Haunting the shelves of decaying authors, hunting for things bigger than bookworms and smaller than castles. Felis domestica. She spends her life in lazy, quiet corners. Where sun dapples in warm waves against her sleek felinity. She does not know how to read, or perhaps she does but does not spout it. She is catalogued here, among the shelves, like the rest of them. She features herself across many fonts, and before there were words she tip toed across the laps of Pharisees and into their glyphs. In her seven lives, she had seen the burning of ancient scrolls, the rise and decline of empires, the rewriting of history again and again. And she watches it now, as she watched it then, her tail twitching, slightly annoyed.

What is good writing? Ask your cat. It's the trance you enter when you fall through worlds just ink stains away on a page somewhere. It's the sometimes not so gentle thrall of the open door waiting there on the bookshelf. When people watch the movie and say "the book was better." The book is always better... why?

Cheshire cats read themselves in and out of stories, navigating with their minds eye to tea parties and pirate ships. When you read, you become entwined, you have been taken as a lover. It is an intimate thing. You are, with the help of someone skilled, creating an entirely separate reality. One where the adventures and lessons are very, very real.

To be the cat at the bookstore, watching, playing with our lives as they beckon us from the window and through the door. Taunting us with their soft fur, and softer bellies, to sit and stay, to read. Sometimes it takes the beckoning of tools apart from written word to fall onto the pages of adventure.

Hunting. Always hunting. Her ethereal body prickled in anticipation at the sound of prey moving into her trap. Every noise echoed in the panicked hush of the woods she encircled. Each twig snapping, each bone chilled shudder, each bemoaned cry as a foot fell wrong through the mossy rocks. But the trees sheltered her prey, their hammock wide and unblinking. A thousand evergreen stares peered back up towards the Huntress.

Then! A sudden gasp of air; frantic cast net eyes gleaming out from the dark forest below. She swooped in eagerly through a breach in the clouds, her talons like silver shrapnel shredding through the soft skin of the poor human girl.

A terrible cry pierced the night sky, like the first bullets on a once silent battlefield. Falling to her knees before crumpling in the clearing, the girl was at the mercy of the Moon. Trilling out rhythmically, a machine gun fire of sobbing racked the body of the young woman caught in the single glimmer of moonlight that descended through the terrible scene.

Cold, serene, the moon did not hesitate, she cupped the girl in a gentle, unforgiving calm- setting a chill softly into the human's delicate, delicious bones, until soon the crying became soft moans, and sooner after a peaceful silence purred from the girl while she slept.

It did not matter the little human's name. Nor the circumstance the Moon had whispered into the dreams of the wolf like men around the girl that led to the blood staining the girls colder and colder body. What mattered was the Magic. Sleeping into the Earth and the trees and kept far from the rivers that would wash it all away. Before the girl was just meat, before the scavengers were brave enough to steal pieces of her flesh that the Moon had no use for, before she was even born, a seed of Magic had made its way into her. Like so many other Human girls. "So undeserving," the Moon hissed to herself.

The moon did not feel sorry for the embrace, she felt no guilt and would give no penance. She feasted, hungrily, until again she was a full, beautiful, lucious Moon. Round and perfectly spherical, hung in the heavens like a goddess, to be worshipped. It would not be until she began to wane again that she would need to hunt. The decaying body of this girl would tide her until then, but already, like clockwork, she had set her spell into the dreams of others. Others who would unknowingly help her With the next kill.