The Jaguar Woman, preparing to end her exile, went through the mirror, refracting her beautiful cat body into many bodies, myriad reflections and shadows that escaped from the mirror and went off in different directions, into other stories.
Then Jaguar Woman went forward into her own story. She crossed the overgrown island where for some years she had roamed content, fighting and sleeping and hunting and stretching as a cat with no concern for her womanhood.
At the shore, in a small village where the people superstitiously ignored her, she stole aboard a boat headed back to her homeland. She’d been driven out of her home by a band of men from the north, escaping as a cat while they looted her living space and took power over her people.
Now something, maybe a shift in the wind or an alignment of stars, called her back.
The boat came into port, and her first ally, the woman of the Air, stood at the dock waiting for her, blonde hair flowing over a simple cloak. She led Jaguar Woman to the well of mystery in the woods, where she drank deeply and transformed into a woman again, her breasts and belly, all her woman parts, covered with soft fur and still showing the tell-tale spots of a jaguar.
The Air Woman offered her a cloak like her own and together they traveled to awaken the other Allies, frozen in time when the Jaguar Woman left her land. First they waked Fire, then Water. As the four approached Earth, the Jaguar Woman saw that her Earth ally had been infected with a terrible curse, a dark magic that would cause anyone who touched her to sicken.
Because it was part of the story, Jaguar Woman reached out to the fourth ally and awakened her, releasing the curse. Together, they all began the long journey up the mountain toward the city. First Earth woman herself crumbled and fell into the ferns at the base of the trees, like compost returning to soil. Water woman grew weaker and weaker, until she slipped from the path, tumbling over a cliff into a river twinkling far below. Then Fire woman went under, her body burning with fever and falling to bits like a leper. Air woman, gasping for breath and shuddering against the slightest breezes, was the only one to come into the city with Jaguar Woman, who had sickened herself and was buried so deeply in her cloak no one could see her.
They returned to the fortress at the center of the city, where a few people sat listlessly in the hot sun, playing cards and drinking cheap beer.
“your Jaguar Woman has returned,” the air woman told the people, “but she is ill. Now is the time to make offerings to her.”
“you’ll have to talk to erik about that,’ someone said, gesturing toward a large man at a rowdy table near the center. “he’s in charge here now.”
Approaching erik, the air woman told him it was time to make offerings to the jaguar woman, the witch-queen of the city who had returned to her home,
“I’m the king here,” he scoffed. “I took this city from her years ago. How dare she show her face around here?”
He gestured crudely at the cloak.
“You have only a short time to leave here before she becomes angry,” the air woman said in a tight, controlled voice.
“I bet you don’t even have a witch-queen under that cloak,” Erik laughed. The air woman was entirely supporting the jaguar woman now, and her body seemd to have shrunken so that she was no more than a bundle in the other woman’s arms.
Air woman laid the bundle at erik’s feet and opened it up, Inside, they could see that Jaguar Woman had taken in the curse that had slain her allies, and instead of growing sicker and sicker, she was growing younger and younger. She had become a tiny babe, and was still regressing. At the moment of birth, she would be reborn into her full power, and her wrath on those who had hurt her people would be terrible.