“Panther, oh Little Panther.”
The Arameri child’s voice had been grating against my last nerve for some time now. It was a game she liked to play. Give Sieh a bunch of unbreakable rules and run him in circles for hours. I’m exhausted.
More so because I really want to kill this child and I can’t. For two reasons: I’ve been ordered not to, and I usually make it my mission not to kill children. I am a child, I always have been, except for when I haven’t been. Which, is none of your business. I’d stick my tongue out, but I’ve been ordered to play nicely.
It’s the presumptive heir’s kid. An unloved child born of a former unloved child. There was a time when they might have been mine. Might have whispered my deeds in the night when they should have been sleeping.
“Trickster, trickster stole the sun.”
How I miss that. Not that I ever answered. It’s my nature to do as I please, to be mischievous. What’s more mischievous than ignoring worshippers, they came to expect it, and still whispered to me. Mortals are odd like that. I have my favorites, we all do. Itempas’s favorites are currently in possession of us. With godswords sigils burned into their foreheads they control the invisible chains that bright asshole has placed on us. The Enefadeh.
Thinking about Enefa still sends a sinking feeling into the pit of my mortal body’s stomach. This sack of flesh feels her loss as strongly as my soul does. It weeps and shakes with anger when my soul can no longer bear it. She was my mother. One of the Three, spit out by the unfathomable Maelstrom and survived. Itempas took her away from me, and I will see him swelter in one of the misty hells left behind after Enefa’s death. All the good heavens and hells left with her, but some of them stayed. It’s not enough to hurt him, but enough to royally piss him off, and I take great satisfaction in that.
I do wish she would shut up. There’s no such thing as a little Panther, those are called cubs. And I highly doubt she’s ever even seen one, or left this Kurue-forsaken palace of daystone. The Arameri went through great pains to get Kurue to design it, and though she did add little secret embellishments for us, the whole palace screams Itempas. The daystone is bright, like our terrible father. The rounded walls and geometric shapes are methodical, like the old man too. It irks me to no end.
The Arameri brat is using me to sharpen her teeth, or at least that’s why her father gave me to her. This is how those soulless mortals learn to control the world, they start with us. She ordered me to become a cat, which she shouldn’t know I can do. Every generation there are signs which of the brats will become family head, and who will die trying. Shaten, all of eight years old, has done her research on me, probably dug into some scrolls she wasn’t supposed to. Kurue would call this heresy, but my brain doesn’t work like hers, I just call her smart. But a smart Arameri is the enemy no matter how young.
“There you are!” Shaten squealed as she found me lurking underneath an empty bed in the servants quarters. She reaches around under the bed, the small hands swatting at me blindly. I turn to leave but her wildly swinging hand grab my tail.
“Ouch! That’s my tail!” I shout through my cat mouth.
“Then don’t run from me,” she says, sounding way to serious to be a child.
Childhood is made up of base emotion. Cruelty is just part of the natural order for children. But it’s an innocent cruelty, based on the fact that children are inherently selfish because they cannot yet view the bigger picture of things yet. It’s what I like about them, and everyone else scorns. The Arameri squash out the childish cruelty and replace it with hate driven, arrogant cruelty. The kind that makes my mortal flesh crawl.
“Sieh, why do take this form? Would it not be better to be human all the time?” Curious Shaten asks, roughly handling me in her short arms.“
“I am not human,” I pout, but find comfort in the crook of her arms and settle in. She finds a spot by my left ear and I purr, hating myself for it.
“No, I suppose not. You are one of the Enefadeh, you are a tool for us.” She says it casually while stroking my back, and my hatred deepens.“
”I am much more than you will ever know,” I hiss at her, moving to get away from her, but she barks an order to stay still.
“I know, and you will tell me,” she said quietly, as if someone could be listening and she didn’t want them to hear.
There very well could have been.
“Shaten Arameri, a good mortal knows what information they are and aren’t supposed to know in this age,” I said, knowing her already greedy mind would take the bait.
“Yes,” she coolly responded, still petting me. “But the family head has to know all of it.”
“And you intend to help your father learn it all?”
“I intend to be family head before my father or anyone else,” she said and I could tell she had already left childhood behind and was fully Arameri. It hurt a small space inside my mortal shell’s chest. But, I saw my opportunity nonetheless.
“Is that so? Well, Shaten you seem to be on the right path. Plenty of former family heads have come to us Enefadeh to scheme their way up, and I’m glad you came to me.” I exclaimed, knowing her response already.
“You are assuming, I have not asked you for anything, Sieh,” she said but I could hear the doubt in it.
“If that’s the case then why are we here alone, talking about family heads and secret knowledge?”
She didn’t say anything, but kept on petting my black fur.
I let the silence drag on for a bit before saying, “I can make you family head, if you so desire.”
She stopped petting, but still said nothing.
I continued. “I’ve done it before, and I’m willing to help you…under certain conditions.”
She sat silent so long I thought I had lost her, but she spoke suddenly and quietly, with a touch of excitement in her voice, “what conditions?” She wanted to know!
A trill of excitement ran down my spine and I’m sure she felt it, but who cares? She going to do everything I need her to do, without knowing what she’s doing. “I just need to be granted permission to leave Sky when I need to.”
“I can’t do that!” She cried. “Someone would notice you went missing! I’d get in trouble!”
“I’d be reasonable. I just have to leave a few times.”
“What do you need to leave for?“ She asked still in shock.
I took a deep breath and tried my best to explain. “You wanted to know why I can turn into a cat, well, before your kind came along, I came to this planet to play. It was a fantastic time. I came as the wind. I blew through forest, whipped over valleys, I sailed the seas for years on end. But animals came along later, and the Teman jungles grew thick with all types of them. The first animal I saw was a panther, and I wanted to play with it. My mother let me, as long as I didn’t hurt it. She was very protective over things like that. I ran the forest as nothing but a panther cub for ages. Back when this planet was pure. I miss those times…I miss my mother.”
“I don’t understand,” Shaten said, sounding as if she tried very hard to solve a puzzle and couldn’t.
“I want to feel as I did back then, when my mothers soul touched everything there is.” I’ve sensed my mother’s soul wandering this plane that she created. Itempas couldn’t truly kill her after all. I’m going to find it, I’ll figure out how to harvest it later. I just need to capture it and I need to leave Sky to do it.
“So your going to…run the forest as a panther again? That’s all you want and you’ll make me family head?”
“Yes,” I quickly lied. Whether Shaten becomes family head or not, I’m not interested. I’ll kill her father for her, but that is as far as I’m willing to help, and honestly she’ll probably take it from there, given Arameri history.
Shaten is an means to an end. A way around these invisible chains my bright ass of a father put on me. I’ll have my mother back no matter who has to die. I am a child after all, and children need their mothers.
