Morrigan’s Price

The barn was a cathedral of dust and dying light. Its splintered ribs let in sun in molten stripes, as if God Himself had taken a knife to the walls and spilled His gold upon the floor. Here, in this sanctuary of hay and shadows, the mother cat enacted the oldest rite of all: the passing down of knowledge not through words, but through the silent scripture of scars.

She moved gracefully, as one who understood certain truths must be shown rather than spoken, and some lessons required the evidence of scarred flesh to make them real. Her four kittens tumbled closer through the sweet-scented hay, their bright eyes full of the innocence that shows they believe themselves exempt from the laws governing their elders.

“Come,” she said.

Morrigan, smallest and blackest of the litter, pressed close enough to smell the complex perfume of milk and mouse blood in her mother’s fur.

The mother cat turned and lifted her hindquarters to display the abbreviated length of her tail like a priest might hold up a holy relic torn from a saint’s body. Where other cats possessed graceful tapering to needle points, hers ended abruptly. This was no clean amputation. The skin had healed in ridges and valleys. The scar tissue was a blasphemy, a ruin of flesh that hurt the eye to look at, not for its ugliness, but for its precision. This was no accident, no clumsy wound. This was pain sculpted by a connoisseur of suffering.

The fur there grew back unevenly; thicker in some places, patchy in others. It was always a shade darker than the rest of her coat, tainted by the injury. The absence remained absolute and throbbed with its own malevolent life, because healing was never its purpose.

“This,” she continued, “is the price darkness takes when it marks you as its own.”

Her words fell into the barn’s warm silence like funeral bells. The brothers shifted uneasily. Their young minds recoiled from implications that made their fur stand on end without understanding why. Her sister pressed closer to their mother’s flank and whimpered as if some memory warned her of dangers. But Morrigan studied the truncated tail intently, like a scholar examining a cursed text, seeing in its ruined flesh a story of pain and terror.

The scar looked almost worn smooth by seasons of movement, but beneath the skin, veins of corruption ran like black lightning through dead flesh. Beautiful, in its way. Terrible, certainly. But not without a strange completeness, as if this maiming was always intended, written into her mother’s fate by forces that viewed flesh as nothing more than clay to be shaped by suffering.

“What took it?” Morrigan asked, though some deeper part of her already knew the question was wrong. Not what, but why.

Her mother’s pupils dilated until they swallowed the gold entirely. When she spoke, her voice came out hoarse. “Something lives where the farm meets the woods. It waits for young cats who wander too far.” She hesitated. “The strawberries grow fat as hearts at the forest’s edge. Plump as a queen’s jewels, sweet as a liar’s kiss. That’s where I lost it.” She twitched the ruined stump like a witch shaking a cursed rattle. “Where I left a piece of myself as payment for my greed.”

She paused, and in that pause lived entire lifetimes of regret, of nights when she startled awake at sounds that should not exist, of glances over her shoulder at movements that defied explanation. “The strawberries grow largest at the forest’s edge. Sweeter than any others, heavy with juice that runs down your chin like liquid summer, like blood from a fresh kill. But they are bait, do you understand? Bait since before cats learned to live alongside humans. The price…” She shook her head, unwilling to complete the thought, but her ruined tail twitched, remembering.

The lesson delivered, she began grooming her eldest son to cleanse the horror she had just invoked. But Morrigan remained transfixed by the missing piece and imagined the moment of its taking: not the physical agony, but the knowledge her mother bore the mark of something immense and merciless, that she who had entered the woods complete had emerged diminished in ways that could never be restored.

Night fell over the barn like a benediction, but sleep brought no peace to the youngest daughter. In her dreams, strawberries large as hearts beat steadily, their juice the color of arterial blood and warm as fresh wounds. She moved through endless rows toward a tree line that receded with each step, while a watchful presence observed from shadows that breathed independently, shadows that whispered her name in voices like wind through graveyards.

When morning came, her decision had congealed like poison in her bones. Today she would test the boundaries her mother had marked in flesh and memory. Today she would learn whether innocence could succeed where experience had failed so catastrophically.

The morning unfolded in the same patterns it always has, but now every familiar ritual felt like a farewell to safety. Her mother left to hunt mice among the timothy grass, unaware her youngest daughter prepared for a different kind of hunt entirely. Her siblings engaged in the theater of kitten warfare as if the fate of kingdoms hung in the balance, blissfully ignorant of the dread that gathered in her small heart.

She performed her own preparations and groomed her black fur until it shone. Each stroke of her tongue was both vanity and readiness; each moment brought her closer to when she would cross from the world of light into territories where different laws prevailed.

When she slipped unnoticed through the barn door, freedom tasted metallic, like her mother’s warnings in her mouth. The meadow spread out before her like a great green sea under the wind’s fingers; but its beauty had spoiled at the edges like cream left too long in the sun. The grass hissed cautions through teeth of saw-toothed blades; the flowers clenched their petals like fists around their fright. Beneath the honeyed lies of wildflowers and rain lurked the musk of prowlers and the earthy stench that thrived where light dared not linger. Underlying it all was the iron kiss of old blood sunk into the soil like a curse.

She had played here many times, but never as an explorer, never as one who crossed from the known world into territories that existed beyond maternal protection. Each tiny step carried her further from the orbit of safety and deeper into the realm where consequences lived and breathed and waited for the foolish and the young.

Above, a red-tailed hawk traced wide circles against the blue dome of sky, and she wondered if it too was hunting, if she appeared to its keen eyes as nothing more than a small shadow moving through the grass. Its cry echoed across the meadow, sharp and mournful, like a dirge for innocence about to be lost.

The meadow’s heart proved larger than memory had served, as if the very landscape conspired to delay her arrival and give her one last chance to turn back before it was too late. Here the grasses grew taller and reached past her ears. The barn behind her soon dwindled to a red smudge, now merely another feature in a place that suddenly felt infinite and hostile and utterly indifferent to her insignificant life.

And there, on the meadow’s far edge, sat the strawberry patch.

She had seen it before from safer distances, but proximity transformed it into something altogether more magnificent and terrible. Row upon row of plants stretched toward a tree line, towering up like a fortified wall. The patch thrummed with its own life; its geometry too perfect, too deliberate. Someone — or something — had positioned each plant according to some divine blueprint designed to lure the innocent to their doom.

Even from here she could taste the sweet aromas so rich and complex it made her mouth water and her heart race with anticipation that felt close to obsession. Underneath the sensation lurked a cloying heaviness that reminded her of fruit left too long before it fermented into something more potent and infinitely more dangerous.

It was more than hunger drawing her forward. It was the same force that compels moths toward flame, that drives sailors toward sirens’ shores. It was the irresistible pull of the forbidden embodied in fruit that glowed like jewels scattered across emerald velvet.

The transition from wild meadow to tended rows was like crossing between the realm of natural law and a place where older, hungrier rules held sway. Here, chaos gave way to order, wilderness to cultivation, but it was an order that felt wrong somehow, too precise, too purposeful, as if the very plants conspired in some elaborate snare.

The broad leaves were glossy as leather and so deeply green they appeared almost black in certain lights. Their fruit hung heavy as drops of desire, but there was something unsettling about their perfection. Something made her uneasy, even as her mouth watered.

She approached the nearest plant and studied the berries beneath its leaves like secrets awaiting discovery. They were larger than any she had seen and swollen to impossible sizes. Tiny seeds dimpled their surfaces and caught the light like stars reflected in pools of blood.

She extended her neck and took one between her teeth, and the moment the skin broke under her small fangs, she understood she had crossed a line from which there might be no return.

The first taste was a revelation, a sacrilege. It was sweetness distilled to a blade’s edge, so lush it verged on rot, so perfect it her gums ached, knowing that nothing so good could be innocent. This was not mere fruit but the essence of summer itself, concentrated into matter that dissolved against her tongue like communion wafers of pure temptation. The flavor contained depths that went on forever. There was a bright tartness that made her whiskers twitch with electric pleasure. The rich earthiness of the soil fed on darker nutrients than sunshine and rain, and beneath it all, a wildness more complex and dangerous than anything she had known.

There was something else in that first taste, however. Something that caused her to pause even as her body craved more. The juice was warm, warmer than it should have been in the morning air, and it carried undertones that reminded her uncomfortably of copper and salt, of the taste of her own blood when she had bitten her tongue too hard, of the metallic flavor that lingered in the barn after her mother’s most violent hunts.

She picked a second berry, then a third. Each proved more perfect than the last, as if the plants had arranged themselves in order of ascending magnificence specifically for this feast, and for this small black kitten driven by fatal curiosity and her mother’s stubborn pride.

The juice stained her whiskers crimson and marked her passage through this paradise. The stains seemed darker than they should have been, more persistent, as if the fruit’s essence branded her as surely as a hot iron might mark livestock for slaughter.

Row by row, she moved deeper into the patch. The sun climbed higher, but here among the plants, time flowed in the rhythm of selection and consumption. With each berry she consumed, the satisfaction grew more elusive, the craving more intense, until she knew she was not feeding herself but nourishing whatever lived in the space between hunger and satiation.

And always, ahead of her, the promise of even greater treasures called from the shadowed edge of the wilderness, where her mother said the largest berries hung like hearts.

But paradise, as all wise creatures learn too late, exists only at the sufferance of older, hungrier powers that feast on innocence and grow fat on the terror of the small and trusting.

Around her, the meadowlark’s song ceased mid-note. Grasshoppers turned to emerald statues. The wind gasped its last breath. And in that silence, Morrigan felt the weight of eyes upon her. Not just eyes: a gaze, enduring as root-growth, cold as the space between stars.

She lifted her head from a berry that had lost all flavor on her tongue. The sun’s light took on a distinct quality, as if filtered through glass, fogged by the breath of presences that should not possess breath.

The darkness of the trees coagulated like blood in a bowl, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with stomachs and everything to do with the void where a soul ought to be. These were not ordinary shadows cast by leaves and branches; these were shadows that contained writhing forms.

Her mother’s words returned unbidden and carried a weight that pressed against her small body like the attention of enormous and ravenous eyes. A watcher from the tree line. A presence that knows when young cats venture beyond familial protections. The warnings that had seemed like folklore now resonated like prophecy.

Her ears swiveled toward the woods because sounds existed there just below the threshold of hearing. She heard the whisper of forms moving through undergrowth that should not grow, the soft sighing of breath that came from lungs too vast for any earthly creature, the deliberate scraping of claws against bark as something immense stirred in the depths where sunlight never penetrated.

The trees stood in perfect stillness, their trunks charcoal-black against the understory that writhed independently; but she could feel eyes that reflected no light yet burned with intelligence. Nothing moved she could see directly, yet she felt watched with such intensity it made every hair on her small body rise and scream warnings that had been bred into her bloodline through countless generations who had learned to fear the spaces where safety ended and danger began.

Then she saw it. Not the creature itself, for that remained mercifully hidden in shadow, but its effect upon the world surrounding it. The space between two oaks coalesced. Darkness gathered itself into a form that could move and hunt and kill. Reality bent around it. Trees leaned away as if they were in pain. Leaves withered on their branches when such concentrated evil drew near enough to drain the life from anything pure.

Terror stabbed in her chest, sharp and cold; but this was not the clean fear of natural predators she could outrun or outwit. This was the dread that lived in the deepest, most primitive parts of her brain.

The entity moved.

It rose from the depths as nightmare made flesh, as every horror that had ever whispered in the dark corners of young minds without names in any tongue. The very air around it curdled. Reality bent and warped as the universe itself recoiled from it. The laws of nature surrendered when something this old and starving walked in the daylight world.

She dropped the half-eaten berry and fled. Her small body became speed as instinct overrode every other consideration. Behind her, the creature crashed through the undergrowth. Its footsteps shook the earth and sent tremors through her small bones. Its breathing sounded of wind through a charnel house, of the death rattle of everything pure and innocent in the world.

This was not the clean pursuit of natural predators. This was a hunter that enjoyed the chase, that fed on fear as much as flesh, that could have caught her in an instant but chose instead to savor her panic. It let her small legs carry her just far enough to hope before showing her the futility of hope in a world where such beings existed.

She did not look back — could not. Looking back was death, was surrender, was acceptance that she belonged to whatever horror had chosen her as its own from the moment she first tasted the forbidden fruit.

Across the strawberry patch, she raced and leaped several rows in her panic. Her paws barely touched the ground as fear gave her the desperate speed of the truly doomed. The plants reached for her as she passed. The entire patch had been part of the elaborate snare from the beginning. Every berry and leaf and flower was complicit in luring her close enough for the old appetite to be satisfied.

The meadow stretched before her and promised salvation itself, but even as she ran, she could sense the hunter gaining ground. And beyond the meadow, far distant, the barn that represented everything safe and known and precious in her small world. The place where her mother was with stories and wisdom. Where her siblings played in ignorance of how close death had come to claiming their sister. Where warmth and milk and gentle grooming waited for a kitten who might never return to receive such simple gifts again.

A shadow whistled through the air behind her. Pain exploded across her hindquarters, brief and precise. A being that understood anatomy wielded that strike, a butcher or a surgeon or a creature that had been perfecting its craft since before the first warm blood had spilled upon the earth. The agony was perfect in its execution, calculated to maim rather than kill, to mark rather than destroy, to leave her alive to carry the lesson back to others who might be tempted to follow in her footsteps.

She tumbled forward and rolled through the grass, her small body a bundle of black fur and blood and terror, then came up running again, adrenaline and the knowledge that stopping meant a death too horrible to contemplate driving her onward.

Behind her, nothing followed. Had anything ever been there at all?

When she reached the barn and her mother saw the blood on her shortened tail, saw the missing tip that mirrored her own, she said nothing. What was there to say? Some knowledge could only be earned, never taught. Some prices could only be paid, never avoided.

That night, while her siblings slept, Morrigan lay awake and listened to the wind. Her tail throbbed where the tip used to be. In the morning, she knew, there would be young cats born somewhere who would hear warnings about strawberry patches and dark woods. And someday, one of them would be curious enough to test those boundaries for themselves.

The strawberry patch still called to her in her dreams, but she would never answer again.

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