It took some time. The two-legger ghosties were very upset, and very distracted, but slowly, slowly we figured it out, one ghostie at a time. If I am being honest, Wuot, Hush and Thimble were much better at ghostie comforting than me. But then these two-legger ghosts had been their people. Even Hush, who purported not to care about the villagers at all (while they were alive), seemed to know a great deal about them.

  “That’s Mistress Violet,” she said, pointed at a gently weeping woman. Phantom teardrops and snot dripped into the air at an alarming and certainly supernatural rate, vanishing before they could hit the ground. An oblivious goose walked through the ghostie, making the edges of her spectral dress billow slightly, like the mist. Hush sighed, the ghosts reflected in her eyes as she watched them. “Poor Mistress Violet.”

  “Violet really liked Richard,” Thimble said, mystically, as if that explained everything. “She was trying to get him to court her. Every day she would do something nice for him but he was only interested in arrows and deer and he-”

  “Why did she like him?” asked Wuot. “He stank, he was always-”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Who is Richard?”

  “Richard is the fletcher!” she said, as if it was obvious. I stared at the silly goose.

  “What is a fletcher?”

  “He makes arrows,” she said impatiently. “Made arrows. You know, because the two-leggers need help killing things? Although they mostly used them for hunting deer. This one,” she pointed her beak towards a tall, leanly muscled ghost with his head thrown back. Empty eyes stared straight up, his mouth was open as he wailed. He was clutching the ugly wound on his neck that continued to drip phantom blood. It was a sorry sight.

  “Okay but… what should we find for him, to send him on? Maybe his bow?”

  “Good idea,” said Thimble.

  “Or his tools,” suggested Hush. “He lived over there.”

  “Maybe we could give Violet something of his…”

  My brother and sister all nodded vigorously and we set to work digging through the ruins for precious items, and matching them to the ghosties. It was hard work. Most of the village had been flattened by the events that had occurred here. Only the well, the altar stones, and a few buildings on the edges had survived. In order to get to their belongings we had to wiggle and dig and climb.

  Still, the process was worth it. Showing the ghosts items that were meaningful to them in life seemed to provide immediate comfort. The trick was finding the right item. I mused that perhaps they just needed some reminder of who they were in order to let go of their sadness and move on?

  It made me feel a bit strange. If I ever became a ghostie I wondered what would comfort me? My wool and basket perhaps? More likely I would be like Thimble’s people: I need my loved ones around me.

  As I dug through the debris of the villagers’ lives, resolve hardened in my chest.

  I would protect my loved ones, living and dead. Death had not stopped me before and it would not stop me again. The rat-king was half defeated already… I just needed to finish him off once and for all! The solution was at once simple and complex: I needed to cultivate.

  And so, I cultivated as I worked, pushing the stubborn tiny intractable amount of qi through my body, worrying at the blockage around my last blocked meridian. It was true there was a little more than before but the difference was not insurmountable. It was slow work but it still was getting the job done.

  One by one we helped the ghosties, sending them on to … wherever it was they went. I tried not to think about the Whisperer’s desert.

  We hunted for objects, and sometimes creatures, matching ghosties to things, me cultivating quietly while Hush, Thimble and Wuot argued amongst themselves about who needed what. It took a long time. Some ghosts were stubborn, seeming not to care for anything. Some were too angry, some just seemed disinterested, content to haunt the ruins of their homes forever.

  I kept half an eye on the shadows. They continued to watch me from the peripheries of my vision, hard to pin down, merging with the darkness. Quiet now, and mostly cat-like they stared with those unflinching, unblinking night-dark eyes. Friend or foe? I did not know.

  I carried on, trying to focus on what was important. Knowing that my fighting abilities were greatly reduced without access to light or fire in my dantian was making me jittery. My reserves were all used up for now, and all I had left was forest, earth, water and mist qi. Some moonlight, some starlight. A wonderful palette, to be sure, but outside my comfort zone for a fight.

  “All the more reason to stick together,” said Hush, stoutly, when I voiced this concern. And she went back to her ghosties. I followed her lead, doing my best to put my worries away to concentrate on my tasks.

  In the end we managed to send a significant portion of the village ghosts onwards, and the site of the village became much more peaceful. Watching the distraught ghosts smile, or sometimes just relax as their bodies shuddered and calmed before disappearing into tiny, gleaming, spectral motes was intensely gratifying.

  I felt a momentary warmth that had nothing to do with fire qi, and some of the blockage around my heart meridian crumbled away. Or perhaps my cultivation was just more effective than I had thought it to be.

  The wraith of For-molsnian did not make another appearance, but then there was nothing much left here for him to kill. My eyes moved across the scene of devastation. Across the still corpses, the few remaining stubborn ghosties, across the draugr geese, the dead chickens and… my still living, breathing, beautiful siblings.

  Apart from Hush and Thimble the only notable living of the forest included my pixie friends, and Mama and her troll tavern. Some of the tree-spirits I was fond of, River, of course, and various unawoken animals. Likely they would move away naturally, as their sources of food dwindled. Hopefully Mama was too far away for the horrible wraith to bother with.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Worries settled like stones within my stomach.

  “Come on,” I said to the others. “Let’s find Moeee. Or perhaps… you two should leave, go back with Montadie and the rest?” Hush and Thimble stared at me as though I was mad, and I was forced to respect their decisions, as Montadie had respected mine. It tasted bitter, and I wondered if this was what growing older felt like.

  Wuot stayed with her flock in the village, while the rest of us left for Hush and Thimble’s comfortable hollow in River’s bank. My siblings curled up to sleep. I tried not to be jealous. Unsuccessfully. Then, with Moeee watching over them, I wandered out, cultivating and thinking, gently encouraged by my progress on my heart meridian.

  The shadow cat had accompanied us from the village. No longer singular in any sense he had morphed into an army, each cat still indistinct, still hazy, but closer now. Watching me, always watching me. When I sent out my perception I found nothing but a lingering suggestion of an unfamiliar qi.

  “Can you see them?” I whispered to Moeee, but he looked at me in confusion. As I suspected. These were spirits only cats could see. Or, the idea struck me all at once - something linked to the mastery of death qi?

  When I entered the forest they trailed me, and I tried not to mind. Shy friends… shy friends who had attacked me during the fight with For-molsnian. Confusing.

  “Why did you do it?” I demanded, whirling to confront them. “Why are you sometimes nice and sometimes not?”

  I was speaking to empty air.

  Or perhaps… was that the lingering trace of a sharp toothed smile fading into the dark?

  I gave up trying to talk to the shadows, and roamed a circuit through my forest, cultivating as I went, although making sure not to go too far from the spot my siblings slept, in case they needed me.

  My thoughts turned to my next tribulation. What would it entail? Another lightning dragon, curling in the sky? The last had been tough but exciting! I pranced a little as I remembered. Then my tail drooped as I felt at the diminished balls of qi wound within me, the lack of sun, the lack of fire. Who was I kidding? I was diminished, I would never be the cat I had been before, that path was closed to me now.

  I climbed a tree so I could be closer to the sky, and cultivated there, worrying away at a particularly frustrating bit of blockage. Whatever I did it would not budge. It hurt. Glancing down, I saw shadows clustered around the base of the tree. The dark animals stared up at me, their blank eyes filling me with foreboding. Not just cats now, but wolves and hounds and rats. Some of them were scarily big.

  Lifting my nose to the heavens, I chased a brief puff of air qi through my nostrils so I could taste the heady scent of nighttime. The sky was bright with stars, a twinkling, spangled arc of them flung across the heavens, wheeling slowly, slowly in the grand dance of the night. They shone down on me curiously, and I was overcome with great emotion.

  “Do you still love me?” I whispered, opening my eyes wide to meet their gaze.

  There was a short, bone aching pause.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.”

  “Now you are cold and dead, just like me.”

  Warmth flared in my core. I felt part of the blockage clear, a peculiar sensation I had never really gotten used to.

  “I love you too,” I told the stars.

  I sat for a while enjoying the feeling, then remembered with a jolt the shadows. Looking down the tree trunk there was nothing there. Every last one of them had gone. I stared down with great suspicion, before making the descent myself. After a brief pause I set off to seek River’s wisdom. On my way they reappeared again, cats once more, lots of cats and a goat and geese and …was that a shadow bee?

  “Why do you keep changing shape?” I asked them.

  Silence.

  When I arrived at River’s banks the shadows settled themselves around us. River sat up on her elbows to greet me, concern in her watery visage as she looked past me to the shadows.

  “Do you know who they are?” I asked.

  “Death,” she said.

  “I knew that already,” I said. “Kind of. Death spirits? But- what do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” said River. We both turned our heads to look at them. River turned her face back to me. Two fish swam around her neck in tiny minnow-y circles. “What do you want, Jenkins?”

  “Me?” I said in surprise. It reminded me of Mama asking me about my dreams. “Right now? I want destroy what is left of the rat-king. I want to open my heart meridian. And I think… I think in order to do that I need to love myself.”

  River looked at me curiously. As did the shadow creatures. I tried not to feel self conscious, with such an audience. She twirled about, the edges of her catching the subtle starlight, before dashing herself back onto her rocks. The water sloshed, then stilled. Her forehead and nose rose once more, the rest of her shyly submerged in the swift flowing stream as she looked at me questioningly.

  “Do you not love yourself?” she said at last. “I always thought you were very good at loving yourself.”

  “I mean of course I do, but-” I gulped. Then I held out one cold, dead limb. Beautiful, of course, but without the lustre of life. Not as beautiful as before. All the words I had kept inside came out in a wild rush. “How can I love this body when I know it is inferior to the one I had before? It is cold, it is dead, it is difficult. It doesn’t always do what I want. It is ugly, it… It is still me…I guess… but I do not like the change. I do not like it. I do not like this me. I do not like me.”

  I groomed angrily for a while.

  River watched me with wide eyes, not interrupting.

  “How can I love this?” I said at last. “Knowing how inferior this life is to what came before? My dreams are crushed! They are over. It all feels pointless. I know there is no way of going back but… I am so so terribly sad.”

  “Then grieve,” said River.

  And I did. The grief coursing through me, like an ice cold slurry. Shocking, violent, and staggeringly painful. I could not cry. I had no tears, so I let out a great, sobbing gulps instead - half yowls, half wails. Like a tortured ghostie. The sound echoed through the forest, and River swept me up in a great watery hug. I sobbed into her wet chest as she patted my head till I was drenched. At least I did not have to worry about drowning.

  At last she put me gently on the bank.

  “You are struggling with the change,” she said.

  I nodded, sniffing. “Yes. I think that might be what is happening.”

  She watched me for a while, consideringly. I knew she was trying to think of something to help me.

  “Some parts of me are very different from others,” said River, after a long moment. She twisted up into a water spout, before crashing back down, drops of water splattering me and the nearby banks. I blinked. “Some parts of me are deep and mysterious. Dangerous, deep, fast-” Her eyes widened, and I saw the stars reflected in her dark blue eyes. “Beautiful. Some parts are breathtakingly gorgeous. Where I flow over mountains and rainbow lights catch in my falling waters. But some parts of me are shallow, sluggish, uninteresting. Muddy.” River shrugged, and two small fish circled each other in the cavity of her chest. Around her watery heart - or where her heart would be if she was a human. “All of me has purpose. All of me is part of the cycle of my life. From the spring that gives me life, high in the mountains to where I merge with the sea, over and over… all of it is me. All of it is good. You are good too, Jenkins.”

  I swallowed my bitterness, thinking. “Good,” I said. “But different?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Tucking my paws beneath my body, under the light of the loving stars, and River’s watchful gaze, I sank deep into meditation. And the shadows drew in.