imitation tigerA Chapter by louwilding Prologue of my book, a total work in progress and uncompleted, writen in first person as Sally Ann Granger A short history of Werecats Author: Sally Ann Granger
Since the dawn of time a battle has raged between good and evil and as humanity has taken hold of our planet so has evil has flourished. It’s not surprising if you think about it; humans are much more susceptible to temptation than animals could ever be. You are sentient highly emotional beings with desires stronger than instinct alone. Over the centuries evil creatures have thrived on human emotion often using it to their advantage.
I’m sure you will have heard of, and maybe even believe in, Werewolf’s and Vampires. But here I will teach you about a lesser known creature, the Werecat.
I have an intimate understanding of their kind because I myself am a werecat, and after years of dedicated studying have become known by my kind, and others, as a trusted historian.
You’ll find us mentioned throughout the world’s folk law stories, with each continent seeming to take a different view.
Many European tales depict us as witches, this is because of the much loathed witch-hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum; a despicable text, which states that witches could, among other things, turn into cats and that these transformations were created by demons or via a pact with the devil. There are tales of the Weretiger in India; where people are also depicted as sorcerers and portrayed as a menace to livestock, who may turn to man-eating at any time as they have no human emotion when transformed, very much like werewolves.
Neither of these accounts is correct.
I have managed to find just two tales that do come close to the truth, although they are still not quite right.
African legends describe people who turn into lions, leopards or Cheaters. They believe that cat gods used to walk the plains in human form and mate with the human population. Their children could then take the form of the cat god from which they are descended. A similar story is told in Indonesia and Malaysia of the “Harimau Jadian” or “Imitation Tiger” whose power of transformation is also regarded as hereditary. This Weretiger knows what and who it is and is therefore no danger to humans (except possibly in cases of revenge) and is more widely seen as the protector of the crops from wild pigs.
You see Werecats are not cursed creatures. Unlike werewolves we are not governed by the cycle of the moon and are able to change form at will. We do not prey on the lives of the innocent like vampires and can live for hundreds of years, after all some cats really do have nine lives.
As the African stories suggest we are the descents of other worldly beings, who used to walk the earth and take the form of cats and humans, however we are not the descendants of Gods. We come from a place like this world only different; a parallel world that was once much closer to this one. It’s not a well-known fact even among my own kind, many of whom still believe we are gods, I only know because I read a lot, but hundreds of thousands of ago that parallel word and this were almost one. Yours called Earth and ours called Terra, even their names mean the same.
You see our younger planets produced so much energy that they could sustain both realities in one space. But as they aged this energy diminished; each time there has been a mass extinction or a new ice age, or some other cataclysmic event they have been caused by one world moving away from the other. Thousands of years ago, when human kind was new, we were still free to roam between these two worlds. In places there was still enough residual energy for that to happen, and that is where we come from. Our ancestors were seen as gods by your prehistoric civilisations because they possessed a magic and technological understanding beyond this world; some of your more ancient ancestors were taught to build and farm by my people.
Unfortunately though we did not come alone, where there is good intent evil often follows and it found its way here almost accidently. On Terra there had been an assembly of alchemists who sought to harness the earth’s energy to power a desire for rare and precious elements. They opened up new and unstable gateways enabling them to perform their experiments by pulling residual energy from the earth. The use of the earth’s energy in this way had unusual side effects on those people unfortunate enough to be too close to these gateways, and caused them to behave abnormally. Some became unable to walk in the light and could only survive on the blood of another living creature and others would go through unnatural changes under the light of the moon. You know these now as Vampires and Werewolves. This is why some of my kind chose to stay as the portals to our planet started to close; they felt a responsibility to the world they had come to love almost as their own. They could choose human form or cat and soon began to breed, their children having the same power to transform and the weight of responsibility that this ability carried.
It’s thought that for every breed of cat there is the equivalent werecat; although I have yet to see them all. This could be because we tend to follow the social desires of the breed we transform into; most cats therefore are solitary until mating with Lions and sometimes Cheaters being the exception, actively seeking out others of their species and living in larger family groups. It has been known on occasion for cats to inter breed, which usually means their offspring will not be able to transform, or if they can it is often a traumatic experience as each cat breed tries to have dominance over the other, but in a few exceptional cases the child has been able transform into both cats with no problem at all.
I hinted before that we have nine lives, and in a way this is true. We are able to be pulled from the brink of death and reincarnated as ourselves nine times. No one that I have met or any books that I have read can explain why this is. We are not immortal beings; if we are not mortally wounded in one of our nine lives then we will eventually die of plain old age. Most people know how to kill werewolves and vampires; werewolves need a sliver bullet and vampires require a wooden stake through the heart, and decapitation works perfectly on both. So you see there is a method that will work for every un-earthly being, even the good ones. A few metals such as silver, copper and iron, can weaken a Werecat, they prevent the healing process from starting and if left untreated they can prove fatal. But the best way to permanently kill a Werecat is to remove its head. On many occasions people have tried to suffocate us as we do require oxygen to live, however it tends to be difficult to achieve by hand as we are resilient and will transform if you try to strangle us. The witch hunters of the 14th and 15th centuries came up with a way that does work though so long as we are rendered immobile and this is drowning. Many cats are afraid of water as we know that it can mean our demise, tigers being the exception they do enjoy to swim.
For those of us who are interested though there are ways to extend our lives, keeping us in our younger forms for a longer time; some cats have been known to use attempted suicide as a way of actually extending their time on earth. They call it conscientious killing. It involves closing yourself away for a day or so and slitting your wrist or some other important artery and starting to bleed out. Fortunately as a practice it has all but died out, but once, during the last war, it was quite a common occurrence. It’s said that it was done because although physically you would look the same the re-birthing process could make you sharper, faster and more powerful. You see when a werecats body believes it is going to die its starts what you might call an emergency shutdown, your heart slows down dramatically and your blood vessels contract to stop you from bleeding too quickly. Then you begin to heal in fast forward, it’s the same way that a human would heal but just so fast that your body doesn’t suffer the shock and oxygen deprivation that would usually shut down internal organs. After the healing has finished, you go into a deep sleep and when you wake apparently you feel strong and refreshed. The reason that we can say we have nine lives and not just that we are semi immortal is that once you are killed and reborn, the aging process halts completely until you reach the age you were when you lost your life, at which point it continues and you begin to age as normal once more. So if you are killed at one hundred years old then you gain another hundred years of life before you start to age again. So rather than just surviving a fatal attack we gain new life in the process. It gets a little complicated if you need to regenerate during a period of non-aging. As technically you are the same age as you were when the clock stopped so to speak, on occasions like this you simply loose the difference in time between deaths before you start to age again. (so if you were re born and the age of one hundred then had to be reborn again after another ninety years i.e. ten years before you were supposed to start aging again then you simply don’t age for another ninety years as you lose ten year difference)
I can’t think of any other relevant
information at this point. I can however tell you a little about our enemies.
The Werecat Vampire Wars
As children werecats are often told the tales of a prolific evil that engulfed earth hundreds of years ago. I was given the vague time reference of “when your great grandparents were alive” and for me this translates to sometime in the 14th century. After some research I believe I can narrow that down to 1334 or 1335. Throughout the 1330’s the world was struck by famine and many other natural disasters, soon followed by a pandemic that is much talked about even today; the black plague. At the time my kind named this foul force Yfel; which is just the old English word for evil; apparently we weren’t very good at naming things back then. Yfel caused so much devastation throughout the world so suddenly that we couldn’t hold it back alone, and it was devastating humanity so quickly that the vampires were in serious danger of starvation. That could have been considered a good thing, but our elders were aware that they would require assistance if they were to stop Yfel from completely engulfing the world and they knew that they had a difficult decision to make. With heavy heart and deceitful intent our elders reached out to the vampire clan leaders and both sides agreed to an uneasy alliance to try to put a stop to the unerring suffering.
The Black Death spread from Asia and hit Europe sometime in 1347 as Mongol army’s attacked the Crimea and also followed those traveling the Silk and Spice Roads from Asia. There is still much debate as to what caused the plague, even the question of whether there was more than one plague virus and if so how it was spread cause much discussion today; was it rat to flea, flea to human or was it person to person contact similar to Ebola. There are so few written records from the time that give us any real insight, but even if events had been well documented the cause would still have been unexplained, as the source of the plague was not of this world. We now know that it was caused by something from Terra trying to break through. Groups of Cats and Vampires stalked Yfel across the continents trying to pin point it’s ever changing epicentre, eventually it was traced to a town in England called Nottingham. And this is where the fight that ended the march of Yfel finally occurred. Soon after Yfel was defeated (exactly how Yfel was stopped has always been very unclear, but both cats and vampires claim victory as theirs to this day) the werecats put their deceitful plans in to action and turned on the vampires causing huge losses to their population.
This in turn led to a long and drawn out revenge. The vampires began by threatening humans in powerful positions and played on fears of the occult already held by the people (by this point witch hunts had been going on around six hundred years, they started when Louis the Pious, King of Aquitaine began to take active measures against alleged occult activities. And so from that time the penalty for witchcraft was death; seemingly by any means). The vampires used this long standing fear of witch craft and devil worship, re-ignited by the recent outbreak of the plague, to their advantage. And sometime around 1486 they coerced the writing of a damming book: The Malleus Maleficarum or Witches Hammer; a hideous text written by a German man driven mad with fear informing you on how to spot and kill witches.
This form of bloody revenge was enjoyed by the vampires for over two hundred years. They would tell people who to target (specifically werecats) and fabricate any and all evidence required to find them guilty. You’ve all heard of these which trials so you should know how barbaric they were and as they targeted mainly women they had a huge impact on the Werecat population. All this really means is that since then we’ve had an even deeper hatred of each other.
We are
told these tales to remind us that all actions have a consequence, killing the
vampires after working with them may have been easy and seemed the right thing
to do, but by turning on the vampires and trying to wipe out two evils at once,
we brought upon ourselves a series of events that almost decimated out
population
Billi Clearwater
What you will read now are the memoirs of one of my closest friends. During one of the most difficult periods of our lives
Her name is Billi Clearwater and she is werecat, a weretiger to be precise. She is 25 years old in her first life. As we age much slower it is likely that she will look and feel like she’s in her twenties for many years and if she is not almost killed during this first incarnation then she could live for well over two hundred years. Living for that length of time is not something that either of us really wants, and as you will discover, after recent events we feel rather lucky to be alive at all.
Like all of her kind Billi comes from a long line of werecats. Her family are tigers and her feline form is that of a magnificent Bengal Tiger (hence her mother’s name for her. Billi is Hindi for cat).
But as I have said before there are others, other cats and other tigers. Tigers descended as different species, like the Amur (or Siberian) tigers and Sumatran tigers. Personally I have only ever encountered my own kind and Billi’s kind, but Billi has encountered the Amour too.
Her family have lived in England for centuries, mine have always been here. I often thought that it was a strange choice of country; there isn’t a great deal of open space for tigers to roam in, but they came at a time when they were needed, at the time of the Black Death, and just never left. There is still a lot of unexplained and supernatural activity in Britain and in Nottingham there are still quite a large number of Vampires too, they keep Billi busy and she always enjoyed the hunt. © 2015 louwildingAuthor's Note
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louwildingnottingahm, United KingdomAbouti am a 30 something trying to break in to writing fantasy fiction, but need help as i am dyslexic so any proof reading is appreciated more..Writing
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