Ceridwen

Ceridwen is large brown classic tabby with yellow-green eyes and a rusty cast to her coat. She primarily has the brown coloring and classic tabby pattern of her father Pendragon, but there a rusty cast to her coat that hints at her mother Valiant’s reddish fur. Her base fur is a light brown-beige color and her stripes are a darker brown. Her fur is short, and she has a tall and slender form.

She is microchipped and wears a woad blue collar with a thin gold flourishing pattern and silver bell. The collar is breakaway style and it also has a rose gold tag with her name and her human’s information on it. It can also have a small bright blue holder on it to fit a tracking device.

The markings on Ceridwen’s body start as neat, thin stripes at her head, face, and chest, then they flow down the top and sides of her body into swirly ripples of darker fur. Her legs have broad stripes that descend to the start of her paws, and her tail has bands of dark fur that end in an equally dark tip. The underside of her paws is the same shade of brown as her dark stripes, but her paw-pads look a bit lighter. Her nose-pad is a dull brownish-pink color.

Her eyes are ringed with lighter brown fur, but have a lining of dark coloring that extends down the sides of her nose. Whiter fur is present on Ceridwen’s chin and muzzle, but her whiskers are planted in the same lighter fur that surrounds her eyes. This coloring continues down her underside. A few thin reddish-brown stripes decorate the very top of her chest, followed by a bigger stripe that matches the rest of her markings. The rusty cast to Ceridwen’s fur is more noticeable on her belly, past the bulk of her wavy patterning.

When she was young, Ceridwen strove to be wise, virtuous, and fair. She wanted to be befitting of her idea of the noble ladies in her father’s stories, as well as be a worthy member of Camelot’s royal family. She didn’t expect to inherit the throne, but she wanted to learn to be a good ruler. Once away from the kingdom, it took her a long time to untangle those ideals from the expectations she had placed on herself.

Ceridwen still remembers everything she was taught as a princess, if only because she spent too much time memorizing it to forget. Ceridwen remains mindful of how she acts around strangers. She tries to look elegant and dignified during such times. If she becomes displeased or angry, she tries to wait until she is out of the sight of others to let her full feelings be known. She spent much time practicing the concealment of her emotions so that she could appear unbiased.

Ceridwen also spends a good deal of her time thinking. Years of living with various cats of various backgrounds left her with a wealth of random knowledge. She still loves to learn, but her mind can be uncooperative if she can’t find immediate interest in the subject. A draining inner conflict develops between her unintended lack of focus and her desire for knowledge and success, and she finds it difficult to pay attention.

In attempt to counter this inattentiveness, she may try to make the boring information more interesting and relevant to her life. Whether she succeeds or not, Ceridwen must devote much more time and energy to learning dull things than she must for interesting ones. When she was younger, Ceridwen would always try to appear focused and learning easily. Anxiety and stress were always things to suppress, but now she knows she could just remain unbothered.

Ceridwen believes she’s much more at ease now than when she was a kit. She still has a need to feel and be seen as intelligent, but she’s learned that she doesn’t need to instantly know everything all at once. Ceridwen still takes her time with things to make sure that she’s done them well and correctly, and she still uses routines to combat potential carelessness through inattention. She does not like it when her routines, as few as they now are, get thrown off.

Ceridwen was born in Whitehart on the 16th of December to King Pendragon I and Queen Valiant of Camelot, making her a princess by birth. Ceridwen was the sixth and youngest kitten of Camelot’s first royal litter. She was born after three brothers (Arthur, Gareth, and Cearnaigh) and two sisters (Kelia and Cora). Cora, her second eldest sister, died a few days after birth. Ceridwen spent her first months watching her elders and learning to be royalty. When her father announced the betrothal of Ceridwen’s sister Kelia to Lord Aslan, Ceridwen became very apprehensive about her future.

As fate would have it, she need not have worried. Rather than stay in the kingdom, she was adopted into a new family of humans and moved far away from Whitehart. A few of them called her Carrie instead of Ceridwen. Once away from Camelot, Ceridwen felt free, but that freedom also scared her. Without structure, what could she do? How would she grow up well? At first, she also wasn’t certain if royal responsibilities ended at the kingdom’s borders. What if an envoy visited?

Ceridwen continued to introduce and conduct herself as a princess for some time. When she told others of Camelot, some found it interesting but foreign. Ceridwen soon learned that Pendragon’s kingdom was not the norm for housecats in her new town. Instead, they did as they pleased. Structure or lack thereof would be hers to cultivate, or she could ask someone to do it for her.

Ceridwen finally felt comfortable and she enjoyed it when cats called her Carrie. Ceridwen had different housemates and friends throughout the years to learn from. The most notable were Alda and Tinunil, who had lived at the house for the longest and second longest amount of time. Alda was Tinunil’s godmother and had been a close friend of his parents.

Being around all of these cats was like having many tutors at once, but the main risk in failing new studies was only personal dissatisfaction. She could study whatever she pleased, even things forbidden in Camelot. Alda taught Ceridwen witchcraft and, although Ceridwen didn’t call herself a witch, Alda recognized her as such. Tinunil taught her about stars and became the father of Ceridwen’s kits.

Their son Idris was the only one of their kits who ended up staying with them. Idris would go on to have his own kits and one of them, Morgan, would also remain at their house. There was also Kathani, Morgan’s mother, and briefly, Azem and Kiran, Kathani’s parents. Azem was also descended from Azim of Toujours Nuit, the brother of Seraphina, who had been a dame of Camelot. Ceridwen didn’t learn of the connection until Azem explained their family history, although they had never met Seraphina or knew of the Cats of Camelot before Ceridwen told them.

Almost ten years after Ceridwen left Whitehart, Ceridwen’s human decided to move there. They arrived after Morgan and their human, and Ceridwen felt like she’d been away from Whitehart for a lifetime. She worried about seeing anyone she knew from before. Being a princess now felt as if it had been a distant dream from long ago. Even the kingdom itself seemed to have vanished while she was gone. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it back, but she did want to know what had happened to it and her family.

Ceridwen remembered cats strolling freely in the kingdom and the rest of town, but Ceridwen’s human wouldn’t let her roam alone so that she could find out the fate of Camelot. Her human was willing to take her out on a harness and lead, as they had in their previous town, but that only allowed limited exploration. One perk of the new house is its spacious catio. It takes up almost half the backyard. With it, Ceridwen can still be outside even when her human doesn’t want her wandering. The catio could comfortably hold several cats, but cats can only enter it from the outside if a human brings them in.

The house:
It’s a Tudor-style house at 304 South Third Avenue and it faces East Olivia Lane. It’s a two-story house with an attic and a basement. The lot is fenced all the way around and a large catio is attached to the back of house.

Ceridwen’s human moves to Whitehart to inherit their grandparent home in order to keep it in the family after their grandparent’s death. That grandparent was also the one who kept Swiftstripe, whose urn and portrait (identifying him as Bailey) are the most recent ones displayed in the house alongside those of others. The cremains inside the containers are in closed pouches, so that nothing’ll get out if something breaks. There’s also a glass memorial piece made with a combination of their cremains, and there’s another memorial piece made with the grandparent’s.

Somewhere in the house are notes and records that the grandparent kept on the cats they saw in town and the wood. Although their grandparent had told them of the town’s various street safety measures to protect its diverse feline communities, Ceridwen’s human is still not used to the cat-friendliness of inner Whitehart and won’t let Ceridwen out alone just yet.

The catio:
The catio has a clear angled roof and its design was inspired by walk-in chicken coops and greenhouses. Ceridwen’s human doesn’t want to know how much it cost. They think their grandparent only called it a catio for house appraisal purposes. The catio was really built as an enclosure that could house a cat full-time, and their grandparent left a full maintenance guide for it.

The catio has numerous ramps, platforms, walkways, heated shelters, and other enrichment features, as well as a litter box and bowls for food and water. One of its most notable shelters is a large cat tree made to look like a willow tree. There’s also a sun-lounger chair for humans who want to relax there too. The walls have fencing and cannot be dug under. Towards the house and where the chair is, the floor is flagstone, but past that it has grass.

For access from the house, there’s a human door and a lockable catflap. For humans, it also has a two door outer entrance. One door leads to the rest of the yard and one leads to the catio. The space between doors is large enough to bring and maneuver a cat trap carrier in. There’s a weatherproof sign reminding anyone using it to lock the preceding door before unlocking the next and that both doors should always be locked.

Extra notes:
The Carrie nickname comes from Ceri and is pronounced as “Kerry”. Ceridwen is pronounced as “ke-RID-wen” with emphasis on the second syllable, but she’ll still respond if it’s said like “ker-ri-dwen” (sounding like “Kerry’d when”) with a more even emphasis.