The Lord and the Cat.

Short fiction concerning Tom and Minerva.

The Hunted.

There are two words scrawled on the page that sits forlornly on the desk, upon which Tom is tapping his pencil. He relishes in the hollow thud, which echoes with satisfying regularity around the room. The sound seems to slash the air around him until his only thoughts are consumed in a haze of decorative (yet entirely pretend) red ribbons.

He wants to write more but he does not know what. At a loss he glances around the room, observing carefully the figures leaning carelessly across individual desks. No doubt, he thinks, spewing out tales amongst the guts of fallen heroes. He has no time for heroics or chivalry.

Looking upon their faces he does not see them as children but rather through them, to the ever-shattering bones beyond their worn clothes.

Their decaying corpses are writing stories of assassins and of creatures seeking prey.

They do not know and he finds he is jealous of this.

They are the only prey in the world.

They are the hunted ones, caught like their fictional characters in a frenetic, epic chase.

It is then, as his eyes fall upon the stinking flesh that he finds – quite suddenly, that he knows what to write, for he is led by the pen and by his knowledge. And perhaps, by innate influences regarding destiny and divine intention, though he will not allow himself to consider such a ridiculous possibility.


Everything crumbles in a confused haze of love and hatred, of peace and of war. Of passionate heat and an icy winter that will never turn to spring.

Somewhere - hidden - an orchestra plays the epic soundtrack - enough to build a mountain out of tears.

Everything crumbles with the passing of time.

Time is a mortal concept.

Everything crumbles because of those who are mortal.

He stifles a yawn, tired now, because he cannot sleep without being woken by his unconscious imagination.

He awakens always to a dark, forceful silence and can do no more but pad quietly to the window to gaze out upon the sleeping street. He will count the flickering streetlamps over and over until he falls into an uncomfortable state of rest against the windowpane, his circling breath casting an ethereal mist upon the view.

He does not attempt to justify this to those whose coarse hands shake him awake under the grey light of dawn.

He merely places the pen on the page and grants it the liberty to run. Behind it he follows on a leash.


Without mortality there can be no time.

Without mortality loss may become an alien concept.

A child who speaks to his mother only through his nightmares may be relieved of his endless torture.

The same little boy who watched a helpless woman force from her insides a child. Her screaming rising and falling to the tune of the hand of time. Divinity of mortal creation lifts and flings her down ceaseless until silence falls with the night.
The wail of the night is infinitely worse.
There is a mound in the flowerbed that marks the place of the helpless, silent doll.

He wants more than this.

He deserves more than just this.

His tutor will not be happy since his neglect of proper story structure is akin to blasphemy of a most terrible kind. His tutor is not intelligent enough to see that his single sheaf of paper is only a fragment of a greater story.

He scribbles a vague, appropriate ending, which may serve to assuage the demands of his tutor although he harbours doubts about this and wonders why he bothers at all.


The boy was made blind by what he saw - his vision torn cruelly away by the sights of a mortal existence.

He journeys alone, in perpetual darkness, until he comes to rest in a place where life does not exist.

There he is buried and there he decays forever.

No more nightmares, he decides.

It is a conscious decision.

He will not fall victim to the ceaseless hunter of time, somehow, by way of a non-existent fate, in which he does not believe, he will force things to change. In the street outside a peculiar, bearded man comes to a halt outside the orphanage.