Re: I created a novel called <Tara is a dog>
teteblackhand
17 minutes ago
Since Gale Dekarios became the God of Ambition—ugh, the God of Ambition—since the well-known Mr. Dekarios became the God of Ambition, Mrs. Dekarios locked away his wizard tower. This, of course, presented no difficulty to a clever tressym, so Tara continued to come and go from the wizard tower as usual. And since the tower had been built with the best source of energy that could be found at the time, considering that the tower in question was in Waterdeep, which meant—by extension—the best source of energy to be found anywhere in Faerûn, and since its maintenance systems were still working perfectly well even now, it was hardly surprising that the place still looked as though it were being maintained by a respectable master with good habits. There was no dust on the desk, and even the book Gale had said he would read carefully again once matters had settled was still lying open there. “Assuming it’s a good omen, let’s hope I can be back at my desk very soon,” Gale had said at the time, as cheerfully as he could. The fireplace had been cleaned, a suitable amount of firewood stacked beside it in case it was needed, a high-backed armchair placed by the hearth, a blanket draped over its back, and beside it a small side table with a half-finished glass of water. All around the room, as ever, thousands of books looked down upon everything from their shelves, sorted neatly into their proper places and waiting to be opened at any moment. Tara strode proudly across several familiar carpets, leapt onto the desk, flicked her tail and looked for a while at the flasks and astrolabe more familiar to her than almost anything else, carefully inspecting several places she considered worthy of particular attention, such as the pillow that was very comfortable to lie on, and the balcony from which one could see the sea. Good. Today was another neat and orderly day. If Tara wished, she could even command the piano to play a tune, but she was not in the mood.
Who could have imagined that Mr. Dekarios would choose to ascend to godhood, completing Karsus’s Folly—although perhaps it should now be called Gale’s Folly—and become the God of Ambition? One month ago, he had still been a pet who needed careful tending by a tressym; one month later, he had become one of the residents of Elysium… There was nothing more detestable than taking a son away from his mother. When Tara watched Mrs. Dekarios make up her mind to lock away the wizard tower, she suspected that the woman was about to cry. In the end, she merely gave a bitter smile, had the tower locked, and did not touch anything inside. A mother ought to have received far more consolation than that, especially when she knew perfectly well that her child had gone far away and was almost certainly never coming home. According to tressym theory, this was one of the classic shortcomings of being human: they could not simply bare their claws when they were angry. In any case, from then on Tara and Mrs. Dekarios tacitly avoided speaking of the new god they both knew so well, as though they had known one another from the beginning, rather than having met because some troublemaker had caused a disaster. And yet, after all, a very large part of life had been hollowed out. Later, Tara simply could no longer stand facing Mrs. Dekarios’s guilt. The elegant, good lady had never blamed Tara for any of it; Tara simply found the sensation unbearable, like an itch beneath her fur that would not stop. Especially after remembering that, before all this, she had once encouraged Gale to go to Sorcerous Sundries. “It’s a good opportunity to expand your research.” When Gale mentioned the Netherese Crown, that was the advice Tara had given him, and the books had ended up giving him some rather unfortunate ideas. The tressym thought—or rather, she thought—that she bore some responsibility for the situation as it stood. Once she realized that, Tara used her cat-hole spell to escape into the wizard tower. Tara, back in the wizard tower, had no idea who could possibly be shameless enough to tell such an awful allegorical tale out loud.
The wizard tower is my territory. I merely have an obligation to look after my territory, Tara told herself.
Sometimes Tara wondered whether it might have been easier for everyone if Gale had simply accepted Mystra’s offer back then. She, Tara, might then have been able to look forward to meeting Gale again in Mystra’s divine realm. But no. Although gods might have other views on the brief, fragile lives of humans, to a little tressym and Mrs. Dekarios either possibility could only have meant a long, heartbroken mourning. Besides, life had offered no other possibility. In other words, fortunately, life had never offered another answer either. And so Tara returned to the part of her life that remained, the part without Gale in it. She could still run across the rooftops beneath the evening light, sometimes turning her head to see the harbor beneath the sunset. Recently she had grown accustomed to dealing with the ordinary housecats she had once looked down upon. Their minds and desires were simpler; they would never think ascending to godhood was the sort of difficult piece of good fortune one might actually attain. Naturally, the unfortunate part was that their minds and desires were simpler as well. When Tara passed among them with the collar she had finally recovered dangling from her mouth, they gathered around her, meowing curiously: “That’s a collar. You took it off. Did your servant stop serving you?” “Don’t worry. There are always other servants. You can tempt some new servant into taking you on by offering a little grooming.” There had been far too many moments like this for Tara to explain the whole story to them, such as how Gale—oh, no, the God of Ambition—had turned her into a hairless cat at a party because of the slightest fit of irritation, taking her collar with him in the process; how Tara had spent some time finding the collar again and was now wondering whether to ask Mrs. Dekarios to help put it back on, or simply become a collarless free tressym. After all, the collar bore the name Gale Dekarios, and Tara was not certain that asking someone else to help her put it on would be sufficiently polite. Yet the cats had already decided that her servant had run away. To cats, that was a common enough occurrence. Other parts were even harder to explain, including the fact that Gale was her pet rather than her servant; that she had once run all over the place looking for magical items to feed her precious pet; that she had watched him grow from a boy into a man with a terrible beard. Would a tressym spend so much effort on a servant? Now the magical items were gone, and so was the pet. Tara merely licked one paw and told the cats to stop discussing her private affairs.
Yes, private affairs. In truth, the association between a tressym and a human wizard was neither necessary nor important to history. The gods in the heavens were as numerous as the stars, and fell like the stars as well; those were the things worth recording in history. But the day Tara first met Gale was a day that would never enter history. Such was the vast difference between gods and mortals… The God of Ambition had once suggested that Tara pray to him; a sentence or two of prayer, no more, and then he could answer. The tressym was sorry to admit that she had once found herself tempted, but at the same time she knew perfectly well that she could never do such a thing. Trying to see the shadow of Gale Dekarios in the God of Ambition was about as absurd as trying to milk a bull. Back to the day the tressym first met the wizard: Tara remembered that Gale’s father was still there. The parents, upon seeing the magical creature their son had summoned, went through several stages, from stunned—to shocked—to delighted—to belatedly horrified, while Tara hissed furiously about having lost her prey because of the summoning. The two parents, gentlemen and lady that they were, strongly demanded that Gale send the tressym back where she had come from, but because of their teary-eyed son and the extremely limited arcane ability of everyone in the family except Gale, they were forced to accept the fact that a tressym had been added to the household. What they did not know was that Tara could have returned to Starwater Gorge on her own at the time. She was a well-bred tressym and had already learned short-range teleportation. But Gale—always Gale—made a bet with Tara. Gale, still a boy, sometimes walking with an awkward little wobble, promised Tara that within three years he would master precise teleportation and would one day become a great wizard known throughout all Faerûn. The stakes were, respectively, a large vat of fish stew from the Dekarios family kitchen, and Cormyrean parchment with an excellent magical affinity, capable of bearing high-level spell ink. Naturally, the bet was made without the worried parents’ knowledge. From that moment on, they were partners who were a little wicked, but never without a sense of decency, and the worth of that relationship was repeatedly proven by the many pigeons that met their deaths beneath Tara’s instinctive claws and had to be paid for afterward. Still, no one was so conceited as to imagine that such trivial little matters could possibly outweigh the plans of goddesses, or grand events such as the Absolute crisis, could they? Certainly they were not more important than a mortal of Waterdeep ascending to godhood. So they were private affairs, fit only for a tressym to remember quietly while crouched on a rooftop, watching the harbor beneath the sunset—or, in circumstances like this, when the tressym was inspecting her territory and caught the faint scent of dried solvent.
Someone once said that being too stubbornly attached to old things was simply another way of refusing to change. Fortunately, Tara was only a tressym, and human notions of that sort did not apply to her. When the cats slipped through a gap in the wizard tower’s protective wards and into the kitchen, Tara swept a paw through the air as if batting away that tiresome human idea. The wizard tower’s monitoring spells sounded an alarm. When Tara reached the kitchen, she saw a cat clinging to a storage basket as it fell from the shelf, sending the food inside tumbling across the floor. The owner had not used the kitchen for far too long, and most of the food had gone moldy and rotten. Tara looked down at the potatoes and carrots scattered across the floor and thought that there was also a shriveled tomato that had turned to mush and smelled strongly of alcohol. Tara hissed sharply at the cats. “Go away! This is my territory!” She raised her tail, arched her back, and then realized that she knew most of the cats in the group. They had been wandering around the rooftops lately. One of the cats Tara knew best stepped forward to sniff her, purring deep in its throat. “But the human isn’t here. And we can get in. Doesn’t that mean the food belongs to us?”
“Go away. This is my territory,” Tara repeated. “This has been my home for a very long time.”
“I know. We followed you here and found this place with you. Your servant ran away. You ought to share the food with everyone.”
“The human here did not run away. He is merely not here for the time being.” The cats looked at one another after Tara said this, and then, tempted by the food, they began exposing the obvious truth to her one after another. “The collar’s been taken off. The servant definitely ran away.” “When my servant was here, he never let me leave the house. He was afraid another servant might steal me, but you wander around outside every day.” “The vegetables have been rotten for ages. He definitely isn’t coming back.” One cat patted a head of garlic that had been reduced to nothing but skins. Finally, one cat voiced what everyone agreed upon: “The servant left ages ago, and you still guard the servant’s house. Are you a dog? Only dogs do things like that.” “Yes, yes, you can’t possibly be a cat. Are you a spy sent by the dogs?” Some of the cats nervously raised their tails and flattened their ears back.
“Absolutely not!” Tara was furious. She felt every hair on her body standing on end. She spread her wings and hissed in the most terrible voice she could manage, “Get out!” Every claw sprang fully extended. “I assure you, none of you cats wants to find out what it’s like to fight a flying magical creature!” She looked genuinely terrifying.
“…A magical creature.” Some of the cats knew enough to understand the difference between cats and magical creatures, and Tara’s wings really were enormous. Most of the cats were frightened. Some backed toward the windows, while a small number of the more indignant ones gave threatening hisses. “You’re a spy sent by the dogs.”
“Hah!” Tara spread her wings and lunged forward. This time, every last cat fled through the windows in turn, leaving only Tara and a floor covered in rotten vegetables. A round little thing rolled to a stop in front of her: a shriveled beholder stalk.
After Gale’s father died, Gale entered Blackstaff Academy. The Dekarios family, which had already fallen out with Mrs. Dekarios over her marriage, began hoping that the good lady would return to the family—or, more precisely, that she would bring Gale back with her. Tara still remembered how some unpleasant children at the Dekarios family estate had wanted to pull at her wings. Before Tara could reach for the Weave, Gale had already taught them a lesson. The affair ended in an overwhelming victory for Gale and Tara, though the reason for their victory was almost absurd: “Because Gale has arcane talent beyond what others can hope to equal. You will respect him.” The family’s efforts to win them back continued even after Gale graduated from Blackstaff Academy. One day they sent an enormous package of magical materials without warning. Gale stood beside the table and unpacked it. “Beholder stalk. Ah-ha. Don’t tell me. Hmm… from a beholder specializing in enchantment.” When Tara leaned closer and prodded the dried eyeball, Gale asked, “Would you care for a taste of beholder eye?”
“I am quite interested,” Tara said, sniffing the dried beholder stalk, “but you are surely aware that this is an excellent material for the manufacture of ink used in enchantment spells, Mr. Dekarios?”
“I have no intention of using it,” Gale replied, his expression turning rather peculiar, particularly because he knew why the material had been sent. So Tara gnawed on the beholder stalk, and from then on she developed an entirely unreasonable fondness for it. She was a tressym, after all, and beholder stalk had such a satisfying chew to it. What else was she supposed to do with a magical material that smelled like food? Tara jumped back into the high-backed armchair beside the fireplace and decided that she was very tired. Even though it was morning, Tara decided she could take a nap. At least the cats had one thing right: at this hour, Gale ought to have lit the fire at Tara’s instruction, spread the blanket over his lap, chosen the thickest brick of a book—history, generally, though a spell-research summary would do—and left it on the table beside him. Sometimes Gale would even have Mage Hand fetch a bottle of good wine, perhaps from Amn, perhaps from Berdusk, perhaps from Silverymoon. Tara would have jumped onto Gale’s lap rather than an empty chair. But the blanket was still draped over the back of the chair, and the fireplace showed no sign of having been lit.
I like eating birds too, Tara thought. She remembered the many times she had eaten other people’s pigeons. There was one wizard named Aquila whose pigeons she particularly enjoyed, although Tara admitted that personal feelings played a role in that. Aquila was an ill-tempered wizard with no family to speak of; the only thing he cherished was the enormous flock of pigeons he took such pride in. He ingratiated himself with the great nobles, then sold them pigeons trained to perform somersaults in exchange for jewels, spell components, and out-of-print books. The sweet words he used to flatter the great nobles were enough to make any bard blush with shame. Tara particularly liked his silly, fat pigeons. There was no one in all Waterdeep who could raise a tastier pigeon. As a result, Tara had been caught once or twice by the magical traps he had set around the pigeon lofts, and she had taken considerable pains to escape them. When Aquila came to the door, Gale gave Tara a look of exasperation mixed with amusement as she pretended to sharpen her claws nearby. Mr. Dekarios then went out to receive the unwelcome visitor, while Tara carefully pretended to be an ordinary cat, peering around the door and mewing softly, pretending that it was simply [a foolish animal, acting according to its nature, unintentionally committing an act contrary to the norms of human society and yet entirely deserving of understanding]. Aquila was in a foul temper and demanded a substantial compensation. Gale, being a gentleman and observing the principles of courtesy, negotiated with admirable smoothness. Tara even wondered whether the dignified Mr. Dekarios was being altogether too accommodating in his attitude. Eventually, whenever one of Aquila’s pigeons died, he would come straight to the wizard tower to complain, and so Tara began going to Aquila’s house to prey upon his pigeons even more frequently. They really were delicious little things, Tara admitted.
“Tara, you owe me an explanation. Why do you always seem to have it in for pigeons?”
“I could provide you with ample evidence as to why pigeons are ideally suited to the tressym palate in both taste and nutritional value. Their small wings, for instance, are particularly suited to the width of a tressym’s mouth, while sparrows are simply too small and gulls have altogether too broad a wingspan. But I rather suspect that is not the answer you were looking for, Mr. Dekarios.”
“Tara, you know perfectly well what I mean. You’re simply far too careless. You’re forever getting yourself into trouble over Aquila’s pigeons. I have no objection whatsoever to eating pigeons, but being caught at it and having the owner come knocking at our door is quite another matter.”
“Mr. Dekarios,” Tara replied with feigned shock, “I had no idea you possessed such remarkably flexible moral standards. Whatever happened to the gentleman Mrs. Dekarios raised?” Then she saw the knowing little smile on Gale’s face, the slight crinkle of one eyebrow that always accompanied that smile when they were sharing some mischief, as though he had some unspoken thought he was keeping to himself.
“Very well. I can hardly pretend that I don’t dislike Aquila myself,” the master of the tower concluded.
Tara curled herself up, wrapping her tail around herself. The empty chair was somewhat cold. Fortunately, a tressym had wings, and wings were useful for keeping warm when one was cold. She rested her head between her forepaws, her vision gradually growing hazy as sleep came over her. In a daze, she saw a bright afternoon. Gale and she were crouched together on the balcony of the wizard tower, and there were many pigeons beating their wings across the sky, some of them even doing somersaults. Gale moved his fingers, his lips moving faintly as he murmured a spell, and a pigeon bound by arcane magic appeared before Tara. Tara stepped forward, pawed at it, and bit through its neck. Behind her, Gale grumbled:
“Good heavens, Tara, that is rather bloody…”
