The Jellicle Ball

 Snail sprawled on a flat slab of wood in the middle of the hearth hall, watching the dust motes dance. Eastern windows faced the sun, rays casting glorious spears of shapely light upon the castle walls.

 It was good to have a home. 

 The old cat rose, stretching languid, toe-beans splaying before he hopped off the table and trotted towards a more centralized part of stone fortress. 

 A clan - he still had to pinch himself. Tail raised, he mrrwed in jolly greeting. “It is a glorious morning, isn't it?”

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The morning sun was rising to shed light and warmth on sleepy Cymru Keep. Given the white stone’s day-long exposure, the thickest parts of the structure’s rock tended to retain their heat throughout the night. At the top of a particularly warm rectangular column, whose broken but rain-worn top was shaped rather like an herbivore’s flat mashing tooth, lay Edgewise.
 
He had spent most of the night hard at work among the trees near the bone-zone, ascending trees and snatching sleeping starlings and titmouses (titmice?) and even a fat little shrew. The shrew he had eaten on the spot to keep his energy levels up, the birds he had brought back to leave in the food pile. He also brought back the report that the bird and rodent population seemed to be thriving there; an absence of major predators in the area, and the abundant plant life, all combined to explode the numbers of mice and rats and birds, and even snakes! Edgewise wasn’t interested in trying to catch any snakes just yet…
 
What he was interested in catching were some snoozes. He was right on the tail end of a quick nap on the warm stone as the sunlight started shining through his lightbrown fur, and through his eyelids. He had been having a fuzzy dream, a vision of a vast, dry expanse. He saw hills, but not hills of stone or soil. They were hills of tiny grains, small enough to blow in the wind, but great enough in number to bury giant stone structures, each like the Keep itself, but different in design and purpose. There were rocky outcroppings there, and creatures that wandered the cooler nights and hid during the day. Edgewise dreamed of cats out there, like him, but harder, windblown, with flecks of the tiny brown grains mixed into their fur, and with a steel in their eyes that shook him to his core. As the sun rose in the waking world, the light in his eyes invaded his dream; a sun rose over this dry place, and the cats there welcomed him, their claws reaching for him, their mouths wide in either words or a biting death...
 
Edgewise, on his back atop the tooth-column, opened his eyes, brought out of the dream-sleep my Snail’s polite greeting. He was still a little drowsy, still half-stupid from the dreamstate whose visions quickly fled his mind, so he said:
 
”Uhh, lemme check.”
 
Edgewise stretched his paws out, his little ribs sticking through as he extended his whooooole body in a big stretchy stretch. A yawn conquered his face, and is mouth opened wide, pink tongue extending and curling. He smacked his lips and looked up, and out, to the sun, and to the absence of any dry grains and buried structures.
 
”Yeah, I figure so.” He rolled over, nearly losing his perch and toppling down to the ground. He tried, and failed, to hide his half-awake stumblings.
 
”What, uhh… What are you up to today, Snail?” Edgewise asked politely.

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 He watched with amusement as his clanmate made an accordion of himself, stretching long and low before compressing back in place. Snail twitched his crinkled whiskers and stared up at the other cat. 

 “I haven’t decided yet, but the day is full of potential. It’s…Edgewise, yes? You’ll have to forgive an old cat. My memory is not what it used to be.”

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”Edgewise yes!” the cat replied in confirmation. And he did indeed forgive Snail his memory, though he couldn’t help but wonder… If his memory wasn’t what it used to be… How did he know that his memory wasn’t what it used to be? 
He decided it would be rude to ask.
 
”Well, if it’s today, and I think it is, then there’s some new stuff today.” Edgewise revealed. With an adventurous flash of his eyes, he descended the column of slumber nearly vertically, climbing down the bone-stone and flexing his muscles as he did so. In moments, he was on the ground level, and he hopped on his paws over to Snail to greet him more properly.
 
”We’ve had a couple new cats join us, for one, and they’re getting settled in today and tomorrow. We found a room with a bunch of shiny rocks last night, and a room down below with these big wooden things, someone’s supposed to check both of those out.” Edgewise sat for a moment, trying to groom a sticky-something out of his right paw-fur. How the heck had that gotten there? ”There’s a big freaky skeleton someone found in the water about 15 minutes along the lake-edge that got some cats talking. And there’s talk of a plains fox sniffing around the southern border.”
 
He blinked both of his eyes, one just a little slower than the other. ”I think that’s the long and short of it. If you don’t have anything on your schedule, what do you say we team up on a project?”

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 Edgewise was a verifiable chatterbox and it chuffed the old cat to be around another with such spunk. There was richness in enthusiasm, for it was a zest for life that allowed you to live earnestly, and Snail had a love of keenness. 

 “My, the keep sounds like a bustling place.” And it was with so many cats about - an abandoned castle revitalized and born again into a home. “I do have a weakness for shiny things.” The old feline admitted. “Shall we go take a closer look?”

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”Yeah, Shiny Rocks Room!” Edgewise cried, hopping and whipping his tail left and right. ”Okay, so, it’s inside some walls, uhh, with holes in them. So we can get in from there, but it’s gonna be dark… We’ll figure it out. I’ll take the lead!” 

Hustling off, but not too quickly, Edgewise led the way. His chocolate-covered tail, twitching and balancing with each hop and jump, helped to spot him as he moved between rubble-pile and scrub-brush. In short order, they approached a wall which was more hole-filled than a woodpecker’s paradise. In fact, it was more hole than wall! ”This one leads to a room, and then there’s another room inside.” Edgewise revealed. He popped inside, leaping through a higher-up opening even though there were a dozen easier entrances on the ground level.
 
The hole-infused room was a mess of junk rocks, mouse debris, bugs and plants. Whatever the floor had been, it was now just a pile. The wall ahead, however, had far fewer entrances in the worn and ruined stone. The most accessible ‘tunnel’, likely worn by collected rainfall, actually dug through the dirt and mortar at the base of the wall. Some enterprising felines had done a little digging to make the tunnel more manageable, but it was still a tight fit.
 
”So, like I said, it’s big-time dark in there, so get your eyes ready...” Edgewise warned, as he wiggled himself through and into the shadows beyond...

Edit: Archiving after mutual agreement with Snail's author.
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