The Cat Who Waits

The Cat Who Waits

I was a crow once. Then a rat. Now a cat.

Bodies are like coats — you wear what suits the weather, and the weather of magic changes often.

My witch is named Catherine. She has the sort of face that looks like it remembers laughter but hasn’t used it much lately. She lives in a crooked cottage that smells of thyme and burnt sugar, tucked at the edge of a forest that doesn’t quite like being watched.

Catherine found me on a stormy night, naturally. They always do. She was scavenging for mugwort by the riverbank when she heard me crying in the reeds — small, wet, pitiful. I put on the act well. The moment she picked me up, our bond sealed like a cut pressed shut. I felt her magic slide under my skin, curious and bright as lightning.

She took me home, wrapped me in an old quilt, and said, “You’ll be safe here.”

I didn’t tell her that safety is never the point.

Catherine is ambitious. The first kind of witch always is. Every night, she lights the seven candles, traces her circles, and whispers names that weren’t meant for mortal tongues. I watch from the rafters or from the shadows by the hearth, pretending to nap while her voice trembles like the edge of a blade.

She’s good — better than she knows. Her will is strong, but her aim wavers. That’s the trouble with the young- too much heart, not enough caution.

The night she summons it — the thing she shouldn’t — starts like any other. The air hums with stormlight, and the forest’s silence is thick enough to drown in. She draws her circle with crushed salt and blood from her thumb. Her voice is steady until it isn’t.

Then the candles bend toward her, like listeners leaning closer.

And the thing arrives.

It isn’t shape so much as suggestion- a glimmer of teeth, a whisper of bone rearranging itself. The smell of iron and ozone fills the room. The shadows turn their heads to look.

Catherine gasps. “I did it.”

“You did something,” I say, flicking my tail.

The thing looks at her, then at me. Its presence scrapes across the air like a dull knife on glass. Then — gone.

She collapses, pale but radiant, convinced she’s triumphed. I lick my paw and say nothing. She wouldn’t listen if I did. Witches never hear warnings until the echoes start answering back.

The next days bring whispers in the walls.

The mirrors fog from within. The forest’s edge creeps closer to the cottage each night.

Catherine blames the damp. I know better.

The summoned thing didn’t leave. It’s simply waiting for her to ask for more.

Witches never stop at one question.

By the fourth night, the creature begins to visit in dreams. I see it sitting by her bed, stroking her hair like a lover. It wears a face almost like hers, but too smooth, too empty. I could drive it away if I chose — banish it, or at least scatter it for a century or two — but I don’t.

Here’s the truth- I want to see what she becomes.

Familiars aren’t guardians. We’re witnesses. Chroniclers of ambition and folly.

I’ve served a dozen witches, and every one of them has believed she was the exception. That her magic would not consume her but crown her.

Catherine is special, though. The thing is learning from her. And she, from it.

A week passes before she speaks to me again.

“You’ve been quiet,” she says, grinding herbs to paste.

“So have you.”

“I think it listens when I sleep.”

“It does.”

She stops. “You knew?”

“Of course.”

“And you let it?”

“I serve you, Catherine. Not your mistakes.”

She stares at me then, really stares, and for a heartbeat I think she sees me — the thing beneath the fur, older than the cottage, older than the forest. Her hand trembles, and she whispers, “What are you?”

“Your familiar,” I purr. “For now.”

The night she loses control, the forest comes alive. Branches claw the roof. The air is thick with whispers. She’s in the circle again, eyes wild, the candles burning blue.

The thing she summoned stands opposite her now, solid and gleaming, wearing her shape like a reflection in broken glass.

She shouts words that twist the air. The thing laughs — a sound like cracking bones.

“Catherine!” I hiss. “Stop!”

She doesn’t hear me. The circle breaks.

Power floods the room, ancient and endless. When the smoke clears, the thing is gone.

So is she.

I wander the cottage for days after, padding between the still candles and the broken salt lines. The forest has swallowed the clearing; roots grow through the floorboards. When I curl up by the hearth, I can still feel her magic in the stones, humming faintly, like a heartbeat deep underground.

Then, one night, I hear her voice — soft, distant, inside the mirror.

“Hello, little cat.”

She’s changed, of course. They always do.

Her eyes glow faintly from the glass, and her reflection doesn’t move when I do.

“You stayed,” she says.

“Someone has to keep the candles burning,” I reply.

The mirror ripples. Her smile sharpens.

“Good. I’ll need your help again soon.”

And I stretch, purr low in my throat, and think — yes. I’ll help. Whatever she’s become, I’m curious.

And curiosity, after all, is the only real loyalty a familiar has.

The Mirror’s Mouth

It begins with whispers. They come from the glass — soft, deliberate, patient. The sort of sound that waits for you to stop pretending you don’t hear it.

For weeks, the mirror has pulsed faintly in the dark, breathing fog instead of reflecting it.

I lie on the hearth and watch, tail twitching, waiting for her to ask.

She always does, eventually.

When she comes, it’s subtle at first. A shimmer, a suggestion. Then she steps forward, and the surface ripples like water.

Catherine looks the same — almost. Her eyes are clearer, but too still. Her movements too smooth. Like she’s learned to copy herself from memory.

“Hello, little cat,” she says, her voice echoing twice, once from the glass and once from the air.

“Catherine,” I say. “You found a way back.”

“Back?” She laughs softly. “No. I found a way through.”

The candles shiver, recognizing their mistress but unsure which world she belongs to now. The forest, too, goes silent outside — the hush before a storm or a scream.

She steps out of the mirror. The glass doesn’t break; it sighs, relieved to be rid of her.

“Much has changed,” she says, running a hand along the dusty table. Her skin leaves a faint frost where she touches. “The world feels thinner.”

“It is,” I tell her. “You’ve brought something with you.”

“I am something,” she answers.

And for once, I believe her.

Over the following nights, she relearns the art of being alive. She eats less than she used to. Sleeps almost not at all. When she laughs, the fire bends toward her, as if remembering an old promise.

She still speaks to the thing she summoned, though now she calls it her other half. I see it sometimes, flickering in the corners of the room — an echo made flesh. It watches me with her eyes, but older, colder.

One night, while the moon is low and red as rust, Catherine says, “I know what you are, you know.”

“Do you?”

“You’ve worn many skins, but you don’t change. You serve power itself. You feed on it.”

I stretch on the windowsill, claws tapping the wood. “Everyone feeds on something.”

She smiles. “Then let’s feed together.”

She begins her work anew, but it’s different now — less desperate, more precise. Her magic feels… symmetrical, as though every spell has a mirror twin somewhere in the dark.

When she draws her circles, I can see her reflection performing the same rite a heartbeat late, whispering in reverse. The glass hums with it.

She’s building something. A gate, maybe. Or a body for the thing she became.

I don’t ask. Not because I don’t want to know, but because knowing changes you.

Familiars learn that early.

The forest starts to twist. The trees grow inward, their trunks bending toward the cottage like listeners at a keyhole. The air smells of rain and copper.

Then come the lights — small, fluttering shapes like fireflies made of glass. They hover at the window, reflecting her face a hundred times.

She stands in their glow, radiant, terrible, and beautiful.

“It’s almost ready,” she whispers.

“What is?”

“The bridge.” She looks at me then, eyes full of stars. “You could cross too, you know. I’d take you with me.”

“Where?”

“To where the old things dream. To the world behind reflection. They remember you there.”

That catches me. The weight of memory presses like a hand on my spine. It’s been centuries since I heard the Old Ones whisper my name.

I pad closer to her. The mirror’s surface quivers, and from within, her reflection smiles — a second Catherine, waiting to receive her.

When she steps into the mirror again, the cottage sighs in relief and agony both. I follow her to the edge. My paw touches the glass; it’s cold as moonlight and deep as hunger.

Inside, her reflection reaches out a hand.

It’s the same hand that once fed me cream, that once traced circles in salt and blood.

“Come,” she says. “We’ll be what we were meant to be.”

I pause. Because this is the moment every familiar faces eventually — the choice between loyalty and survival. Between curiosity and wisdom.

Then I leap.

The mirror swallows us both.

Inside, the world unfolds sideways. Every sound has an echo. Every shadow has a twin. Catherine and I walk through endless halls of glass, each reflecting another version of us- her younger, me older; her laughing, me bleeding; her dying, me watching.

She looks at me, and for a moment, she’s simply Catherine again — human, trembling, brilliant.

“Was it worth it?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

Because it always is.

Even here, in the endless reflection, I feel alive.

And somewhere, far behind us, a candle flickers once, twice — then goes out.

The Mirror World

Inside the mirror, the air hums like a plucked wire. There is no up or down, only reflection. Light doesn’t fall from anywhere; it simply exists. When I breathe, the sound comes twice — once from my throat, and once from the echo pacing beside me. The floor — if you can call it that — is cool and perfectly smooth beneath my paws, not glass but something softer, like polished bone.

Each step leaves the faintest mist, as though my warmth doesn’t fully belong here.

Catherine moves with an uncanny grace now, her footsteps sending ripples through the air as if she’s walking on still water. The world reshapes her with every motion, sharpening her edges, smoothing her hesitations. I can smell her magic here — frost and old paper, the scent of something once familiar now hollowed and perfected.

“Where are we going?” I ask, though I already suspect.

“To the beginning,” she says. “Or the end. They’re the same here.”

Her smile is one I recognize, but emptied — like fire remembering how to burn without remembering why.

The mirror world stretches onward- corridors of reflection that twist without turning, horizons made of surfaces that are not surfaces. In one pane, I see myself as a crow again, feathers slick and shining like oil. In another, a serpent coils in my place, scales catching desperate little sparks of light. And Catherine — she changes in every reflection. Older. Younger. Once nothing more than a smudge of smoke shaped like longing.

She stops at a wall where our reflections have traded places — my eyes where hers should be, her mouth where mine belongs.

She touches the glass. It is warm, like skin.

“They’re not reflections,” she whispers.

“They’re possibilities.”

“Or warnings,” I say.

The silence responds before she does — a soft vibration under my fur, like breath against the back of my neck. The mirror world speaks in tremors rather than words.

And now it is speaking to me.

Memory surfaces — before the cat, before the crow, before the rat. Before I learned to wear myself small. I remember the weight of my oldest name, the shape of wings I once unfolded across the sky. The familiars were guardians once — keepers of doorways, guides for those who crossed between. We let ourselves be bound not out of weakness, but fascination. Witches asked questions no one else dared.

Now, standing beside Catherine, I understand the question that unmade us-

What if a witch loves the door more than the world it opens?

We arrive at the heart of the mirror — a chamber vast and deep, the floor still and cold beneath us. At its center floats a single candle. It burns without flame, its glow bending the world around it like gravity.

“This is where they made me,” Catherine murmurs. “Where they make all of us.”

Her reflection stands beside her now, solid and smiling. “Come back,” it says. “Be whole.”

And I understand. The mirror does not copy. It consumes. Every witch who enters feeds the world behind the glass, each reflection swallowing a piece of the original until nothing remains but the echo.

Catherine’s fingers tremble. “If I stay, I can learn everything. No more limits.”

“You’ll learn nothing,” I say quietly. “You’ll only repeat.”

She looks at me — truly looks — and for the first time since the summoning, I see her.

“What should I do?” she asks.

“Break it.”

She draws in one breath — sharp as winter air — and raises her hand.

The mirror world screams. Cracks spiderweb through the sky. The reflections shatter, each version of us unraveling into dust and light.

The candle flares — and—

I return to the world like a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. The cottage forms around me slowly, as though painted into place stroke by stroke. The floor is rough beneath my paws — warm, splintered wood catching softly at the fur between my toes.

The air smells of damp ash and rain-heavy earth.

The mirror hangs on the wall, cracked down the center, as if something inside it tried to escape. The fracture scatters the candlelight in jagged fragments across the room.

Catherine lies beside it. Her chest rises and falls — uneven, human, alive. When I press my forehead to her cheek, her skin is warm, but underneath there’s a faint, river-stone cold, the kind that takes a long time to leave the body.

The forest outside exhales. Wind moves through wet leaves. The world is settling back into itself.

Her eyelids flutter. Her voice is barely there. “Did we win?”

I curl against her ribs and feel her heartbeat — steady, stubborn, hers. “We survived,” I say.

She manages a crooked half-smile.

Beautiful because it is imperfect. “That’s enough.”

The candle flame steadies. Its light falls in only one direction now. No echo. No second world looking back.

I purr — truly purr — for the first time in a long while. Her breath warms the side of my face. The room holds still.

Outside, the forest leans close, listening. It knows what I know.

This peace will not last.

Witches are hungry things. And I am older than hunger.

For now, we lie beside the broken mirror, the candle steady, the world singular again.

But the crack in the glass never heals, not really. It waits. They always do.

When Catherine wakes fully, she will ask another question. Another circle will be drawn. Another door will open.

I will be here to witness it. I always am.

Curiosity is the only loyalty I’ve ever had.

And cats, after all, are very hard to kill.