05/12/2025
Some cats wait not for affection—but for warmth rising from a cooling heart.
In the Scottish Highlands, they whisper of the Cat-Sìth: a great black fairy-cat, big as a hound, with a white blaze on its chest and paws soft enough to sneak between worlds. Folklore casts it in shadow—an omen, a thief of dying souls—but the stories closer to the peat hearths tell something softer, stranger. They say the Cat-Sìth only appears when a death is unattended, when the vigil breaks, when grief or fear sends a family from the bedside too soon. In those hollow hours, the creature pads in, curls its vast shadow around the cooling body, and lowers its head as if listening for a fading whisper. Whether it takes the soul or simply keeps it company depends on who you ask. Some say it steals. Others say it spares the newly dead from loneliness.
One tale tells of a shepherd’s daughter who kept vigil alone—night after night—refusing to leave her father’s side even as winter clawed at the shutters. The Cat-Sìth came, watched her, and in some old versions, touched her hair with a paw before vanishing into the frost. When dawn came, her father’s passing was gentle. No terror. No shadow stolen. The Highland folk still light candles in three-day vigils, not only to guard a spirit, but to honor the one who comes when mortals falter—a creature feared, misunderstood, yet bound to the threshold between the last breath and the first silence.
Snowlight, candle-gold, and a guardian too ancient for simple judgment.
