I couldn't see Arlott anywhere. She had just vanished into thin air. 

Looking around, I began to recognize where I was. I had been there before; When I died and went into the Sea of Wills. Even though I had gotten used to being on my body by then, being in that place brought back some memories. All the sorrow I felt at the moment. All the dread I had seen Kiandra trying to hide.

But the worst part was the idea that I could just vanish in there. I didn’t really know how my will had changed in the last months, but merging with the Sea of Wills was a possibility I couldn’t just forget.

I began to think about how Kiandra would feel if she knew I was here. Or what could happen with Arlott.

I tried to shove that thought away, so I began to look for something that could distract me.

At first, there was nothing around I could find. Only the same dull-colored place, covered in a blue hue that made it hard to see too far ahead. But then, I saw a child crying on the floor.

I felt like I knew her, but I couldn’t be sure. 

As I approached her, I thanked the goddess for having something to distract my mind. Though, it might have been better to thank the Will of the World. Who knows.

When I was next to her, I gently touched her shoulder. But that startled her. She looked up at me with a fearful expression, but when our eyes met, she seemed to calm down as she hugged me by the neck.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she kept repeating in a muffled voice. She looked at me as if she hadn’t seen anyone in years. “Thank you for not being one of them. Thank you for being someone I know.”

Hearing that really confused me. Do I know her? Even more so, do I know her to the point she feels relief at seeing me?

I picked her up from the floor to try and clean her clothes. Something that became impossible to do under the dense space we were in. But the girl seemed to be able to move without a problem, since she even jumped when I startled her.

I had too many questions, and none of them was getting near to being answered.

That’s when the girl froze in place. I was so distracted by all the things going inside my head, I didn’t notice what happened outside my head. But then, she grabbed my arm with her trembling arms and I looked around us.

In the time that passed since I saw her, we got surrounded by a group of strange shapes. 

At first, there were only a couple of them. They were too blurry to know what they were. But then, more and more began appearing, coming out from what looked like mist that enveloped everyone of them.

Then, one of them got close enough to let me look at it more clearly.

It had the silhouette of a person; you could even see clothes and know if it had a more feminine or masculine body. But it had no eyes, no mouth, not anything that could make it have any expressions. It was like a living mannequin, but too alive to be one.

Getting a really dumb impulse of touching it, I reached at it with my hand. Luckily, the girl shoved me to the side just before that thing threw itself in our direction.

Getting up and trying to grab the girl to run, I noticed that I couldn’t lift her. For some reason, the girl was heavier than she looked. But soon, I noticed that wasn’t the problem. She wasn’t heavier than a person of her height. It was me. I didn’t have enough strength to lift her. I looked at my arms, my belly, and at last, my ass, and it was all gone. There, there were no muscles, and no tail.

I was back to my human form, before it got mixed with the cat.

Pushing those thoughts with all the others, along with the questions and all the anxiety too, I grabbed the girl's hand and began running away. Or the closest thing the density of the Sea of Wills would allow me to.

The girl seemed to notice I had trouble running, so she decided to guide me instead. 

As she drove me through places I didn’t know, I heard her trying to say something too muffled to understand. The girl stopped for a second and grabbed me.

“You have to think of this place as being different from ours,”  she said and with visible anxiety. “When you can do that, you will detach from the other and get used to the new ways things work.”

The girl's eyes then went really big and full with panic. I looked to where her eyes pointed and almost a hundred of those things, in all sizes and shapes, were coming.

She tried to pull me once more, but now her legs were trembling, freezing her in place. I lifted her with a strength I only had in my hybrid form, and slowly began building up some speed.

It felt like walking on the moon at first. Slow, and not advancing that much. But then, my stride began to get longer. Each step got me further away from the others. 

With the time it got me to move, the distance between us and the mannequin people was close enough for them to touch us. But I reached enough speed to leave them behind.

Focusing on where we were, I ran into the direction where Kiandra’s portal would be if we were in the living realm. I ran through all the trees and stone walls, and into the forest. But there was no portal.

I looked for it everywhere, but I just couldn’t find it.

Then, the girl tightly held on from my arm, making me remember the things that were following us from . 

I quickly began to think where to go, when I noticed something away in the distance.  There was a place that looked different from the rest. I couldn’t really tell why, but it felt different, even despite the density making it hard to look far.

I decided to just bet on it and ran over to that place. 

It happened to be the church I ran away from when I first got into town. But the air around it didn’t look as dense as it was everywhere else.

So, I swallowed all my bad feelings about a church -feelings that had grown a lot after Arlott’s story- and went right inside. I kept on running down the nave until the girl patted me on the shoulder, asking me to stop.

Slowing down, I looked around and those things weren’t following us anymore. I put the girl on the floor and looked around. For some reason, all of them were frozen in place. Some of them close, some others farther away. There were even ones that tried to approach us, but they just couldn’t.

I returned to the girl, and seeing how she was still too scared to move, I picked her up to help her sit on a bench.

But right as I was letting her down on the bench, the colors in my vision started to look brighter, as our surroundings began to blurry. The girl dropped to the floor as the bench under her disappeared, and I could feel a pair of arms around my neck.

“Istas, are you okay?”

The person clinging to my neck was Arlott, my girlfriend.

I felt my tail swinging from side to side as I saw I was in Kiandra’s hut. She looked at me with worry all over her face. Arlott then left my neck for a second, and Kiandra jumped over me the same way Arlott did before.

I almost fell over. But luckily, I was in my strong feline body, so I just took  her momentum.

Then, I remembered all the questions I had when Arlott looked at the girl beside me.

“Breena?!” She said, almost shouting out of surprise.

The little girl on the floor was Breena, Arlott’s coworker that I met before. But, for some reason, she looked a lot smaller than when she was with Arlott. I looked at her, then at Arlott, getting confused. My tail was almost ripping apart from the force I used in every swipe from side to side. 

Kiandra brought a kettle, which she heated quickly with magic, and made some tea before asking me and Breena for an explanation.

Since Breena seemed to still be too scared for all that happened, Kiandra got her a cup of tea first as I began explaining.

I told Arlott and Kiandra about what happened since Arlott disappeared. About being in the Sea of Wills, the Things that followed us, and our escape into the church.

After I was finished, I looked at Kiandra, hoping she would give me some answers. Instead, she kept a serious face and, for the first time since I knew her, didn’t say a word.

We all turned to look at Breena. She looked like she calmed down in the time it took me to explain what happened.

Breena left her half-drunk cup of tea on the table and took a breath before grabbing my hand. That took me by surprise, as I thought only Arlott could do this. But just as I was about to pull my hand away, I looked at Breena’s eyes, and  the sorrow in them. So, I decided to hold her hand back, as she told us her story.

“Eh, yeah.” She started, visibly nervous. “I’m Breena and I-- I mean.” She kept hesitating and cutting herself short. “I’ve known Arlott for... About a year?” She looked at Arlott, who nodded back. That made Breena have a little more confidence.

With the support of Arlott, Breena began to talk with more ease.

“For some personal things, I got into a situation where I needed to be self-sufficient.” Arlott's head dropped upon hearing that. She probably knew more about Breena’s situation she didn’t want to share with us.

“So, I began working at a café and there I met Arlott.” Her shoulders dropped a little, but she continued. “Some time ago, a man offered me help if I helped him with something. It looked fishy, as he was at least two decades older than me, but I didn’t have another choice and it wasn’t anything that I wouldn't do. So I just said yes.”

She started to make pauses again, starting to sob.

“He made some kind of ceremony, and took a drop of my blood. He used it to do something really weird.”

Breena went silent and looked at us ,searching for support. At first, she looked like she didn’t get it. Her gaze moved on from Arlott to Kiandra. But when she met me in the eyes, a little smile appeared on her face and she continued.

“I think the thing he was making was magic.” She waited for a response, but we remained silent, so she just kept going. 

“I tried to move on with my life after that, thinking I was going crazy about all of this. But when I got to work the next day, Arlott began talking about a girl she liked.” Arlott blushed and looked to another side. Breena instead looked directly at me, and then it was my turn to blush. She just giggled and continued.

“She showed me a picture on her phone. When I saw… Istas?” Breena looked at me, so I nodded, getting  even redder than before. “In the picture, Istas had cat ears, and even a tail.” She paused, smiling a bit. “For some reason, that gave me some hope that, if the photo was true, then I wasn’t going crazy about magic existing.”

It seemed that talking helped Breena to relax.

“Arlott kept showing me pictures, talking more and more about how wonderful Istas was.” Arlott seemed to have shrunk in her seat, almost small enough to fit in a pocket. “So I asked her if she could present that girl to me.” Breena continued, oblivious to her friend’s embarrassment “Arlott looked surprised, but then agreed, smiling wider than I’ve ever seen her do so.” 

For some reason, all the strength gathered up to that moment just left her. Instead, she continued with a voice so full of sorrow you could almost touch it.

“So far, the man has kept paying for me, though I didn’t see him that much. But then, one day I found him in my home and talking with my mother.” I thought Breena was about to cry, but despite the deep sadness of her voice and expression, not a single drop fell from her eyes.

“He was talking with my mother about marrying me.”

A gasp came from the three of us. Breena must be a little younger than me, but not by much, and she said the guy was at least two decades older, so he had to be in his forties, if not older.

We were all expecting to know how did Breena’s mother took the Idea of a man that could be her husband wanting to marry her daughter.

“To be honest, I never thought my mother cared too much about me.” Breena closed her eyes, taking some air. “She wasn’t exactly bad, but I knew I was more of a nuisance to her  than anything else.” Her voice almost cracked, letting the air out, but she kept her resolve.

“But I never thought she could just give me away like that.”

We were all in shock when she said that. I couldn’t know what Arlott or Kiandra were thinking, but I guessed we were all thinking about going and making Breena’s mother know the guillotine. Or at least a judge.

“I was scared. I knew the man for some time by then, and I knew he just didn’t care about me. I just didn’t understand why he would want to marry me.” She closed her eyes, as if gathering strength to keep talking. “He then took me to an apartment. There was another circle drawn on the floor, just like the one at the ceremony.“

She fixed her posture in the seat, clearly uncomfortable.

“Then, I just was in that weird place where I met Istas. I don’t really know how much time passed. There was no way to tell the time there. The weird people kept me from going anywhere until Istas appeared.” She looked at me, half tired, but also half relieved.” When I saw her, I remembered the things Arlott told me about her, about you, and I knew I was safe.”

A silence took the room, until Arlott broke it.

“But when I told you,” she was almost whispering. “That was like two weeks ago.” She sounded as confused as I was. “Then, who was the Breena that was there all this time?”

The three of us looked at each other without knowing what to say. Kiandra looked at Breena, then at us.

“I think I have some idea of what’s going on.  But I'm not entirely sure.” She left her own cup on the table and got up. “Let's end this here for today and have some rest. I’ll tell you tomorrow, after I can confirm what I’m thinking about.

Seeing Kiandra talking so concisely and to the point took Arlott and me by surprise. She then went into the office that was meant to be Arlott’s room and opened the sofa bed for Breena who went and fell asleep there instantly.

Kiandra then left for her own room, leaving Arlott and me alone in the living room.

“I’m just so happy you’re  safe.” Arlott kept looking and, with a really warm smile, she hugged me tightly.

After a while, I asked what they did in order to help me get out of there and back at Kiandra’s place. She began playing with her ring.

“I’m kinda tired now,” she just said. “Could we just cuddle until we sleep? I’ll tell you all tomorrow.”

We both went to our room and cuddled together until we were lost in our own dreamworld.