Thar Shaddin

Continued from Seemingly Pointless Meandering
122PW, Fall
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San.

That was what they had called him. Everything else felt fuzzy, but he remembered that they had called him by his real name. His head burned. He rubbed at it with what he hoped was a human hand, but turned out to be a cat paw as before. The Sea People had promised him the curse would be lifted in his dream. He'd hoped that it hadn't been a dream, that they really had turned him back.

The coastline was warm. There was a rich humidity that tasted like salt in the air around them. Ko had finally stopped cursing. Cat had finally stopped shaking. Strange sea birds surfed upon the currents, formed by the relaxed waves beneath.

None of the rest of their party was anywhere to be found. The elf and the boy Cat had been clinging to during the nightmare of the shipwreck were gone. They were in a place that smelled surreal and different from the port they had journeyed from. They were somewhere along the Great Scar, Cat assumed, but there was little else surrounding them to be sure of where upon its thousands of kilometers they had landed.

Behind them was no ship anchored at sea. Before them was little more than dunes of sand and palm trees. The sun, at its full height, blasted through the thick air and onto them. What should have been a pleasant feeling on his skin only made him feel sick, ready to vomit.

It was almost impossible to separate the threads of reality from the dream. They had been on a ship, of that he was sure. The ship had crashed on something. Monsters had invaded its decks, pulling it to the stinking land mass beneath it. A fire had burned his hat and a dog with the ship.
Monsters? Adrenaline, or perhaps dream, had made the whole event blurry.

And then the very earth from under them slipped below the waves, and they were drowning. All of them were drowning. Then, the people in the water.

"Of two beasts, of two hearts,
By false love, torn apart,
Free at the last hour of the last day,
What sews hearts together is cliche,
Forever shall the felis drift,
'Til whole again, a curse shall lift."

Cat remembered the words they had spoken. He couldn't even remember what the Sea People had looked like, and yet the words were strangely branded into his mind, as if someone had placed them there. Cat couldn't even remember the words from when the curse had been put on him, but he could practically read the new poetry like it was printed on paper before him. What they meant, he didn't know.

The silver tabby started to groom himself, and then looked at Ko, his ironic counterpart. He noticed they were not wet, and effectively had no scent to them at all despite everything that had just - possibly - happened.

"Well, we're not dead," said Cat.

Everything was wrong.

The sun, the sand, the dense green foliage in the distance, the cat, himself.

Everything.

And he'd made clear to the sky and the ocean and the sand exactly why. He was catching his breath when the cat spoke.

Spoke.

Yeah, everything. Every rutting thing.

A breeze picked up, bringing with it stinging humidity, and he laughed into it, staring at the cat. There was a definite edge of hysteria.

He was no longer real sure he was sane.

He kept staring, and laughing, until something caught in his throat and he started doing something he hadn't done for a real long time. The sobs were ugly, the tears moreso, especially given that they had no source of nothing like clean water, just all the saltwater in the world. Tears and snot and alla that stuff, refusing to think of it as crying like some pissant brat. Refusing to think at all. Refusing to do anything but exist and not accept that he'd plum lost it all, and even if he wasn't dead already, he was likely gonna be real soon.

Ko started sobbing. Cat watched bubbles of snot drain from the man, if such a creature could be called that. Cat frowned to one side and looked away from the mess of a human. He put his paws forward and stretched himself in a very satisfying yoga movement, ending with a back arch that popped two vertebrae back into place.

He'd forgotten that during the entire time he'd been with the ship's crew, he hadn't spoken a word. Perhaps that was why his voice felt so smooth.

"Don't worry yourself so," said Cat, in a meager attempt to calm his partner. "I was like this before... uh, all of that."

He began grooming again, confused, annoyed, stressed, and all of that. It was nice how a tongue on his skin seemed to make things disappear for a moment.

Okay, not his best day. Not by a long shot. It entered high on the list of things that made him look like some sissy, right, but since all there was to witness it was some freakish talking cat, he was right ready to just put it aside and pretend it never happened. The stupid thing was, a talking cat wasn't the weirdest thing what'd happened to him the last moonspan, but it was just hinky enough to push him right over the edge. Asides, he'd never liked that damn cat, not since it'd torn him up some few times. It'd been better if the dog'd lived. A talking dog'd be something more useful, he reckoned.

He got hisself under control, wiped everything up until he was more or less dry, and turned a sour glower onto the cat. He swallowed his first statement -- I hate you -- in order to say something more productive.

"Y'couldn't've been that damn dog?"

Okay, only slightly more productive, but it was some start.

Cat looked at Ko as he asked the question. It wasn't very good Eyropan, and it took him a moment to figure out what Ko meant.

"That dog died because he was stupid, because he was a dog. I am not a cat."

He paused for dramatic effect, sitting there looking as much like a tabby cat as one possibly could.

"Where did... they... put us?" Cat looked around, but there was little to distinguish the landscape from any other deserted southern tropics. The palms were sparse, and the coast line disappeared beyond a spire of rocks in the distance. Cat wondered if they were on an island. If they were, they were surely doomed. Well, doomed more so than they would be otherwise.

"Not a cat? Have y'looked at yourself, tabby? Sure knew how to use them damn claws, an' that's bein' kind."

Ko glowered. At the cat. He was not ready to move on. Well, except for the sobbing. He snuffled real loud, because on top of bein' drier than a two bit whore tellin' you to spit and spit again, he'd just wasted what was left in him. And now he was stuffed up.

But he wasn't ready to move on.

He put every ounce of nasty he could muster into his glare. Just forget that it'd be more effective if he hadn't spent the last several minutes bawling.