The cat stood up. Stretched. Walked the few steps to where Dante was sitting, climbed up onto his knee with a casual familiarity that suggested it had been a domestic cat at some point in the very distant past and remembered the protocol, and looked up at him.

"Give me your hand."

He gave it.

The cat placed one paw — small, soft-padded, weighing almost nothing — on the back of his right hand. On the broken sun.

Warmth.

Not the warmth of a body. The warmth of *recognition* — the gold half on his hand brightened, very faintly, and he could *feel* the brightening, the way you could feel a light turning on in a dark room even if you couldn't see it. Something inside him *clicked* into place. Something that had been loose since he had landed in the cave.

In his head, a voice he had never heard before said, very calmly and very neutrally:

[Notification.]
[Blessing identified: SHADOW.]
[Rank: I.]

Dante jerked.

"What —"

"Don't worry about that. That is a thing called *the system*. It will keep talking to you for the rest of your life. You will get used to it. Sooner if you stop flinching every time."

[Skill granted: Shadow Step.]
[Skill granted: Conceal Presence.]

The cat took its paw off his hand.

"There," it said. "That's the Blessing properly issued. The Vocation came along on its own — the system picks Vocation based on what your soul actually *is*, not what I want it to be. You can read the rest yourself when I am gone."

It walked off his knee. Sat back on the moss in front of him.

"Now. Equipment."

It looked at his robe. Considered.

"I cannot do for you what Solis did for the others. I cannot make armor out of moonlight. I have never been *that* kind of god. What I can do is —" the cat gestured with one paw at his robe, "— *help*. In small ways. With what I have."

The paw twitched.

The robe — the soft gray robe that Dante hadn't asked for and hadn't put on — *changed*.

It was a small change. Not dramatic. The fabric darkened by several shades, going from soft gray to something that was almost black but not quite, the dark of a deep forest at twilight. The cut tightened at the waist and shoulders. A hood appeared at the back, soft and deep, the kind of hood you could pull forward and disappear into. Sleeves shortened to the wrist, leaving his hands free. The hem fell to mid-thigh now, with under-trousers of the same dark fabric beneath, and proper boots — soft, quiet, well-fitted — appeared on his feet where the slippers had been.

He looked down at himself.

Practical. Functional. The clothes of someone who needed to move and not be seen.

Inside his head:

[Notification.]
[Equipment acquired: Thief's Drab (Common). Equipped.]

"There," the cat said. "Better. Not glamorous. Not what the others got. But it will keep you warmer than you were and it will not catch on every branch."

Dante reached up to feel the hood. It was *soft*. Worn. Comfortable in the way clothes were comfortable when they had been worn many times. Not new. Used. *His*.

The cat's eyes followed his hand as it moved. Then dropped to his chest. Then lingered.

It said nothing.

But Dante understood, in a small clear way, that the cat had seen the note. The folded paper was still pressed against the place where his heart was — even now, even under the new fabric. Wherever the note had been before, it was still there. Across worlds. Across forms.

(*Thank you.*)

Dante did not say it out loud. He thought the cat heard it anyway.

---

"Now," the cat went on briskly, "weapons. You have one item from your old world. It came down with you. Where is it."

Dante blinked. He patted himself down — and felt, in the small inner pocket the new robe had grown for him, something thin and hard.

He pulled it out.

A pen.

His pen. The plastic pen he had been twirling in his fingers in literature class when the floor had started to glow. Battered. The cap chewed at one end. *His* pen.

The cat looked at it for a long moment.

"That," it said, "is going to do."

It twitched its paw.

The pen *rose* out of Dante's hand. Hung in the air. Began to *change* — not the changes Dante had watched the cat make to his own body, but slower, more deliberate, with the slight resistance of something being *worked*. The plastic darkened. Lengthened. Split. The cap fell away and dissolved in mid-air. Steel emerged from inside the casing, and the steel kept emerging, and the pen was no longer a pen, and there were now *two* slim things floating where one had been.

They settled to the moss in front of him.

Two daggers.

Plain. Functional. Twenty centimeters of dark steel each. Leather-wrapped grips. The kind of weapon a poor man would carry because it was what he could afford and because it would do what it was for.

[Notification.]
[Equipment acquired: Plain Daggers (Common). Equipped.]
[Competence acquired: Daggers — Lv.1.]

Dante picked one up.

It sat right in his hand. Lighter than he'd expected. Balanced.

"They are not fancy," the cat said. "They will not slay dragons. You should not, given everything else about you, attempt to slay dragons. They *will* end the life of most things you are likely to meet on the road, provided you can get close enough, which is the entire point of your Vocation."

"Thank you."

"Stop thanking me."

"Sorry."

"Stop apologizing too."

Dante laughed once. The laugh was small but it was easier than the first one. The cat's tail flicked once with what Dante was choosing to read as approval.

"There is a village," the cat said. "Or, as we discussed, there *was* a village, and there is a strong probability it is still there. East of here. Half a day's walk if you are fast and you do not get lost, which you almost certainly will. I am not going to go with you. I cannot — there are reasons I cannot stay long in this form on this plane, and the reasons are catching up to me as we speak."

It looked at the sky briefly.

"They are *very nearly* catching up to me, in fact, so I am going to need to be brief."

"Wait —"

"I know. There are a hundred more questions you would like to ask. You will think of most of them five minutes after I am gone, which is a universal property of conversations with gods, I'm afraid. Save them. Some of them I will answer the next time we meet. Many of them will answer themselves with time."

"The next time —"

"Yes. There will be a next time. Not soon. Not when you would like. But there will be."

The cat stood up.

Walked a few steps away from him, into a patch of dappled forest light. Turned. Looked back over its shoulder.

"One last thing," it said.

"Yes?"

"The system you are about to discover — the *windows*, the menus, the voice that just told you about your Blessing — it has a help function. If you get stuck. If you have questions about how the *system* works, as opposed to questions about how the *world* works. The help is competent. It will be more useful to you than I am, in many practical matters. Look for the small marker in the bottom right of any window."

"Okay."

The cat sighed.

"And — *finally*, and I will say this once because it is the only piece of advice I have that is worth more than the rest combined — *what matters is not the size of your strength.*"

Dante waited.

"It is the size of the goodwill and the sacrifice you are willing to put into building it. The strong who do not sacrifice become tyrants. The weak who do, become something the world has not had a word for in a very long time. I am not telling you to be a saint. I am telling you that the difference between staying who you were and becoming someone else is not — was never — a question of how much was given to you. It is a question of what you do with it."

The cat looked at him for one long second.

"Don't waste this."

It crouched. Sprang into the air.

Mid-leap, it changed.

The cat was gone. The crow was back — black, sharp, much larger up close than it had any business being — and it beat its wings twice, hard, lifted off the moss, and *vanished*.

Not flew away. *Vanished*. There was a small soft *pop* in the air where it had been, and a faint compression of the light around the spot, and then nothing.

Dante sat alone on the lip of the cave.

His clothes were dark. His daggers lay on the moss in front of him, the steel catching one of the gold shafts of light coming down through the canopy. His right hand glowed very faintly with a broken sun that drank the same light.

His mother's note was over his heart.

The forest went on around him, exactly as it had been going on before any of this, completely indifferent to whether or not he was now part of it.

He sat with that for a long time.