Princess Adila hunted cats. It was scary work but she was a brave dragon and could handle it. It was a much more fair fight than she'd imagined it would be when she thought of cats as those cute little sprawls of fur who spent their days lazily shifting between sunbeams. She had claws! She had wings! She even had a little badge! And there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to be useful to her friends in the Watch.

But cats. She had claws? So did they. Cat claws were perfectly capable of scratching through her baby scales and they had the reflexes of greased lightning. She could fly? So could they. Better than she could - she'd been floored the first time she'd seen a cat run up a vertical surface. Was that something people could do? Was that something [i]she [/i]could do? She'd learned the answer to that one very quickly. She had a little badge? They had a little princess, with a little crown, and a little kingdom of various kitty-exiles - scumbags and rogues just as capable of using teamwork as the Watch, and just as capable of laying an ambush for proud little dragons. 

[I]She remembered the swirl of time, forwards and backwards. The Clock and the Eye and her failure. Each connection was like a thread tied to her and as she fell through broken time they wrapped around her, forwards and back, tying and binding her until she couldn't move, and still tighter they pulled. She grabbed at one of the knots and tried to untangle it, and as soon as she touched it and the thread that connected to it she knew that it was the most important thing in the world.

Ropes wrapped her into a ball, an egg, but still she clung to that strand as it began to unravel...[/I]

She was here to hunt the princess of cats. It was the scariest part of a scary job, but it was the most important thing in the world. She needed to, with stealth and cunning, lure her out of the narrows to the open where the waiting Watch would be able to finally capture her. Once the Princess was in captivity the city's cats would be brought to their knees, and the Watch would issue a terrible demand for her release: The mandatory bathing and medical examination of every single cat in Jedad, a procedure that would in the Captain's estimation eliminate a seasonal fever from the city entirely.

No force less than the capture of their princess would bring the defiant cats to the negotiation table. And so little Adila stalked into the darkness. It was scary, but it was a small fear, of a small world, when everything was still small and manageable enough to fit into the boundaries of her perception.