There was a moment of panic, dizziness, and then confusion as she stood there in the office.

It was an unfamiliar office. She didn't even remember walking into it, or how she'd arrived. An indistinct memory that something very urgent and alarming had been happening was there, but already fading away as though she'd just awakened from one of those strange early-morning dreams. She looked around, admiring the place she found herself in.

Every inch of wall was covered with finely-made bookshelves constructed of smooth but undecorated darkly-stained wood. They were filled with neatly arranged…well, she assumed they were books. They were obviously in bookshelves and their outlines were shaped like neatly-arranged codices, but they appeared to be of some impossibly featureless material dyed to such a degree of blackness that the whole room seemed to dim when she tried to look for titles on their spines.

The familiar sound of a quill scratched its way into her hearing and her senses began to pull themselves into awareness around it.

“Right on time, as expected.” the …man?… seated at the desk before her said with precise enunciation. She had never before seen anyone for whom the phrase “sharply dressed” was so appropriate. His suit appeared to be a well-maintained black silk, completely free of wrinkles and fastened in the front with perfectly round obsidian buttons. A clean, smooth white shirt and black tie were visible underneath. His black moustache, beneath a beak-like nose, was long and thin, waxed to points, and a matching pointed goatee poked from his chin. His hair (black, of course) was cut short enough to be slightly spiky, parted exactly down the middle. Even his ears were slightly pointed.

His skin and irises the color of freshly-spilt blood were unexpected, but somehow appropriate.

The codex in which he wrote was bound in black leather - *normal* black leather, she noticed, unlike the books in the shelves. He appeared to have filled the front side of the last page with writing. Before she could see what it said, he turned the page over with the thin, perfectly-manicured fingers of his left hand as he reached to dip the quill once more in the unlabeled inkwell with his right. At the top of the back of the last page, he wrote one word, then drew a signature line beneath. He turned the book around and offered her the quill. “Sign, please.”

Still unsure of where she was or what she was doing, she reached for the quill. Had she somehow suffered an illness just as she was supposed to sign a contract? The top of the page simply had, in neat, legible calligraphy, the word: “Killed.”

This was clearly not a contract she should sign without understanding what it meant.

“Um, I'm sorry, I seem to be a bit indisposed at the moment. Forgive me if this is a silly question, but what exactly am I signing, mister…?”

“I have no name” the man replied. “You were a well-educated woman, surely you realize what is happening here.” He tapped the book, as though it explained everything.

She had noticed the “were”.

“Who are you?”

“I am responsible for this” he said, pointing at the door behind him. It was an expensive looking door, made from the same smooth, darkly-stained wood as the desk and bookshelves. A blank silvered nameplate was attached to it with carefully symmetrically-placed nails. “This is your new…office. Sign please.” he gestured once more at the book.

Clarity arrived.

“Oh. Oh. I've been killed. I'm dead? And you must be the gatekeeper.”

The man gave a small, polite smile and clapped once. “Correct. Well done. If you'll just sign here we can finish up.”

“Wait, no, I can't be dead yet, I must finish the accounts for…” She realized she couldn't remember whose accounts she needed to finish or why they were so important, but that wasn't what interrupted what she was saying. Rather, it was the man's smile growing to a wide, genuine, and somewhat predatory glee.

“Unfinished business? Well, being the educated person you are, I'm sure you must be aware that I am authorized to make…deals.” He pulled open a drawer from the desk and withdrew from it a densely written piece of parchment, turning it so its own signature line was towards her. “If you'll sign *here* perhaps we can come to an arrangement?”

She almost reached out to sign. She still felt there was something important she needed to do, but she couldn't even remember what it was, and she did seem to recall that making deals with the gatekeeper was never expected to turn out well. She shook her head and with a resigned shrug, he put the contract back in the drawer. “Pity. You'd have made a most interesting ghost.” He tapped the signature line in the book once more.

She wrote her name there, and it seemed to leave her mind as it apppeared on the nameplate of the door. The ink had dried immediately as the quill deposited it on the page. The gatekeeper turned the book back around to check the signature, then closed it. She noticed that the spine had a name on it that she knew had been hers, in a silvered ink.

He took the quill politely back from her and set it carefully in its inkwell. He stood and turned to reach for the door.

Then there was a scratching sound behind her, and for just a moment a flash of annoyance leaked through the heretofore perfectly-composed face of the gatekeeper. As he hesitated, she turned around to look.

There was another door there in the wall behind her. This one was plain wood, seemingly in a single large piece from the side of a tree-trunk. The bark was still attached, and it didn't even seem to be flush with the floor. A single bit of remaining tree-branch poked out where a handle ought to be. She thought she could feel a gentle draft from under the gap at the bottom of the door and it smelled of trees and freshly-fallen rain, and a musky scent.

The gatekeeper cleared his throat loudly. As she turned back, she saw him reach for the silvery handle on his door - her door - and pull it open. It swung silently, and behind it was…literally nothing, which somehow seeped slightly a few inches into the room before evaporating.

“This way please.” he said, ignoring the ever more insistent scratching coming from behind her. Logically, she felt she ought to be afraid, but she wasn't. This is just how existence worked, wasn't it? She took a step forward, then stopped as she was startled by the sound of something large and heavy slamming itself into the door behind her, even as the scratching became more frantic and now there seemed to be the sound of agitated birds. The gatekeeper gestured once more with curt insistence towards the gate of Death, but then gave an aggravated snort as the scratching redoubled, and the heavy thudding repeated, again and again. The woodland door shuddered each time, and bits of bark broke loose and fell to the previously immaculate floor. “Excuse me a moment” said the gatekeeper, irritation now firmly imprinted on his face as he closed his door, and stomped across the office to the other one. She stepped back as he grabbed the tree-branch/handle and indignantly flung it wide open.

The other side was like an illustration from a very expensive book of children's stories. An unlikely crowd of woodland creatures stood there in a small meadow. A stag larger than any creature she'd ever seen before stood there, pairs of birds of many different kinds perched in its antlers. The doe beside him was only slightly smaller and would definitely not fit throught the door either. Pairs of various other animals were gathered around them in a group as bees, wasps, dragonflies, and other insects hovered nearby. At the front of this group, a pair of enormous mountain-lions stood, each holding large, limp dead rabbits in their jaws by their necks, which didn't seem to bother the pair of live rabbits sitting nearby. The whole scene behind the door seemed a bit distorted to her, as though viewed through water. As she watched, a pair of trout swam around the stag's head and then turned to float between its antlers, facing the doorway.

The gatekeeper turned his head slightly in her direction. “The nature spirits”, the gatekeeper explained. “I do not normally deal with them here like this.” Then he turned back to glare at them. “Why have you come here now?”

They stared silently at him.

“This is highly irregular.” he said to them, as if participating in a conversation she couldn't hear.

“…”

“Yes, but it is not usual for a spirit to be brought back through the gates of Death without even having actually gone through them first.”

“…”

“I am aware of the precedent, but nonetheless, it is not usual.”

“…”

“I, more than anyone, am aware of the rules, thank you.”

“…”

“Why this one, though? Can't you do this like we always have?”

“…”

“Ah…you noticed that, did you?” He turned for a moment back to her “I suppose it's expected that the nature spirits would have keen senses for that sort of thing” he said to her, as if that would help make any more sense of things. He turned once more back to the mass of creatures who still stood staring silently at him. He sighed. “Fine. Bring the payment in.” he told them, and turned to walk back to his desk. The two mountain-lions came in through the woodland doorway, and padded quietly past her, their shoulders as high as hers even though they walked on all fours. The gatekeeper opened another drawer and took out a fresh black-leather codex, its cover and spine completely unmarked. “No, not on the desk, please”, he said to the mountain-lions who appeared to be trying to drop the dead rabbits there. “Put them on the floor next to it.” As they did so, the gatekeeper opened the book to the first page, which was blank. He took up the quill and wrote a few neat sentences at the top, then drew a line at the bottom. He turned the book towards his feline visitors, who just stared at it. The gatekeeper sighed, rolling his eyes a bit.

“You see, if you'd done this properly we wouldn't be having this problem, would we.”

From yet another drawer he extracted an inkblotter, which he poured a bit of ink on. He lifted a forepaw of a mountain-lion and pressed the blotter to it, and then did the same for the other, and they both pressed their paws to the page. The gatekeeper turned the book back to examine these “signatures” and then, satisfied, he closed the book. She noticed there was now a small silver pawprint on the spine.

“They'll take you to where you're supposed to be.” he told her. “Don't worry, your office will still be here when you return.” She noticed the nameplate on the door was blank again.

“I don't understand,” she said to him, “what am I doing now?”

“Go.” he said, rising and walking back across the office to the woodland door, where the assembled creatures on the other side appeared to have stepped aside to make a path. The two mountain-lions followed, then stopped at the doorway to look expectantly at her.

She stared back, still not understanding.

“Go.” the gatekeeper repeated, gesturing at the open woodland door. “Go live. Hopefully next time things will proceed more normally.”

The mountain-lions led her through the door and she followed. She heard the door shut behind her. When she turned back it was gone and there was only forest. She followed the two mountain-lions through the silently watching assembled animals to the middle of the meadow where she found the ghostly shape of a third mountain-lion resting on the ground, belly full and swollen. The ones who had led her sat on either side, and stared at her.

“Is…is she okay? Is she sick? I don't know much about medicine, I mostly just do numbers and logic. What do you want me to do?”

Still they stared at her. One of them pawed gently at the ghostly form, but didn't look away from her.

She stepped closer and leaned over to get a better look, but when she did so, the massive nose of the stag shoved into her back, and she stumbled and fell onto…and then into…the ghostly mountain lion.

And then, in a small secluded cave at the nightward edge of the Brightly Woods, a cub was born.

—

Guidance from her mother and 3 years of practice had made her a skilled, successful hunter. She had her own territory now, way over on the morning side of the woods, near the two-legged predators that competed with her for deer. The others instinctively avoided them, but she felt comfortable around them. Although she stayed out of their way out of entirely reasonable caution, they seemed somehow familiar, and after they took down a deer with those peculiar fangbirds they brought with them and eviscerated them with the single massive claw they had, they usually left the tasty entrails behind as they took the carcass off to their own territory.

She dreamed of it now, sleeping in the branches of an old oak tree.

A stag stepped out from among the trees. As large as it was, it should have made some sound as it did, but it didn't. Also, no stag should have been tall enough to sniff at her face as she slept up there in that tree, but it did. She inhaled its scent, and her paws twitched eagerly as she dreamed of leaping upon the neck of the tastiest deer in the world. The stag watched for a while and then gently touched its nose to hers. Her eyes snapped open immediately at the touch, and she reflexively leapt back against the truck of the tree, hissing. “What do you think you're doing?!?” she thought at it, but the stag just snorted, and he turned and bounded away in the direction of two-leg territory, seeming to shrink back to normal size and then fade away.

“What was that all about?”, she thought.

“What's this all about?”

“'Words'. These are words. Those sounds I've had in my memory all my life, those are words. How do I even know what words are?”

As she considered the concept of “words”, she looked at her forepaws, for a moment expecting them to be those spidery-looking “hand” things those two-legs…people. People have. “How am I supposed to fill out a ledger with these?” Wait, she was “people”, wasn't she?

Her head buzzed manically for some time as memories of concepts connected to each other, then reached down into her subconscious to pull still more concepts and memories to the surface.

She didn't know who she was or what was happening, and there seemed to be a lot of memory missing, but she remembered experiences that were no part of her life in the forest. Now that she could introspect…that's a funny word, “introspect”, that's the sort of word you don't really know unless you've had lots of experience with words…she remembered reading, and writing. She felt that at some time she must have done a lot of both. She remembered part of a territory, people territory, but she'd never gone into any place of…civilization…in her entire life.

“What…who am I?” she tried to say, but all that came out was a quizzical feline noise.

“Something screwy is happening here” she thought. “I'm going to need some help to figure this out.”

That unnatural stag that had awakened her - he had run off towards the people-territory…village…that's a logical first place to enquire. She leapt down from her perch and padded off in that direction.

“I wonder if they have any books? I haven't even seen a book in….well, I literally do not know how long.”