#familiar's mark

The lengthening shadows kept time as I explored Grayriver in search of Eric. After two hours, I was exhausted for completely mundane reasons. I need a nap and a grooming.

Everyone I saw was asleep, and there was no response to my calls. I wasn’t sure where Eric might have gone, but I knew I was running out of time. I couldn’t look for him any longer. With my tail dragging in the dirt behind me, I slunk back to the crater. Elise and my mage were crumbled at the bottom of the stairs, just as I remembered, but the ground around the trap door had turned a blinding white. It was as if something were leeching every last piece of essence out of the earth, leaving behind a nothingness that I could only interpret as ‘white’ because I didn’t have the vocabulary or knowledge to explain what I was seeing.

Even as I stood at the edge watching, the white crept further. I didn’t know what would happen when the hungry edge reached my mage and Elise, but I suspected it would be very bad.

I ran around the edge of the crater to the top of the stairs. From there I could see that a pale mist shimmered above the bleached earth. It was only an inch or two high, and so thin it was impossible to see against the white. The mist led the slow march of death though. Is that what the demon looks like? A bit of barely-there mist?

“Kitty? What is that thing? Why won’t Mommy wake up?”

The soft voice trembled and I spun to face Eric. Tears had left streaks on dirty cheeks. He stared at me with wide eyes that were just beginning to fill with hope. I couldn’t help but tremble. Facing a demon and saving the day was one thing, but to be a child’s last hope was too much.

I pressed against his legs and nuzzled my nose into his hand. “I don’t know what to do, Eric,” I told him. “My mage is asleep just like everyone else, and the demon is escaping.”

Eric trembled and a tiny sob hiccuped in his throat.

“We have to stop it, but I just…I don’t know how.”

Eric’s hand buried into my fur and I felt a small tingle of static. It shouldn’t have been possible for me to feel the boy’s magic—a Bound Familiar can only feel ambient magic and that of their mage—though it had certainly been a day full of impossible things. His voice was just as full of fear as before, but he said, “If everyone else is asleep, then we have to stop the demon.”

“That’s very brave of you, but I told you, I don’t know how.”

“Papa used to say that”—his nose wrinkled and eyes screwed shut—“heroes aren’t the people who knew the answers, they were the ones willing to get the job done.”

Heroes? I’m no hero, I’m a cat.