Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Chaykeely - Book Two ❯ Chapter 3 ( Chapter 3 )

[ P - Pre-Teen ]

Keiran was used to living his life outside society. Unlike vampires and witches, it was more difficult for a werecat to hide what he truly was, because every full moon resulted in his transformation. As a result, all of the werecats were forced out of their villages. Eventually, they all made it to the same place and set up their own village.

Keiran lived with both of his parents in a hut in this village. They were very happy. They had enough food, water, and friends to whom they could relate. Keiran, especially, was very happy. He was fourteen years old, and his parents had arranged a marriage for him with a werecat girl who lived next door, which would occur in a year. He liked this idea very much, and the girl seemed to like it as well, because as he stepped outside one fall morning, she stood there, smiling at him.

“Hazel…”

The girl continued smiling. “Hi, Keiran. My mother wants you to come over for lunch later.” She beamed. “Will you?”

“Sure!” He smiled back. “What are you doing now?”

“Oh, I’m going to the market…we need some…fish. Full moon tonight and all…” She giggled. “We have to make sure to get some fish before they run out, you know. We don’t want to wake up in the night with a craving for fish and not have anything.”

Keiran nodded. “Okay. Hold on, I’ll get some money from my mother and come with you.” He ran inside. Hazel sat down on a tree stump nearby and waited, twirling the basket she held in her hand around, humming softly to herself.

“Okay, I’m back,” Keiran said, carrying his own basket. “Let’s go before they run out!”

Hazel jumped up, looping her arm in Keiran’s and resting her head on his shoulder. “Okay!”

They walked to the market together and were dismayed to see that there was already a line. “It doesn’t matter,” Keiran assured Hazel. “They can’t run out. They stock a lot of fish just before the full moon, because they know demand is high.”

Hazel smiled and nodded. “Right. Of course you’re right.” She laughed and ran toward the line. She looked back and saw Keiran staring at something, clearly puzzled. “Keiran?”

He didn’t respond. Hazel walked back over to him and grabbed his hand. “Keiran!”

His eyes drifted toward Hazel’s. “Oh. Sorry.” He shook his head. “I just had the strangest feeling…”

Hazel’s eyes widened in fear. “What kind of feeling? Was it like a premonition? Keiran, we need to tell our parents–“

“No, it’s fine,” he mumbled. “It was nothing.” He frowned slightly, then smiled at her. “Yeah, hurry up, let’s get in line. We want to get the freshest fish.”

Hazel nodded and they stood in line. After a moment, Hazel seemed to forget about how strangely Keiran had acted before. She began chatting away to the people also waiting in line, leaving Keiran to his own thoughts. He vaguely wondered why he had had that feeling, but he was unable to ponder the answer for long, because he and Hazel were in the front of the line.

They each bought a bushel of fish and walked back to Keiran’s house. Keiran, in order to make sure that Hazel wasn’t worried about him, found a pink flower on the ground and picked it for her. Hazel was delighted and stuck it in her hair, thanking Keiran repeatedly.

Keiran took his fish inside and gave it to his parents. Then they went next door, to Hazel’s house, and did the same with her fish. Finally they left and stood alone by the trunk of a tree.

Neither spoke for a few moments. Keiran was still lost in thought and Hazel was worrying about him. She decided to say something, finally. “Keiran…”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t tell me that. Now I know something really is wrong.” She glared at him. “Keiran, was it just a feeling or did you see something?”

“It was just a feeling.”

“And?”

“A bad feeling,” he said. “That’s all.”

“I don’t believe you,” Hazel said.

“I’m not lying.”

“But you’re not telling the whole truth, are you?”

Keiran was silent. “It was a really bad feeling.”

“Like what? Someone dying, the world being destroyed, what?”

Again, he was silent. “The…world being destroyed.”

“And you refused to tell anyone? Keiran, this is serious.” She frowned. “I’m telling my father.”

“Why? It’s not like it really means anything.”

“Are you serious? ‘It’s not like it really means anything’? Keiran, do you realize that if we don’t tell anyone, we could all die?”

“Okay, say it means something. Say the world is going to be destroyed. How are we supposed to prevent it? Our entire village is made of outcasts, Hazel. To the majority of the people outside this walls…we don’t exist.” He waved his hand toward the wall to the east erected to keep the werecats in, not to keep other people out. “Even if we could, why should we help them?”

“So we can help us. Surely you don’t hate the people of our village.”

“No, I don’t,” he said quietly. “Okay, you’re right. Besides, if it means anything…we probably wouldn’t have time to warn anyone else anyway. It’s not like it would be easy to get through the wall, either.”

“Okay, then let’s go.”


It was raining. Kael opened his eyes in the morning to discover that fact. He stood up, crawling his way out of the blankets that were currently five times too big for him, and literally jumped off of his bed. He ran around the room a few times, then jumped as high as he could to try to reach the door handle. He failed. Sighing, Kael repeated the maneuver, opening his mouth and biting down on the handle as hard as he could. The handle pulled down, and he kicked the door open. He jumped down and ran into the kitchen.

Kael lived alone. Except for times like this, when it began to rain unexpectedly and he had no time to prepare, he didn’t really have any trouble. Those times it didn’t matter that the furniture in the house was meant for a human over six feet tall. Right now, however, it was a bit inconvenient, as Kael was only two feet tall.

He was starving. He wished it would stop raining so that he could go out into the forest with his bow and kill something. At the moment his teeth weren’t sharp enough to kill anything and he definitely couldn’t even breathe fire, as he’s heard some dragons could. He silently cursed the warrior from his former life for being so stupid to be–well, cursed–by a witch to become a dragon when it rained in this life.

Having nothing to do and being resigned to his fate, Kael watched out the window for any signs of the rain stopping. After an hour or two, it did, and he became human again. Rejoicing, he ran over to the wall and took down his bow and quiver of arrows. He went outside to hunt.


Keiran and Hazel explained everything to their parents. Keiran’s mother looked very worried, but the others simply shrugged it off.

“It’s fine, Keiran. Don’t worry about it,” Hazel’s mother said.

“Yes, it’s not as if we have any seers in our bloodline,” his father added.

His mother still looked very nervous, however. “Mother?” Keiran asked.

“We have to warn everyone,” she said.

“Why? I just said, we don’t have any seers–“

“I do, and therefore Keiran does!” She grabbed Keiran’s arm. “Keiran, you need to leave the village and warn the people outside.”

“Why? Why should I care about them?”

“Just do it.” She frowned. “I wish it wasn’t the night of a full moon…but you have a good five hours before the moon comes out. So you’d better hurry.” She looked at him closely. “There’s a hole in the wall…even in your human form, you can get through.”

“But I have to warn the people in this village.”

“I’ll do it,” Hazel volunteered. “I know you don’t want to, Keiran, but you have to…it’s best to get it over with.”

Keiran started to protest, but nodded instead. “Alright. But you’d all better be here when I return, okay?”

They all laughed and nodded. Keiran ran away.


Kael came back from his hunt very pleased. He had killed a doe, leaving him with sufficient food for a week. After a few hours, spent carving the deer and eating some of it, Kael noticed that the sky was darkening. He knew it would start to get very cold soon, so he started a fire. Then he heard a scratching on the door.

He opened it and stared. There was a tiny black cat with violet eyes staring up at him. Kael considered killing it, but it watched him so intently, with such intelligence in its eyes, that instead he gestured for it to come inside. It did, to Kael’s amazement, and it sat by the fire, watching him as he closed the door.

“Where did you come from?” Kael asked, half-expecting an answer. He didn’t get one. He laughed, thinking himself a fool for even considering the thought that the cat would respond. “Well, can you write an answer?” he asked, without even thinking.

To his amazement, the cat seemed to nod. Feeling like an idiot, Kael grabbed an inkwell from a desk and sat it next to the cat, who dipped a claw in it. Kael set a piece of parchment before the cat and watched as he wrote.

“My name is Keiran.”

“Why are you here?” Kael asked.

“I am to warn everyone of a disaster that is about to befall the world. Unfortunately…” Keiran accidentally knocked over the ink. Kael grabbed it and gave Keiran another piece of parchment. “Sorry. Well, anyway, unfortunately, the moon came out before I got to a village, and I saw this house here, in the middle of the forest…I hoped that whoever lived here was an outcast like myself, so I scratched on the door.”

“An outcast?”

Keiran dunked his claw in the ink again and wrote. “Yes. I’m a werecat.”

“Oh. I see. And I was cursed in a former life to transform into a dragon when it rains. Anyway…what do you mean, ‘a disaster is about to befall the world’?”

“I don’t know,” Keiran wrote. “I just know something is going to happen and my mother sent me to warn everyone. I had the feeling that something bad would happen and apparently one of my ancestors was a seer.”

“So that means you are, as well?”

“No.”

“Then why would anyone believe you?”

“I don’t care if they do. They can all die for all I care.”

“Ah. I see. They banished you.”

“My species, yes.”

“And…you’re angry about that.”

“Yeah. It’s not like we hurt anyone. I mean, what could we do? Scratch their eyes out?”

Kael laughed. “Yeah. I think that sometimes too, about my dragon form, but more along the lines of ‘I’m so useless in this form, I can’t even effectively kill anyone.’ So, Keiran…I’m guessing you want to stay until the morning, because it’s dangerous for something as weak as you out there. Not that I’m insulting you,” he added quickly.

“I know. And yes, please. I swear I won’t trouble you. I’ll be gone in the morning. I’ll just stay by the fire. But first I need to go find my clothes. They fell off somewhere…whenever I transformed.”

“I’ll go with you. Hold on.” Kael went to get his bow again. “It’ll be safer that way. And do you want to clean your paw of that ink?”

Keiran nodded. Kael brought him a rag and he wiped his paw off on it. Then they went outside.