The road was guarded by stone panthers on either side. The glow of the Eyes plated their black backs with silver grey. All was quiet. Only the occasional calls of birds nesting under the arches of deserted temples periodically disturbed the calm. Anar slid along the formations of statues, hiding in the shadows of their massive pedestals. His paws tickled in anticipation of escape; the nape of his neck quivered excitedly.

He froze suddenly, sensing a nearby presence.

She was sitting solemnly on a pedestal, straight and proud, bright green eyes fixed on Anar. The city's forbidden territory was forbidden to her as well, but she couldn't be bothered concealing herself. Anar gave a wry laugh – who would dare reproach the empress of Rual – the god-like Queen Alara – about anything? Even in a simple dark dress with no jewelry or crown, her true form remained unchanged: a majestic woman before whom one could hardly fight the urge to prostrate oneself and humbly listen to her will. Anar emerged from the shadows and took on bipedal form.

"You've lost the last traces of sanity, dear nephew. You, who will ascend the throne after my husband and who's keeping my son from taking his father's place," sighed Alara.

"You have the right to be angry, my queen," Anar got down on his knees before her, bowing his head.

Emanating repentance with his whole being, he simultaneously prepared himself to counter any possible attack by Alara.

"I no longer have the right," she answered in a bizarrely meek tone.

Anar was so taken aback by these words that he lifted his head and looked Alara in the eyes, expecting to see mockery there. But there was none. Instead he saw emptiness and fatigue – unprecedented, inconceivable feelings for a queen.

"Unlike you, impudent fool, I've always known my place. That is my wisdom," said Alara. "You've found favor with a tal sianae, and I don't dare contest her will. I won't kill you or even tell my husband of your sacrilege."

"How did you – "

"How quickly you've forgotten everything you've been taught! You dare to ask me questions without permission? Poor Amialis! Wasted so many years on you..." Alara suddenly laughed, and it occurred to Anar that he had never seen this imperturbable woman so natural and full of life.

"You remember everything! You know the truth about Briaellar and Alasais!" he spat without warning. For the briefest moment a glimpse of something flashed across his aunt's face... like the vestige of a past life. And that something gave her away beyond any doubt.

"That is my eternal sorrow," Alara bowed her head. "I remember much of what I'd like to forget. And you, my naive nephew, will soon find out why." She said this candidly, almost tenderly, which was even more surprising than her rolling laugh. "I feel sorry for you. You have no idea the kind of gutter you're about to plunge into. And what rats will be wallowing in it with you. Annoying, stupid, licentious creatures, degenerates whose souls reek as badly as their bodies. And you, my boy, will be forced to regard these mayflies – petty mortals without a drop of Alaean blood, without a shadow of the gift of magic – as your equals. Ye-es, such are the perverted laws in the realm of chaos from which there is no escape. There, beyond the Curtain, you won't be able to simply squash one of these detestable insects. You'll have to tolerate them, and you'll see..." Alara looked Anar in the eye for a long time, "that even Alasais has to do so as well.

"And besides these contemptible beings, there are also others, some of whom are infinitely stronger than you. Think about it: beyond the Curtain you won't be the powerful heir to the throne, respected and feared by everyone... even the king."

Anar didn't know how to respond, or whether to respond at all. How could he explain to her – a creature who had willingly confined herself to Rual – that his heart detested this status of a crowned slave, chained to the throne?

"I'll take care of your slave," Alara said unexpectedly. "Now go, and may the goddess forbid I should see you again before your departure!"

Anar bowed gratefully before the queen and disappeared into the darkness...

She followed him with her eyes, looking in his direction for a long time after he was gone. She was glad for this unexpected gift from fate – to finally be rid of her hated nephew! But Alara's celebration was wholly internal. On her face was the stamp of deep maternal sorrow: she felt so sorry for this stupid boy, oh so sorry, but she couldn't, after all, go against the wishes of a tal sianae!

It was undoubtedly because of this "sorrow," in order to somehow get around the Punishing Claw's interdict, that Alara had allowed one of Amialis' spies to follow her and overhear her conversation with the heir – the former heir! – to the throne.

"Now you'll rush right over, sister dear. You'll hotfoot it here as if your royal tail were on fire. Your impulsivity always has been your weak spot. You won't even notice that it's a tal sianae in front of you... Poor, mad Amialis. You'll dig yourself a grave with your own claws."

Alara pensively released and retracted her slightly golden claws.

"If your pup were a true Rualite, it would be all right to let him leave. But once there, that waste of fur will soften and wallow in pleasure instead of looking for a way to skin your hide – as he ought to. He won't take revenge, but simply cross you out of his life. And he'll convince the tal sianae to do the same. A tal sianae! That weakling, fussing over slaves! Two degenerates have found one another," she couldn't help herself and scoffed. "Then you'll turn your attention to Nakar, draw her away from serving the goddess in Briaellar, and pin your hopes on her. Then we will finally have a worthy heiress, and not this milksop... An heiress who appreciates power and is infinitely better at achieving it than her brother. And that, we do not need.

"But if you openly attack Alasais' Shadow, no one will be able to simply brush that under the rug. You'll be exiled. And without you, Nakar won't come back to Rual – she doesn't want to be queen; she's set her sights on something higher. And my children will finally take a place worthy of them."

Alara recalled with pride how right she'd been long ago, when she made it a rule to look into the thoughts of her relatives' servants. Oh, what treasures could be mined in their stupid earless heads! A tal sianae in Rual! She truly did have reason to reward this Kad fellow! Oh yes, she would praise and coddle him. Even if she couldn't break through the mental barrier Alasais' Shadow had put up around the half-elf, she could easily recognize the nature of the spell itself, and, therefore, who cast it. The rest was just details – as soon as she approached the slave with benevolence and brought up the fact that she too had had contact with a tal sianae, Kad, mad with delight at such graciousness on the part of his queen and the chance to share a juicy secret with his wise ruler, told her everything he knew. A good slave. Even he would make a better heir than that wretched mongrel Anar.

The queen of Rual, Her Highness Alara, was celebrating the most grandiose victory of her life. The world around her had become ideal, and she was happy.

***

Anar raced through Rual. An abundance of shadows flashed and stole back into the darkness around him. His fellow clan members were going about their affairs – the kind the convicting light of day would not have allowed. Taking note of them with some shred of his consciousness, Anar concentrated on one thought, one intoxicating word – freedom.

"I'm free! I'm free!" everything inside him cried. He turned a deaf ear to his royal aunt's admonitions; nothing in her words could mitigate his determination to get out of Rual as soon as possible.

Practically skipping, he flew up the stairs of his palace. The guards' faces did not express a hint of surprise – they were too well trained to allow themselves to even have, let alone demonstrate, their own opinions. Anar almost stepped on the lazy sacred cat by the doors. Gently prying Pobla from the floor with the toe of his shoe, he turned him over on his back and stroked his belly – goodbye, you little beast! His striped Grace stared at his master with sleepy eyes and yawned sweetly.

"You could at least purr your goodbye," Anar sighed... and all of a sudden the wide smile slipped from his face.

He felt uneasy, dreary at heart. For a second he wondered: what if his hopes weren't meant to be realized? What if something, someone would keep him from leaving Rual, and all the events of the last couple days would become nothing more than yet another wonderful, impossible dream...

Anar drove the repugnant thoughts out of his head.

Whistling with emphatic cheer, he went up to his chambers, locked the door thoroughly and got his two biggest treasures out from his secret wardrobe. The first was a rucksack – almost the same as Aniallu's, except brown and a bit bigger. Sewn from the skin of an unknown animal, it was resistant to water, fire and magic. The inner walls of the rucksack were carefully cut in specific spots; apparently, it once had secret pockets there, but somebody had found and gutted them a long time ago. One of the rucksack's side pockets, like a ripe plum or the figure-eights of ants' backs, was dotted with tiny, almost schematic representations of people torturing cats – scrawny, grotesquely bug-eyed – in every imaginable way. Oddly enough, it was these sacrilegious figures that had saved the rucksack from ruin. Unlike Anar's other stuff from his life before Rual, Amialis had kept it as an illustration of her tales about "that life."

"Look. Look!" she growled, grabbing Anar by the scruff of the neck and shoving his nose in the rucksack. "That's how they taught you to hate everything Alae, how they tried to choke, mangle and burn everything feline out of you!"

Anar obediently gawked at the drawings and tried with all his might to become enraged. But it worked out just dreadfully. He couldn't drive the annoying thought from his mind that all this was merely someone's prank, a joke, and not at all some devious propaganda. Alas, no emotional traces had been left on the rucksack, and the Alae could neither confirm nor disprove his theory.

There was, however, a scent. Later on, taking cover in some secluded nook, Anar would often take on feline form, spread himself out on the floor, rested his head on a soft ledge, and... just breathed it in. His sides, like two golden furs, expanded, and he felt like he could take flight, filled with this magical, enticing, forbidden aroma. It was the smell of hope, freedom and change. Of travels and adventures. No sooner would he smell it than an incomprehensible longing began to eat away at his heart, every time. But his heart was apparently very big, since to this day, much of it remained...

The second treasure was a book. A thin little book in rough leather binding, with an image pressed into the cover: a toothy winged pangolin scratching itself behind the ear like a cat. The book had probably been completely painted gold, but the paint had rubbed off and now only scattered bright speckles flashed here and there. It looked altogether too worn – someone must have used it all the time, and extremely carelessly. Its pages were scribbled by hand, with some lines going awry, as if written in a hurry or in an uncomfortable position.

Anar was very attached to it. About twenty tomes of non-Rual origin were in his stash, hiding from a horrible death: from the manual on breeding whitefoot herring to the tearful novel about the forbidden love between a priestess and a prince, but only this story fascinated him enough that he read it over and over. The plot and the characters appealed to him, especially the main character who recounted the narrative in first person.

Once he found Kad with his treasured possession. The half-elf had apparently dropped the book while changing his master's bedding, and was frantically checking each page to make sure they hadn't gotten crumpled. Fortunately, not one had been ripped. Nonetheless... to Anar's astonishment, they were all blank! Not a single line or letter was to be found. The paper shone glossily, positively glowing as if brand new. Glancing over Kad's shoulder, Anar quickly leafed through the book. The pages were blank as before.

He grabbed it from the petrified slave, slapped it shut, stared at the cover – it hadn't changed a bit, even the recent mark from his claw and a dent from Amialis' high heel were still there. He opened it to find the text once again in place, and the pages colored with age and tattered as before. Anar realized why his mother hadn't blown her top when she walked in on him reading "this trash from beyond the Curtain." These pages obviously appeared white as virgin snow to everyone but the book's rightful owner...

The Alae rubbed the cover affectionately, just like shaking the hand of an old, trusted friend. He tucked the book carefully into one of the rucksack's compartments.

He wasn't sentimental in the least about the rest of his things; hence, packing took less than a half an hour altogether. Once the last item – a bundle of "Alasais' Whiskers," the most durable rope around – was in place, Anar put the rucksack in his spatial pocket; after all, he wasn't going to carry such a heavy thing on his back! Plus, he could easily get to anything in it whenever necessary. Casting the corresponding spell, he then tried it out: he mentally summoned a vial of hatty[1], which then appeared in his palm. The Alae smiled contentedly and cast one final look around the room. It was time. Time to find Kad and set sail.

There was no need to call on Kad twice. Stopping at the entryway respectfully, he looked like a bright lamp with a moth-eaten shade, his overflowing joy flooding past the shabby fabric of sorrow. Alara's most certainly already spoken with him, thought Anar.

"What a shame you're leaving us, master!" Kad whined from the entryway.

"Leaving?" the Alae repeated just in case.

"Yes. That's what Queen Alara said. My mistress, Queen Alara," the slave corrected himself.

"Is that so."

"Yes, master. I am now the personal slave of the empress of Rual," Kad's chest swelled with pride.

"And I was thinking of taking you with me," Anar said, already sensing Kad's reaction.

"With you?! There – beyond the Curtain?" Kad went pale and reeled back. "No, master, have pity on me!"

"Listen, Kad, you know as well as I do that the world beyond the Curtain is not nearly as bad as they make it out to be," Anar patted Kad on the shoulder reassuringly, which horrified the slave even more. "And you won't have to face it all by yourself. I'll take care of you, protect you, but you'll be free."

"No, master. That world might not be so bad for you... but for me, it is!" Kad's voice broke. "I love you so much, Master Anar. But I love Rual more. It's overflowing with peace, grandeur, prosperity. It's... perfect. And if I have a choice, I choose to stay. Especially now that the queen in her generosity has raised me to such a high position."

The slave bowed his head submissively. Anar felt so disgusted and powerless he wanted to scream and shred the tapestries.

"That's... probably a wise decision," he finally managed to say. He tasted the bitter aftertaste of these words on his tongue, as if he'd taken a gulp of moonshine. "I respect your choice. Good luck to you, Kad. I hope you won't be disappointed with your new mistress. Now leave me."

The slave stood up silently, bowed low and, without raising his eyes, withdrew from the room.

Chilly streams of fear trickled anew along Anar's spine, and he shivered. A foreboding feeling, a feeling he had waved away so carelessly, had been building up in a dark corner of his mind, and now it reached critical mass and tore into his conscious mind. A sense of danger overwhelmed him; his keen intuition took it as a resounding call to action.

Moments later he was racing through a secret passage laid in the thick walls of the palace. From inside they looked transparent; lamps, tapestries, pieces of stucco flashed past the running Alae like ghosts of the past, as if hanging in midair. Some still visible nails were like darts frozen in flight.

Anar only paused once to admire an amusing spectacle. A trap had gone off in the hallway that ran parallel to this: in a split second, a flood of viscous mass, exuding a stupefying stench, had descended upon Alara's snooping spies. By some miracle, they had managed to sense the oncoming trap, and protected themselves as best they could: the spheres surrounding them kept the magical substance from passing through, sticking out above it like huge bubbles in the middle of a swamp. Anar moved his fingers, considering treating his guests to dessert by sending the ceiling crashing down on them as well, but decided not to give himself away.

He ran on, wondering what could have made Alara change her mind. To dare oppose the will of a Punishing Claw... Even if Aniallu wasn't the divine executioner of legend, she was still Alasais' voice... The more Anar thought of it, the more unsettled he felt. Something was clouding his mind, and the Alae soon had to stop and brace himself on the wall. A wave of visions came over him. It had happened before, and he knew better than to try to fight it.

________________

[1] Hatty – a coal-black substance the Alae rub on the insides of their eyelids in order to cloak the radiance of their irises, which can betray a cat's presence at the most inopportune moment. The process of applying hatty is rather unpleasant, although for the overwhelming majority of Alae it had become a daily ritual. There is no acceptable alternative to this substance. Young kittens who still lack retractable claws are taught to make do without vision, relying only on their sense of smell, hearing, and "cat's sense." Alae eyes have their trademark look of being outlined in liner precisely due to hatty.