The Forgotten Zodiac

"It's alright. Some people just feel the need to hide things, I suppose..." Werr tutted, moving back into the kitchen. "Is that why he wears those bandages around his face? So people don't know what he looks like?" He asked, frowning some as he pulled some potatoes out of the cuboard and prepared the pot for stew.

"I'm sure he has reasons for his actions." Heather said quietly, rocking herself in her chair a bit.

"I actually don't know why he wears the mask." Welk said honestly, turning his head to look at Werr and Heather. "He had it on when we found each other. Whenever I asked him about it, he would either not answer me or tell me it wasn't important, so after a while I just stopped asking."

He frowned, turning his head back to the window. "He always gets nervous when you talk about his mask or what he might be hiding under it, so I usually make fun of it to make him mad." He sighed. "I've never seen him take it off. Even once. He doesn't even take it off at night when he goes to sleep. I know, because I've looked in his room once I knew he was asleep. He never takes it off."

He blew a lock of his blonde hair up out of his red eyes, crossing his arms back on the window sill.

"Interesting..." Werr said quietly, starting to peel the potatoes. "Well, at any rate, he certainly needs an attitude check or something."

"Werr, dear, what happened to my art book?" Heather blinked, looking around curiously.

"Art book?" Werr looked up from his work, blinking. "Oh, um...the dog ate it."

"Did he? That stupid dog. Why do we have a dog, anyways? You should get rid of it."

"I already did, mother."

"Oh, thank you. Such a good boy." Heather smiled. Werr didn't, looking down at his work again. Mother never drew anything, she didn't have an art book.

Welk gave Heather a strange look, then turned back to watching the rain. "Yeah, Cynyr's a jerk." he said softly. "I've never heard him laugh or seen him smile." He thought about what he just said and laughed. "Well, I've never seen his face, so I couldn't see him smile anyways!" He sighed, his tail curling carefully around the leg of his chair. "I just know he's never smiled. I can see it in the way the fabric of his mask curves around his mouth. It always curves down and not up."

"Not even when you tell jokes?" Heather blinked. "That's not okay. Everyone should smile sometime. It's unhealthy not to smile."

"Some people are more troubled than others, mother." Werr pointed out.

"That's true, but my point still stands. Does this Cynyr get sick more often than you do? It would make sense." Heather looked towards Welk. "Werr get sick all the time, and that's because he doesn't smile enough."

"Not even when I tell jokes, and I tell a lot of jokes." the blonde Half-cat answered. Welk thought about it for a second, then said "No, he never gets sick. He's never even had a cold, much less anything serious. He's always really careful and cautious with everything he does. Maybe that's why he's such a good student at school..."

He sighed again and flicked his tail around behind him a few times.

"Still, that's a very bad thing. If he doesn't get sick, that just means he'll die sooner!" Heather looked very worried.

"There, there, mother. It's okay." Werr came in and sat down. "Dinner will be done soon. Potato soup, your favorite."

"I thought pork was my favorite."

"Your second favorite, then?"

"What is?" Heather blinked. "Second favorite what?"

"Um...nevermind. Forget it." Werr looked away again, letting out yet another sigh.

"Okay. Werr, why don't you show Welk around the house?" Heather said, smiling again.

"Oh, right." Werr stood. "Come on then, Welk."

"Okay!" Welk said, hopping out of his chair to bounce after Werr. His ears were once again sticking up happily over his head, his anger over Cynyr all but forgotten. He kept looking at everything in the house with an awed look on his face, as if he had never seen a house like this before.

"Your home is so much nicer than ours." he commented. "You should come see our house some time! My room is on the second floor, and it has its own window. I can see really far from it, but I can see farther from Cynyr's. His room is in the little tower part that's attached to the roof. The stairs are really really old, so I usually never go up there. I'm scared the stairs will fall down while I'm going up or something."

Werr smiled at Welk's energy, leading the way into the hallway. "I'd love to see your house sometime, if Cynyr allows it. It looks much bigger than ours. And if you want, I could help repair it a little bit. It's no good to have drafts and the like, especially in the winter." Werr opened the door to his room. It was small with no windows and a stone floor, though that was mostly covered by a large brown rug. There was a little bookshelf next to the bed, and several other stacks of books elsewhere.

"This is my room. If you need something after we've gone to bed, come to me, alright?" Werr nodded, then pointed to the door next to his room. "That's mother's room. Don't go in there, she hates it when people go into her room. But the guest room is here," Werr walked past his mother's room to the door on the other side. It was a bit bigger than Werr's room, with a window facing the hill where Welk's house stood, though the rain made it impossible to see. That, and the dark blue curtain covering the window. There were two beds and a small blue rug, plus spare blankets and sheets in the closet. "Here's where you'll be sleeping. It's not much, but it's enough for a couple nights, at least."

"Woooooow." Welk said when he saw the room. "This is a LOT better than my room! It doesn't have holes in the walls!" He charged forward and jumped onto one of the beds, transforming into a cat in mid-air. He landed on the bed and began rolling around on the covers on his back, thoroughly enjoying himself.

"This is great!" he said happily, disappearing under the covers. His tail stuck out from under the edge of the blanket, flipping and twitching energetically. He took a deep breath, his sensitive nose picking up all the scents of the room. "Ahhh~! It smells clean in here." The lion-sized cat poked his head out from under the covers, his fur sticking in all directions.

"Your house is amazing, Werr!" he said, then pulled his head back in.

Werr laughed at Welk's over-excited-ness. "It's not THAT great, but we should definitely fix the holes in your walls. And yeah, I make sure I keep the rooms clean. I don't like having messes, it makes things horribly...well, horrible. Plus, as my mother already mentioned, I get sick a lot, and it's hard for me to rest when there's a mess to take care of."

Welk's head appeared once again out from under the covers. "You get sick a lot?" he asked, tilting his head to the side. "You need to get out and do stuff! Being active helps keep you healthy."

He wiggled out from under the blanket and trotted over to sit next to Werr. "I spend a lot of time in the woods, but I'm almost always alone. You should come with me when I head out there tomorrow after school!"

"Well, I have to take care of my mother..." Werr said quietly, but he nodded. "Yes, I can come with you after school. Mother usually sleeps until I get home, and then she just sits in her chair anyways, if she's in a good mood. Going out into the woods sounds like fun, though." He smiled. "Oh, do you want to see the library? It's not actually a library, more like...a collection. Come on, I'll show you."

"Awesome! I'll show you all my favorite places!" Welk said, flicking Werr's leg with his tail. Then he paused and his mouth opened slightly. "You have a library too? Wow!" He followed closely behind Werr, still in his cat form, his red eyes bright and lively.

Werr smiled and led the way through the door to the stairwell, down the stairs and into a candle-lit room that was full to bursting of seemingly random objects. There were spinning things and toy boats, bug collections and piles of pressed flowers and leaves, a globe and a shiny white marble balanced ever so carefully on top of a miniature barn complete with little carved animals. "My father was an adventurer, as was his father before him. They all collected things from around the world, no matter where it was from or what it was. This was my father's collection; he spent twelve years traveling around the world before settling down with my mother. She wasn't always like she is now...she started getting like this around the time the world started dying. Almost three years now." Werr sighed, picking up the little wooden pig. "I don't normally come down here, but I thought you might enjoy seeing it."

Welk was beyond words when he set eyes on the items in the room. He slowly transformed up into his human form, his mouth hanging open as he stared around the room at the amazing things around him. "This..." he started, only to trail off.

He walked over to a shelf and gaped at its contents, dumbfounded by the things he was seeing. "Wow." he finally said, looking around the room in awe. He kept his tail curled around his right leg, keeping it away from where it could cause any potential harm by hitting something.

"This...this is amazing!" he said, the corners of his mouth quickly turning up into a smile. "I've never seen stuff like this before in my whole life!" He walked over to a different shelf and carefully ran a clawed finger over a chunk of crystal sitting on it. "Cynyr would love this room. He's always spending time in the school's library, reading books or looking at all of the stuff on the shelves around the room."

He smiled, turning his attention to the miniature barn that Werr was near. He carefully picked up a small horse, studying the wooden animal fascination. "I wonder why the world is dying?" he said, referring to Werr's earlier comment.

Werr blinked. "No one's really sure...but do you remember about two years ago, with the massacre of the magic-users? The kings thought it was because of them that the world was dying. So they hunted the mages and witches and killed them off. It only lasted about a week before the magic-users were all but gone, but the world is still dying, and now this kingdom faces the war..." Werr tutted. "Things look pretty grim, yet here we are, waiting around." He looked around, setting down the wooden pig again and picking up a book to flick through. "I'm glad you like this room, though. Perhaps we should show it to Cynyr tomorrow, before we head out to the forest. We can apologize in that way, perhaps?"

"I remember that." Welk said, putting the wooden horse down. "I'm glad I'm not a mage or a witch, and I'm glad Cynyr isn't one either. Then we would've died along with all of the others that got killed." He sighed, picking up a book and flipping through it. He stared at the words on the page with a frown on his face for several long seconds, and Werr could see his mouth moving silently and slowly as he sounded out some of the words. Finally, the Half-cat put the book back down with a disdainful air. "I'm not apologizing to Cynyr." he said, his ears going down against his head. "He was a jerk, and I didn't do anything wrong. I have no reason to say I'm sorry."

He glared at the book, his tail flicking around behind him.

"Hm," Werr just said, not wanting to touch more on the subject. He used to have several good friends who went off to one of the mage schools that had been completely and utterly destroyed. Which partially explained why he was so alone most of the time. The other part of it was his mother. "You don't have to apologize, no one's going to make you. Perhaps we can just show him to cheer him up?" Werr suggested, flicking through the book. The books down here were adventuring journals, of course.

"You know he won't come in your house." Welk said despondently, picking up a different book and opening it. He frowned at the page, his lips once again moving silently and slowly as he mouthed the words. His frowned deepened after a few tries, and he closed the book and put it down. "If we could get him to come down here, however, he would spend hours in here. He loves stuff like this."

He carefully touched a tiny bird statue that was hanging from the ceiling by a thin wire. He glanced over at Werr, looking the boy up and down once, then said cautiously "So...what are those, uh, books about?" He gestured over at the book he had been holding, a guarded look on his face.