Every self-proclaimed do-gooder who ever undertook it to turn someone's world upside down ought to have first inquired whether its inhabitants would like to live with the lights on the floor and the toilet on the ceiling.

From a lecture by Ellis an Temiar

The short night was passing. It was getting light, but the shadows were still thick enough to hide the Alae seeking refuge in them from prying eyes. Anar slid from one column to another like a grey ghost. He hid behind the crippled statues – some missing an arm, some without tails, others deprived of golden ears – due to battles from long ago. Catching his breath after the great exertion, he leaned against the trunks of ancient trees... so warm, powerful and stern to behold, one might think that instead of sweet sap, thick salty blood flowed beneath the bark, which they'd sucked out from myriad fallen righteous warriors. Anar chuckled at this eerie reverie, so readily cultivated in the fertile vineyards of his mind's eye once nourished by fear's witchery! Every stone here was saturated with it – the doings of mommy dearest from her youth...

He didn't allow himself to think of Aniallu. It was paramount to get out of the forbidden territory without being noticed, and the slightest stray thought might be his undoing. He forced himself to keep going, paying heed to his sharpened sensations and focusing all his efforts on finding a safe way out.

After a few minutes he was able to get beyond the confines of the temple complex and plunged into the dense shrubbery of the forest. Because he often went for walks here, he knew virtually every trail, every tree. It was the only "uncultured" wood in Rual – brazenly untidy, dark, dense and loud. When he got further in to the humid thicket, Anar stopped and sat down on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree. He couldn't shake the feeling that something very important was eluding him. He replayed the conversation with the tal sianae time and again in his head, but couldn't make heads or tails of certain emotions that had so clearly manifested on her expressive face. First of all, her bashfulness at the sight of the healed wounds – first her own, then those inflicted on him. It seemed there was some sort of hidden meaning behind it all, but he lacked the imagination to understand exactly what.

Maybe his own embarrassment was keeping him from figuring out hers. He recalled with insufferable shame the first moments of their encounter, when he so passionately incriminated Aniallu as one of his mother's minions: "... topnotch face... wonderful actress – to say so much with just one look, having never actually felt anything that your face is depicting... our meetings would turn romantic..." What an oaf he was! Anar's nose and the fleshy pads of his paws blushed with shame. He sat, stood up, shifted his weight from paw to paw. And she was genuinely worried about him; he was actually dear to her. Dear to a tal sianae! Dear... to her. Unthinkable... and intoxicatingly pleasant.

Anar rested in the forest for over an hour, licking his disheveled fur and straightening his tangled thoughts. Then, having donned a royally apathetic mask, he headed home.

He climbed at an easy pace the stairs of the walking trail, which wound into the forest like a long grey tongue. The stones that paved it were kept cool by magic, chilling his dusty paws pleasantly. The sky was wrapped in a haze of clouds, and the enchanted lanterns' flames were dissolving in morning's pale diffused light like chunks of colored sugar in milk. The trail led to a tiny triangle-shaped chapel. On the wall facing the forest, it featured Alasais leaning over a kitten's crib, blowing a miniscule amber bead from her palm like fluff. It was Anar's own creation: Touched by the Birth of the Liberator, Alasais Inspires Him to Create the Curtain. The Alae glanced at it... His eyes were probably playing tricks on him in the dim light, for he thought he saw a hint of Aniallu in the goddess' stately features.

Perhaps be was right. Why else would Amialis hate this particular fresco so vehemently? Sure, this depiction of her violated all the rules, but it still wasn't enough to justify such a storm of protest. Praise Alasais, Anar had managed to convince a priest to consecrate the piece before his mother had laid eyes on it. She dared not destroy an image of the Goddess that had already received Her spirit. The only thing Amialis would muster was to have her mages turn the chapel so that the "defiled" wall now faced the woods, where hardly anyone would ever see it except for her blasphemous son.

Anar tried to stay out of the city as much as possible. Rual was a city of truly majestic scope – a grotesque monument to the menacing greatness of Alasais and her adored children. The temples' thick walls ascended to dizzying heights; colossal statues towered over the streets, leaving no crevice where one might escape their severe gazes; immense columns crowded the half-lit watering courtyards, smoke from the censers always hanging thick in the air. The priests, with their shaved heads and ears, soaked it all up, floating in this reddish mirage like pale gugu berries in tomato soup, but, despite their comic appearance, the sight of them filled Anar with a frigid, mortifying melancholy.

Nothing could lighten the load of this oppressive atmosphere – not the bas-reliefs, nor the rich tapestries, nor the brightly colored murals. They had all been done according to the holy canon, using a strictly defined palette. The scenes were often repeated: The First Offering, Alasais Smites the Idols, Alasais Laments Rual, and, of course, Anar's favorite painting, Alasais as the Mother of All Cats, Tramples Frailty, Unbelief, Disobedience and Irreverence. In his opinion, this entire vainglorious display was painfully devoid of life, imagination, play of colors, highlights and half-tones... Just like life in general in this city.

But today, as Anar panned his gaze over the temples' triangular windows, he felt a delightful distance from the hustle and bustle buzzing behind him. He was no longer a part of it. It couldn't touch him. Anar felt as though he was lazily leafing through the pages of a well-worn book, packed with illustrations of the same old Rual motifs.

To the left, an adolescent cat was strutting by importantly on disproportionately long rear legs. Holding his pointy snout high, he clutched a sacred ring between his teeth and looked down scornfully at his less fortunate peers. To the right, a dandy dressed up like some fashion doll was accompanying his mistress to the nearest place of worship. He had just showered her with complements and now, as soon as the temple doors had slammed shut behind her, he was staring at them with contempt (all the while mumbling mechanical apologies to Alasais for approaching "her blessed abode" and leaving without paying his respects). Through the window of that same temple Anar could see a shaved-eared priest prostrated on the mirrored tiles. His excessively long tail was wriggling unnaturally, contorting into sacred symbols...

Like a worm on a hook, Anar thought to himself; he felt nauseated and quickly turned away.

An amusing scene awaited him: a hook-nosed slave leaning with a questioning look over a bowl of milk in which a huge beetle with long antennae was floundering. The slave's face was contorted into a mask that betrayed a terribly tense inner struggle. And no wonder – accustomed to never making thoughtful choices, here he had to make an independent decision, probably for the first time ever. Noticing Anar, he started and fell to his knees, bowing as low as possible to the ground. His bald tattooed head looked like a glazed bun.

"Why has this bowl upset you so?" Anar asked, assuming his bipedal form.

"There's a beetle in it, master, and I don't dare fish it out. My fingers will defile the milk, and the spoon, having been in my hand, will as well. But no one is permitted to pour milk out..." the slave twitched nervously. Anar could almost sense him mentally bemoaning the wise writers of the Code for forgetting to include what to do in this case – which of the two evils to choose.

"An awful dilemma. But you do fill these bowls somehow, right?"

"Yes, master. I've earned the honor of serving the four-legged cats of this temple."

"And how exactly do you fill them?"

"I grasp the sacred pitcher with a prayer," the slave indicated a series of wide-mouthed vessels lined up beneath the covering along the temple's wall; some were full of milk, others already empty. "I lean reverently over the bowl and pour the milk into it..."

"So the fact that you held the pitcher doesn't defile it?" Anar asked pointedly. "The milk doesn't lose its purity?"

"No, master. The pitchers are consecrated in a special way," the slave answered readily.

"Now think how you could use that to solve your beetle problem."

"Master?" the slave asked pitifully.

"Think!" Anar commanded. He might as well have ordered a stool to fly...

The victim of the pop quiz bowed his head. Mere minutes later the slave's hands began to shake, his Adam's apple moving anxiously up and down. Anar decided to have mercy.

"What if you took an empty pitcher and used it to scoop out the beetle?"

The slave thought for a second, and then his face lit up with unadulterated joy.

"Truly, Alasais herself planted this wisdom in your head, my master!" he clucked, ecstatically bowing before his benefactor.

Anar gnashed his teeth. Releasing the slave with a motion of his head, he watched him dash for a pitcher.

"Hopeless," Anar muttered for the umpteenth time in his three hundred years of Rual trials.

The slaves' inability (who was he kidding – many Alae as well!) to think for themselves, even under threat of punishment, scared him. Certainly, among the slaves some were slow and others downright imbecilic. Still, that was less than a quarter of the non-Alae population. What about the rest?

Anar had long been haunted by the thought that some heinous secret lay behind all this, that all these "the Code creators knew best" creatures had been purposely maimed, turned into useful tools to blindly obey those in power. He had searched for traces of the priests' enchantments everywhere, and had observed the slaves' lives from birth to death, but nowhere had he been able to find anything suspicious.

No one was manipulating their minds – neither by magic nor by the transformational force of the Cat's spirit. No one was messing with their brains. Furthermore, young slaves' upbringing could hardly be considered cruel. Their parents practically never had to punish them. The babes fulfilled their straightforward tasks happily, soaking in the rules of Rual life like sponges – readily, even with a kind of... strange hunger. It was as if they desperately wished to fill the scary emptiness in their little heads, and knew of no other way to do so except to learn from the grownups. Or rather, they didn't care to look for another way.

Exerting to attain something or contemplate it, let alone to think something up all by themselves – all that seemed like an ugly and unnecessary, perhaps even unnatural task to them. Whenever Anar proposed that they use their imaginations, the children cried and the adults fell into a stupor, looking like cats who had been ordered to jump into a cold pool. Or worse, like cats who couldn't swim... And Anar had always encouraged his servants to take initiative, never punishing them for their blunders!

Once he tried to teach the slaves' children mathematics. To some extent, the experiment proved successful – his pupils quickly grasped problem-solving concepts and remembered them well. However... however, if it was not possible to use a single template to solve any given problem, they inevitably got confused and ran to Anar for help.

It was the same story with art. The children adored drawing, painting and coloring, but couldn't come up with their own designs. Anar knew of only two exceptions to this rule. The slave of one of his old flames could compose simple melodies that half the servants in Rual would be whistling before long; and his own slave Kad who drew portraits of his friends on shards of stone. It was interesting that neither one stood out from the rest in any other way. On the contrary, they were quite zealous when it came to observing the rules, and adored the Code with an almost fetishistic passion.

But Anar didn't give up. Once he suggested to one of his servants – a middle-aged female, clever and lively – to imagine what kind of wedding she would like. The slave dropped to the floor, sobbing and wailing about what she had done to anger him so that he deemed her unworthy of a traditional ceremony. When he explained that his proposal was no punishment but a reward, she beseeched him not to saddle her with such an overwhelming burden... A burden... too much to be decided, too much... freedom.

Alas, her happiness lay elsewhere. Anar had racked his brain for years trying to understand how an altogether able-minded being could be so extremely content doing the most banal, repetitive work in which there was not an inch of room for self-expression?! She derived no less pleasure from placing her master's food on a dish in perfect accordance with the canon, not adding one minute leaf of dill by her own initiative, than he did after successfully testing a new spell he'd just created.

Could it be that she actually had no "self" to express? But how was that possible?

A series of blue flashes suddenly illuminated the sky over Rual. They grew brighter and brighter. Anar did not need an explanation – the soul of a top aristocrat was departing to Briaellar. And so it was: a vertical line of black cat tracks, surrounded by a halo of sapphire blue, stitched its way across the thin gauze of clouds.

"Damn!" hissed Anar, retreating into the triangular shadow of a bush.

If anyone from his clan were to notice him, he'd have to drag his behind to the Temple of Ascension. And who knew how long he would have to be there...

Stalking along the wall of a gazebo, Anar broke into a run. He tore through Rual's underbelly, looping along the maze of ancient alleys, crooked as the bureaucrats that ran this town, and narrow as the minds of the religious fanatics that populated it. At last, his own house appeared in front of him. Like all the Rual nobles' palaces, dozens of magical shields wrapped around it, exactly like layers of cabbage. Bypassing them unhindered, the Alae ran into the backyard and dove into a tiny Alasais' chapel that was designated for meeting the servants' spiritual needs. No one would dare disturb him here – private communion with the goddess was no less vital than lamenting departed relatives.

Shifting into feline form, he respectfully stretched at the feet of the Mother of All Cats, humbly lowering his head to his paws... and fell into a deep contented sleep, having avoided a blasphemer's punishment.