Soleo

The Soleo is a great cat that seems to have swallowed a lantern. Its fur glows from beneath, the way coals glow behind a grate, and its mane is not so much hair as a slow, rippling fire of pale gold light. I first saw one at dusk, padding along a ridge above the dunes, and for a long moment I honestly believed the sun had forgotten to set and was instead going for a walk.

They favor sunlit ridges and the edges of the great desert dunes, and they are, above all, creatures of routine. Every Soleo I have watched climbs to a high point before dawn and sits facing east. When the first light breaks, it closes its eyes and its whole coat brightens, as if drinking. I have made a point of sitting beside them on these occasions. The view is lovely, though I have yet to brighten.

The Mystery of the “Cold Footprints”

The Soleo is known for leaving glowing footprints behind it, and indeed it does. What puzzles me is that these prints are cold. I knelt and pressed my palm into one, expecting the warmth of a hearthstone, and found it as chilly as river water, glowing all the while. They fade after an hour or so, always in the order they were made.

A Hesskari caravan master, who keeps two Soleo to guard her wagons by night, told me the warmth goes into the cat, not out of it; the footprint is the light it could spare. A Centaur elder of a dune clan had a grander answer. She said the prints are not left by the Soleo at all, but by the first dawn, which still walks behind every Soleo like a shadow walks behind us, only made of light. I asked how one might test this. She told me some things are not for testing, and that humans always ask that question.

On the Matter of Bonding

You cannot bond with a Soleo in the dark. I mean this literally; every account I have gathered agrees that the first meeting must happen at sunrise. The Hesskari do it with their summoning mirrors, catching the first ray of the morning and flashing it toward the cat. If the Soleo walks into the reflected light and sits, it has accepted you. If it walks around it, you will need a different morning, and possibly a different mirror.

I am told the Soleo looks for a steady heart in a hard season. They are drawn to healers, nurses, people who keep going when things are dim. The caravan master told me hers first came to her the winter after a fever took half her crew. She had been sitting by the wagons every dawn, unable to sleep. The cat simply lay down against her back one morning and did not leave. “It is a strange thing,” she said, “to be chosen for being sad. But it did not choose me for being sad. It chose me for still watching the sunrise.”