I have watched thousands fall by the meer infliction of my gaze. I’ve toppled empires and left only destruction in my wake. I’ve assumed the mass casualities of a raging storm. I’ve been called many names, feeble human reductions in my power to try to understand me. Only now…

“Fluffy!!” I heard the old crow coo at me. She was nearly blind, with glasses that took up half her face doing hardly anything to help. After a particularly rough encounter, the humans had left me weakened. I reduced my form to try and recover, and then came Beatrice, mistaking me for a common dog. My “fur” was nothing more than shadows that obscured my silhouette. It seemed more trouble to kill this woman than to leave. After all she didn’t do this to me, and so far has been nothing but kind. I took the liberty of closing all but two of my eyes to blend in further. For some reason she would take her cold brittle hands and place them over me, trying to touch me, and she would look very intently into the eyes I left open.

She was doing it once again, “Fluffy you haven’t eaten yet. Are you hurt?”

I felt a rumble deep within me, of course I’m hurt. My form is at its weakest and my only worshiper is a blind old bat who lives alone. She took the food from the dish off the floor and threw it away, for the best, I’d rather starve than eat that dried excuse for sustenance.

Then she hobbled her way over to the stove and started cooking something. Shuffling her way from fridge to cabinet and back. At one point she reached too high and plastic dishes started falling out like an avalanch. I reached around her and caught every one, shoving them back into place before they could hit her. She just adjusted her glasses with so much as an “Oh!” Before continuing her work. I heard the click of the stove a few moments later before she walked back to me with a plate. It smelled, oddly good. Like meat and something else, something earthy. She placed it in front of me and touched my head again, tousling the shadows this way and that.

“There you are fluffy. This’ll be much better than that bagged stuff, and it’ll make you strong.”

Strong eh? I moved myself over the meal, I could taste every piece that was within it. The meat, the earthiness coming from herbs and roots from the ground, I could even taste the routine method in which she made it, the memory of her mother teaching her how to make it, and the love and care she has to do these things. Humans, always so sentimental. Their pack bonding tendencies are almost as annoying as their fears. I laid down on the floor exhausted, my power was dim but the meal helped to stretch my old muscles again so to speak.

Beatrice patted her leg slowly then walked to the other room. With a slow grunt she seated herself in a chair coated in cellophane. She patted her leg again, and I knew what she wanted. I moved myself onto the space beside her and laid into her lap, I could sense everything about her when I was this close. I believe she considers me her only friend left in the world. She moved her hand over me again, her breathing slowing down as she drifted off to sleep. I gazed up at her a moment before allowing sleep to take me over as well. If I was her only friend, then the least I could do was return the kindness she had given me.