Part seven: Do you doubt this hero?

What good does it do me to shine alone?

What is the use of becoming the sun king of solitude?

There is no such thing as darkness, there is the absence of light; and when self-criticism threatens my consciousness, when it makes it look so much like the fickle, ephemeral, fragile present.

And I say this because the yellow mass is extending downward, taking the form of yellow mountains; the same form that the sky has in Luz's mind.

The only difference is that in the sky of Luz the mountains are charred by the jealous fire of the devil.

I have criticized him so much and, if I feel well, I am also very jealous, but with Light.

Now that the earth trembles and my paws feel like they are going to break, I wonder who dreamed of being a spy: the cat or the jealous one?

Reflecting does not generate light in the mind, what generates it is the reason why you want to go further, the reason why that detail is so important to you.

Seconds later I feel that the piece of land I cling to has separated from the rest. I don't need to hear or see to know that my piece is not the only one that is going to separate from the world.

Critical and funny?

I wish I could be so with myself, I can't stand mockery or criticism, I feel attacked and my stiff tail- curled around and underneath my body- shows it. It doesn't matter if the stance I've chosen hurts because, with the feeling that something will always go wrong, that pain is the one that will be with me forever, when I most need my mind to be filled with thoughts, in the bad...what if I'll be left with an empty mind, in nothingness...no...I need so much to lean on.

Even if there is storm noise and lightning, even if my piece of earth spins and spins on its own axis, nothing can let me hold on to my piece of earth..... IT'S MINE!

I can't fight from having a WHOLE even if it's a small whole, at least I will see it big and eternally mine.

Is it too much to ask for a forever that has my signature on it?

Maybe the horse's tail not only touched the angel girl; but also her power, her light and made her depressing, self-destructive light pour into everyone's mind.

And who is in Luz's mind?

I have always looked at what the earth has wanted me to look at and now it wants me to look at myself in full darkness with such a golden sky towering above me.

This oppression not only affects me, it also attacks the EGO of Luz (I am inside her head) and of the writer of this story.

I still don't understand why the demon needed to contact a mortal to write his story online; or rather, I don't know how Lucifer allowed it if he hates the internet for the reasons I told you chapters ago.

The flames of which the demon's words are made link me to the human copywriter girl. So, imagine, if that's all her words burn, imagine under pressure... if she doesn't take action her head will explode and fly straight into the broken glass of the plates she dropped because she didn't get her ass out of her seat in front of her computer.

However, I don't think the girl editor is dumb enough to continue being a word pyromaniac, I bet she will publish only one chapter a week from now on... she doesn't have the money to have plastic surgery to insert neurons inside her head (if that were really possible).

No doubt knowing how to spell doesn't take away from the fact that you still have the wild instinct we are born with.... and humans are supposed to be the rational ones?

And all because we are under the control of everything around us? why does nature always have the last word?

But turning my attention back to my story, suddenly, the noise of the storm around me does not prevent my sharp ear from hearing the meowing for help of a kitten, no doubt no older than two years.

This was my chance: If I was going to die, I would die a hero.

It may not be the right thing to do for others or for my sanity, but it's what I want or what I wanted in those moments of pure rebellion.

The poor thing was buried underground, no one of my kind had foreseen that the earth would go from being made of jelly (it was like walking on clouds) to being made of solid, compact rock, like a vast brown diamond.

And if it's a diamond-solid earth, how could I dig up the kitty?

Remember that I come from another world and my claws, already because of my special cat species, have a mind-blowing strength. Thanks to that I started my digging, without any problem for my paws to make their way through the brown diamond earth.

I can't remove anything from the diamond, my digging didn't proceed as well as your human kind does. The diamond reacts to my claws, it gives way under my paws and sticks to the diamond walls next to it; the diamond hides inside the diamond and so diminishes, but never splits because it is too solid... my claws also have their limits, I must take care of them.

I startle myself and raise a paw, I move my claws in the air so that they detect the sound that has irritated me so much. From what I heard, besides storm, it was one of the thick forks, it fell from the sky straight to the nothingness that surrounded the piece of land I clung to survive and be part of the new world.

At that instant I thought that if any thick bifurcation hit my piece of land, there could not be the slightest doubt that the diamond would give way, because diamonds also have their limits and must protect themselves.

But how would I make the bifurcation and my piece meet?

What could a single cat or, rather, a single cat do against the will of a part of the earth?

The earth was composed entirely of allies and, if I think better of it, without them it too would be nothing.

Did this conclusion-flavored premise leave me in nothingness, without any possibility due to my great loneliness?

There had been no friend in sight for three days, even if there had been, could we against Mother Nature?

The only way to catch those thick forks was to move my piece of land from one side to the other until the sky would basket, at least, with a single fork inside my piece of land... I was too stubborn and too young.... to have to agree with the earth was...

Either it was my EGO or the life of that kitty, even if the answer was obvious, how can I make peace with the earth without feeling dominated by the earth?

What binds me to the earth besides the obvious?

Still, with this uncertainty consuming my spirit, I noticed that on the earth where I was digging lay black figures with the same silhouette as my claws. Your kind would call such figures the tracks of my paws and claws.

Had they just appeared or had I just seen them?

So, I dug deeper and deeper, and saw the prints multiply before my paws.

Before the earth was pristine and immaculate (perhaps because I was treading on clouds and not the earth itself), in my world the earth could not be damaged in any way, not even the slightest thing... now the earth resembles the spirit of a cat or the human itself: sensitive, fickle and confused.

The earth has become weak at the same pace as us, as if we were one with her, as if we were her components... perhaps, instead of calling her mother or, rather, perhaps she is not only like a mother who gives us life, she can also play the role of a naïve sister who admires and imitates us.

Maybe the slender forks were imitating someone else?

But who?

The earth was our sister

But who is brother to heaven?

I tried to leave footprint in the air as I have left it on the diamond earth. In that instant I corroborated that the air, unlike the earth, does not follow my thread of weakness, at least that guilt was someone else's.

The only thing that rose from the plane of the earth and was stable enough to climb were the trees.

Would there be any hope here?

I noticed that the more footprints I left on the diamond earth, the more the exasperated mewling of the endangered kitten reverberated.

Maybe with what my species did to the unicorns, we inspired panic to the earth; but with the sky....

Would heaven give us the second chance we needed?

I didn't know, but I had to try; even if the piece of truce would give me no respite with its, seemingly, endless twists and turns.

Be warned, however, that to reflect, even if you have all the will in the world, requires a certain exterior and interior stillness, a little less speed and tension.

How could I think in the midst of lightning sound (there is only sound, there is no lightning, unless the thin bifurcations are the predecessors of lightning) and twists and turns that completely dislodge you from your senses?

I can only conceive, with my present knowledge, of one way that I could not discern before, and that is the involuntary use of the angel girl's depressing light.

Only in this way could I explain the heaviness and my slow motion movements, despite the chaos around me.

What's more, I'm sure that light is to blame for a certain defect I had back then.

That doesn't matter, the questionable point is that this kind of light is supposed to belong to the angel girl I have seen in my present. In my past there were no such entities as angels or demons or anything like them. And if they really existed and I was unaware of it, there should be some kind of mutation, some change between the angelic light of now and that of before; but from what the demon's flames say there is no transformation.

Neither evolution, nor involution.

Why is that?

How can it be in my past, passing unnoticed its depressing luminosity from my memories?

However, supposing that this mutation thing doesn't apply to everyone, then she would be one of the first; if not the first ancestor of the angel girl. That being the case, she would have been able to help me if I had known of her presence at the time.

Of course, if depressing, the great chaos that loomed over the world was her glory... the glory that would end her sorrow and that pleasurable feeling of doing something right... the wrong glory buried her alive because she wanted it so.

How could I have convinced her?

But, back to what really happened, when I started walking, clinging to the piece of land as if there was no tomorrow (there might not have been), towards the foot of the nearest tree; well, I think it's time to tell you a little more about my physiognomy in those times when your world was still in diapers.

My skin was soft, without any hair, smooth and brown. You know that my paws were my eyes, I had no head like all the others. My claws were my ears, but that was the end of its resemblance to the claws of my other cat companions. My claws were too big for my small body and this made me slouch so many times that even now I do it at times, when I feel attacked; because it makes me remember how attacked I felt, not only by nature, but also by the teasing of some cats and the alienation of others.

Before, my paws were inside the clouds and, although the world did not have as many mysteries as now, it was infinitely more beautiful, and not because of magic; there we were all equal, we could all run on the horizontal line of the earth or on the vertical line, from the earth to the sky.

Peace seemed so boring to me and I ran before I learned to walk, I do not understand why my curiosity was attracted by danger, by wanting to feel intensely.

And I am supposed to criticize Luz?

Anyway, I took what I assumed was my punishment for having been directly involved with the crime against the unicorns.

Anyway, I didn't consider that I lied to you, I just let you imagine me as you wanted because that's what any story is all about, letting the reader's imagination run wild.

Clearly I don't do it that well, but Lucifer took me by surprise and I couldn't prepare myself to play the narrator. I hope I have been improving from how I narrated in the beginning of all this psychological paraphernalia with adolescent aroma.

Continuing with the plot, I could not run like all the other cats in the new lands of the world (very heavy claws), so far away and unequal to my cat world.

Leaving aside my fruitless laments, I must say that all that discomfort and more, all I would have been willing to endure if I had been told that in exchange I was going to meet live and direct the great legend in the world of cat espionage: the first spy cat in history.

How did I recognize him faster than any of my other compatriots?

You have no idea how loud I screamed when I saw him, louder than BTS fans for sure. So much so that all the cats in front of me turned to look at me very scared and, even the cat legend himself raised his imposing voice to ask about my situation. Believe me I made a supernatural effort, I'm not exaggerating, not to run and recite my best verses to her.

This reminds me of how jovial I was when all I cared about was playing with my friends. If I resented the earth so much, it is because I could never get my feet on it properly; therefore, if I can't step on it, I can't see.

You know that neither I nor any cat, I doubt that any other unknown animal did, in those times we had faces that bore our eyes. In the absence of faces we had to use our paws, yes, here the law is fulfilled that tells us that the one that adapts to the environment is the species that will survive... and you see, your species now knows mine.

My vision of the new world is blurry, how can I not need to be someone that everyone recognizes, that everyone sees very well and never forgets?

The day the master arrived in this new land, a tall tree emerged with a trunk as thick as rough bark (this characteristic is common to all other trees).

The branches of that tree extend and collide with each other, emitting the sound of small bells... this sound is not new, is it?

Little by little those branches merge together in such a way that the sound of bells reverberates in a grotesque way. The branches merge into a single bifurcated branch, so similar to a pair of tweezers that when they collide they emit the repetitive chimes.

At that very moment, amazement overwhelmed me, when the great master "master of masters" appeared inside the bifurcation. I looked at every detail of his appearance, it is the same as ours; but his tail joins the "pincers" of the bifurcation and they form a wooden circle.

From here, I have no doubt that he wanted to make sure of my well-being, he began to move by rolling the recent circle of wood helically through the robust trunk of the new big tree until he reached the foot of the tree.

The master was such a master that he left a trace of his passage on the big tree, because its trunk was left in the same way as the path of our big spy cat: helically.

If I had to compare it with something you know, I would say that it resembled, at least from my position on the ground, the tail of a scorpion, and at that very moment I had the vision of one; but of course I gave it a different name: self-suffocating tail.

Which name sounds better?

Forget that question, the point is that the master looked for me with his eyes and we made eye contact and POW.

I don't know how to describe what I felt, but I'll try: It's one of those looks that kills, something akin to that sly little look from Alexis that literally melts Luz's insides.

When he looks at her she imagines having his eyes on the skin of her face and caressing it with tender illusions like the image of the two of them hugging when they were a couple of lonely kids.

Doesn't that seem like a nice power?

She is probably foolish to think he would settle for that alone, but so he would treat her, in a rather fictitious future, like a princess she would give him no more than that... things of a girl and a cat in love.

If there is a coincidence between Luz and me lies in our concept of love, for both of us this word is summarized in admiration, we are both super fans.

The master left me with my mouth wide open, if that was possible, when he moves his paws (at that moment I was not the only one who noticed that he had no claws) with extreme delicacy over the petrified earth, he looks like a relief made of brown diamond (I forgot to mention that little detail, didn't I?), and transmits a vision to him so that he transmits it to us:

From the shape of the silhouettes, we can see that these are the shadows of a man and a woman, respectively.

When the male shadow raises the female one like Patrick Swayse to Jennifer Gray, the shadow of an animal, which I now know is a turkey, unknown at that time to me and my compatriots; it breaks free and flies away, while the shadows of its abundant feathers spread without him looking back.

When the male shadow lowers the female shadow to the floor, at the same height as him, it is observed that the shadows of the feathers are born from the waist of the female shadow ... an inheritance of the turkeys?

I still can't quite remember if it was from our sense of sight that we knew that the shadows, which acted within the land of brown diamond, belonged to those who now define themselves as male and female ... or it was the master cat the one who told us that those shadows were different.

Perhaps both shadows were the same, but the words of such an admired genius can misrepresent the truth. In addition, I can assure you that, although I was the one with the giant claws and the one with the bad footing, the other cats still did not adapt their paws very well to the new land, which, to make it more complicated, changed shape every day.

Anyway, you have to leave the dead in peace, and those from beyond will have judged the master of cat espionage.

Coming back to the point, when both shadows were facing each other, the female shadow began to fully curl up with the turkey's feathers.

The male shadow struggled to remove those feathers from her.

He loaded her with everything and feathers, raised her a little off the ground and carried her from one side to the other, she turned; did a dance with what looked like a basket made of feathers.

When he stopped dancing, he knelt in front of the basket and leaned back what looked like his head (now I know it was his head) and began to beat it against one of the feathers.

Then the image began to shake. Having lost all hope that the shadow woman was still alive inside the basket made of feathers; the only thing left was to resignedly rub his forehead against one of the feathers. In that instant, pieces of those feathers fell sliding on the profile of his masculine shadow ... Or perhaps they formed just then what we now know as the shape of a human man?

Perhaps the words distorted my vision and that of my compatriots.

Why do I doubt a teacher?

Because the one watching was a cat who wanted to be the hero and the one who narrates now is a hero who wants to feel like a cat.

Perhaps my admiration blinded me?

Anyway, returning to the man, he separated his forehead from the feathers to rub this time the part where his eyes would be, and the feathers fell further outlining the figure of his profile (obviously not entirely resembling the actual man).

He rubbed his eyes with such anxiety and speed that it seemed to me that, lacking the human invention of words, he used the movement to express how confused and full of doubt he was in a world where it was so lonely, without her even more so.

Each doubt marked the rhythm of his movements around the basket made of feathers; those which, in the face of the movement and agitation of the man's infinite questions, pressing it against himself for an instant and pushing it away in another, all this indecision reminded the feathers of their terrible origin; the man conveyed to it the complications of his humanity and in the end the feathers fled to join those that went with the turkey.

And speaking of the turkey's feathers; as he flew farther away his feathers grew longer and longer, until they surrounded the whole world of shadows in which the pair of shadows dwelt. However, when the feathers realized that they would again be in contact with man (more doubts and questions they might not be able to resist answering through the quickest and most questionable methods); so they became invisible as they transformed into smoke.

For some reason unknown to us cats so far, as more smoke touched the basket and the man simultaneously, the feathers began to detach until, at last, he finally set it free.

However, the man had not noticed this, he was with his head on his knee when she touches his forehead; he looks up and, from what he has been telling you about his flow of feelings, his bewilderment must have been immense.

They joined what should be their heads and shoulders, sitting side by side, I think they were turning their backs to us. At that instant I heard the sound of the chimes again and the smoke no longer allowed us to see any more.

At that instant I was almost sure that the sound of the bell came from that union between the shoulders and head of the man and the woman, from that sharing of doubts to find the question that gave rise to the others... the question in which movement is the answer, the reaction of their shadows before the uncertainty of their existence in a world also unknown to them.

After the image went up in smoke, the imposing voice of the master resounded:

"Behold the beginning of a new coexistence for the new world, the time has come to take destiny in your paws; you will know you have arrived at the right question to find the only answer that will welcome you to the new world when you hear the chimes as one.... as you have just heard now from this new being."

At that moment I was disappointed because I had thought I was the only cat who heard a single chime.

Do you think these claims are the cat's or the hero's?

Who to trust?

Lucifer has always called me kitty, maybe he does it to confuse me more, but confusion is not bad if you find the right question that opens the way.

Do you trust the hero or the cat?

Do you doubt this hero narrator? (so far I've been narrating as the hero narrator).

In the age this world is in, doubts are for humans not animals like me.

Could it be that Luz's doubts make me more human?