Chapter 14 – Cat and Owl

Why did that stupid cat keep flashing into his mind? Clockwerk paced back and forth restlessly across the central chamber, much as he had been doing for the past 2 hours. The bears were long overdue to return, and he was beginning to get… hungry. He shook his head, clearing the edges of his beak of a thin bead of drool as he tried to get his mind back on track.

"Cat…"

Why was this so difficult? For that matter, why should he even care? It was probably just a hallucination brought on by the rather unfortunate series of events he had endured over the last couple of weeks. His mind must still be cold, he reasoned.

The image of the cat flashed into his mind again, a bit clearer this time than the last.

He quickened his pace across the room, ruffling his feathers. There is no way that his mind could be playing this good of a trick on him, oh no. What is that stupid cat?

He stopped abruptly, his talons making a short screeching sound against the stone of the floor. He cocked his head to the side, and then closed his eyes as he forced himself to concentrate as hard as he could.

A memory, or perhaps just a dream, began to play back in his head.

Oh God, it was so cold.

Harsh tendrils of icy wind tore at what feathers of his remained as he felt himself being carried by an unknown entity towards an unknown location.

It was cold.

He forced the frost from his eyelids as he tried to open them, only to have them assaulted by the harsh, reflected light of the tundra that surrounded him in all directions. His eyes were instantly dried by the freezing wind, but a sight to his right forced him to keep them open. There, floating alongside him, was a lump of wet fur that ruffled pitifully in the torrent of deadly elements surrounding it.

It was cold. He was cold.

His eyes frosted over, obscuring his vision behind a cloud of white. He blinked as furiously as his tired abilities would let him to try and rid his view of the intruding ice, but it was no use. He tried to move his wings, but found them hopelessly frozen to his side in a mixture of blood and ice.

Oh God, it was so cold.

That had to have been it. That had to have been the cat, he thought. He opened his eyes, but furrowed the feathers on his brow as realization struck him. The bears had carried it into their dwelling alongside him. It must be in here with him.

A burning desire to find it, a desire that he could not even in the slightest begin to explain, washed over him as he set his legs in motion to convey him to the arched stone doorway that marked the exit of the main room. He felt the feathers of his wings brush against the sides of the stone as he walked through it, the cooling sensation it gave him not being entirely unpleasant. He passed by another arch that led to the sleeping rooms, and continued on his way into parts of the cave that he had not yet had the chance or desire to explore. After what felt like several minutes of walking, he began to feel the air around him growing colder. The sparsely placed sconces on the wall, their fire casting odd shadows along the hewn rock sides of the walls, gave off just enough light to make one's way down the passage without issue. Even they, however, seemed cold to his eyes.

Before he had realized it, he found himself in a part of the cave where it opened up into a room about the size of what he had come to know as the main chamber of the bear's home. He looked around the sparsely furnished clearing quickly, but his eyes instantly locked on to one facet of the room in particular.

Off to the side, in one of the corners of the roughly rectangular room, was a stone table with what appeared to be a large mass on top of it being covered in multiple layers of cloth and furs. He slowly walked up to it, the incredibly cold air leaving puffs of his breath behind him in small clouds as he traversed the span. He placed a wing out in front of him and ruffled the top-most layer of fur with his pinions. It was an exotic material, black with hints of grey, the origins of which he did not know. He curled his feathers around the edges of it and pulled it off to the side.

He repeated this process with each layer of the material, littering the floor with them as they were tossed carelessly about. What he eventually uncovered was a still body. The body of a cat.

He looked it over, two black tipped ears sprouted from the tip of a stout face that was connected to the rest of a horribly emaciated body covered in tufts of dark, sandy orange fur. What intrigued him the most, however, were the teeth. 2 pure-white sabers, easily over six inches long apiece, jutted downwards from the mouth of the creature in a slight curve. Whatever this cat had been, it was-

Clockwerk's thought froze in place as he noticed the tail of the creature, a small stub, twitch slightly. For reasons unclear to him, he stepped back a pace.

The cat lying in front of him on the table let out a soft groan that began to slowly build into a low growl that evolved into an ear-splitting screech of a roar that shook the very stone of the room they were in. Its body convulsed on the cool stone, as if all of the pain that it had endured over however long in whichever place it had existed finally came back to it in one fell swoop of torment. Clockwerk took a pace forwards, regaining lost ground, and then placed an extended wing on the midriff of the beast. It turned its head towards him as its eyes shot open. It mumbled an incoherent string of syllables directed at the owl, and then lost consciousness with a groan.

Clockwerk cocked his head slightly to the side, still looking into the closed eyes of the creature in front of him.

"How odd."

A.N./

Short and seemingly incomplete, I know, but I wanted to put something out there so that I didn't fall into another cycle of ungodly long times between updates. No matter how bad the odds may seem, this story is still alive and kicking after almost a year and a half. Like I have said in previous notes, almost the entirety of the story is planned out in a little journal of mine, but putting it into words is ridiculously hard to do for some reason. Wish me luck, guys. Several other in-progress chapters are open in several other tabs. I'm gonna finish this thing if it kills me.

-Jake