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Of all things street and livelihood, there is one oddity that Horas has noted as of late. Perhaps, had he paid more of his mind to the chores done with his mother inside the home, he wouldn't have glanced farther than his eyes are meant to see.
Next door is the church, and every day he goes there because he has to. In said church lives a cat. The window of her room is directly outside of his own, such that he'd only have to lean a little back from his writing table to see her.
He knows only one catfolk. She wears her robes until her body is swallowed by draping fabric, except for her feet, shoes unfit for paws. Her ears poke just a little past her hood. Her fur is a raven's black. Her mask fits snugly around her snout, a moth with its wings spread standing proudly with showy flourishes of color. He found it odd. Often people would think the Lord to be some form of great flying bird. A moth, fragile and small, seemed out of place.
Nonetheless, Horas continues to watch her in his spare time. He's not sure when he began to watch her. Sometimes, bored out of his own mind, his eyes find her sitting at her table, toiled over tomes. She never sits facing him.
"Does she turn to watch me too?" Horas wonders, staring at her back, "Does she know who I am?"
He never learnt her name, but he would've liked it if she somehow, miraculously, knew his.
Many of his halfling, elven, human and whatever else friends tease him about her. When are you going to ask her out, they ask, nudging him by the shoulder. He always says the same thing. It's not that big a deal, she's just the church girl, I don't even know her name!
They simply tell him to actually go over there and ask.
He never did.
And yet it felt as if he grew up alongside her.
He was there when she first arrived. He remembers her when she was a child before, when her tail was only half the length it is now, her face still free of the mask. He remembers seeing her at the pews sometimes, her body swaying to the sound of the choir. He can't remember her eye color. Or anything about her face, really. All he knows now is that she wears the same colored robes and the same iron mask as him.
The years flutter by quick, and he's pretty much an adult (15 years old). Sometimes dawn is yet to rise and he'll find himself climbing over the high fences about the church, jumping whatever window was left open. Through the glass in streaks of blue moonlight and nighttime purple, his knees are greeted with cold tiles, his shadow casting itself in long painted strokes across the floor. He walks between rows of uncomfortable wooden pews with eyes unfocused, until his body gives up and he is lying face first on the floor instead. Here he cannot smell the incense, and he cannot look at the masks hung and framed on every wall.
From here though, he can see her. As always, all he has to do is turn his head to the side.
He'll find the cat curled at the bottom of the staircase where the people worship, upon the feet of God. Sleeping with her tail between her legs, visible only now because her usual robe and mask are gone. She looks too peaceful for him to dare disturb or come near. A piece of slumbering midnight on marbled porcelain, she looks as if she'd been chosen to be the dear child of something more than either of them are allowed to know, and he forgets it would be blasphemous to compare anyone to the figure of the Lord.
Many nights will play out just like this. For some, he'll forget to return home and fall asleep right where he was, tonight no different.
Thunderous are the church bells, reverbrating in his drowsy head as he jolts upright. A sudden pain sounds in his arm, which he has no choice but to ignore as he bolts right out the window he had come through, lest the priests spot him.
…
He comes home and back in his room to find his arm still a little sore, his sleeve bulkier than usual. A quick search by tearing his shirt off helped him find… a packet of biscuits.
The average kind you'd find at any nearby vendor. One of them had broken into a bunch of crumbs from his little escape. And once again, he finds himself leaning back against his chair, staring outside, to the shining early morning.
Her window is closed.