Could a cat truly be blamed for being a cat?

Even if said cat was in reality, a reincarnated soul that could harness powers beyond my understanding and grew larger every time his skeleton burst from its flesh?

It was a perfectly natural occurrence for house cats to bring their prey back to the door of their masters, out of a desire to consume it in a place of safety or by the instinct to impart the art of the hunt to others. Under normal circumstances, however, the slain prey was a bird or a rodent and not a boar whose sheer mass threatened to crack the table it lay dead atop.

I could say with almost complete certainty that Sam had not been searching for safety.

No, I didn’t think Sam could be blamed. Arcane nature or not, if it looked like a cat, it was at least part cat.

“You have my gratitude, Samsara. Your gift is well received.” My mother said, quick on her feet. “What do you intend for us to do with it? We could build a pyre and burn it in your honor?”

“It is to be eaten. How you chose to prepare it is of no concern to me. I had my fill with its mate.” My familiar stated as if he wasn’t subservient to the daughter of the head of the manor.

A hand gently touched my back.

“What’s going on?” Anna whispered into my ear.

I moved out of the way so she could see.

“Eww, what the fuck is that?” She said, turning away from the boar as soon as she laid her eyes on it.

“Language!” Ms. Lao snapped.

My mother glanced at me, terrible mischief in her emerald eyes. She addressed the guard that had been the victor. “Driskt, you and the other guards are able to clean and prepare the beast?”

“Expertly, Lady Aubrey.” Driskt answered.

My mother smiled. “Do so. It is Amoranora after all. It would do us all good to have our spirits lifted,” She addressed everyone that had packed into the kitchen, including the boar. “Save your hunger. Tonight, we feast!”

The mischievous little fox my mother saw in me had not come from nowhere it seemed.

Minutes later, the guards had dragged the boar back out of the manor with Arthur’s help and Anna had gone to help her mother back to her room. My mother had thrown herself into preparing for the feast, which was something she had done for me a handful of times before I had escaped.

Sam, evidently having found the time to groom his blur fur free of the gore, spoke to me. “If you intend to visit The Well, now is this time. Sleep will take me soon.”

With everyone else occupied, there was nothing else for me to do. I started towards the back door. “Shall we?”

The light in the well house was cast from four lanterns that hung high off the ceiling by chains. Their light was dim, making the small room feel like it was caught in an eternal dusk. Once I had closed the heavy marble door, it was just bright enough for me to not trip over my feet when I was undressing or getting in and out of the pool.

Sam padded around the circular pool, his big blue eyes held upward. “Still, even during my absence, you refuse to provide me with somewhere suitable to observe you.”

The stone walls were bare, which meant there was no ledge or hold that my familiar could climb up to in order to gaze down at me in judgment.

“Do you ever,” I asked, pulling my dress over my head and throwing it in the general direction of the bench. “miss the boarding house?”

Sam answered without hesitation, his deep voice echoing shallowly up the walls and off the ceiling. “No.”

“Honestly? Not even the lights over the mirror? You loved that spot.” I slipped my legs into the pool, just like everything else in Erosette, it was pleasantly warm. I never had any reason to fear coming out of The Well in a fit of shivers or running out of enough hot water to view another memory. It was always the same inoffensive temperature, always. And, the water was salted. I never put salt in it, I never saw anyone put salt in it, and the walls and bottom of the pool were solid marble so it did not salt itself.

I sank into the water and lay on my back. I did not understand how, but the salt kept me afloat on the surface of the water without any effort.

Sam settled himself on top of the bench. “I do not love, I . . .”

The water filled my ears and deafened me momentarily. I closed my eyes. I may have missed the old house and my bathroom, but the well house had been made with a purpose in mind. The only time it had ever been easier for me to sink into The Well was when I had been asleep and not known I was doing it.

The last ripples from my entry into the pool bobbed my ears out of the water long enough to hear Sam finish what he had been saying.

“Are no birds here. There were birds there.”

Then I left reality behind and felt my mind spiral into itself.

I opened my eyes in the only place that was my own.

Temporarily.

The same as it always was, I found myself standing in a circular room made entirely of a seamless black material. I took the black door from the room that had once held the trimetal walls and entered The Well proper.

It was the only door left in the place inside my mind.

The Well had changed.

Sometime before I had been moved to Erosette, I had compared The Well to a library. In the time it had taken for me to be moved, get settled, and become comfortable enough in the well house to enter The Well, my comparison has been rendered true.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I had never actually been in a library, my only experiences within them had come from memories.

The near infinite amount of halls and doors had given way to a near infinite amount of shelves and books. A trimetal staircase spiraled up from the center of the room and led to an uncountable amount of identical rooms above, all filled with books that held the memories within their pages that the doors once contained. The same was true of the staircase leading down.

There was only one explanation for the sudden changes to the ethereal structure inside my mind and it wasn’t me.

The thing at the bottom of The Well that had spoken with me and kept The Mothers from learning I had broken through their barriers, whatever it may be, must have heard my words and taken them to heart.

If it has a heart. I had tried to speak to it several times once I had gotten back into the routine of things. It hadn’t answered, which I should have expected but it annoyed me regardless.

It had lived within my mind for over ten years and had communicated to me once in that time. At that rate, I would have to carve a reminder to myself in my skin so I could remember to ask why in ten years time.

The Well’s new form was not just shelves and books. A collection of comfortable chairs spread around a roaring fireplace waited for me on every floor. At first, having fire so close to so many flammable books had seemed like a terrible accident waiting to happen. Then, I had remembered that everything I could see was a part of an ethereal structure that only existed within my mind and dismissed the notion that the fire was even real. If I was wrong, having a near infinite amount of books go up in flames would probably be enough to melt me from within and at that point I would be beyond the ability to worry.

Walking between two high shelves, I ran my fingers over the spines of the books as I went. Every new spine the tips of my fingers brushed over, a momentary glimpse of the memories bound within it flashed in my mind. Seleca, Etain, Givins, Wing, Melathandra. I passed hundreds more, dropping my hands down before every brown binding only to raise them up once it had been left behind me.

The Mother in Brown had chosen to punish me first. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me or when it would happen, but I couldn’t keep myself from avoiding the color all together.

I reached the end of the shelves and started for the next when a sound stopped me in my steps.

Sounds in The Well that were not caused by me were rare and in my experience, they were normally the prelude to me being smashed or the floor dropping out from under me. I spread my feet and braced myself against the shelf, waiting for something to happen.

It had not been the thunk that sounded so much like a metallic heart thumping within The Well and after a moment, I found the courage to move.

Around the corner, a book with an orange binding had inexplicably fallen from its place on the shelf, its covers laid open and its pages bent and folded against the floor,

“Did I shake the shelf?” I asked aloud, knowing I hadn’t. Even if I had, the empty slot where the book had been before it had fallen was on the shelf opposite the one I had braced myself against.

How had it fallen? Had the thing at the bottom of The Well decided to communicate with me?

I remembered the last words I had heard from its strange voice. You remind me of. . . him.

I picked the book up by its spine between my thumb and forefinger. As soon as I touched an open page I would enter a memory and I had learned that falling out of a memory was much more comfortable if I did it while in the safety of a comfortable chair.

Ola Gresha.

The thing at the bottom of The Well making Ola’s book fall seemed much more likely than it actually falling, and I had no way of knowing which had happened, but I couldn’t just put it back.

It wasn’t in my nature.

Throwing myself down in the biggest chair that sat in front of the ethereal fireplace, I got comfortable and ran my thumb over the pages until It split open and I was pulled into a memory.

“Come back to bed. It’s much too late for you to be awake.”

I hadn’t known Aster had woken until she had spoken.

Under the amethyst glow of the stars she had painted on the ceiling before we had been together, the smoke from my last burner drifted up and spread into wild white shapes.

I took another drag, not even enjoying the smoke. My hands had just needed something to do.

Aster moved, wrapping her legs around me and brushing my short hair back behind my ears. She reached around and took the burner from my hand, stealing one of the last drags I could have before morning came. “Tell me what is troubling you, Ola. It will ease your mind.”

“I’m just restless.” I lied, knowing full well why I was restless, but bringing her up to Aster in that moment would have been a manner of cruelty that I was unwilling to commit.

“Perhaps,” Aster said, carefully placing the burner back to my mouth, a faint purple stain from her lips marking the white paper. “You have not been tired out enough.”

I finished the burner and snuffed the smoldering remainder out between my fingertips.

I did need something else to do with my hands, if I didn’t occupy them, the numbness I could already feel deadening my fingers would continue to spread. Before she had been called away, in the peaceful days before The Mother in Blue had strode from Zenithcidel and faced down the demon Azeralphane, the numbness had been nearly forgotten.

She had done that.

Just as I decided to let Aster ease my mind again, a knock sounded on my door.

“Ola?”

“Go away Constance. It’s late.” I spoke up. Why was she awake?

The knock sounded again. “Ola?”

Aster wrapped her arms around my middle and dragged me back down to the tangled sheets. “Ignore her, she will go away eventually,” She threw her leg over me and ran a finger from my throat to my navel, tracing the dotted line of my tattoo. “We have much more important things to do.”

A violent impact hit the door, swinging it inward on its hinges and slamming it against the wall.

Trea, her pouty face shifting from annoyance to shock before it finally settled somewhere between a smirk and anger, stepped into my room. “Come to the circle now, she is back.”

“Who?” Aster demanded.

Constance peeked her head into the room, saw the state Aster and I were in, and vanished. I would have to find her and make her talk to me later if I didn’t want her avoiding me for a month like last time.

When it had been with her.

I didn’t need to wait for Trea’s answer to know which she, she, had meant. The feeling in my fingers had begun to return the moment the door had been broken open. It was a trick of my heart surely, but even with the floors between the sleeping quarters separating me from the circle, where she must be, I thought I could sense her.

Trea, the knowledge of the mess that had just been made because I had taken Aster into my bed present in her eyes, turned her pouty face away from me and walked out of my room.

Sitting up and pulling the sheets along with her to cover herself, called after her. “Who are you talking about?”

As if in answer, she stepped into view. Like Trea, her deep blue eyes went from shock to anger in a matter of moments, but they settled into a cold threatening stare.

“Nami.” I said.

Then, the water came.