Yuki the Cat

A Witch in the Snow

My name is Yuki, and I'm a cat.

Well, physically speaking, at least.

When you cross over into the realm of metaphysics, things get a little more complicated. I'm actually a man inhabiting the body of a cat.

I mean, I've gotten used to it since I've been this way for a while.

You see, I was cursed by a beautiful but malevolent Snow Witch. I was escaping from a handy ninja gig, having successfully dispatched a particularly despotic Lordling. It was on the Sea of Japan coast, pretty much due-north of Tokyo, and the snow was falling heavily that year. I'd taken to the trees to cover my escape since, night or not, it was easy to track a fleet footed fleeing assassin if he happened to be fleeing through knee-deep snow.

While springing from branch to branch, through the thick pine forest just outside the Lordling's compound, I came upon her: an ethereal beauty, clothed only in a thin summer yukata, and perched impossibly on a branch some thirty feet above the ground. Her skin was of a palest white, almost opalescent in its clean, smooth finish, and as soon as I turned to look her in the eyes, I was done for.

I fell for her instantly, and we spent the rest of that night in an unreal embrace, high in that tree. Some time in the night, she whispered into my ear, asking me if I could have any wish, what would it be.

And because I was young and brash and couldn't picture my life beyond the next contract, I told her that I wanted to be the most dexterous, most silent killer the world had ever seen, forever and always.

She chuckled into my ear—a sound like ice wrapped in velvet—and said words that would change my life from then on: when the morning comes, so shall it be.

But with the first rays of the sun, she sublimated, turning to naught but steam that blew away on the breeze. And I fell for her again, this time from the nest we'd made ourselves in that tree and down 30 feet to the ground below. I was so surprised when it happened, and still so wrapped up in the memory of her, that all my ninjitsu training fled from my mind, and I was lucky to fall safely on my four paws.

Paws.

That was when it hit me: that something had irreversibly changed. As I craned my neck to look up to the bough where we'd been, the new eyes I'd been given could just make out the shape of her in the steam blowing away on the breeze. She smiled down wickedly at me, and she spoke to me in a voice I could only hear in the back of my mind.

The most dexterous, the most silent, the most efficient of killers: now and forever. So are you now, my love, and so shall you ever be.