The air shimmers, almost sparkles, a gentle purr fades to nought. Perception grows hazy, nights black seeps away to the blue twilight before dawn, the great cat seeming to blur, draw thin and fade; ocean’s blue ebbs from the whitest of sand; drawing tall and erect, as vision gains focus, the shifter now stands.
With hair of jet and milk white of skin, slight, delicate, androgynous; the figure returns your gaze with a dark, elfin like eye: a hand rises to touch a still feline-like ear.
In an instant the ear ‘shifts’ to true form, the figure grunts, turns and slinks to a seat by the fire, behind a tail of fine sable flicks and twitches in ire.
*** MEMORY ***
Memory, such a fragile thing, so easily damaged, broken, or lost .....
In the beginning there was Darkness, a time of security and ease, when all the world was a thing undreamt of; a place a thousand lives ago, a place without pain.
Then the Darkness stirred, squeezed, ruptured and Light was born; bright, golden, beguiling; enticing and warm.
Lhiandar frolicked and played, long and carefree, the days without end, racing ahead of the others: darting, weaving, flitting and diving: as at home upon the ground or high in the trees.
Always the fleetest, the most precocious, daring and elusive Lhiandar would lead his friends far a field to new places of excitement and adventure; hiding to leap out at them as they toiled to keep up.
Until that one day when they never did catch up.
The air shimmers, almost sparkles, a gentle purr fades to nought. Perception grows hazy, nights black seeps away to the blue twilight before dawn, the great cat seeming to blur, draw thin and fade; ocean’s blue ebbs from the whitest of sand; drawing tall and erect, as vision gains focus, the shifter now stands. 
