Lesson 13: Conversations with talking animals are generally a bad idea.
The blood dumps him out into the glowing landscape of the forest. He takes his time getting up from the ground. He's near the edge of the hill that he traveled up last night, but when he peeks over the edge, the town is nothing more than a faintly glowing array of lights against the dark.
Without the bat, there is no desire to visit the glowing statues he knows are waiting above, so he walks deeper into the forest, his path illuminated by the violet and emerald glow of the trees.
He walks for an eternity, although in the night of the endless forest, it might be no more than a moment. Whichever it is, he eventually comes across a giant clearing. He drifts forward until he reaches the middle, looking up.
The sky is visible from here, a velvety blue that's almost black, but not quite. Silver stars dot the sky, arranged in a pattern that seems incredibly familiar, although he doesn't see it until he squints.
"A cat," he murmurs, words echoing like ripples throughout the silent forest. "You're a sky cat."
"If that's what you'd like to call me."
Soul jumps back, and suddenly the sky cat isn't in the sky anymore. Its infinite eyes regard him with no emotion. "You are a strange little creature."
It's only a dream, so he isn't afraid. He draws closer to the cat, eyeing the moving galaxies of stars woven into its fur. "Are you God?"
"If you'd like to call me that instead, I do not care." The cat's mouth does not move as it speaks; in fact, its voice doesn't even seem to come from itself, but all around him. "I suppose that is what I am to you, although that is not what I am to myself."
"Fine," he says after a moment of trying and failing to work out what the sky cat means. "Then, you're God."
The cat blinks at him. "You little creatures like to find meaning in everything."
"Isn't that the point to all this?"
The cat only gives a sigh.
"If you're God, then can you see everything?" he asks, trying again.
"The Beginning was moments ago, and the End is moments away," the cat replies. "The universe eats itself and spits itself back out, forgetting everything. That is the nature of things."
He starts to become annoyed. "Am I supposed to know what any of that means?"
"You are Monstrous Existence," answers the cat. "It is not the nature of atoms to understand themselves."
"I'm a lot more than atoms, and so are my friends." He jabs a finger at the cat. "What's going to happen to them? To my town?" he demands. "Are you the thing that's been calling me?"
"You experience things on such a tiny scale, it is not a surprise you understand nothing." The cat's tail flicks, and the stars in its fur swirl in tandem with it. "It is why I do not make it a point to mingle in the affairs of little creatures."
His hands ball into fists. "Then what is calling me?"
The cat doesn't answer.
Soul throws his hands in the air. "What is the point to all of this?"
"The universe is forgetting you," says the cat after a long silence. "But I will remember you, not because I care or because I want to, but because you were here."
Another silence follows, shorter this time.
"You know what, I don't care if you're God," Soul says as he starts to walk away from the cat. "You're a really big jerk."