Aldera (Cat, years before the Causeway)

Aldera had catalogued Elvira's tells for months without a name for any of them — the sundial, the east wall, the old well — and had assumed, the way a young animal assumes most things, that the list was complete. It was not complete. The abbey gate added a new entry before Elvira had even lifted her hand to knock.

The sound did not arrive the way sounds usually did, through the ears and then the rest of her. It arrived through the ground first, up through the paws that weren't touching it and the arm that was, and by the time it reached whatever part of her did the actual hearing, it had already rearranged something. She went still because stillness was the only response left available to her. Every other instinct — bolt, hiss, climb — required a body she could feel herself standing inside of, and for as long as that frequency lasted, she could not.

When it passed, and it did pass, she found she had bitten down on nothing, hard enough to ache. Elvira's grip on her had tightened without either of them deciding it should. Neither said anything about it. Aldera filed it away regardless, the same way she had filed the sundial and the east wall — not yet knowing what she was building toward, only that the list was still not complete, and that whatever lived under this particular gate was worth remembering the next time they came back.