Ember

The first thing I remember was warmth, the press of her hands around my small body, the scent of rosemary and smoke. She hummed a song I didn’t understand, but somehow it wrapped around me like protection.

“Nine moons, nine souls, nine chances to roam,

One heart to wander, one heart to come home.

When death takes the breath, let the moon take the pain.

Born today, dear Ember, and let it be again and again.”

The air shimmered. Above me, the moon bled light through the cracks of the thatched roof, washing the world in pale magic. I blinked up at it, and for the briefest moment, I thought it blinked back.

I didn’t know it then, but that night marked my first life.

I grew quickly, as all kittens do, though my paws never seemed to quite fit the rest of my body. She laughed when I tripped over them. She talked to me constantly. I didn’t understand the words, but I learned her moods, the way her voice lifted when she was happy, and how it thinned when she was afraid.

During the day, she worked in the garden. I followed her everywhere, weaving between her skirt as she cut herbs or dug in the dirt. Sometimes she’d hold a leaf to my nose and say its name softly, as if she were teaching me a secret.

When the light faded, she sat by the window to write. Her pen scratched softly across the page, the candlelight flickering against her face. She always began the same way, her voice barely a whisper: “Dear Thomas…”

When she finished, she’d fold the letter, tie it with a bit of thread, and press it to her chest before setting it aside.

Days or weeks later, letters came back. She read them by firelight. She’d untie the cord, smooth the paper, and her voice would soften into something distant. “Dear Maren…” she’d read, her eyes shining. I didn’t understand the words about rivers, roads, or the sea, but I knew the sound of longing.

They always ended the same way:

“Love, Thomas.”

After each letter, she’d sit very still. I’d climb into her lap then, and she’d draw little circles on my back with her thumb.

Villagers came and went. They came with sick babies, broken bones, and hearts heavier than their baskets. She healed them all. They left with trembling gratitude, then crossed themselves as they stepped off our front garden, as if to erase her kindness from their souls.

Over time, fewer came. When they did, they spoke in whispers at the door.

Once, I woke to find her burying something in the garden at night. Her hands shook. I wanted to go to her, but she whispered, “Stay, Ember,” and I did.

Then came the night of the knocking.

Three hard blows against the door. The sound made me flinch. Maren froze, her face pale in the firelight. The knocking came again, louder this time, followed by angry voices. She turned to me, her eyes wet. “Hide, Ember.” Her voice cracked. She pushed me under the chest near the hearth. I pressed myself into the dark, tail tight against me.

I saw their boots first, thick with mud. Then hands, rough and fast, pulling her away. She didn’t struggle, only looked once toward the place where I hid. I followed them from a distance, through the trees until I saw the square. The whole village was there. Torches flickered, and the air smelled of smoke and tar. They tied her to a post.

When the flames caught, she didn’t scream. She just lifted her head, eyes on the sky. The fire rose around her, and the crowd stepped back.

I ran before it was over. I didn’t want to see her fall.

I remember thinking the fire didn’t deserve her. It should’ve taken them, the ones who lit it, the ones who watched. I wanted it to spread, to swallow the whole village until nothing was left but ash and silence.

When I came back the next morning, the fire had died. Smoke still hung over the square. I lay near the ashes, where her shadow should have been. I stayed there until the sun set again.

I woke to the sound of footsteps, slow, steady ones. A man came through the square, his cloak dusty from the road. He stopped when he saw what was left of the post. His hand went to his mouth, and for a long time, he didn’t move. Then he saw me.

I don’t know how he recognized me, perhaps the patch of red fur on my otherwise black coat, but he knelt down and said quietly, “Ember.”

His voice shook. He wrapped me in his cloak and carried me away from the square. I lived with him after that. He didn’t talk much, but sometimes he read her letters aloud. His voice broke often, especially when he reached the end.

“Love, Maren.”

Sometimes, when he slept, I’d dream of the fire again, but this time I was the one inside it, and I wasn’t afraid. I was stronger, larger, something the world couldn’t burn.

I grew old in his care. My fur thinned, my steps slowed, but his hands were always gentle. I died in his arms.

But death didn’t last.

At first, I thought it was a dream, the sound, waves crashing against the shore. I opened my eyes to gray light and salt in my mouth. I waited for the dark to take me again, but it didn’t. The tide licked at my fur, cold and patient, as if testing whether I still belonged to it.

I dragged myself up the sand. The sea stretched ahead wide, endless, cruel. I hissed at it, hoarse and angry. It only hissed back.

Everything was gone, the shack, Thomas, but I was still here. Same body. Same scars. Dragged back for reasons I couldn’t name.

And then I heard it, faint and familiar, somewhere deep in memory. A voice, humming softly through the roar of the waves.

“Nine moons, nine souls, nine chances to roam…”

The words rose unbidden, echoing in my mind. Maren’s voice. The night I was born.

“One heart to wander, one heart to come home.”

I closed my eyes. For the first time, I understood.

“When death takes the breath, let the moon take the pain.

Born today, dear Ember, and let it be again and again.”

Maren must have given me this for a reason, to make something right.

In my nine lives, I would find it.

Whatever it was. The meaning, the balance, the home I’d lost, I would not stop until I did.

I turned from the sea.

The wind bit at my fur, the horizon bare except for a single shape, a house, hunched and crooked, its chimney coughing thin smoke into the gray. It was the only thing still alive in this place.

So I started walking.

My paws left faint prints in the sand, proof that I was here, again.

As I neared, I saw the garden, overgrown but vibrant, herbs spilling over the path, small bells of white flowers nodding under the drizzle.

I paused at the door. Before I could lift a paw to scratch, a voice from inside said,

“I’ve been expecting you, Ember.”

I froze. The door creaked open on its own. Inside, an old woman stood with her back to me, stirring a pot that hissed softly over the fire.

“You’re probably confused,” she said, still not looking at me. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you in this life.”

I stepped inside, silent but watching. She didn’t turn.

“You can put the claws away,” she added with a small laugh. “If I wanted to harm you, you’d still be lying by the sea.”

The room smelled of smoke and heather. Strange symbols were carved into the beams above, glowing faintly where the firelight touched them.

“Who are you?” I wanted to ask, but all that came out was a low growl.

“Names matter less than purpose,” she said, as if hearing me. “And yours, Ember, is only beginning.”

She turned then, eyes cloudy with age but bright underneath. “The world’s changing. Magic is fading, and it won’t survive on its own. Maren’s gift wasn’t to spare you death. It was to keep what she loved alive… yes, you, but also… magic.”

Her gaze held mine, calm and unflinching.

“You, Ember, will carry the last spark,” she said.

I wanted to ask what it meant, how I was supposed to keep something as invisible as magic alive. But before I could, she smiled, faint and knowing.

“I can feel the questions in you,” she said. “All that restless wanting. You think you should be doing something already.”

I flattened my ears, embarrassed. She was right.

“But not yet, Ember. You’re still too full of the world you’ve lost. That kind of ache burns holes in things. You must learn to live again before you can protect anything.”

She reached out a hand, thin and trembling, and brushed a bit of ash from my fur. “Your time will come. I promise you that.”

“When?” I wanted to ask.

“When the world forgets,” she said softly, turning back to her fire. “That’s when you’ll remember.”

I stayed with her until her hair turned white as snow and her breath grew thin. When she died, she looked peaceful, as though she’d been waiting for me to finally understand something I still didn’t.

My second life ended quietly beside her hearth, no fire, no storm, just the steady tick of the world moving on.

I was reborn again and again.

Each time, there was always a witch, whether they knew their powers or not. I was drawn to them like a shadow to flame. Some found me as a kitten in the cold, others claimed I simply appeared. None ever questioned it for long. Maren’s thread pulled me to each of them, binding our lives in ways they could never see.

In my third life, the world still breathed magic. My witch was fierce and wild, her laughter bright as sparks. She could coax rain from clear skies and make crops bloom in the dead of frost. Power obeyed her because she loved it, not because she demanded it.

I wished it could’ve stayed that way, but I knew it wouldn’t. Maren wouldn’t have sent me here if it would. I could feel it already, something shifting underneath the joy, like a tide pulling back before the break.

Still, I knew it wasn’t my time yet, so I enjoyed this life while it lasted.

My fourth witch was quieter. Her magic came with rules, drawn in careful lines. She shut her windows when she worked and prayed no one would hear her chanting. “The world’s afraid of what it doesn’t understand,” she told me once, tracing a charm on the inside of her wrist. “But we do it anyway.”

I watched her grow old in hiding, and when she died, I stayed beside her body for days, wondering if the world would even notice another light had gone out.

My fifth witch didn’t know she was one at all. She worked with medicine. She mixed herbs and powders with careful hands, wearing white instead of robes. Her shelves were lined with vials instead of charms, her prayers replaced with formulas. Yet when she healed, I still felt it, that quiet warmth, that shimmer beneath her fingertips. She believed only in science, but I knew better. The same magic still moved through her, she’d only given it a new name, science.

In my sixth life, my witch called her craft invention. She built machines that mimicked magic, fire that never died, light that never dimmed. She called herself an inventor, not knowing that her curiosity was the same old power, reshaped and renamed.

Her workshop hummed with gears and steam, and she said machines would make the world better. They did, for a while. But each time I brushed against the metal, I felt how cold it was, how lifeless. She’d built wonders, but none of them could feel the pulse that once bound the earth together.

My seventh witch wandered. She carried no charms, no books, only her voice. At night she told stories to strangers, and for a few moments, the air shimmered, soft, alive. She never noticed. Maybe that was the point. Maybe magic had already learned to disguise itself as something simpler.

I enjoyed this life. It was simple, unhurried. For the first time in many lives, I wasn’t waiting. I was just… there. Sometimes, when her stories ended and the night grew quiet, she’d rest her hand on my back and murmur, “I don’t know why I love telling stories.”

I did.

It was magic’s last attempt to stay alive, to make people remember. And for a moment, it worked. Sparks lit their eyes as they listened, but it faded, just as fast as it came.

Now, in my eighth life, the world hums without pause.

The witches are gone. No one listens to the wind anymore, or wonders why the earth shakes, or thanks the sea for sparing them. The world no longer believes in anything it can’t measure.

The woman I live with is kind enough, but she’s nothing like the others. She keeps her eyes on screens that glow long after the sun has set, her hands always moving, tapping, scrolling, searching for something she doesn’t know she’s lost. There’s no magic in her. Not a trace.

I feel nothing either. The thread Maren gave me is stretched so thin I can barely feel it anymore. Sometimes I wonder if it’s already broken.

Outside, the skies burn with the wrong kind of light. The oceans rise and choke the shores, forests die faster than they grow, and storms tear through cities that were built to last forever. Humans call it change, but it’s closer to forgetting ; the world unmaking itself piece by piece.

I remember the old witch’s words: “You’ll know when it’s your time.”

But how could it be now? There’s nothing left worth saving. The witches are gone, the world is dying, and I , I have done nothing.

I thought I was meant to keep magic alive, but what good is magic in a world that doesn’t want it? Maybe my time will never come.

At night, I curl by the window and watch the sky, no stars, just the dull orange haze of smoke.

I close my eyes and whisper to a moon I can’t see,

“If not now… then when?”

The world doesn’t answer. Only the machines hum.

I sleep.

When I open my eyes, the hum is gone.

The air is still, too still. The house is gone, or maybe it was never here. Around me stretch the bones of a city, its towers half-swallowed by vines and ash. Cars rust in the streets, windows stare blank and hollow.

I call out once, a sound between a meow and a memory, and it echoes, unanswered.

For the first time in all my lives, there are no humans.

I rise slowly. The silence feels wrong, unnatural. But beneath it… something stirs. Faint, buried deep. A heartbeat, not human, not mechanical… older.

I take a step toward it. The ground hums.

The thread Maren gave me, the one I thought had vanished, tugs again, faint, certain, alive. It pulls me, I start to walk.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know this: the world isn’t dead. Not yet.

And if I can find where that heartbeat hides… maybe I can bring it back.

I walked for days, or maybe years. Time meant nothing anymore. And still, that pull, faint, steady, guided me onward.

I followed it through ruins and silence until, at last, I reached the forest.

It shouldn’t have been there. The world was ash and ruin, but this place was alive. Young trees swayed like memories of their ancestors, and in the center stood a circle of stones, cracked and sunken but still humming softly. I knew it the way you know your own heartbeat.

This was where Maren had lived.

And there, at the circle’s heart, half-buried in moss and time, lay a single stone, black as night, split down the middle, a faint glow pulsing inside like a dying coal.

I stepped closer. The hum grew stronger. I felt it in my bones, in my breath, in the thread that had kept me alive for so long.

I understood then.

My time had come.

I didn’t know how I knew, only that I did. The knowledge wasn’t loud or sudden. It was quiet, like exhaling after holding your breath for centuries.

I was never meant to save magic. I was meant to return it.

Maren hadn’t given me nine lives to live. She’d given me nine chances to outlast everything else, to be here, at the end, when the world was ready to begin again.

I curled beside the stone, pressing my body against the earth. The pulse within it quickened, matching my own. The warmth spread through my fur, rosemary, smoke, and moonlight.

“Born today, dear Ember…”

I heard her voice again, clear as the first night.

“…and let it be again, and again.”

My heart slowed. The glow beneath the stone brightened.

When my breath stopped, the light erupted, racing through the cracks of the earth, up the trees, into the air. The dead leaves caught fire without burning, bursting into color. Flowers clawed their way through ash. Rivers awoke, glittering like silver veins. The stars, long buried beneath centuries of smoke, blinked open one by one.

Magic returned to the world.

Not loud. Not violent.

But alive.

The forest shimmered, and somewhere, deep within its heart, the faint sound of purring rose and fell with the wind, as steady as breathing.