Familiar

Familiars have not featured among the Discworld Witches, with the exception of occasional assistance from Nanny Ogg's Greebo, until the accounts of The Shepherd's Crown. Here we find two extraordinary and apparently magical animal helpers: Geoffrey Swivel's exceptional goat, Mephistopheles, and Granny Weatherwax's cat You, which shows the ability to travel long distances in very short times to transmit subliminal messages. In Wyrd Sisters, the older witches despair of the sheer number of times Magrat Garlick was persuaded by various Dibbler-inclined salespeople to buy dubious familiars of various species. However, she did once acquire an interesting tortoise billed as a sentient living rock, which according to Granny Weatherwax "makes 15 this year, not counting the horse". Before the tortoise, Magrat had a toad but it "wandered off" and "anyway it wasn't very good".