Chasing Chaos: The Rise of Chaos

Chapter 5

The weight on her chest grew so heavy that she woke with a start, struggling to breathe. Her eyes registered nothing but darkness when she opened them. She immediately panicked. It was the snake, surely, coiled around her, squeezing the life from her body. She was paralyzed for a moment before realizing that she had locked up from fright. Relaxing, her eyes adjusting to the darkness and her mind groggily restarting, she realized that Lady was perched on top of her. The cat looked down at her blankly. Caitlin sighed.

"Get your fat butt off of me," she said, and picked Lady up.

Before she could set the cat aside, a husky voice said, "You'd do well to show me some gratitude."

Caitlin froze, her eyes searching wildly about the room, but she could not see anything out of place. She held her cat in front of her but Lady gave no struggle. She merely looked vaguely amused.

A moment more of silence passed. Just when Caitlin was about to dismiss the sound as a figment of her imagination, it spoke again.

"And I thought you were a smart girl." The sound came from directly in front of her. Six inches in front of her face, to be precise.

Caitlin's eyes grew wide as she studied her cat's face. The cat looked back into her eyes and lifted its head slightly.

"Lady?"

"Yes."

Immediately Caitlin threw the cat. Ladybug twirled through the air and landed less than gracefully on a pile of dirty laundry. Caitlin hopped out of bed and backed away.

"What's going on?!" she screeched. "How are you talking?"

Lady jumped from the laundry after being so unceremoniously tossed, and this time Caitlin recognized the humanesque look of irritation play across the animal's yellow eyes. It was so alien and un-catlike that it gave her pause.

"Don't speak unless spoken to. If you listen, you will understand. If you're going to just blather away I'm wasting my time here."

Caitlin blinked, fixing her eyes again on the sleek body of the cat. Ladybug's pitch black fur shined with an almost iridescent quality in the pale light of the moon outside. Caitlin had never noticed this before, and as the cat slowly approached her with determination, she thought she might scream.

Instead she remained silent.

"I am known as Mafdet," the voice said, coming from the body of the cat. The voice was deep and silken, the tone sure and steady. It was clearly a woman's voice, but very much masculine. "I have been in this form for a long while. I have hidden from my enemies, and watched and waited until the time when they would show themselves. I was trying to catch them unaware, but I did not foresee that they would find me. The enemy has prematurely turned his attention to you, and therefore to myself."

Caitlin's head was racing. She was on the verge of tears. "Y-you can talk?"

"Yes, idiot girl, I thought we were aware of that."

Caitlin stood before the cat speechless. What exactly was going on? Caitlin had raised Ladybug from a kitten years ago. How come she had never spoken before? Was she finally, truly going insane?

"The enemy," Caitlin replied after a few deep gulps of air to calm herself. Then she whispered, "I saw a giant snake at school today. Was that him?"

"That was merely a vessel. The true danger is much more incomprehensible. What you encountered was a fraction of the might that is Apophis."

"Apophis?" Caitlin had never heard the word in her life.

Lady-- or Mafdet-- curled her tail around her body and looked at Caitlin through those oddly intelligent eyes, appraising her. It made Caitlin shudder.

"Apophis is the Lord of Chaos. The forms he chooses are varied and each more gruesome than the last, but he is a serpent, long and unending and always hungry. He has forces under him that could rival and crush any army. His gaze paralyzes and seduces. He is evil and must be stopped. He has been searching two hundred years for me."

Caitlin, still speechless, grabbed her computer chair and fell into it. This was all so much information given way too quickly. Was she just supposed to accept that a snake-demon was after her cat? Or, to start with, that her cat could talk and was some sort of magical being?

"Why me?" was all Caitlin could say.

"Why you?" If a cat could ever look puzzled, this one did.

"Why did you choose to hide here, with me? Why me?"

Mafdet cocked her head as if in contemplation. "I never truly thought about that. You were there, I suppose. I needed a safe place to hide."

"And you need my help?"

"I do. But you also need mine."

"Why?"

In one fluid motion, Mafdet sprang from the ground up onto Caitlin's desk and approached her at eye level. The cat's head was low, the eyes focused on Caitlin, ears tensed.

"Because Apophis is after you now, as well. I've been protecting you as best I can from his mind games. He's been trying to enter your mind through your dreams. Every night I've chased him from you. But he hungers, and he eventually gets his way."

Caitlin's heart dropped, "So that's why I haven't been sleeping lately."

Mafdet nodded. Caitlin was so weirded out by the abnormal gesture, having never seen a cat act this way. It would take some time getting used to.

"The storm earlier was no ordinary storm," Mafdet continued. "It was Apophis' entrance to this realm."

"You were afraid of him. That's why you hid in the closet this morning."

"You should be, too. I am here only as a last resort. I come from a different place. You see, your world's legends are realities where beings like Apophis and I dwell. But where we reside, we have no written meaning, no history. Here, all of the knowledge of our existence is stored. Our origins. I came here to seek answers, to find help. Apophis is evil incarnate and has doomed my realm to destruction."

"What's he done?" Caitlin asked, now fully invested. There was little question now-- this was really happening. She tried to take in all the information as her head started to hurt from it all. How could one person accept so much nonsense at once? She barely knew what to believe.

Mafdet stared purposefully into Caitlin's eyes, her irises glowing with an otherworldly light. The cat she thought she'd known her whole life was suddenly an alien.

And then, speaking slowly and mournfully, Mafdet said, "He devoured the sun."