How I Became Your Familiar

I have a secret that has been kept to me for centuries, but I’m not sure when to tell it to her.

Samantha, my first and dearest friend, had found me as if the very divine had pitied me enough to have her come to me to help end my many years of loneliness.

Amid those years of aimless wandering, my habit of staying at secluded areas had suddenly worked in my favor. What I had used as a new resting place had actually been a spot often frequented by her kind of people. Those that practiced a modern revival of the natural magics had made shrines and left offerings by the trees and brush, though at first my disbelief had made me think that it was just all the work of litterbugs and creative children. That thought had some weight to it though, as it was also in an area by a body of water where past generations of people had dumped their old refuse before the invention of proper disposal, as that is what I overheard from the people going there to scavenge for surviving antique items to collect. These are what both Samantha and her also spiritual cousin Marian came here for, and that is how I met her.

Marian was helping Samantha find antique bottles in the dirt to repurpose for herb and oil storage. I had been resting inside a bottle that ended up in their collection. The short voyage to Samantha’s house within a shaking, clinking box of objects had disturbed me enough to consider escaping.

Soon after they had placed the box in the middle of her living room and Marian had left for the day, Samantha was unloading the box to place the items on her windowsills. The sunlight had shined through the bottles brightly enough to cast colored shadows of brown, green, and blue onto the floor. I saw the floor through the glass, and though I wasn’t visible on the window, I could see the light give away my form inside the wider blue bottle as if I was inside an egg.

Not knowing what to do, I laid still and waited. Samantha had returned to the room several times and eventually noticed the odd shape within the bottle’s shadow. I grew increasingly nervous as she began to examine the bottle to see what was making my shadow. I couldn’t float nor let gravity keep me still, as her repeated handling of the bottle had made me lose control and I began to move inside. Knowing that I could no longer hide it, I decided to grin and bear it, and finally reveal myself.

I knew she could sense my energy, and as a believer she was not fully shocked by my appearance as would an average person. So once I reached my paws outside the mouth of the bottle, she stared with bemused interest. She warily set it on a coffee table to watch, and I carefully pushed my head outside, feeling the air and the atmosphere once again. I let my gray body slide out like liquid, struggling a bit with my hindlegs and tail before falling off the table and letting myself land gracefully.

Oh right, I’m also a cat.

Urgent for a reality check, Samantha curiously asked me what I was. And I responded, revealing to her that I’m capable of speech.

“I am, well… my name is Agnes, and I’m a cat-sith.”

“Oh, and I am… Samantha, I’m Samantha, yeah. Are you… real?”

She cautiously reached out her hand to pet me. I was fuzzy with a bit of static, and held some solid pressure before her touch became strong enough to phase through me. I was, for sure, real. Or at least real enough for her belief to allow.

It was the first time in centuries I had directly interacted with someone who believed. And all this time I thought that people had moved on, thought that I’d forever be a wandering folktale that faded with the passing of generations. And to finally feel what it’s like to be seen, have my existence acknowledged, made something deep within me want to take action to not lose this only chance at a new life.

“Samantha… are you really, even in this time and day, a witch?”

“Well, I mean, not the ones people usually think of. I help people, and they call that…”

“It’s cunning folk, Samantha”

“Right. Today we call them light workers. But yes, I am one.”

My excitement got the better of me.

“Can I… stay here? With you? I mean, it’s a long story, but for years I’ve been awfully lonely, and I never thought that I’d be able to… reunite with my people.”

Samantha was struck curious once again.

“So does that mean you are… a familiar?”

“Yes, and I’ll gladly be yours, if that’s fine with you, or with anyone else—”

“Sure. I never knew that familiar spirits could actually appear to us, this whole time I thought they were just metaphorical. I’ll let you stay here, and we’ll see what you can do.”

And so it began.

I developed quite a number of powers over the many years before, and I would demonstrate them to her from time to time. I could fly at high speeds to appear in unexpected places, mark surfaces with my claws, locate lost items, and feel the energies of natural objects and materials that had use in magic.

Marian returned a few days later. Samantha let it happen naturally without invite to not cause suspicion. I had left the house a few times to show that I am still invisible to passerby, and she wanted to see if I would also be visible to another spiritual believer like Marian.

To little surprise, Marian saw me. Once Samantha introduced me to him, he had grown equally as intrigued.

“She says that only believers can see her.”

“Huh, so it really is a familiar. Never thought they actually existed.”

“Beats having a pet.” Samantha joked.

“So she can be taken outside?”

“Yeah, she can go anywhere. To everyone else she is invisible.”

I chimed in.

“I can come with you wherever you want to go. Seems like my presence can help you find your fellow witches.”

And that’s what they did. For they all knew each other in this New England town, identifying their nearby friends of the craft with me was easy. I could sense when a stranger nearby was having bad intentions, or if a place had recently been tainted by an incident. When they spoke to me, they heard my speech as telepathic, and I could even possess the bodies of nearby strays to walk alongside them if they ever wanted me to be in psychical cat form, though at the expense of limiting some of my powers.

At home, Samantha did business like usual. She would return from work to continue her studies, use divinatory methods to plan the weeks ahead, and go about giving medicines and cleansings to those in need, all while I would sit outside with some former stray cats that I had brought to the house by possessing their bodies and then leaving them to stay in the yard for her to occasionally feed and care for.

Quite some time had passed, and once the secret of my past had resurfaced in my mind, it had bothered me endlessly.

It was on one simple day that I decided would be the point in time that I reveal it to her. I climbed up on the counter and sat among the herbs and teas that were being prepared next to her altar. Happy to have another friendly chat, Samantha asked me what fun did I have in mind today. I answered:

“I don’t know what you’ll think of this, but I have something complicated to tell you.”

“Oh, really? That’s unexpected. Okay, you can tell me, if you really want.”

I took a deep breath and sighed.

I told her the whole story. Told her that I wasn’t always this way, and that I used to be something else. Someone else.

I always lived here. I always had the name Agnes. But what no one knows is that I was originally a descendant of Scottish settlers who came to the colonial land that would become modern New England. And though I would have hated to admit it, I was a witch. And I was one much unlike Samantha. What I had insisted was just my necessary gray morality had darkened over time. I had such bad rivalries with some of my neighbors that I had resorted to hexing, and it only spiraled from there. They had chased me out of my home, and I ran into the woods. Part of me wanted to succumb. But I also wanted to escape.

I am a cat-sith, which means that as a human I used to have the ability to shapeshift into a cat form, but only nine times. I had used up eight of those chances, and once the mob had started firing their flintlocks at me, I had done it for the ninth and final time.

It was a spur of the moment decision that, as far as I know, permanently altered the trajectory of my fate. Because once a witch turns into a cat-sith nine times, they will stay as one permanently. As an animal spirit I would be barred from going to any afterlife, and I would always be left to wander the Earth. It probably wouldn’t have been so bad had I known that believers still existed, but the guilt had made me give myself up. I did it to direct the accusations away from the innocent, and I felt that I had deserved it. After all, those many years of resting, wandering, and ruminating over what I had done had indeed felt like a purgatory of sorts, and to truly be remorseful had made it all worth it.

I still remember the day I left my humanity. Even in the passing of centuries I made sure to keep the core memory with me, despite most of what came before it having faded with the years. But traveling throughout the land, seeing those generations come and go and grow as a society, and secretly eavesdropping by thousands of random human conversations to learn modern English, had brought me here today.

And as I finished telling all this to Samantha, a great weight has been taken off my chest as if to balance a scale. And though I did have some fear over what she would think, as somewhat expected, she understood.

“So is that where familiars really come from?”

I thought about it again.

“I think they have all kinds of origins. But now you know mine.” I said contently, relieved.

She then petted me empathically.

“I’m very glad you told me that. Makes me appreciate you all the more.”

Since then, my life had never been better. My story gave as much interest to her friends as the day they first met me, and they started having discussions on how more familiars could be found. So soon I could have just as much spiritual friends as I would physical. And Samantha would say: “Who knows? We all forgive her. Maybe Agnes could ascend as a human again one day.”

Human or not, I wouldn’t mind either way, as I had found happiness. And never again shall I spend a day lonely. With my fairylike company I’ll continue to help others alongside my friends, both in person and in spirit. And our relationships will always stay, as I would like to put it, familiar.