'kittens'. They snuck back in overnight.

They're all startled at being woken; there will definitely be some flailing.

That's okay, cats kittens need a lot of sleep. They'll be able to go back to sleep soon, but she's going hunting and wanted them to know she was leaving in a controlled and sensible manner. Soon, she will be back with food for kittens!  

All right then.

So they're going to go dig a den of their own somewhere else now, right?

Actually Denice is thinking they might stay? It's warm here, and she half expects the monster to bring them breakfast. And they'll be in much better shape to go explore once they all have their winter coats in.

It did get pretty cold last night before they were sure enough the monster was asleep to come back.

That's... true... but she's still pretty nervous about it.

How about if Denice digs them a little bolthole in the back of the den, so if something happens they have a place to go where the monster can't get them.

Yeah, that'll help.

She'll do that, then, and if there's still time before the monster gets back she'll poke through the bones and see if she can figure out what that red light is.

Was it mentioned that for some reason digging is really easy? It continues to be really easy, and she has a den dug out in no time at all. 

The remains include parts of the possessions of at least three humans, who appear to have been armed to the teeth in classic medival style. As well as the source of the glow (a helmet with a lamp-light on the front, somehow flickering with a red-gold flame both heatless and sourceless.), and many things rendered unrecognisable by time and rot, she finds several swords, an axe, most of what was once a chain shirt now blackened with dried blood, several purses full of what look to be solid gold coins, and a broken-open backpack full of books and glass vials full of strange herbs and tinctures. 

She doesn't recognize most of the gear right away - she's seen swords in cartoons, but not often, and coins even less - but the books are interesting. She listens for the monster coming up the tunnel to make sure she won't be caught, and shifts to her human form for a moment to prop one up against the cave wall and put the light nearby, then back to cat form before looking to see if it's readable.

Scholars have theorised many reasons for the inexplicable ability of the monsters from beyond the bounds of the universe - Ninnuani Lords, Ghenenan warbands and more unique and strange things besides to comprehend and speak arbitrary languages, often thinking it innnate to those lofty beings as it is innate to angels and thier ilk. In fact, the answer is well, albiet inaccessibly, documented in the Library of All Things, which weilds its divine domain over language to ensure that offworld visitors are able to communicate productively.  

Denice knows none of this, of course. To her, it is simply the case that the book, despite being written in the secret script of the druids, is entirely readable, and so are the other three books, despite each being in a different language. 

One is titled "Druidcraft in Our Age". Another is titled "Alchemist's Herbarium of the Northwestern Surface". The third "Living Among Beekeepers" and appears to be a travelouge of sorts. The final book is a slim, relatively speaking, volume, made from rag paper rather than parchment, titled "Commercial Success as a Woodswitch".

Denice didn't check the books' titles, just grabbed the first one that came to hand; luckily, it's the druidcraft one. She settles in to read.

The book has a brief but awkward opening where the author summarises their reasons for writing the book - apparently the organisation they were in has dissolved into many smaller local groups and they wanted to ensure that these group retained proper access to their full body of technical knowledge (and implicitly, to cleave to the author's prefered flavour of post-schism heterodoxy).

After that, it gets into the real meat of the book: the magic. The book describes a series of excercises and meditations designed to alter the soul in such a way as to enable the user to percieve and alter the fabric of nature in ways beneficial to them, resulting in the ability to cast a handful of spells whose number and strength will increase as the practitioner follows the guides and "strengthens thier soul by the usual means". What the usual means are, exactly, are taken for granted, but they are implied to be dangerous. 

(It also contains an extensive glossary at the back with the index, if such is needed despite the translation magic, as might be the case for some technical terms not otherwise described in the text.) 

She looks through the spells, and - oh, oh yeah, they sound very useful.

Anything stopping her from trying the exercises in cat form?

An important part of the exercises is mapping the new soul-capabilities to physical actions and words, so that you can actually invoke them without sitting down and taking ten minutes to an hour of meditation to plunge back into your soul. This process seems to be a mix of designating psychosomatic triggers for spiritual actions, designating places to grow new (spiritual, not physical) organs, and enforcement of practical considerations like "if you want conjure a hurlable ball of fire to hurl it at people, you want to make sure the fire arrives already in your hands and not, say, down the back of your shirt". Constructing an alternative mapping doesn't seem to be impossible; the book contains off-hand advice for several situations including having a non-standard number of arms (more or less), being a horse with wings, or being a giant wolf, though none for if you are a housecat. Developing a suitable mapping seems like it would be the work of months, added onto a project which looks like it will take at least a year of part-time work. If she's canny and doesn't have anything better to do with her time, she might even be able to get it done inbetween mediation.

It's magic, she'll make time, not that she expects it to be very hard to. Which is good - she doesn't just need to figure out a mapping for a housecat body, she needs to figure out one for three, with her familiars. At least the wolf mapping gives her a starting point.

No time like the present to get started; her familiars will alert her when the monster is on her way back, she's sure.

One soul in three housecats is hardly the weirdest form of life that's tried and succeeded at learning druidcraft, in the history of the world. It certainly seems possible.  

It is only a few hours until the monster returns, carrying with her a pair of snow-hares, quite dead. 

Her familiars do indeed alert her when they hear the monster coming up the tunnel, and by the time she gets to the den the three of them are lying together in the nest, watching alertly, the larger two slightly fluffed up with anxiety.

One of the snow-hares, bigger and fatter than they are, will be dropped in front of them, that's their share. She will eat the other, checking back on them to make sure they understand how to eat properly with her example, if for whatever reason whoever was looking after them before didn't cover that. (They seem to have been bad at their job, which is why it's her job now.)

They aren't used to prey with fur this thick, but they can figure it out, probably.

Right! Then it's time for more sleeping, because sleeping is good and also, it's late winter. The hunting will be better soon enough. Then the kittens can grow big and strong?