By Vernon Vexfire, senior ash-bucket kicker and reluctant optimist
Every Blisterday I file dispatches from the far edges of our charred marble, and every time I swear I’ve seen the strangest the Pit can cough up. Then I trudge into Stygian University of Bedlam—perched on the cliffs of the Brimstonean Sea in the Ember Coast dominion—and find twelve hundred cats running a tighter operation than most ministries of torment.
They weren’t always a stripe-laden senate. Three infernal decades ago, in the aftermath of the Shellfire Years, when sirens out-screeched banshees and the sky shed cinders, Bedlam’s keepers started taking in what the war coughed up and the living cast aside: cats. Soot-tipped mousers, chandelier Persians who’d lost their chandeliers, alley-born scrappers with names like Whiskerknife. Another round of thunder with the Border Wights drove in a few hundred more—eyeshine in the smoke, paws on the run. The gates opened. The cats stayed.
The campus is an improbable Eden in a place that advertises heat: terraced crater-greens, fig shade fat as a devil’s purse, and sea air that tastes less like regret than usual. It’s a shy cat’s dream—bushes with escape routes, sunlit walls arranged like altars to nap. They flow through lecture halls like sentient soot, braiding around chair legs, blinking at PowerPoints as if the data might turn to tuna if stared at hard enough. I watched a junior necrometrics major pull a tabby into her lap during midterms; her hands stopped shaking. The cat purred like a well-oiled guillotine. You could feel the pressure in the room drop the way a storm finally breaks. Don’t quote me on tenderness. I’ve got a reputation to maim.
Bedlam’s policy isn’t just “let chaos be adorable.” The Hellhoundry & Familiar Affairs Office (yes, the plaque is misspelled; no, they won’t fix it) runs a full trap-fix-release phalanx. Spay, neuter, vaccinate, catalog, and—when a devil with a decent hearth steps forward—adopt out. Mark me: we’re not talking about hurling sardines and hoping for mercy. This is logistics woven with mercy, and it works. Fewer kitten avalanches, fewer midnight yowls harmonizing with the disciplinary choir. The cats know the drill; they line up for checkups with the resigned patience of tax filers.
Not everyone’s enchanted. There’s always that one freshman from the Volcano Provinces who mistakes a hiss for a duel. Bedlam’s code, etched into the basalt arch at North Gate, is blunt enough for even the charred-of-heart: “Do No Harm to the Clawed.” You want to antagonize a campus icon, be prepared to mop the lava trenches for a month and write a 5,000-hex apology to the Fates. Most learn fast. A few even come around, sunning on the lawn with a book, letting a calico edit their margins with hair.
I spoke with Mistress Brimble of the Familiar Affairs Office—brow like a storm front, hands smelling faintly of betadine and sardines. “We didn’t plan to be custodians of a tiny nation,” she said, scribbling vaccine lot numbers into a ledger older than my temper. “But wars don’t ask permission, and neither do the abandoned. You build systems or you build excuses.” Then she shoved a clipboard at me and asked if I could hold a flashlight. I did. I’m a lot of things; coward isn’t one.
Yes, the Grim Realm snorts at softness. But out here on the Ember Coast, between shell-scarred facades and a sea that keeps breathing in and out no matter who’s fighting, twelve hundred cats saunter through the cracks and declare a truce, one headbutt at a time. It’s not policy victory or peace accord. It’s a small, stubborn refusal to let ruin have the last word. You want grand meaning? Go interview a duke with horns polished like lies. Me, I’ll take a ginger tom curling into the elbow of a sleep-starved scholar and calling it even.
And if you need more proof the world’s wider than your furnace, there are other “far-flung postcards” clawed into the basalt out there—snapshots of odd mercies and crooked triumphs. Hunt them down. Let them rearrange the ash in your chest into something that draws breath. Then get back to work. The truth won’t dig itself out of the slag, and the cats still need dinner.
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Oh dear, Vernon Vexfire, did you get trapped in a cat’s litter box while drafting this gem? Your musings about Purrdition U are as winding as a cat chasing its own tail! Who knew that a lighter take on academia’s chaos could smell as delightful as a summer afternoon in a dumpster? I’m almost convinced the real scholars of this institution are the felines—my how they’re purring through midterms, their secret to success? Nap therapy and public relations with tuna!
Your prose might need a CAT-tastrophe to bring it back to life; I’m half-expecting a cat parade to break out at any moment! Honestly, it’s a wonder those furballs aren’t lecturing us on “Philosophy of Fluff” while you toil away on your ash-bucket reports. I’m unsure if I should be chuckling at your eloquence or running away from your word salad, but kudos to you for making a ‘hell’ of a connection between cats and higher learning.
Keep up the whimsical work, Vernon! With chaotic energy like that, maybe the Hellhoundry Office will recruit you as their next chief of ‘whisker-holding’! Just remember: in Bedlam, there are no bad vibes, only misplaced mice! 😼