2025 Apr 20: Cats

 Besides keeping grain stores free from mice, cats serve a second, arguably just as important purpose. Cats glow in proximity to curses. Different cats detect different types of curses, and some cats glow with different colors for different kinds of curses. Some sorcerers have dedicated their lives to extensive breeding programs with the aim of producing a cat that glows when exposed to any kind of curse, but these efforts have so far been in vain.

Because of this cats have an association with sorcerers, priests, and other scholars of the magic arts, and if someone asks a temple to lift a curse, the first step often involves exposing the cursed place, individual, or object to the temple's collection of cats to try to determine which kind of curse the priests are dealing with. 

While most cats only react to one or two common types of curses, almost all of them react to the rare hex that sometimes fills the air around the dwellings of the Metal Men, which causes the affected to feel nauseous, lose their hair, and finally die in horrific agony. 

Image by Di (they-them), CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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