Inside the maw of the shadow dragon was dark and still. Shocking still. The quiet was suffocating. The lack of motion was weird. One moment I had been frantic, scrambling Jenkins, rushing through the forest in a haze of panic, the heavens after me and the wind roaring at my back, and now here I was - suspended in formless dark.

  I blinked, trying to see. A barest whisper of wind caressed my fur, pushing at me softly. I rotated, gently, like a bug caught in a web. There was nothing to see, no matter how I peered. There was nothing to feel, besides that soft wind. So I smelled, listening instead, desperately feeling for anything that might give me a clue to …my freedom? To the threat I was sure was out there?

  I had no idea what was happening but I knew one thing: I was not going to fail this tribulation. I, Jenkins Greenleaf, did not get eaten.

  No.

  It was I who was the eater of things. That was the natural order.

  Dragging air qi up my nostrils I inhaled aggressively. There was nothing much to smell - far away a scent of damp forest, intermingled with the more pungent and present scent of death qi that was all around me. Not unexpected. So. What could I do to escape? To defeat a death qi dragon? Before it… digested me? Hurriedly I stopped thinking about that, it wasn’t productive.

  What defeated death? Life? Light? No. This was a lesson I had already learned.

  I cultivated. Ah yes. The energy flowed into me, the dragon’s death qi circulating through my body to strengthen my limbs in a way that felt both new and familiar. Confidence bloomed in my chest. I knew what to do. I would eat this dragon! From the inside out, one strand of qi at a time.

  As if in response to my thought the shadows shifted and sighed around me, pressing in to compress me tight.

  Of course, I did not expect the death qi dragon to accept its fate lightly. That would be foolish. Prey seldom went willingly. I kept cultivating, as the shadows bobbed and flickered, pushing and hissing, trying to distract me. Suddenly I was falling, tumbling through darkness, the strings that held me in stasis cut.

  Another feeble attempt at distraction. I kept cultivating, stuffing the death qi into me as fast as I could, as I fell. There was so much, but then I had not expected this to be easy. It became harder to maintain concentration as formless shadows flashed past. Faces, shapes, places, flashes, flashes. Someone was calling me, somewhere far away in the darkness - a familiar voice that I knew as well as I own. My Maud! She was here in the belly of the great heavenly beast. Where was she, what was she doing here?

  My cultivation faltered as I turned, searching. She needed me.

  I ran towards the sound of her voice, running, running, running, searching and there she was, in her familiar black dress rising, from shadows. I leapt into her arms, bunting my head into her face. To my surprise she swatted me away, her face a mask of revulsion. “Disgusting cat,” she shrieked. “Shoo! Get away! I don’t want you here. I should have left you in the River where I found you!”

  Her words were like a slap.

  The shadows were lying. I shook my head free of cobwebs. My Maud would never speak to me so! That was not my Maud, that was a pile of tricky, tricky death qi that was afraid it would be consumed. This was a clear sign that cultivating was the correct -

  The darkness lurched sideways.

  I was spinning, sick inside, drowning in River’s cold clammy depths, water in my lungs, the life leeching from my tiny, weak, kitten body. The shadows forced themselves into my mouth, long stringy fingers grasping me, pulling me, pushing me, pushing me down, down down my throat and into my belly to rip me apart from the inside. Bad memories, so many bad memories. I was falling again, falling from a tree, the ground rushing up to meet me with a roar. I hit rocks, then spun, catapulted through the air, wrapped in dizziness. It hurt, they hurt. The spinning shadows didn’t stop. All my bad memories, rushing past, death after death.

  Gritting my teeth, I endured, expecting them to stop at my last death but they did not. They kept on, racing into the future. Or possible future? The treacherous shiny blade ended my life then, Maud’s face again, different this time, but still recognisable as my Maud, an axe severing her head on a stone slab, then mine. Death, cold death. I screamed in terror as the Whisperer’s face loomed forward. What was this? I did not understand what I was seeing.

  A flash.

  An immense icey dragon, startling blue eyes, exposed skeleton, chunks of flesh rotting from its frame. It picked me up in its claws and tossed me, tumbling through the clouds. I plunged into deep freezing water, and I downed again, again, I was stabbed by a hundred blades, the Whisperer stomped on me again, again…the deaths keep coming, whipping by me in a breathless whirl.

  The death dragon was incredibly tricksy.

  It was trying to distract me and indeed, this was very distracting, but I knew that it was all rubbish. What had been, was past, I could not change it. What was coming was not yet determined. My Maud loved me. I was magnificent. These were facts I knew with unshakeable certainty..

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  I cultivated, ignoring the craziness around me. I cultivated, ripping pieces of the shadow dragon up, little by little, coaxing it into my body, in, in, making it part of me one thread at a time, compressing the shadows, channelling death through my veins like silk. The shadows leapt and danced, I leapt and danced with them. They roared and screamed, and I roared back: "I am not afraid of you!” Because I wasn’t. Still cultivating. The shadows slapped and sloshed and I laughed back, even as the shadow dragon sent me tumbling this way and that.

  What was death qi to the dead but a silly friend to be eaten?

  As if the thought had summoned him my shadow cat appeared with a jaunty shake of his whiskers. He grinned at me in the dark. Together we cultivated, passing the energy back and forth, twining it into neat, great balls of pitch black yarn which grew and grew. With the two of us they grew twice as fast.

  “Thank you,” I said, and he nodded, not stopping. More and more and more I added, until I was worried I would not be able to hold more, but then I realised since opening my heart meridian, my core was much larger. Excellent.

  Cracks and tears began to show in the shadows. As I drew in a particularly large chunk of qi, I saw a flash of green. A scar of forest outside. Real forest. The merest glance before the shadows hurriedly filled the gap but I knew then that it was just a matter of time.

  I ate the dragon piece by piece, until all of it was in my belly. Well, inside my dantian. The last shred disappeared within me with a tiny roar, and then I was free, laughing, drunk with qi, and running through the woods with such power in my legs as I had never felt before.

  I was liquid grace. I was power. I was moving at a speed that I had never before known was possible. Qi infused my eyes, my ears, my body, every one of my senses. The storm dragon had gone, probably intimidated by my display of dominance. The sky was normal once more, scattered with friendly stars, and little puffy clouds. My core was full.

  I set to work locating my companions. I did not think it would take long, although I was not sure how much time had actually passed in the shadow dragon’s belly. Cultivation had a funny way of making time dippy. It did not matter, as long as I was not too late.

  So fast was I travelling that absolute focus was required in order to avoid hitting anything. Fortunately, it did not take me long to find my siblings and Moeee.

  “Jenkins!” shouted Thimble, as I galloped alongside them. I actually had to slow down a little to let them keep pace. “You survived!”

  “I survived!”

  They all stared at me. I stared at them.

  My companions did not seem to have suffered any lasting side effects from their brush with my tribulations, other than being a little singed. This was a relief. But now we needed to get to Mama. Through soggy glades we ran, across the marshes, and past the slimy spot where I had buried so many demonic rat cores, their corruption oozing into the surrounding land. We leapt more of River’s tributaries, and ran down hills and up hills.

  “How did Mama reach you?” I asked between wild leaps and thundering paws. One of the advantages of not having to breathe was the ease with which I could talk while running, while Hush and Thimble’s breath came out in short, wild pants.

  “She dream walked,” Hush said, and I stumbled, just once, before picking myself up and tossing the jealousy aside. Of course they could still dreamwalk. That was fine. None of them had eaten a shadow dragon made of death qi.

  “The rat-king?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  They nodded, and we bent our noses to the task with renewed vigour, careening down a hilltop, and bursting through a glade of ferns to scare a small herd of deer. Moeee fluttered ahead like our own personal star.

  “Er, Jenkins,” said Thimble, after a while.

  “Yes?”

  “Who is that?”

  “Who is who?” said Moeee, confused.

  I glanced over at the shadow cat that was keeping pace, a little off to one side. He turned his head and although I couldn’t see, even with my enhanced eyes, I knew he was smiling. Probably showing a little fang.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “He’s a new friend. He’s here to help.”

  There was a pause.

  “If you say so,” said Thimble.

  The shadow cat, the shadow me, kept pace with us all, and I could not help but be proud of him. Of us.

  “I do,” I said. Hush didn’t comment, merely shooting the shadow cat the occasional suspicious glance.

  “Jenkins,” said Hush, a moment later.

  “Yes?” I snapped. Even though I did not need to breathe, I was still concentrating. Both on the journey and on my thoughts. All this nice death qi was all very well but I still had no idea what it did. And it did not seem like I would have the opportunity to stop and experiment at this rate.

  “Your qi signature is…”

  “Is what?”

  “Weird,” said my siblings together.

  “Very weird,” said Moeee.

  I shrugged my shoulders and kept running. This was not a surprise to me.

  “You’ll get used to it,” I said.

  It was a good reminder to suppress my qi, however. No point letting For-molsnian know we were coming if we could help it. We were nearly there now.

  As we approached the gorge tell-tale signs of For-molsnian’s passage became visible. Sickly swathes of corruption, the odd boneless, desiccated carcass here. Shrivelled leaves and rotting vines. That smell, the curling sulphurous ribbons of rot and death. It bothered me still, but I would have to examine the reasons why later.

  The trail of destruction led straight to my Mama’s home, and the path flared hot and raging in my vision. I had not felt this hot since I had died.

  Thimble, Hush, the shadow cat and I sprinted across the stonework, and leapt down, Moeee swooping after us.

  I used the last of my precious air qi to stop me from tumbling into River’s waters, far below. Dimly, I could see her waving and pointing. What was she pointing at?

  Moeee exploded into lunar glory, catching a tumbling gnome, and a screaming pixie who had just been ejected from the doorway under the bridge. Not, this time by mama the bouncer, but by a wraith.

  The doorman lay sprawled across the platform as the rat leered over it. One of the doors hung by a hinge.

  “Idiot cauldron,” said the rat, morphing into Brosnod’s shape, but speaking with For-molsnian’s voice. “Back again? Third times the charm? I dare you.”