Medieval Scriptorium

When Index opened her eyes, the cushion had vanished.

In its place: a long wooden bench, faintly warm from where a monk had recently sat, and the unmistakable scent of… ink?

The air was thick with it. Ink, dust, beeswax polish, and something faintly herbal—lavender, perhaps. She blinked slowly. The room was brightly lit with candles and alive with motion: scratch-scratch-scratch went the quills; shuffle-shuffle went the sandals of hooded humans bent over heavy parchment. It was quiet, but not still.

A medieval scriptorium. She’d landed in a monastery.

Index let out a sharp prrrp and flicked her tail. She had to make her presence known, after all.

A novice monk, barely more than a boy, looked up and gasped.

“Brother Æthelric,” he whispered, “A cat!”

Index yawned in response.

Unbothered, she leapt gracefully onto the nearest desk. The scribe flinched as her tail brushed the edge of his illumination-in-progress. She stared down at it: a gleaming gold initial, a curling vine, and what was supposed to be a cat. It had five legs and a face like a lopsided turnip.

She squinted. Then, with a deep sigh from the soul of all felines, she sat directly on it and began to lick her paw. It had been roughly ten minutes since her last ablutions, after all.

Once her fur was in exactly the right place, it was time to explore.

Index jumped from her perch to another table. As she did, the young monk leapt forward—narrowly catching a pot of blue ink, painstakingly made from crushed lapis lazuli. Index, unaware of how valuable this ink was (or how much it cost to import from Afghanistan), continued her mission to find a sunbeam worth her time.

A few paw prints on vellum later, and she had found it: a warm windowsill with a near-by monk to provide head scratches.

Index curled her tail around her body and settled in, content in the knowledge that she was, once again, the main character in everyone else’s story.

“Perhaps she’ll keep the mice at bay,” remarked one monk—who, incidentally, bore a striking resemblance to Index’s own human, Leopold.

Meanwhile, another monk quietly sealed two vellum pages together, forever preserving Index’s tiny footprints through time.

🐾 Fun Fact! 🐾

Medieval manuscripts have been found with cats’ paw prints pressed between pages. In some cases, the vellum was sealed together for centuries—only to reveal tiny feline intrusions when separated. A most enduring kind of editorial input.