(no subject)

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

[Cy appears on the Plane, looking totally out of it. She's sitting, small and wide-eyed and confused, amidst the scattered bodies of dead cats. They're sad, grotesque creatures, some missing eyes, or a leg, some unnaturally large, almost all missing hair around the face and neck. Most have wounds, some shallow and unhealed, others recent, signs of a brutal fight. Many of them are charred. The one closest to Cy has wires wound up into one of its eye sockets.

She walks over to him, dabs gently at his face, and starts trying ineffectively to clean the soot from around his nose.]

Wake up, brother. There's dances to be done. Wake up. You can find the road again. Please?

Comments

[soimpressive.livejournal.com]

It isn't always. There's just a lot of them out there.

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

[Smacks his ear.] Talking 'bout you, Sir Knowsalot.

[soimpressive.livejournal.com]

And I'm one of them, aren't I?

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

[Sigh.] Is you is or is you ain't my baby. S' neither here nor sideways.

[She jumps off his shoulder and walks over to the nearest body, staring down at it.]

Lemme tell you a story. Can I tell you a story? [Looks back over her shoulder.]

[soimpressive.livejournal.com]

[settles himself a little better so he can listen] Of course you can.

1/?

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

[Walks a circle around the body, watching it carefully, almost like she still expects it to move.]

It starts at the beginning, in the dark, when the first cat blinked and the world turned under her eyes for the first time. The first cats tracing the first paths, the first Roads being born, just whispers, threads of the great cats' passing.

[She sits and watches the dead cat's face, oddly serene.] With the first roads came the first life of cats, the first steps of the Majicou.

2/?

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

In the beginning, he didn't know himself. He was just a cat, like any other, just a cat. In his second life he was Pardus, a mighty hunter, a great spotted beast that man feared. Man--the accident of creation, crawling from the Cat of the World's pupil, the pupil of her silver eye--the moon, the eye that looks in upon the paths of the dead, the dark things that move in old places.

[She paces again, her eyes shimmering weirdly. Her voice doesn't sound quite like her own; there's a feral tang to it, something old and dark and masculine. Her gait changes, smooths from her awkward kittenish ramble to a smooth stride.]

Man feared us. And what man fears, man desires. What man fears, he also wants to possess. They painted us, emblems on their cave walls. They dreamed of us. They danced. They tried. We looked on and laughed at their attempts, their sad mimicry.

And then Pardus's time came, and as he waited for the last road to open, they found him. But still they were afraid!

[She laughs, and it's definitely not her voice anymore.]

They waited and watched, whispering to each other. What would come of it, they wondered? Laying his flesh upon their flesh, his claws upon their hands, his head over their own? What gifts would the old hunter give?

And Pardus died in peace while they hid in fear, and for three days more they watched his carcass wither before they braved the clearing, the little humans, to steal the skin from his empty body.

They chose their greatest hunter to wear the skin of Pardus, and they stroked it, reverenced it, fingered the mighty claws and lost some fear of us. And the hunter danced, and none could match him. His strength was the jungle's strength, his voice the jungle's voice. And so man learned, all in accident, to draw power from the magic of the cat.

[soimpressive.livejournal.com]

[he's been listening intently, of course, expressioning getting darker by the second]

That wasn't right of them.

3/?

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

[She laughs again in that old, rich voice.] Right and righteousness. To hear man tell it, those spheres are theirs alone.

But no. It was not.

Eventually they left their caves and spread over the Great Cat's creation. We avoided them, most of us. Watched from a distance with distrust and dislike and more than a little bit of scorn.

But our small cousins, our curious little Felis cattus drew close to them, saw the human cities ravaged by plagues of mice and rats. Instinct drove them into the cities to hunt, and humanity blessed them as saviors. In Egypt, where they first gifted man with their willing association, cults sprang up, gods were born in the image of the cat. And the worship was willingly accepted. A cat is a cat, after all.

[Long silence. She stares at the bodies, her pupils massive.] It was the third life of cats, and the second betrayal by the humans.

4/?

[cyfor.livejournal.com]

They treated us well. They held a festival each year in honor of their cat-headed goddess, and each year they interred the bodies of dead felines in her temple and on her grounds. They honored us, and brought our mummified bodies to Bast as offerings.

Humanity. [A pause.] They have a fondness for celebration. What species does not? The festival, with time, became riotous and drunken. They used it as an excuse to run wild along the Nile, to dance and expose themselves to the bright eye of the Great Cat. They would lose their offerings. They lost many offerings. And the prophets of Bast saw opportunity.

Cats disappeared. They took them from cities, from streets and from homes. They took them from the storehouses where they drove back the feeding pests. They took them from the wild when they could catch them. And they killed them. Gently, they did it, but they killed them, embalmed them, and sold them to the revelers. And the more the revelers bought, the more the prophets killed. All in the name of their cat-headed goddess. All in twisted honor to our image.

[soimpressive.livejournal.com]

I know.

I was there. Great civilization, a little overzealous. [his mouth opens as if he's going to say something else, but he abruptly shuts it and waves Cy on with a zipping-his-lips motion afterward]

[ooc: sdfgsdf Sorry about short tags, but if I let him go he'll interrupt with his own monologue and we'll never shut him up |D]