading his arms. He tapped his head, the brittle pinecone sound barely audible. “My tree.”

Now I was getting a look at the odd assortment of Small Folk gathered in my winter garden I realised they were all young. It was hard to judge - in a strange, uncanny way the Small Folk looked like two-leggers, and in other ways like beasts, or spirits. I knew two-leggers got wrinkly as they aged, and sometimes their hair fell off or changed colour. Their proportions also changed.

Small Folk were similar. These ones looked like a mix, and also a bit like plants and… things from the forest. One or two had broad faces with skin so grey it looked like troll-rock. Berryman was not the only one with animal parts, or a seed head. Some of them had leaf wings, or clothes or twigs for limbs. They were a mash up, people caught in between. Not that it seemed to bother them.

I felt a brief moment of sympathy. How terrible not being a cat! But besides the weirdness of them, I could tell, these particular Small Ones were teenagers. Not babies, not adults. In between in many ways. I relayed this information to Wuot, who proceeded to make rude intimations about my and Hush’s brain’s not being fully formed, and that was also why we thought staying behind was a good idea.

“What’s your excuse then, old goose?”

“I’m very aggressive,” she said sweetly.

Berryman Devil-lad coughed and stamped his foot, and we returned to our negotiations.

Once I had realised, (helped along by impassioned mime and encouragement) that ‘wang the nanglin’ shoe, hup hup’ meant remove the horseshoe from the front door, I did so, knocking it aside. My Maud probably wouldn’t notice for a while. I put it in a bush for safe keeping. Perhaps one of the Small Folk could replace it with a lookalike? They seemed talented with deception.

Before I could finish the thought, Small Folk were flooding into the house whistling and hooting.

As they stampeded past, I had a brief moment where I doubted the wisdom of this.

Best behaviour had been promised. I had threatened to return the shoe if even one tiny fae foot was placed out of line but they were already swinging from the rafters and dancing around the oblivious Maud. She looked up for a moment, confused. As if she could sense the freewheeling, screaming ecstatic fairies rampaging through the kitchen. She shrugged and then carried on with what she was doing.

“No breaking anything,” I shouted. “No stealing anything!” I paused. “Unless I say so of course.”

Berryman Devil-lad gave me two tiny thumbs up, and that was that.

My house was now full of fairies. Fairies chattering in the cellar. Fairies dancing on the roofbeams, rows of them set up on the shelves, tiny naked fairy bottoms sat side by side on the wood, with more resting on Maud’s pots and pans and jars.

The lady of the house continued blissfully unaware of her new houseguests. Still muttering over her cauldron, and playing with her sparkly lights, she had progressed to bottling the fruits of her labour, which meant she would soon retire to her bed in the loft to sleep for the next ten hours or so, leaving the house smelling funky.

I eyed the Small Folk with consideration.

Hush and Wuot were convinced a small, fae army would be of use. I was less sure. If they could concentrate for longer than five seconds the pixies might make good spies and scouts, this much was true. To actually fight the rats? That seemed unlikely. Ah well. I could always return the horseshoe and chase them all out. Wuot and Hush returned home, and that night I went to sleep in the middle of a pile of pixies. They made surprisingly good bedfellows.

When I woke the next morning they were all gone.

Stretching, I wondered if it had been a particularly vivid dream until I found Polly-wally snoring behind a jar of pickles, her mouth smeared with the vestiges of one of Maud’s potions. The rest of them were goodness knows where, probably up to no good. I asked her where they had gone but she seemed too drunk to speak.

For the moment I was just pleased to have the cottage to myself again. I did notice it was cleaner than usual, which was a surprising side effect.

Maud was looking around with bleary morning eyes, and a wrinkled brow, clearly trying to remember if she had done the washing up before going to bed. I left her to her confusion, and set out to do my patrol.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

All was well.

The forest continued to slumber in its winter blankets. There were no rats. Nothing untoward. Peaceful, cold, serene. I greeted River, who was sluggish and frozen on her edges, and then did my exercises, before working on my cultivation.

It had been a while since I had had the opportunity to simply be.

Since I had broken through to Radiant everything had moved so quickly. Walking through the wintery woods, I experimented some more with my new, super beautiful dantian. I already knew I could send qi down just one channel of my body, connecting it to a particular part. I had already been doing this for a while but now I was Radiant the difference was far more noticeable. If I needed to think clearly, or was tired, a shot of qi to the brain sparked me awake. If I needed extra power for a jump, my back legs became momentarily extra powerful. If I needed to see something beyond my already enhanced vision I could augment my eyesight. The difference in strength was intoxicating.

My reverie was broken by a small snowball to the snout.

Berryman Devil-lad and some of his friends had found me.

“Seen any rats?” I asked them.

Two score fairies vigorously shook their heads.

“Done anything useful?”

Much enthusiastic nodding.

“What did you do?”

One of them stepped aside, revealing a very small, wonky snowman. Another held out a handful of pebbles. Another produced a nobbly, human sized woollen sock from somewhere about her person, and brandished it at me, like a flag. Six or seven of the other fairies then proceeded to produce various other oddments, socks, undergarments, waving them at me with great pride. Clearly stolen from the nearest two-legger’s washing line.

“Those better not be Maud’s,” I said sternly, nodding at a pair of bloomers.

They shook their heads, apparently shocked at the suggestion they would steal from their host.

“Oh well, carry on, I suppose.”

“Sithee, kittlin!” shouted Berryman, and then they were gone.

I went on my way, cultivating, watching.

***

Time passed.

I grew older, and stronger, and at length the peaceful snows of deep winter melted into the slush of spring. Before I knew it, buds and baby creatures were everywhere.

Still the rats did not come.

The necromancer did not come.

The Small Folk kept watch but the only rats who invaded were in small groups and relatively easily picked off. What were they waiting for?

“Death,” said Montadie at my next full moon class. “They wait for death. They will move when the necromancer moves and you will not be able to outrun that flood.”

I opened my mouth to protest.

“Yes,” she snapped. “Yes, I know you do not plan on running. Speaking of which, your physical training is falling behind.”

I glanced down at my gleaming, perfect, well muscled body, as beautiful in my dreams as it was in real life. This comment did not seem quite fair. Montadie was pushing me hard now, harder than she had ever pushed me, and I understood why. I drew myself up tall, but it seemed my esteemed teacher was in a mood.

“You are working hard on your cultivation but you will not be able to fight anything off if you do not find a master who specialises in feline combat. I suggest you seek one out. And quickly.”

Montadie was not wrong. While I had opened my seventh and eighth meridians and could now store enough fire qi in my dantian to roast a rat in one plume leaving behind only claws and a few sooty pieces of smoking hide, I had only had my siblings, Wuot and Moððe to spar with.

Wuot was a fearsome opponent, but I had beaten her many times.

Moððe was interesting to fight, since his flight forced me to use my qi externally in ranged combat. This was challenging and invigorating. Still, fighting a giant moth was probably not the ideal experience to prepare me to fight overpowered demonic squeakers.

I returned to the high bluff and spoke more with the gryphon, but beyond the odd platitude she was not interested in teaching me till I could fly. This was demonstrably unfair but I set aside my frustration and roamed the soggy spring woods, searching for… well I knew not who.

I wanted to go and observe the rats for myself, thinking perhaps I could start picking them off one by one in their lair, weaken them before it was too late. But Montadie said I announced my presence as loudly as a beacon and I believed her.

Not ideal in this situation. It was only natural that all would feel my magnificence, and feel me coming. Working on suppressing my qi was like the opposite of manifesting a killing intent. Quiet, close, controlled. This was difficult. As my qi reserves had grown, so had my Radiant energy field.

After many weeks I had it quiet as a whisper. Still me - sunshine, fire, moon, mist, star, water, ice and snow beautiful me. But quieter. It should also be easier to disguise myself now the days were growing lighter. I just needed to add other qi signatures to my own. Easy.

I studied others, looking for inspiration. Berryman Devil-lad’s was all forest-pine and earth, stronger than an actual pinecone, but similar. This must be how the rats sensed him. But I knew the rats tormented the pixies so that was no good. The obvious answer was as a shadow. No one suspected a shadow of being anything else than what it was. And black cat that I was, I was already half way there, and almost impossible to perceive in the deep dark. Unfortunately the shadows and I were not yet friends.

We knew about each other though, and eyed each other up in the night. It did not ignore me like metal, but we were still not close.

“Darkness is but the absence of light,” said Moon, many times.

“You cannot have one without the other,” said Mama. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars. Light is your primary affinity but it is only part of the whole. You must embrace your whole self to embrace the whole world, you cannot pick and choose.”

That may be the case but in the meantime I surrounded myself with the tiny strands of earth and forest qi that I was currently able to cultivate, and mixed those with the same sunlit strands that were the same qi signature as a spring born hare. This was a mistake. The rats identified me as prey before I even got close to their lair.

One exhilarating chase later I managed to shake them off, having learned nothing.

Next I tried a rock. It was demeaning to think of myself as a rock but the qi signature was not that complex. It worked, humiliatingly, but meant I had to stay still. Rocks were not known for their swiftness. I dealt with it by creeping slowly close, awkward, tedious. Stopping and starting. Like this, I managed to observe the rats without them observing me.

I dared not get too close, but I watched and watched, seeking any knowledge that would help me destroy them. I saw a heap of two-legger corpses, five or six of them, dressed like warriors, weapons strewn across the rotting ground. The bodies looked old, although it was hard to tell. My heart sank. Was this perhaps the result of Montadie’s warning?

A shadow moved and I stiffened. A living human walked by. The necromancer - a tall greasy man who smelt of death, trailed by another snivelling man. This second one was interesting. He did not just smell of death, he reeked of it. Perhaps the draugr of whom Ule and Moððe spoke? The pair were clearly busy with something, but I could not divine their purpose.

The rats lived off their scraps, coming and going from the rocks and holes in the ruin. Their cultivation was repugnant, and their meditations undisciplined. The entire sect, if you could call it that, was undisciplined. Power trumped everything, and I was convinced half of them had rotten brains already, their demonic cultivation eating away at their own flesh as well as stealing the qi of others.

A continuous stream of small forest creatures were brought into their lair, disappearing into tunnels I could see but dared not enter.

Once, I thought I caught a glimpse of their king - the much talked of For-Molsnian himself. Just for a moment I saw a golden crown resting on a scraggy head, a glint of red, a body bigger than mine, twelve tails, and an aura to make me quiver.

I crept away quietly, and redoubled my efforts.