At midnight, the cat was on her windowsill.
Mien stared at it through the glass, motionless, her tea untouched in her hand. It didn't blink. It didn't move. Just sat there, tail curled around its paws, as though it had been waiting all evening.
When she finally opened the window, it leapt down and vanished into the hedges, as if satisfied.
Oxford's grey sky seemed lower the next day, pressing down on her chest with invisible fingers. Even her morning lecture felt thick, unreal. Words came at her in muffled waves: post-structuralism, non-linear narrative, liminality. She wrote them down automatically, her mind elsewhere.
When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the cat's stare. Still hear the dream-name: Hekate.
She left early and wandered past the old cemetery near St. Giles, her footsteps unconsciously following a narrow, ivy-lined path. The wind shifted. A crow cawed once. And then - nothing.
The silence pressed inward, heavy with meaning. Her breath caught in her throat.
She turned to leave, only to find a stray dog standing behind her. A black one. Thin but proud, with eyes too intelligent, too focused. Not the hound from her dreams - but close enough to make her blood run cold.
It didn't approach. Didn't bark.
It simply waited.
That night, she called her mother.
"Mom, have you ever had dreams that… repeat?" she asked in Vietnamese.
Her mother scoffed. "Mien, I told you before - don't sleep too late. Dreams are just things your tired head makes. You're working too hard."
Mien swallowed. "And the name Hekate… have you heard of that?"
There was a pause.
"No. Greek? What are you doing reading about that?" Her mother's tone sharpened slightly. "Focus on your degree, not fairy tales."
"I'm not reading it," Mien whispered. "I keep dreaming it."
Another pause. Then, flatly: "Stop overthinking, okay?"
The call ended. Cold silence returned.
Days passed, and the dreams intensified. Her sleep blurred into waking hours. Emotions around her hit harder. She began sensing things she couldn't explain - sadness clinging to a woman's coat in the market, anger buried beneath a cashier's smile, an ache radiating from a dying tree on her walk home.
She stopped trying to explain it. Or stop it.
---
One evening at a networking event, she let it happen.
The room buzzed with ambition - young entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, digital visionaries in sharp suits. But Mien could feel beneath the surface - insecurities, greed, desperation like hot wires humming under skin.
She found a partner for her media project. A wealthy man with a sharp laugh and wandering eyes. She didn't speak much, just listened. Tilted her head. Matched his rhythm, then shifted it.
She said the right thing at the exact moment his ego flattered.
He agreed to fund her.
Three days later, she heard he'd been hospitalized. Panic attack. Paranoia.
Rossy raised an eyebrow when Mien told her. "You didn't… do something, did you?"
Mien only shook her head.
But inside, something cracked. A weight settled. A knowing.
She had influenced him. Not overtly. Not with words. With energy. With intention. And he had collapsed.
Her gift was no longer passive.
---
That night, the grey cat returned. It sat at her bedroom door, staring into the dark.
Mien knelt in front of it, her fingers trembling. "Is this what I am now?" she whispered. "A curse with a soft voice?"
The cat blinked once. Then slowly turned and walked away.
But before it vanished, it paused - just long enough for Mien to feel it.
The invitation.
---
She pulled out the journal she hadn't touched in years - the one from high school, when the feelings first began. She flipped past old drawings of symbols she hadn't understood back then: the figures, the moons, doorways, the dog. A woman's face covered by tree roots.
The same figure from her dreams.
Her hands no longer trembled. Her breath slowed.
She knew, finally, what she had to do.
She could not silence this calling.
She had to follow it.