Fever and Feline

The sun might still set in an hour or two, but Atheria Port was already awash in heat and activity. The scent of brine mingled with something less pleasant—tar, fish guts, and the collective breath of sailors too long at sea.

Ellan emerged from a ship alongside several other passengers, his gait unsteady. His boots scuffed the uneven steps, shoulders set rigid despite the hollow fatigue gnawing at his chest.

He blinked against the sunlight. His eyes were sore, red-rimmed and gritty. His throat burned. His sinuses throbbed behind his temples, and each breath scraped raw through his nose.

“Sailing through storms took a toll,” he muttered—though whether he meant the weather or his life was unclear.

“At least I made it… at the last minute,” he murmured in relief, walking slowly along the dockside path.

As he passed through the crowd, he noticed a postboard nailed to a thick wooden post, covered in names and notices. He squinted, stepping closer, straining his fevered eyes to focus. The words wobbled and swam, but eventually he found his name among the listings.

With heavy steps, Ellan trudged to the harbor office. After responding to some questions and paying the weary officer, he received a letter.

He slipped it into his coat pocket without opening it. He didn’t have the energy to read.

With a strained, dry voice, he told the officer, “Any letters addressed to me from now on… send them to the city of Virestead.”

The officer gave a nod, and Ellan turned to leave. Outside, he began weaving between crates and crew, his steps sluggish. His black coat—once formal and sharply tailored—now hung loose and salt-streaked. He looked like a nobleman who had fallen on hard times.

He felt worse than he looked.

A sharp shout rang out ahead.

Barrels came rolling across the dock, loosened by a careless crewman’s pull on a rope. Ellan ’s hazy eyes snapped into focus, alarm cutting through the fog of his fever. A child—no older than seven—had tripped, his foot caught under a loose coil of rope. One barrel bounced toward him with terrible speed and weight.

Ellan didn’t think. He lunged forward.

His hand locked around the boy’s collar and yanked him clear. The barrel slammed into the planks where the child’s head would’ve been. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Ellan , breathing heavily, guided the frozen, pale-faced boy to a quieter corner of the dock and let go.

The child blinked up at him, stunned. Ellan stared back, not in scrutiny but in effort—trying to keep his own balance, trying to see straight through the fever making the edges of everything blur. His narrowed eyes, sharp even when bloodshot, made the boy flinch and scurry off.

Ellan ignored him. He resumed walking, each step swaying, more drained than before.

Then the world tilted.

He clenched his jaw, trying to stabilize, but someone moved into his blind spot—another figure suddenly in his way.

A sharp flare of pain in his shin—he’d been kicked.

The impact knocked him down. He crashed to his knees on the sun-warmed dock, the whole world lurching sideways before righting again.

He looked up. His blurred vision locked onto a pair of piercing gray eyes set in a striking face. He squinted, trying to focus.

“Sorry,” he rasped, voice low and hoarse. The apology came reflexively. But his tone? It was anything but apologetic.

Something flickered in her gaze, but he didn’t register it—his attention had dropped to a scrap of parchment fluttering past her boot.

His letter.

The sea breeze had caught it.

He stood too fast, the dizziness surging back with a vengeance. He reached after the drifting parchment, stepping toward the dock’s edge—

—and was shoved by someone.

Hard.

His foot slipped. For one breathless moment, he was weightless.

Then came the splash.

The sea embraced him in a cold, jarring crash. Water closed around him, silencing the world. The docks above disappeared. He felt weightless again—this time in darkness.

And for one fleeting, blessed second, the fever cooled.

His spinning thoughts tried to comprehend what had just happened.

Then he heard it.

A sound—thin, weak, almost imagined.

A mew.

He surfaced, gasping, and grabbed one of the dock’s barnacle-covered support beams, clinging to it as he scanned the water.

He spotted the wet letter floating nearby, snagged it with effort, and tucked it into his inner pocket. Then he resumed searching.

There, wedged between timbers and floating debris—he saw it.

A kitten.

Its fur was drenched and plastered to its bones, its mewling almost lost to the slosh of the tide. Ellan didn’t hesitate. He reached down between the beams, scraping his hand against barnacles, and gently pulled the shaking creature free.

He hoisted it above the water with one arm and began swimming with the other.

A sailor—broad-shouldered with a scar on his cheek—had already begun climbing down to check for him. When the man spotted Ellan paddling toward the dock, soaked but alive and holding a mewling kitten, he burst out laughing.

“Aha! Don’t be down, young blood!” the sailor bellowed, gripping Ellan ’s arm and hauling him up. “You’ll find someone good in the future. Your luck’ll turn. You’ll see!”

Ellan didn’t reply. He couldn’t even hear the words properly. His ears were ringing. His head throbbed. But he held the kitten close to his chest and walked away, soaked and silent.

He didn’t care about the stares. He didn’t look back.

He wandered until the crowd thinned, eventually settling in a quiet, sun-drenched corner beside a low stone wall. There, he crouched and gently set the kitten down on a dry patch.

Vendors lined the street nearby. Ellan walked over to them, still dripping, and bought a thick towel and a small jar of goat’s milk. He ignored their curious looks—not that he could have answered any questions. His body was too tired. His head, still swimming.

He returned quickly, kneeling beside the kitten. He wrapped it carefully in the towel, swaddling it like something fragile, and sat beside it. The sun began drying patches of his coat.

The kitten shivered at first, but when Ellan dipped his fingers in the milk and let it sniff, it slowly began to lick the droplets. Eventually, the tiny creature began to lap from the jar itself—shaky but determined.

Ellan didn’t smile.

But he stayed there, unmoving, until the kitten curled up, warm and milk-drunk, dozing against his side. It didn’t cry anymore. Its half-lidded eyes stared at him—wide, unblinking, and comically fierce.

The sun began to set. Shadows lengthened across the stone, and the sounds of festivity rose in the distance.

Ellan stood, carefully cradling the towel-wrapped kitten, and made his way toward the port’s central market square, where the festival was in full swing.

As he approached, the roads became more crowded. The buzz of voices, laughter, and instruments rose like a wave. The sudden noise made the kitten shift uncomfortably in his arms.

He veered off, choosing a quieter alley beside the festivities, and crouched low beside a wall. He tucked the kitten carefully beneath a cloth, its small head poking out to glare at him with those same mean, judgmental eyes.

“Stay here,” he said softly in his hoarse voice, giving the kitten a brief nod.

Then he stood, took a steadying breath, and began walking toward the center of the festival once more.

All his exhausted brain could produce was a single line of thought.
‘At last… I get to taste the Ember Moon pie.’