I believe it is best to begin with my earliest true memory, that is, a memory free from the dark edges and vague shapes the passage of time gives it. But before I begin, I must say that, had I written this just a month or even a week before today I might have been able to conjure up an older memory... but lately I've been thinking about cats, cats and their little idiosyncrasies. And so this is the oldest true memory I can think of.
I recall how the French trees scratched the sky, every breath of wind bringing with it a swirl of dead leaves. The trees were so tall to me then, for I had taken the form of a small child, no older than eight, whom I had found rotting by the roadside.
It was the Plague that took him, its fleas borne upon the backs of the Bloodless, Lycan servants who rebelled against the Vampyre Cults. No doubt they stole into the nearby town Issoire and spread it there, I thought, No doubt the hysteria has already begun.
Just as they intended.
I was a Vampyre, and thus had become well-acquainted with hysteria. Scapegoats are always found first, I knew, the first of them being those that are different. The Jews would be murdered or exiled, then behind them the lepers, and behind them the deathly poor or other outcasts. I could help none of them, for I did not yet have the tongue, nor the mind, to manipulate Humanity. But, when they ran out of Human scapegoats...
I climbed a tree and set myself comfortably in its crotch. Drawing from my wasteband a flute, I played a bewitching melody, eerie to Humans and plants and most beasts, creatures with souls; but not to Vampyres, and not to cats.
As I played out they came from the undergrowth, a grey, a tabby, a spotted, a black. For a while they gyred about the base of the tree, twitching their tails and flicking their ears at the sound. Until eventually, one remembered that he could leap, and so he jumped into the tree, and the rest followed him, so that by the end of my song nearly every branch of the tree held a cat, purring and prodding and nudging. At this sight I could not help but giggle, the shrill giggle of the dead boy.
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