Oh, great! This took sooner than I thought! Okay, here it is. The next chapter!


I coughed and coughed.

I doubled over with intense pain from my coughing. My throat felt hot, dry, scraped with heat.

I hated this. I hated this, and I so desperately wanted to stop coughing, but I somehow just couldn't.

I so wanted to wake up. In fact, I couldn't even figure out what was reality, what was my dream, what was in my sleep or in the waking world.

Was I still dreaming?

This pain was real. This coughing was genuine.

Bona fide.

The actual thing.

Elmspirit's soft barking voice, strangely melodic, floated somewhere ahead of me.

"Alepou. Alepou. " He sort of sang out my name and his voice was warm with a sympathetic touch, as if we were friends, as if he understood what I was going through. "Everything will be fine."

I was so captured in pain that I didn't hear his next sentence drift towards my ears. I didn't hear his softly spoken words hover in the air around me, echoed by millions of starry cats who stared at me with expressions now full of hope,

"Though it may not be what you expect, you will live to see another day- another life. Alepou."

I hate you! I hate this!

I choked on a cough, and, just like that, my vision swirled with chaos and erupted into blackness.

'Don't ever regret, Alepou. You will save the Clans.' I heard a whisper, in fox language, and knew, suddenly, I was listening to Elmspirit's voice, again.

I don't know what you're talking about. I thought weakly back.

Then I fell to the ground, collapsing with a thud.


I woke up to a frosty blue sky, panting, slightly coughing and relieved beyond words, not to mention badly shaken.

I blinked at the faintly glaring sun, leaped up and stretched euphorically.

I was alive.

It had, after all, been a dream.

Right?

I stretched once again, shaking off the sleepy feeling that weighed down my drowsy bones.

Just a dream.

I thought about Elmspirit, the starry cats.

Just a dream!

My coughing, the pain.

Hey, wait, let's go back to that sentence.

My coughing.

I hurried back into my den, my eyes widening, and curled up into a tight ball in my mossy nest, trying not to tremble, trying not to scream out with confusion.

Coughing.

Before I had been to sleep, I had been in the strong clutches of a definite lethal fever. I had definitely had a fever. Definitely.

Where had my fever gone?

It could have miraculously healed overnight.

Right?

Things like that rarely happened, but it was achievable.

But my mind wandered again to my dream, and I doubted that at my age I could make a miraculous recovery from both an internally and externally powerful fever.

Something was seriously wrong.

And I had the strangest feeling that I knew.

I mulled over my current state. I was a very old fox. I had felt certain that my end was near. That I was going to die. Surely I was.

I was old, after all.

But…? Yet I felt so young...and so full of energy. I hadn't been like this before.

I felt different too. Like, physically different.

And something was wrong with my mind. I wanted to scramble up the nearest tree, chase mice and leap after a bird.

What was going on?

And, as a fox?

I mean, scramble up a tree?

That was a weird thought. One would almost think I…

Was…

A…

Cat.

I felt my heart pound loudly, felt its tremor, heard myself let out a gasp. Horror streaked through my belly, leaving behind a cold trail of fear.

It couldn't be. It had all been just a foolish dream. Hadn't it?

I remembered Elmspirit. He was a cat. Well, I mean on the outside. He looked like a cat. You would think he was a cat, completely.

But I had heard him speak.

He had spoken with the language of the foxes.

And the way he looked at me, it was as if he understood exactly what I was going through.

His sympathetic tone, for one, unlike the doubtful gazes of the starry cats.

His understanding, regretful eyes, for another, expressing words I wasn't –until now- aware of.

But now I think I know. His eyes said, 'I know you're innocent. I'm sorry. But, like me, you are chosen. Chosen to suffer a fate. Like me.'


After pondering what I should do for what seemed like hours, I finally scrambled to my paws, and padded through the forest. My mind was like a stone, radiating no thoughts and feeling numb.

I came to stream and looked around.

Was it just my imagination, or did I see a flash of blue-grey flicker behind a foliage of rubbery leaves to my right?

It reminded me of my dream, of the starry cat, the long-furred blue-grey one who had been talking with a small black cat.

I shivered and chased the thoughts away from my head. Best not to think about the dream at all.

I stared down at my paws. They seemed smaller than usual, which only increased my suspicions.

And their colour was a lighter shade of russet. As I squinted at my paws, I caught traces of thin black stripes. I jerked my gaze away from my paws, apprehension making my clenched jaw ache.

Those wretched, sadistic starry cats. That wretched Elmspirit.

If my suspicions were correct…I shook my head, once, twice, three times and closed my eyes.

I couldn't possibly believe that my dream had been real. I couldn't possibly believe that…I gulped.

Well, I did believe. I did believe that I had been turned into…

Again, my brain refused to register the fact that poked at me, enforcing the growing sense of horror in my throat.

There's only one way to know for sure.

I slowly opened my eyes. Slowly, slowly…and lifted my gaze to the stream, where my image was reflected on the shimmering water.

My heart drooped like lead. I flattened my ears.

Now, I was shaking uncontrollably.

No! No!

With golden eyes glittering- or was it just the effect of the stream? –and short, faintly striped, light russet fur shivering in the breeze stood me, a…

A…c-c-ca…

I looked away sharply, still shuddering with disgust, bewilderment and fear.

I opened my mouth to utter a dismayed cry.

But instead of a normal, foxish cry, what came out was a meow.

A meow.

As in, the sound those cats make. A meow-meow thing.

You may have figured it all out by now.

Like Elmspirit, indeed.

Those cursed kitties had turned me into one of them.

I was now a cat.