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Shadows stretch across the street, chasing the last rays of the setting sun. A house sits on the end of this street, brightly lit. Laughter and loud voices drift from open windows and half-open doors.
A cat-like beast sits on the doorstep, yawning and blinking all three of its eyes. It notes the fading light, and gets up to stretch its paws and pad inside to the warmth.
The cat-beast walks across the colorful rugs that adorn the floor towards a room in which sweet and savory smells float through the air. The cat-beast knows it will find a stray piece of food on the floor there.
It weaves between the many legs of humans and beasts alike to reach its prize, a dropped piece of kofta.
Before it can get there, however, a leg blocks its way, its owner bursting with laughter.
The leg belongs to the metal girl, who likes to play with her swords in the exact spot the cat-beast takes its morning nap.
She is laughing at something the tall girl said, who is holding another cat-like beast who is sound asleep in her arms. Its glass earrings clink when its ears twitch, but the noise is lost among the din of the food-room.
Momentarily distracted, the cat-beast remembers its purpose and resumes its journey towards the abandoned kofta. It enters in a brief scuffle with a bird-beast, but its sharp claws and quick feet escape the bird-beast’s reaching shadows.
The cat-beast brings its prize out of the food-room and up the creaky wooden stairs, heading for its favorite spot on the roof where it can enjoy its meal under the moonlight.
It passes two adult humans, gesturing idly and trading words that hold no meaning to the cat-beast. It catches the scent of something that smells like murgh makhani, but one look from a much larger, fanged cat-beast sends it scampering down the hall.
The cat-beast decides to take the scenic route and jumps through an open window to pad along the ledges on the walls, stepping over rangoon creepers in full bloom.
Through a window it spies two human kits, their heads drawn close together as they whisper to one another. The cat-beast recognizes one, the sleepy girl who used to live in this house until she didn’t.
The cat-beast also recognizes a shadowed figure crouching behind a tapestry, listening intently. The shadow girl likes to pull on the cat-beast’s ears when it is trying to sleep, so it continues onwards.
Here, the ledge ends so the cat-beast squeezes itself inside a gap in the wall that the big metal scorpion had pierced through in an earlier spat with the cat-beast.
It follows its set path down a hallway, and then diverges into a dimly lit room where it knows it will have best climbing access to the roof from.
It treads lightly, not wanting to draw attention from the huge wolf-like beast who is curled up around its smaller counterpart, who seems to be sleeping using the wolf-beast’s massive head as a cushion of sorts.
To make the journey to the balcony that has access to a Neem tree whose branches stretch up to the roof, the cat-beast must step lightly past the wolf-beast and the wolf-boy, who have conveniently located themselves in the middle of the small room.
Just as the cat-beast nearly makes it to the softly billowing curtains that frame the balcony, the wolf-boy opens his eyes.
The cat-beast and the wolf-boy stare at each other, bright brown eyes meeting deep black ones.
They do not move. They do not blink. The cat-beast waits with bated breath, waiting to see what the wolf-boy will do next.
The wolf-boy continues to stare at the cat-beast, and it begins to think that maybe he is asleep, or dreaming, or whatever it is humans do when they stare at cat-beasts unblinkingly.
The cat-beast is about to turn tail and dash out of the room when the wolf-boy blinks, breaking the spell. He rolls over and settles himself more deeply in the wolf-beast’s fur, and the cat-beast can hear his breathing slow.
Relieved (though it will never reveal this emotion to anyone- cat-beasts are proud creatures, after all) it slinks away to the balcony and jumps onto the Neem tree that brushes against the side of the house.
The cat-beast scales the branches of the tree up to the rooftop. It pads along uneven shingles to the top of the roof, where it can at last settle with its hard won prize.
The moon is full and bright that night, and the cat-beast shivers a little from the light breeze.
As it nibbles on the now cold kofta, the cat-beast hears all the sounds of its home beneath it settling into sleep.
Satisfied with its meal, the cat-beast settles and closes its three eyes.
Somewhere in the distance, laughter sounds.