Chapter Eight

"Your majesty may draw a bath according to his native custom later this evening," drawled the painted shadow-cat

"I'm not here for the bath, and nor, do I think, is she." Oji padded nearer, treading through water so warm as to feel scarcely wet at all, more like a hot wind rippling through his paws.

While the sphinx had a human face, her eyes were slitted in a catnap that could not be more feline in character, and her chest heaved in gentle rasps that shivered the warm water, and agitated the bubbles blown by the brass horns.

Oji had underestimated his hunger. Sniffing the unmistakable scent of mouse, he licked his lips,

and flicked his head this way and that to catch a glimpse of the treat, before it scurried back to the dunes. When something flickered in the sphinx's towering well of shadow, he gazed into pale blue eyes hidden where her feathers merged with tawny fur. As he backed up, and the secret eyes still stabbed to where he used to be, he looked again, and traced a small human pressed flat to the snoring fur. Then he breathed in, mingled with mouse, a more familiar, distinctive scent.

"Michel!"

"Oji?" She took in a sharp breath. "Where have you been?"

"Is Bear here?"

When Michel burst into tears, Oji sighed, and studied the sphinx as if she were a perilous mountain. While Michel was in need of comfort, and he was in need of answers, even one acquainted with a sphinx must take great care not to presume on that familiarity, when dawning recognition is not as fast as a roused reflex, and for all their great size, sphinxes are so blindingly fast that if one rake of her paw did not cut him in pieces, it would send him hurtling into the desert.

Oji gathered his resolve. No doubt many cats, pups, and birds had settled, scurried, or lingered in her fur, he rationalized, and even in this catnap, waterbugs and lake currents had not disturbed her rest, and a wind-blown market scrap fluttered under her haunches. Nonetheless, he arrived at a safer way to bring Michel face to face.

"You're friends with a sphinx, Michel."

Michel's snuffling diminished to a drier honk, and she laid her wet cheek on the sphinx's fur.

"And you're a Marchioness." As Oji trumpeted his admiration, a squeal wracked Michel. How could this set her off--was she envious of the other Animalytes' higher ranks? "Not that that's important, not to such a brave girl, who flew here on the back of a sphinx.That's a tremendous accomplishment."

"Perhaps to the sighted," sniffled Michel. "Not to a blind girl."

"Nonsense! It's harder for you. Whereas the seeing can choose their handholds of feathers or hide, you had to huddle where you lay and hold on for dear life."

"Yes." Anger began to redden her wet cheeks. "How is that a good thing? Cringing and cowering are hardly heroic, Oji."

"Cringing and cowering are heroic when your fears seize the scruff of your neck, and wind you up for hurling into a greater danger. I can only guess what you went through, buffeted by wing-blasted wind, your fingers aching to let go, then so numb that you don't know if you're falling or holding on. I can only imagine what happened before that."

"Your majesty," said Oji's escort. "You must be tired."

"Why do you say that?"

"Hmm." The painted shadow-cat seemed at a loss for how to proceed. "If I may be frank, your highness, the sphinx is sleeping. Who are you talking to?" When Michel pushed up from the sphinx's shoulder blades, his aloof eyes widened, and he spoke with a sofer, demurring tone. "A human."

"Yes, a real one. In the flesh, not mareira clothed in their gussied-up notion of the human image. Moreover, Michel is stamped with the true coin of nobility, unlike my collection of 'your highnesses' and 'my princes,' with which I can't even buy myself my own sweet ice."

"True nobility is rarer than a desert flower even here, my prince." The painted shadow-cat had slipped into human guise, but his eyes glinted, streaked down the middle with a starry light. "Would that we had time to admire, your highness."

"She's no mere acquaintance, but a lifelong friend. You might call her my sister, being among the only family I ever knew."

"Living on Earth must make one lucky, when you both roll up to our door like tumbleweed. If we can pry her away from the sphinx, you may bring her if you wish."

"While the sphinx and I were never friends, I knew her in Suvani's menagerie. The sphinx may relinquish Michel for a greater riddle. Can you extend my plus-one to plus-two?"

"Your friends may come, even if more hide in these waters or roll in from the dunes."

His ingratiating smile spread too thin. "Your sphinx may not like the taste of magic after Suvani's menagerie."

"In my first proper conversation with her majesty, I'll only be too happy to ask--which is to say, rub it in her face--why your tribe was not represented in her collection, if she meant to amass one of each enchanted cat." Oji's laugh sliced sharp, then died abruptly when he remembered the out of place unicorns. With not only the royal library at her disposal, but the power to legislate her fussy spite and taste for revenge, she no doubt knew of shadow-cats, but was frustrated in acquiring one.

When Oji hooted long and hard, the shadow-cats glowered, Michel started on the sphinx's back,

and the sphinx stirred. If the unicorns were place-holders to fill the empty spots of her perfect collection, then the revenge she staged for Oji was half-hearted settling at best, and the egotistical queen had no doubt suffered, in her mind at least, nearly as much as he had.

As the sphinx opened her eyes, their stern yellow seemed to tint the hot haze rising from the waters. "Will your land shimmer so, when its king is a caterwauling shadow?"

Oji looked up and smiled. He could care less that he didn't know what she meant. He was happy to see her face,which had always looked upon him with frank, truthful regard, and never called him prince or king other than cryptically. If they were not friends, friends were fickle, and the sphinx as absolute as sunrise or moonlight. If he did not completely understand her, by grasping a riddle at a time he entered her enigmatic mind. What seemed perplexing was only the future seen through the jigsaw of her wisdom. As with all puzzles, her riddles fell more to persistent time than to fleeting perception, which must be teased as much as it is trusted.

"Sphinx, I'm so happy to see you outside your cage that you may insinuate whatever you wish."

"Why slight my friend, or afflict him with the ingrates of Alsantia?" Having ruffled her feathers, the sphinx turned her massive head, regarding all in his train, whom, one by one, flickered from their affected human images to their true forms. Whether shadow-cats were flesh and blood or only shadow and magic, the sphinx's scornful eyes raked through them as she rolled back on her rear haunches, as if preparing to pounce. "What strange company?" In inflecting her question as neutral as possible, it not only lulled the question mark, but stood her statement on its edge like an exclamation point. Despite burying her unvoiced exclamation in a very subtle riddle, Oji got the point. She could care less who they were, having insinuated they were not only odd companions, but bad company--Oji had fallen in not with a pride of lions, but yet another wicked swarm.

"They're called the mareira. By the by, how are you called? We were never properly introduced. I can't very well call you sphinx."

"If I liked you, and cared to tell you, should I trust you with yet another riddle? What is the point, when there is nothing more to me but sphinx? If there is nothing to you but cat, should we crown you with illusions?"

"I was only being polite," sighed Oji. "Keep your secrets and your riddles both."

"Why wound me so? Is that princely behavior, or are you a king already?" Not waiting for a reply, the sphinx turned to the mareira, favoring them with a knowing look. As the sphinx dragged its massive bulk from the water, the shallows surged, swamping Oji and the shadow-cats with the warm, glinting water. "Given my company of late, could I step from a distant oasis, and not splash a king?" She snorted. "If the past lies behind us, where is our future? If destiny lies ahead, why wait? If you know, why do you not speak?"

Many times during this bizarre, riddle-infused conversation, Michel seemed like she wanted to chip in, but each time doubt clouded her face and she settled deeper in feathers and fur.

Looking exceedingly irritated, the mareira led them farther down the curving banks to a bridge which seemed to shimmer into being from the humid air itself, a bridge crossing from one side of the lake to the other.

"That wasn't there before," said Oji.

The shadow-cat looked as if he was about to speak, but when the sphinx's wrathful eye drifted to him, he only led them onto the bridge.

As they crossed, the sphinx seemed not to shrink, but to summon the surroundings up to size, and expand the shadow-cats until shoulder-high to the sphinx.

As Oji marveled at this enchantment, the sphinx's ebbing power seemed to wash over him, a swelling wave increasing not only his stature, but his significance, until he was the only thing under the sun. When he shuddered and shrank from the upwelling energy, it shook him, sinking deep into his shadow, subsuming his shy self in a profound roar that rocked the belly of creation. Was what he thought of himself only the spark of a greater being? That morning, he was only a calico kitten, but now was only a scratch away from unleashing a mountain of black fur, and the surging power whispered of deeper roars. The more he cringed from his inexhaustible reservoir of power, the more it thundered, until he felt himself only an echo of what was to come.

Michel was also profoundly changed, for when the rest had expanded, she had contracted back to a mouse, sinking into her perch upon the sphinx's shoulders.

While the mareira village fell into a fog behind them, the other shore came no nearer, and, in fact, receded into the mist emanating from the swollen, rippling lake, which suddenly billowed and rushed in rapid, perilous waves that blasted the guardrails, surging and casting them up, then down, the infinitely narrowing bridge now a ship's prow, the converging clouds its sails, and the oasis an ocean.

"I can't wait to hear how you explain this!" Oji rolled his eyes, but it was doubtful his sarcasm could be seen or heard, not when pummeling rain drenched his face fur and whiskers. No matter how he wished or groaned to release the magic that would rise him up shoulder to shoulder with the shadow-cats, all he could do was claw the boards tighter.

"Get below, my prince."

When three shadow-cats put their shoulders to the yardarm to shift sail, they yawed left, then held fast against the blasting wind for long groaning minutes, as their teeth gritted, and their closed, straining eyelids seemed to pull at their creased brows and red cheeks. When they released their hold, staggering back with the yardarm, the ship hurtled toward a darker mass of water, which flooded back from a rocky spur, then swamped it again.

When a gust blasted the sail tight, then tighter still, it doubled against the mast, a sail-wrapped hammer of wind rattling the yardarm until it ripped free of their paws, and the ship surged from the black, agitated sea, launching so high over the waters that the creaking hull fell to a hush before rammiing hard into the waves. They might have plunged deep into the brink, had the sphinx not unfurled her wings, dug in with her talons, and pulled their ship up by the hull, by no means flying the cumbersome craft, but coasting precious yards over crescent reefs sharper than scimitars and the thorny wreckage of other vessels. They ground to a halt with a splintering crackle.

Oji was a gangly, sopping mess, having tumbled to a sprawl, splashing face first in a puddle of still-foaming sea water. First rising on shaking elbows and rubbery knees, then staggering to his feet, Oji brushed wet sand from his pants. While the sphinx was still diminished, and Michel's scurry trailed shivering sphinx fur and feathers, no sooner had the shadow-cats landed on all fours than they rose as shadow-clad humans.

Oji tasted salt as he spat wet sand, and had a striking thought. "I'm still dreaming."

"You've found us out, my prince. Was it the taste of sand or salt that clued you in to our phantasm?"

"The whole thing is branded shadow-cat, your grace. But do you really expect me to believe that, having landed on the Ephremian coast, we traveled inland over a desert peninsula to a hidden oasis, which we crossed to another island? Moreover, the details are all wrong--whereas fresh water runs into the lake, the nightmare wrapped us in ship, then splashed down in salt water." They waded in from the bay, but could scarcely be considered to have set foot on the hidden isle, not when that shore was cloven by so many innumerable rills that not land, but water, was its defining characteristic. Earth was a scarce commodity in this network of rivulets, where green seawater coursed through tiny capillary streams, and brightened to a foamy blue. It was as if the oasis water was like a chameleon, not only shifting green to blue, and gaining speed like a running animal, but changing from fresh to salt water and back. Even the air was not impervious to the strange, amphibious alchemy, for when Oji looked up, he saw not sky but the lake they had stormed, white-capped waves billowing like clouds, and the sun shining through its translucent waters, as if they had voyaged under the oasis. The lines of the horizon drew them inward, as if the island folded in toward its center, where they would be folded up and tied shut in the inside-out oasis. It was a wrong-side-out world in miniature.

"As we now follow fresh water, we will pause for refreshment." The man stooped in his melting shift back to maerira, crouching by a flickering stream.

When Oji's human-faced shadows fell to a hush and bowed as one, a dark flood of shadow-cats swamped the rivulet. As they lapped the bright waters, Oji took a grudging step, knelt, and dipped a hand in the stream. Instead of cupping it to his mouth, he raised the back of his hand to his lips and licked the sweet, sweet water. Still dehydrated from his clout on the head, his tossing and turning nights on shipboard, and his meandering jaunt through these Ephremian hinterlands, his thirst warred with his pride, and he fell to all fours, groped the slippery river rocks, drank deep, belched, and drank some more, then rolled on his side.

"Not real," he muttered.

"You keep saying this, in one form or another." The painted shadow-cat's brows knitted in perplexity.

"One form or another," snorted Oji. "That's rich, coming from you."

"My prince, magic is so inextricably wrought in this enchanted world that everything has a bit of magic. Even the most gorgeous tapestry has holes in its weave, and our world, like your world, has its share of dead and dying zones, but for every place where magic is on the wane, it fountains and flowers in a hundred paradises."

"So your desert is like the opposite of the Sargan Vos."

"Once a joyous eden, home to dryads and talking beasts, but now a horrible, blighted land.

While that catastrophe is an immense tragedy, it is the exception in Alsantia, where magic remains not only the rule, but the reality. Just as your world's waters do not deceive, our enchanted waters do not lie, and your thirst feels quenched because it was sated. For all its magic, and layers within layers, our oasis is no mirage.

"You speak of blight." Oji touched a dessicated flower, and its thread-like seed fluttered into the breeze. "Has the curse of the Sargan Vos spread this far?"

"Every land has its own bleak shadow, my prince. From day to day, year to year, and age to age,

each place fluctuates in and out of its shadow, so that prosperity and desolation go hand in hand. Even magic observes the laws of nature." As he rose to his feet, he stretched into his man-faced shadow. "Which is not to say that we welcome and do not weary of our shadow. Come. Let us show our shadow to the door, and sweep darkness from the land."

As they trod further into the river-webbed land, they hugged close to the widest stream.

Although the oasis was both above and below, the watery skies were no shield against the scorching sunshine. Save for a few flecks of dew crushed under claw, the grass was crisp and nearly dry, and the shadows evaporated with the mist. The rills trickled glinting water toward the isle's interior, countless streams crinkling in like blood-bearing veins and arteries, as if this stream-shot isle breathed in new life.

As they walked, Oji drew deeper, darker breaths, flashing from two legs to four and back,

the boy now hulking under a thick, orange mane, and the shadow-lion harder than the earth

shaking under his paws. If he was shadow-cat even in part, it raised questions of his blood lineage,

a thought he had often suppressed, knowing neither his mother nor father, but only the faint silhouette of their story, shrouded in the sheltering lies of The Mansion of the Shining Prince.

"I feel that I should know you," said Oji.

"What a curious thing to say." Nonetheless, his guide's ever-present smile receded into unfathomable impassivity.

"Can the sun know the darkness?" The sphinx had begun to mushroom to her natural size. "Can the light see the light?"

Surprised and struck dumb by the sphinx's sudden interjection, Oji unconsciously closed his eyes as he considered the riddle. But his guide got there first.

"We are always at rest in our blinding truths, ignorant of the darknesses they conceal behind the worlds we build."

"You forget your audience," said Oji. "While you hear philosophy, her wisdom crouches in riddles and puzzles, and she craves not answers, but solutions. To which I say no, the sun can know neither the dark it faces nor the light that face radiates, being blinded by its own light. The moon knows darkness and light better than the sun. Having a taste for philosophy myself, I would say we are more moon than sun ourselves, never quite at rest in our truths, and shifting into the darkness of unknowing as our worlds or ourselves expand past our tolerance for illumination." Oji shrugged, and swelled to his shadow-cat form. It felt raw and new, this glorious shadow-lion, like he was an enormous infant, with the enormous power to match his freshness. "You haven't answered me either."

"Was there a question?"

"Please. If you know anything that concerns me, why withhold it?"

"Well, I am a cat, not only by birth, but in my nature and culture. Even our city is quite cat-like, the way it lurks, springs, and slinks around the oasis."

"Don't change the subject." Must you be so obscure?"

"If I seem to hold my tongue, well, I am a cat..."

"Then why are you so squirrely!"

"...and if I seem vague, I am a shadow."

Oji had enough. As much as he yearned for simpler, carefree days, lolling on Berangere's lap

or watching birds through the barred windows, it wasn't like he knew freedom on the windowsill, or learned anything of liberty in the Mansion. No sooner had he returned to Alsantia, than he was passed from one cage to another, and had only set paw on the strangest of soils: first the disintegrating Sargan Vos, now this inside-out oasis. Everywhere he walked dissolved one way or another, shifting shapes nearly as quickly as his own shadow. If this was puberty, he had enough.

If this was growing up, the grown-ups had set the bar uncommonly low, and every example they set was easy to surpass. While they were sometimes good, none were ever that good. When his swirling shadows shrouded him like a cloak and doubled him every moment until he had swelled to a shadow-lion, he dwarfed the painted shadow-cat, whose cunning, smarmy eyes dared Oji. Oji only hesitated a moment, not being accustomed to holding in a roar larger than the house cat he had lived in so long. Now feeling this immense power coiled, not only in knotted musculature but in the arcane shadows constantly coalescing around him, he felt the painted shadow-cat's insolence as a pestilence that must be stamped out as surely as the swarms he had crushed into the sand.

When Oji lunged, the other cat's whiskers quivered, and his eyes widened in Oji's rampant, inky blackness, before bursting up on his own haunches, and blocking Oji's descending paws with his own,

their heads clashing so close that Oji's wet nose streaked the fur of the other's chin, so close that they scraped tooth to tooth. When the sly old cat leaped, each raking claw found a rib or a leg, until Oji swayed under the shadow-cat's weight, roared in pain and rage, then clapped his paws to the others' head with such stinging slaps that the shadow-cat retinue shuddered aas one and even the sphinx took a rumbling step back.

As Oji crushed forward, he felt his hulking bones and forward-coiling barrage of muscle as a flood of unstoppable feline power. Even his tail was an undeniable dynamo, drumming his topsy-turvy body into a fury, and wagging him forward with an indomitable, unshakable will. Had he at last succumbed to this inside-out oasis? Power had made of Oji a hungry brute eager to feed on the cowardly vitals of the prince he was. It was good that the sphinx bent down like a mother cat,

nipped the scruff of his neck, and shook him, for though his good sense was still inflamed, and his paws burned to tear the impertinent shadow-cat cold fear of the sphinx pooled in his hindquarters

and skulked at the back of his skull, where his kitten self yet curled in a ball.

No matter how he summoned that kitten now, that form only coiled tighter in his brain's shadowy recesses and refused to come out. It would have been useful now, for compared to the shadow-lion's considerable bulk, his kitten body would have dripped from the sphinx's claw like a teardrop, and he might have at last been free to choose his own direction. When the sphinx clasped him in both paws, her meshed claws caged him so tightly he could barely breathe.

"Free me. Your prince commands it!"

"Is this how a prince behaves?" The sphinx dropped Oji into such an ungainly heap that the bedraggled shadow-lion forgot how to land on his feet, twisted just far enough to avoid landing on his head, and took it on his shoulder instead. While that shoulder was a massive knot of muscle gripping a boulder of bone, the immense crack of pain squashed Oji to a blind, mindless squint, and he lashed out entirely by reflex. When Oji's claws hooked in the leathery padding of the sphinx's paw, and lodged there bloddlessly, the prince's heart wrenched the whole gamut from powerlessness to double-sided fear and frustration, to two-clawed anger, to a four-clawed frenzy that sent him whirling, scratching, and howling so furiously at the sphinx's colossal toes that the sphinx scooped him up again, dunked him face first into one of the meandering brooks, then shook and wrung him so hard he sprinkled and sprayed the other shadow-cats.

"Let me down," caterwauled Oji.

"Spare our prince," drawled the painted shadow-cat.

The mareira turned to the sphinx and crouched, their eyes cast down, and their faces unsmiling and assured.

"Can I dig a grave for a thrall and not crush a worm?" The sphinx's eyes silkily caressed the shadow-cats, and her voice grew so velvety it seemed to shine.

"He is no thrall, but the crown prince and savior of Alsantia."

"Is he not destined to be downtrodden, like the thrall and the worm?" snickered the sphinx.

As Oji's guide wrinkled his painted brow, a lost look flashed across his face. "It is not a cunning answer, great sphinx, but please spare the boy."

As the sphinx raised an eyebrow, it was as if that tiny upward flex drew out her hot scorn,

leaving her face cool and impassive. Laying Oji gently at the shadow-cat's feet, she turned her back on the mareira. "What thrives in obscurity, and dies in fame?"

As Oji nursed the bulging bruise on his chin, the enormous red lump shrank by the second, as if injury could no longer stick to his sleek, shadow-cat hide. Still, he couldn't keep the throbbing sulk out of his voice. "Privacy?"

Although the sphinx faced the wall, Oji could see one side of her perking grin. "Are all princes so smart?" Despite his aching face, a grin slipped out, then sliced into an ghastly grimace at her mocking laughter. "How many great minds mistake the flower for the fruit? Should we not grope lower for this shrinking truth? What is the root of privacy?"

As a chill ruffled his spine, Oji's tail shot straight up. "Secrets?"

"And what is this one to you, to care so deeply, but conceal deeper still?" The wave of her paw swept over the fretful guide, whose face pressed the grass in fervid obeisance to the sphinx.

"If you insinuate I am the prince's father, you lie. Do I look like a king?" The guide scowled. "And whatever I am matters little, when he comes not at the behest of a father but a king."

"And a queen," said Oji.

"All of whom we keep waiting. If I thought to hide our connection, my prince, it stemmed from my urgent focus on our royal mission." Oji and the sphinx shared an eye-roll as his drawl stretched urgent and distorted royal mission. "Having waited fourteen years, it was little sacrifice to postpone our introduction to another day. Whatever obligation I have to my prince and nephew, my loyalty is to my king and lord."

"If you are my uncle, you are uncommonly impertinent."

"I never claimed to be common, my prince." The painted shadow-cat shrugged, slouched aside,

and led them along the stream that pointed nearest a tall mountain mellowed slate gray where sunset mingled with moonrise.

Oji brought his paws to his weary head. He was at a loss, more exasperated than exhausted.

Should he follow the fickle shadow-cats? If they meant him nothing but good, his uncle would have been more forthcoming. While his lion form not only resembled mareira, but suggested he had inherited their shadowy legacy, Oji's strongest instinct warned him to scurry into some desolate desert shadow untouched by fickle mareira magic.

It was a meandering but painstaking journey, stepping over stream after stream in the rivulet web, and Oji often wet his paw by carelessly dipping toes in a muddy brook. The rills were an endless tangle all the way to the iron grey foothills, which were streaked not by water by by glinting veins of blue and emerald ore. The mountain's eerie metallic hues were as so outlandish that it seemed less likely to have formed over eons of crashing tectonics than to have crash landed, its engines having sputtered and given out when it had been drawn into the enchanted influence of Alsantia.

What a stupid idea, Oji sighed. Of course science works here. Not that it has ever sparked in this inside-out island, an embedded lake at sea in its desert.

On drawing nearer a shadow marking the faintest crevice, that scratch revealed a jagged cave, which also proved a trick of the shadow, for while its interior was indeed a cavernous void, it was not roughly hewn, but glassy smooth, leading to endless tunnels of gemlike stone lined by torches. In some places, the walls were so glazed that they mirrored and doubled the torchlight, and in others, ght flickering light fell on cave paintings depicting scenes even more alien and enigmatic.

Surely they did not depict actual events, for here the Alsantian moons rested on crumbling mountain peaks; there the paints flared in a slow grade from yellow to orange to pink to the blood red joining where this painted sun gave birth to Alsantia;and there shadow-cats waged a savage, bloody war on humanity.

This otherworldly glass ran to an enormous chamber brilliantly lit by a mindboggling skylight somehow crafted from a single pane longer and wider than the Galiel's main sail. Compared to the torchlit glass of the dark tunnels, this blazing space seemed brighter than day, and it illuminated artworks equally fantastic, being filled wall to wall with lustrous ivory and mahogany figures.

As Oji rubbed his eyes and padded near, the retinue turned from following the painted shadow-cat and tailed Oji.

Half were sculpted from shimmering white stone, polished to such an exquisite sheen that they were gilded by the skylight. The others were shadow-cats in repose, dressed in opulent finery of violet silk and creamy linen. As they faced the center of the chamber in unblinking silence, he had mistaken them for stone.

The skylight was no simple ceiling glass, but a glinting glass sky, etched with sun, moon, and stars, as if this window so mingled night and day that its single moment of crafted time captured not only sun, moon and stars, but a cloud-streaked, azure twilight.

While the skylight flooded the chamber with moonlight, sunlight, and starlight, its central spotlight illuminated the center, where sat an old mareira, the dark pupil of this eye of light.

While his hangers-on clustered so near their lord that their shadows were minuscule squiggles

beringing him so neatly that it looked like writing in an ancient, lost script, the ancient mareira cast no shadow at all.

As Oji approached, those standing knelt, while those tailing him bowed their heads in grave respect, their jocularity banished in the profound hush that imbued the chamber with such a holy terror that it set Oji's teeth on edge more than the harshest noise he had ever heard.

Steeling himself against this overwhelming reverence, Oji lifted his head proud and upright, feeling that casting his eyes down would let down not only those who helped him get here, but the dying lion on the throne.

No, not a throne. What first seemed the knotted and gnarled arms of a mammoth chair, were the shadow-lion's massive arms, spotted with advanced age, and their golden-black hairs trembling.

While age usually crowns the old silver or grey, and the shadow-lion was undeniably and unfathomably old, his beard, mane, paws, and tail were tinged with gold. It was as if his winters had not frosted, but gilded the ancient lion. While the old lion's eye were likewise glazed to a golden sheen, he seemed not a feeble shambles of old age, but a hero bowed in gentle drowsiness.

When his haggard head stirred, lifted wearily, and bobbed faintly, somehow those blind eyes sought out and found Oji, if they seemed to stare through him to a moment behind where he was. It was like the ancient beast was neither here nor now, but in the near future, and as Oji strained to hear the shadow-lion's trailing whisper, he fell to that where and when.

Come nearer, son of starlight.

Oji obeyed.

The ancient's gilded shadows were nearly translucent, as if he was a remnant left behind, and his greater soul somewhere else, so that he no longer could be said to exist in this world, being but a refraction of his true, undying image. As Oji's claws scraped the chamber floor, he felt the sheer, tenuous skin of this world stretched tight on its own soul, the well of meaning in the heart of the hereafter, and his hackles rose as he held a shuddering breath. It felt like the only breath left in the universe, and holding it felt like holding onto the world.

"Son? Are you..." If Oji's voice doubly trembled, it quivered less from fear than from the strange bending of his voice, rushing in to this thundering moment. For days, Oji had the troubling sense that his hind-paws gripped Earth while his fore-paws scrabbled to find footing in Alsantia, and now each paw seemed to rest on another possible world, with one hindleg numbed by the ashy touch of a dead world, and one half-asleep, shivering foreleg straddling the mareira world. "Are you my father?"

Would that I could claim that distinction, for he who sired you was a good beast, and I am happy to see him soon.

"If you are not my father, why send for me? Why would Ephremia's King and Queen make me come all this way, if I am nothing to the King of the mareira?"

Worlds lie between nothing and everything, prince of Alsantia. Even if not my son, you could be my heir. And only if I was vain, proud, and insensible of all good sense, would I choose my own son over one the shadows have chosen. His long exhalation caused a stir in the room, as every shadow-cat converged on his sigh, fearing their monarch had given up the ghost. When he opened his scowling eyes, by the barest gesture of his brow, the mareira king indicated a gigantic shadow-cat, whose girth was so enormous, and who sat so still, aside from the idle flick of his flabby tail, and the occasional sweep of his paw through a tray of herbed meats, that Oji had still believed him a statue after picking out the living mareira from their stone forebears. Moreover, the chamber seemed somehow less full of life where this fat shadow-cat squatted, for while the rest of the room was vibrant not only with golden light, but lustrous shadows, the light and darkness deadened and dulled around him, as if his soul had already curled up and died.

If primogeniture was our rule, he would rule. Fortunately, power need not go where kings will.

Even as my strutting lords beg me to confer the distinction upon them, a shadow conclave prowls here,

purring with contentment that their spirits are heard and heeded.

As he shifted in his place of rest, his shadows shimmered, and his silken bedding sparkled through, giving Oji a strange eyeful of its gold and silver threads, as if the shadow-king's translucent body was an orrery magnifying its woven stars and planets.

Rest a moment, young prince. Acquaint yourself with my ministers. Some cast a pall of their own, but others have lightened my mood in these last days.

With that, the mareira king rolled onto his side, exhaled another large crush of wind, again tearing all fearful and gainful eyes back to him, then soothing and disappointing their expectations by resuming his ragged breaths.

Suddenly self-conscious of all the eyes falling on him, Oji hunkered back a space into a half-squat, licked his trembling paw, and groomed back his stiff hackles and ears. It would be nice to know who to start with, Oji groused to himself, then turned to the ring of shadow-cats.

As he padded near, each drew nearer their current conversation partner, drawing back from Oji as they did so, so imperceptibly that one could have thought it all chance. Feeling that he had accepted a duty from the mareira king, Oji pressed harder into the fray, only to find himself proved right, for the milling ministers so unquestionably skirted Oji that their keepaway dance was undoubtedly deliberate.

When the rumbling growl roared, then echoed on the ceiling tiles and shuddered in the skylight,

Oji glared left and right, thankful for a challenge from these snobby cats, but when the growl boomed again in the enormous chamber, and his own nostrils flared with the blast, he glanced away, his cheeks burning as he padded into a shadowy corner. Still unaccustomed to the raw power of his new form, he squatted low and rubbed his head on the wall, pausing to grind his scalp on the dust-shadowed gems studding the ancient fresco.

He took a step back from the painted scene. While the ancient artist's tools were undoubtedly crude, having scratched a shaggy line overflowed by dimmed paints, this scene so called to Oji, it was like it was painted it with him in mind.

On a faded white backdrop, a calico cat crawled through a shadowy pit shaped like the mareira king. Had he any doubt this ancient fresco depicted the dying king, it was dispelled by the gold streaks in the painted animal, and the ring of shadows that waited for the calico to cleave their dead king.

He meant those ministers. I've been courting the wrong courtiers. The mareira king hadn't meant he should pow-wow with lords he had already deemed vain and arrogant, but another class of nobility entirely, one that reigned not over earthly property or worldly wealth, but insubstantial shadow.

As he prowled the shadows and peered into the chamber's darker corners, the mareira snickered and shied from him, some receding into alcoves where they glanced at him sidelong, and others cupping their hands to their mouths as they shared whispers.

It angered Oji. As their king lay dying, they played at masquerade, dancing coyly in lying human skins, none clothed in their own selves. Should they not bow their heads--their real, leonine heads, drooping their whiskers until they scraped the floor? His should not be the only roar, but the tiled chamber should be deafened by booming mareira. Instead, high-pitched human chatter reached a verminous chirp, pierced by nasal snorts of scornful laughter.

Then they were shrouded by blackness as impenetrable as deepest night, a blackness nearly unknown under Alsantia's two moons, and a sprawling civilization that lighted not only human cities,

but forests and wild spaces. It was like Oji had taken a step in an abandoned dwarf mine, and the mountain's peak had fallen, sealing the entrance.

At first Oji saw nothing in the pitch blackness, but as he padded deeper in the darkness, there was a flicker, then a white, wavering flutter no broader than a ribbon, and then a streak of light as broad as a fresh stick of chalk rolled on its side along a blackboard, which traced the starkly revealed shadow-ministers with such a broad brush that their outlines seemed the whitened negatives of the shadow-cats. As they strode through the dark, they strobed black to white, a pure, snowy white that did not pierce the enveloping darkness, or give any hint at what transpired among the gossiping, human-clad court of shadows.

When their flickering steps brushed near, Oji flinched, then scampered back, but he was boxed in by the converging shadow-ministers. They padded nearer and nearer until their prowling foreheads butted his, and their bodies rubbed and drove him to a kneel.

Having now loosed the shadow-lion twice, and having held the beast down during their dim, deadening journey through tunnel, lake, and this dreamy mareira land, where this isle hid in an ocean buried in an oasis,Oji was about to test his claws on ghostly hide, when they nodded to each other, then to Oji, rolled back on their ghostly haunches, and padded away.

It is time. This was no shadow-cat's mew, but a high-pitched snarl, like the cats that fought furiously over alley scraps in Draden. It was like his own meow, echoed from memories of The Mansion of the Shining Prince: Loren stroking his tail impishly, yanking her hand from his spinning hind claws, then darting in again; Bear rubbing his chin with one hand as she drowsily droned Moby Dick.

When Oji cut through these beguiling memories, his heart was only half in it, for he had been clawing his way back to Bear for months, and it was good to see her, even in a memory, which seemed to glint crystal clear in the stark contrast of the darkness. He scowled when he slashed through the remembrance to see their whited-out traces, their turned tails fading in the dark. "It can't be time. He wanted me to go back."

It is too late for that, young king.

"What king? I'm barely a prince. Won't he tell me what I am? If I leave now, my whole journey was a waste of time."

You dearly need to hear all that he had to say. But unless you turn back time, the mareira king can no longer grant you audience.

"Everything was pointless," moaned Oji.

Even as you met, your destinies converged.

"What destiny? More like a car crash," snorted Oji. "After we met, he rolled over and died." He remembered when Njall had run over the great stag that burst through the Mansion's stained glass window.

When he saw your fate was already rewritten, he let go this world and passed to the next.

"So he's where you are?"

We're far from dead, your majesty. Our powers are of this world.

"Then why not come to me sooner?"

We have been with you since you left Alsantia,

"Since I left? Don't you mean since I arrived?"

While we have indeed tailed you since your return, we have watched over your majesty since you were sent to Earth.

"Why not step in once in a while?"

Your majesty, we have our sacred trust...

"What good is a sacred trust if your reaction to injustice is to make popcorn?" Oji growled. When he roared, they crept further into the dark. Oji scowled and reluctantly followed the eerie tribe of negative shadows.

"Why did he die?" Oji struggled to speak under the crushing weight of this death. Whether Oji's father or not, the mareira king had comprehended Oji with his dying glance. For the first time, Oji had been seen. Seen not only as he was, but as he is, and as he will be. It was the closest thing to a religious experience he had felt on either world. When the king's vision fell on him, he was transformed into something new.

There can be only one.

"One king? Suvani will have something to say about that--not just any prophecy of one kingdom under one king, but of their needing to be a king, and not a queen. Moreover, it will set Ephremia's royals squabbling, and even Alsantian animals, though long dreaming of the benevolent rule of beasts, having scarcely heard of mareira, will continue to live as they will."

Even our king was only a shadow cast by the one. There can only be one, and there will ever only be one.

While Oji shrank and shuddered under their crushing implications, he shook it off, snickered and smiled a wry smile. "You scarcely like me, and suggest I am your foretold king?"

For now, you are nothing among our shadows. As evils submerge in the light, worlds and futures emerge from the darkness. We shadows have waited for daybreak.

"You should have invited the sphinx," sighed Oji. "She's more qualified to rule over riddle makers and puzzlers."

Puzzlers? We have solved for you for centuries. The last puzzle piece to seal the broken worlds.

"Study other solutions. I haven't yet said I'd help. Should I obligate myself to those I barely know, or my own beasts in the wilds of True Alsantia?" Disgusted by his guide's smug smile--Oji had entirely too much of smug guides and cage-holders--he breathed a sour sigh. "Where are we going?" Oji was tired of asking this, having asked entirely too many times since leaving Earth for Alsantia.

Wherever your majesty wills.

Oji snarled. He had placed his destiny in others' hands--human hands, wicked hands-- for far too long, he raged, stamping on the shifting shadow-floor with his massive paw. First its padded, muffled tread only knocked in the endless dark, but as his tiredness gave way to exasperation, then indignation,

his paw thumped again, then boomed, shaking the diaphanous dark of the shadow corridor, which was neither stone nor wood, but something that shimmered like satin, rippled like water, and billowed like the Galiel's sails.

When the shadowy hall careened back and forth, Oji was on sealegs again, and he staggered woozily, shouldering aside the dark ministers.

When the light rises, the sun arrives.

"What light? What sun?" Oji growled. As Oji's paws ground deep, tearing grass and crunching soil, his hot breath hissed through his teeth, and he smelled rain, not just a light sprinkle, but the faint smell of salt and smoke that fell before a tempest. The darkness was ripped apart by a bright white shimmer, shunting the dark fabric of the shadow corridor, as if it was only a hood drawn over his eyes.

Rising from rain-wet grass was the scent of dandelions, mushrooms, and wild onions, as well as the damp soil that lifted up these growing things, but when the fragrance of fresh blossoms, minty pinecones, waterlogged bark, and glistening leaves drifted down, Oji's eyes pinched half-asleep,

and he purred involuntarily, feeling a wave of ecstatic gratitude.

For somehow, in treading the shadow-ministers' dark paths, he had traded desert and darkness for an ageless woodland in the throes of spring.

While he had never held the full breath of Alsantia at its best and healthiest, having been drawn underground by rude dwarves, tucked in a cage by Suvani's courier, then locked in Suvani's garden menagerie, which was full of a bale, malevolent bloom, and many poisonous flowers aside from Suvani as well,their scents smoldering like ashes and gunpowder; having escaped to the deadest place on Alsantia, the desert void of enchantment known as the Sargan Vos, crawling only with scorpions, vermin, the merest trickle of swarms, and the ranging, carnivorous forest known as the Ashflowers;

while he had no memory of Alsantia at its finest, his nostrils, still flaring hot from his raging tread down the shadow-trail, made the connection to the malicious, rotted patches he had visited, and scented how the enchanted world meant to grow. For while Alsantia was heartless to the core, it strove for purity and innocence, the purity of thorn-armored blossoms and the innocence of strangling vines.

And the woods' uninhibited life whelmed him now, its warm air pressing down twice as thick as the desert, so thick it was like breathing water, and its yapping, chattering and chittering lives teeming while somehow not popping the profound bubble of silence that nestled around him in the clamor.

As he strode forward, the bushes shook, disclosing young deer frighted towards the tall grass fringe that veiled the slope, and where they burst through, stags crashed back, lowering towering racks,

and nearly as large, from point to tail, as shadow-lion Oji.

When he braced for their charge, they seemed not to see him at all, and slashed through the dim, surrounding air, not only startling him, but surprising him even more when horn clashed on something in the shadows. His ministers had not departed, but trailed him through the Alsantian woods.

As the stags tramped and stomped through the overgrown patch, the shadow-ministers seeped away like steam, and only when they had sunk into Oji's shadow did the stags buckle back with a start,

and raise their antlers.

"Why do you wait?" called a voice in the bushes.

"He's no ghost." This sleek stag was at the forefront of the deer backing towards the grass fringe.

"Ghost or rogue beast, it matters not. This is a sacred place. Do your duty." The deep timbre of the hidden voice echoed in the glen.

"Forgive me," said Oji. "I was wandering through the dark."

"The dark? It's morning."

"I traveled through that dark thicket." Oji gestured with his paw toward a wide-ranging grove. "I was heading for Teriana."

The voice laughed, a long, screeching chitter that unnerved Oji. "You're a long way from Teriana. This is the heart of Alsantia. True Alsantia. The only Alsantia that matters."

"Just where have I arrived?"

"The Holy Foyer." The badger plodded from the bushes. While he was a tiny thing next to Oji or the stags, he was a gigantic badger, with thick rolls of flab belting his middle, waddles crusting his neck, and paws so pudgy he seemed to coast on them like rollers. "The doorstep of all worlds."

His words resonated deep in Oji. While they left Earth only weeks ago, so much had happened

that it seemed years since he huddled in Berangere's vestments on the bus rumbling from Draden, listening to Lucien tell of the giant stag that had passed through the Holy Foyer of The Mansion of the Shining Prince.

"Not ringing a bell?" The mocking tones now sounded eerily familiar, and while he could not place the jowls or the creased brows, there was a nagging familarity to the badger's face. "What of The Noble Pelt?"

"While I've heard of The Noble Pelt, I never heard it was a place."

"That's a human way of thinking," grumbled the badger. "Only one who lived under a human's thumb or heel would say that. Everything has its own place, you see. This tree is not only a thing, it's a place. Human ideas of property twist everything in an attempt to make a ghost of place, a possessive, property-owning ghost, as if each place conceived its contents and residents, not the other way around."

"You're a teacher, aren't you?"

The badger dipped his head with a twinkle of pride, and his dry, patchy cheeks pulled into a wry smile. "And you must be a prince." The badger waddled closer and squinted. "Maybe a king."

"Njall! It's you!" Oji stepped softly and lightly around the Elderlich, as if he was still the kitten that slept on the sill.

"Of course it's me," snorted the badger. "Why do you think I'm here? I've been waiting for you."

Oji growled. "If I've really been expected, why did you never tell me?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've known of my destiny for years, haven't you?"

"Since you were a blind little kitten."

"I never got much bigger, Njall!" bellowed Oji. "It would have been nice to know I had this waiting."

"What? No one talks about how tall you were after you've died, your majesty. They might share stories at your wake about how wide you were around the middle"--he patted his stomach with a smug smile--"but you need scarcely worry about that. And if I kept a few surprises from you, what of it? It was hard enough to keep your secret, without having to hold your hand and warn you of your coming changes."

"This way, your majesty." Beckoning to Oji, Njall led them through tangled bushes and gnarled trees. Bowing their racks and kneeling in a slow, majestic wave, the stags resembled the roots of immense tree trunks themselves, their dim brown hulks seeming to join to the groves.

As they walked, it became clear where they were. While he had only seen it from a distance,

across the vast mulch desert of the Sargan Vos, there was no denying these mammoth trees had grown not only the hugest trunks imaginable, but branches as wide in girth as everyday trees. They had arrived in the heart of the Luskveld, where woodland creatures dwelled less on the forest floor than on the low and middle branches connecting a colossal vegetal web from tree to tree.

"You've waited all this time?"

"I have."

When Oji attempted a sarcastic smile, his teeth spread into what what was no doubt a horrible snarl, and Njall shrank back, until Oji drew in a deeper blast of breath, then exhaled this hot air until his whiskers twirled, driving the badger into a full-throttle scurry. "Shouldn't you have taken a more active role?"

"What do you mean, your highness?"

"Shouldn't you have helped us?"

"I did help you! Who do you think sent Djrezinia? That ship was no accident."

"You're joking. How would you know where to send it? Or did you know I would cross from Earth to Alsantia at that exact spot?"

"When I heard that you escaped Suvani, I assumed you'd make your way to your friends in Teriana."

"Then your help was only a coincidence."

"What you call coincidence I call serendipity. If my intentions were not only well-meant and desperately needed, but powerfully effective, who cares how good my aim was?

When a branch flicked Oji in the face, his huge paw lashed out, scratching its leaves to ribbons and its bark to shreds. Njall snorted, crouched, and pointed to the other low branches just up ahead.

"Isn't there an easier path?" Had they taken the arboreal path, a network of gigantic branches that stretched clear through the Luskveld, they would have avoided the thorns, burrs, and sharp thickets.

"I'm not suited for the arboreal path, your majesty." Njall shrugged and huffed as he waddled. "And my prince was a kitten. I had no foreknowledge of this other legacy."

"Isn't it the same, though?

"Is that what they said?" When Njall bristled, then shuddered, Oji's brow clenched, and his tail quivered, as if whatever distaste struck the Elderlich like a tuning fork shivered in him also.

"What? Just say it."

"Has Alsantia here you so rude already, my prince? You would have never dared speak to me like that in the Mansion."

"As I was keeping up the pretense of being a common housecat, I would have never spoken to you at all. By your command, I was unable to disclose my true nature even to those closest to me."

Having lumbered to a halt, Njall lurched forward another nose, then rolled back into a squat. "As for your true nature, we've arrived."

"You speak of true nature!" The acid sneer drizzled acrimony and scorn, instantly dissolving their conversation. "When you have slipped here from a shadow realm, thinking to overshadow Alsantia for another millennium."

It was like looking into a mirror. Perched on a heavy limb, another shadow-lion glared down at Oji. As he glowered back, the sarcastic arch of their twin eyebrows clashed and their smug slouches jibed all too eerily well, for he had posed with that sneer on countless occasions. While mareira were black head to toe, and Oji's white paws and star, which had carried over from his calico kitten form to the shadow-lion form, were patterns positively unheard of among true shadow-cats, this one mirrored these exact markings on his paws and brow.

When his twin's sudden muteness seemed to justify his disbelief, Oji stepped gingerly left,

hoping it would step right, as a reflection should, but when it stepped left, as a true copy would,

displaying not only a perfect image, but an identical handedness, he froze. When his duplicate did not freeze, and contracted its cruel face to a sharper scorn, Oji remembered this monster.

It was a horror many feared, a nightmare anyone would understand. Although there was no doubt in his mind that he was the genuine article, and the other the fraud, hundreds of cats crowded the clearing, kneeling before the false Oji. Surrounding this feline tribe, representatives of every animal nation--stags, wolves, bears, rabbits, mice, and more--also made obeisance to the monstrous sham posing as Oji.

"What is this?" Njall's booming voice sheared through the crowd, causing many to flinch,

and others to rise from their haunches to all fours, then pace the clearing.

The puddlegulp.

The monstrous mockery had tormented Oji for pleasure throughout his captivity in Suvani's menagerie. Able to mimic perfectly any creature, alive or dead, the puddlegulp had maliciously and enthusiastically mirrored Oji to a tee, mimicking not only his calico fur and markings, but his mannerisms, poses and affectations; not only the most natural, to increase the authenticity of the illusion, but the most affected, wringing agonizing self-consciousness from Oji, who winced to see his most embarrassing quirks displayed, as it were, on a screen.

When the Oji-shaped puddlegulp snickered, rose to all fours, and pranced about the clearing in the most mortifying way, Oji saw it. Although almost nondescript--just a scruffy, ruffled rug of frosted brown hair--his eyes flashed to it and froze there, and as he padded nearer the Noble Pelt, the puddleglum faultlessly copied his possessive steps, so that they each laid a paw on its fringe together.

Having expected a thrill to course through him upon contact with the ancient skin, he was disappointed when the only tingle was from the coarse hair underfoot, stretched taut under their opposing paws.

If Oji was destined to be crowned on The Noble Pelt, why should the artifact encourage this pretender; if hallowed to True Alsantia, why sully itself by letting the puddlegulp set paw on its hide?

The puddlegulp's eyebrows--his eyebrows, Oji numbly realized, copied more painstakingly than any artist's rendition--slashed down in a sneer. "You would have them believe me the copy, and you the original."

"I don't care what they believe. They'll be persuaded soon enough."

"What did you expect? Musical fanfare? A meteor shower? Not for one as false as you." While the puddlegulp must know it was the copy, and Oji the genuine article, he could not help feeling the monstrous deceiver had scored a hit, for despite his travels, his transformation, and his being endorsed by the mareira king, he felt himself to be an impostor, and the thought of standing on The Noble Pelt--no matter that it seemed an antique scrap unlikely to judge his worthiness--pricked cold fear and seemed to promise a revelation.

As Oji lifted his paw to prowl in a wide circuit around the kneeling animals, he felt himself outside their worship, and not the object of it. Had he been the first to arrive, the puddlegulp might still have upstaged him, for he felt himself to be the pretender, not the true king. Looking on their beatific, adoring faces, he felt on the outside looking in, his soul both the glass window he stared through and the shadow passing over it, dimming the light.

Puddlegulp-Oji strode forward, then crouched over two bowed foxes, whose faces scrunched in reverent joy, as if they made this moment themselves, and weren't mere witnesses of the prophesied transformation. The copycat Oji's smile stretched to a slavering snarl as he eyed the sleek foxes,

then relaxed into an austere, kingly poker-face.

As Oji saw its smug, snobbish grin, he hoped he didn't look like that, that he didn't present such monstrous condescension. The puddlegulp's spiteful reflection dared come too close and personal, not only to himself, but to what might become his defining moment: assuming the crown of True Alsantia, then going on to redeem the world.

"Stand away from my people."

"Your people? How fortunate for me. How about a round of introductions? No? You mean you don't know their names? And you would claim them as your own people?" As the puddlegulp's shadow-lion form towered over the kneeling animals, its melodramatic sigh wafted the leaves of the lowest branch above.

While Oji shrank from disturbing such worship, no matter how misguided, and feared disappointing long-suffering expectations raised by a vague prophecy, he had no fear of heights, and no qualms about prowling the arboreal road. When he pounced onto the colossal branch above, leaves shivered, snapped off, and showered the animals.

"Look," puddlegulp-Oji jeered, "it flees."

"Does a worm turn, or does a king take the high road?" As the profound timbre of the riddling voice resonated in the clearing and echoed warmly off surrounding groves, an enormous shade overran the crowd, darkened the bright patches where the sun had tweaked through the crush of leaves above,

and dimmed the humid air under the canopy.

How she had arrived, Oji had no idea, but he was profoundly grateful for the sphinx's endorsement. Moreover, he was emboldened by her presence, for even if every other beast backed up the puddlegulp, having one sphinx at his back was a tremendous advantage.

Oji racked his brain for a cutting and clever wisecrack; some aphorism that would be buzzed about for a year, then attributed to him for centuries. But while a burning urge to speak is a galling thing to sit on the back of your tongue, disgust and the desire to smite an obscene blight smoldered deeper in his soulfire. As his booming roar consumed the burning, unsaid words, he pounced on the puddlegulp.

When the burning roar clashed with the snarling puddlegulp, it was engulfed with an eerie, silent flame that sparked green and white, but did not crackle, dwindling to a snowy foam dissolving into the grass. Its gathered worshipers hastened back from his oozing remains, where Oji landed square,

thumping so hard that the receding crowd jostled, elbowed, groaned, swore, and growled, as if they were shoving all the way back to mute beasts in their fright.

While the pads of Oji's soaked paws puckered, and his toe fur melted into the monstrous residue, he took only a moment to take in his ugly, hairless paws, composed himself, then strode towards The Noble Pelt. He had always been an oddity on Earth, he reassured himself, being not only a white-pawed calico, but a talking animal on a world of wordless beasts. As a colossal shadow-lion with hairless paws--all knuckle, skin, and claw--he looked like death personified, but he no longer felt out of place when the worshiping beasts shuddered and bowed.

Just as he was about to set paw on the ancient unicorn pelt, murmurs rippled in the crowded animals, then a clear shout: "he bites the heel!" Turning aside, Oji glimpsed his own face--not his shadow-lion visage, but the kitten, stretched by foot-long fangs past caricature to the point of nightmare--subsiding into oozing puddlegulp slime, and when the throng of beasts yapped and roared again, Oji swung right, just scraping by another puddlegulp pool, where his boy's head reared, crammed with the same bloodcurdling fangs and eyes grayed by death, until his paw thoomed down,

squelching bubbling flesh, enveloping his paw in goo, spattering the front row of onlookers, and flinging a single droplet toward the Noble Pelt.

At the sight of something so vile and profane globbing toward the ancient artifact, the beasts dropped to a hush, aside from a single mew, which, Oji was surprised to hear, stemmed from his own massive head. It was like all color drained from everything as the gobbet spat toward the ancient hide,

and the stark moment did not stop there, but emptied all noise to the point of numbness, so that even amid hundreds, Oji felt sealed off in his soul-encompassing bubble of fear. Once its corruption profaned the Noble Pelt, would it go on to consume all Alsantia?

He might have stopped it with one single step, but something in him crawled at the thought of the puddlegup washing over him, so despicably had it profaned his image, not only in life, but death,

and its twisted caricature of both, when his own face tore up from the goo, moment to moment an awful living death.

Blasting through the crowd by a trundling momentum preposterous in one so old and fat,

Njall slid the last few inches, his nails tearing the dirt under the Noble Pelt's hem, and his ear scraping just under the splash.

Njall froze in that awkward sprawl--paws clenched under the sacred hide, head and shoulders protruding over it--as if he had turned to stone. And spreading over his unflinching paralysis, the gray puddlegulp smear mottled and transformed the badger. His strangled scream and wide, bulging pupils said the badger was fighting the putrescent spread of puddlegulp, but his shivering forelegs said it took all his strength not to collapse onto the Noble Pelt.

Why should the ooze be contagious to Njall, and not Oji? Oji frowned, but there was no time to entertain his confusion, not when the ancient pelt was under peril of being desecrated by puddlegulp,

and not when Njall might still be saved.

Believing himself immune to the puddlegulp's deadly spread, Oji clasped his paws under Njall's forequarters.

"Stop him!" some shouted, and Oji hauled harder under the Elderlich's massive bulk. When the corpulent badger proved much lighter than Oji anticipated--not unlike steeling yourself to lift a cumbersome box, and finding it empty, falling back three steps by your own momentum--he staggered back from the force of his own exertion, rolled on his haunches until he stood nearly erect on his hind legs, and felt something dripping down even as he flinched from Njall's lolling head and lifeless eyes.

"Bring water! Save the king!"

"Save yourselves!" others screeched. "Flee!"

They stared up in such utter, abject terror that Oji was certain he was being chewed up by the ghastly transformation, but on stepping back from the stamping, clomping horde, he found himself complete and whole, if wet and oozy down his ribs. Glancing down, he saw gore streaming and splotching his fur.

From Njall. Half of Njall. While Oji's upper paws still clasped Njall's lolling top half, the badger's hindquarters squatted near the Noble Pelt. When the bloody hind legs liquified, instant by instant, into more grey ooze, Oji backpedaled, flinging Njall's gory remains far into the woods.

No wonder the puddlegulp was fearless of death. Death was how these monsters reproduced.

After death, their fluids transformed their killers to carry on their unwholesome purpose of chilling transformations. While this didn't answer the question of his own immunity, Oji knew he must protect those not so shielded.

"Not water," he boomed. "Earth. You badgers, bury these oozing puddles, and be quick and careful about it. Njall deserves a better burial, but if we are not hasty in cleansing this moldering ooze, the blight will consume us all."

"You killed him." While her tail and ears were nearly silver from age, this graying orange fox was supple and sleek. "What if you consume us all."

The shade seemed to convulse when the sphinx ruffled her wings and barked a sharp, vulgar laugh. "What if you are already food?"

"You're not welcome here, beast," growled the fox.

"Unwelcome, or out of place?" With a baleful leer, the sphinx tapped a massive claw to the fox's brow. "Are you out to lunch, or out of time?"

"We don't want you here, sphinx," the old fox snarled.

"We? What friends?" As the others backed away, the sphinx folded the fox in the circle of her massive wings. "Who could relish you more than worms?"

While the crowd's attention had shifted to the gigantic beast, Oji kept his furrowed frown on the slandering fox as he padded over to the raccoons and bears, who had just trundled back from the river,

balancing bowls on their heads sloshing sweet-smelling river water.

As Oji was still parched from the sea and desert, thirst overwhelmed his relief, and he seized the first bowl in his paws and downed it in one gulp, as the beasts poured the rest on his paws and underbelly, washing the gore into the grass, where it dissolved into foam, then fizzed into the air.

He hoped there would be no consequences from the ground absorbing evil, instead of light, air, and water. If it seemed wrong that the innocent earth should not be able to distinguish evil from good,

he felt that he had failed this holy place, which had long depended on his arrival, not only as its redeemer, but its protector.

As he gathered his resolve for the reason of his journey, he couldn't help thinking of Njall as he had known him on Earth, as much captor as guardian. While he couldn't lie to himself, and tell himself there was no good memory of the the irascible and irritable Elderlich, he felt the self-deception in any effort to mourn the dead shape-shifter now.

He sighed. He was only avoiding what he must do--pussyfooting around the last fear left standing.

Having a long time to familiarize himself with this fear only increased its vise grip, for while it liked to be coddled by rationalizations and fed with the inevitable postponements that frustrated his royal inheritance for far too long, he had pampered and feasted this fear until it became the hulking terror that egged on all his fears, so prodding his poor judgment that he had likely prolonged his powerlessness by choosing some of what would carry him furthest from his throne. For not only had Oji never wanted to be king, but since he had learned of his destiny, he had piled up fears in a dark mass that overwhelmed even his quiet moments on Earth. Even his dreams had been plagued by terror of the kingship. Berangere and Loren had joked that he chased dream mice, when in truth he fled nightmares, as well as the beastly horde that would bow to crown and throne.

While on Earth, his dark feelings had ridden him, on Alsantia, his shadowy fears were a crushing burden, so that he felt dwarfed by his own responsibility and power. Now that he craved what he had feared, he realized his fears' shadowy grasp had only reached sooner, before he was conscious of his desire. He had always been this shadowy desire. As it grew stronger, it grew its own claws, then outgrew him, becoming the enormous shadow-lion he had long repressed, that well of ancient magic that had always been part of Oji. While he had wanted to remain a kitten to cleave closer to Berangere,

he could not stave off his true self forever. His shadow had always lain in wait, and the Noble Pelt was only the outward symbol of this transformation.

There was nothing to fear, he sighed. He was born a king, and the noble pelt made for no better footing than his own shadow. As he took a step onto The Noble Pelt, the beasts knelt, and the lowest, basest part of himself creeped and cringed within him, as if it also clamored to abase itself before the True King. When he pulled out of these shudders, his shadow spread to an enormous pool embracing the shadows of the multitude. As Oji curled on the Noble Pelt, he preened the newborn fur of his paw.