In Search of Cat Island: a feline adventure story
All the world’s milk has soured, laps have disappeared, the dogs of war — unleashed. Foretold in the ancient Chronicles of Ulthar, the Day of Feline reckoning has come.
A small gang of survivors band together on a perilous journey to escape the city, where already thousands of their kin have been killed: strung-up to lamp-posts and cast into fires that burn through the night by militias of cat-hating humans.
Leaving behind this place of horror — and the tender memories of what it once was — their only hope to make it to the ocean and sail to the mysterious Aoshima, a special cat island rumoured to be somewhere off the coast of Japan, according to a famous cat explorer who found it with an owl, over a hundred years ago.
But first they must cross through the dreaded Valley of Yarn, which threatens to tempt them into an eternal distraction, trapped in an endless game of chase the string . . . the path then rising up into the Raven Mountains, home of giant black birds that will swoop down and try to carry them off back to the nest to feed ravenous bear-sized hatchlings.
If they are lucky to escape this, they might then come across the Cave of Thousand-year Naps, where the warmth radiating is enough to lull them into a slumber they cannot rise from. They will lose a few of their best here.
Finally, they will reach the River of Despair, a river the width of four olympic-sized swimming pools, dark and deep, the icy water made up of melted snow from the mountains.
Using their combined cat intelligence, they must find a way to cross this, before finally reaching the coast . . .