For a while I doubted I'd ever be back to write. Yet, here I am.

Whatever this story is, I don't expect it to be that long or popular. I wrote this chapter a few months ago and only yesterday uncovered it. It has been so long since anybody has actually looked at or viewed my writing, both online and in real life. It's here for the chance to be read and reviewed by others. That might be a lot to ask though, considering that a full understanding of this story would benefit from the reading of my last multi-chapter fan fiction, To Be Alone, which, aside from being riddled with typos, is what I believe is my best work. However, it is hard to read, being nonlinear, highly stylistic, and based off of intricate, external ideas and world-building. Reading To Be Alone isn't required for someone to be able to enjoy this story, though it would help in the overall comprehension of the latter titular character.

However you choose to approach this, I hope you do so willing to review and share your thoughts with me! They are always the best way to display appreciation for a writer's work and encourage them to continue.

Disclaimer: I do not own Warriors.

Part I

When Icepaw went to sleep that night, he had done so hoping to either wake up a warrior, or not at all.

He had a lot of space to himself. While technically, he shared the apprentice den with Dawnpaw, the pale golden she-cat often worked late into the night, organizing and reorganizing herbs, periodically checking on anyone that she felt needed checking on, staring at the stock and studying every remedy for every illness, and making note of anything that wasn't there so she could rise early in the morning to go search for it. Icepaw guiltily hoped that one day, she would work herself all the way to StarClan, or madness, whichever lasted longer.

It got lonely, which made thinking all the more agonizing. His mind often went to numbers: five more moons until Sparrowflight's kits were apprentices; three whole seasons since his father traded respectable warrior life for a love affair with a kittypet; one final assessment before he earned his full name; and thirty-six leafbare nights since his mother was brutalized by a ShadowClan warrior in battle.

He hadn't even been there to see it. A sprained paw acquired during training that day kept him in the medicine den under the unbearable watch of Dawnpaw, meanwhile, on the Twoleg path, Willowtail was taking her last pained breath following a fatal strike to the throat. Smokebreeze, Brightfang, and Mouseleap were there to comfort him at her vigil, whispering things to him such as, "She's with Mothkit and Darkpool. She's in StarClan. She's watching us." Icepaw had leaned against them the whole night, his face resting in their fur, their tails all intertwined. A few days later, they went back to not speaking to each other. Icepaw tried not to hate them for it. They were warriors, he was an apprentice, and that's all there was to it.

The moonlight shifted over time. Silver had poured into the den at the start of the night, and now, Icepaw was left in total darkness. His restless tail brushed against the bracken in surrounding empty nests. Maybe he wouldn't be so alone if Thistlepelt only accelerated his training. The senior warrior was approaching old age quickly, and it showed in the way he taught Icepaw. Icepaw bit his tongue at the thought of his mentor moving into the elders' den before he made it to the warriors' den.

The air was cold this night, and it got colder as dawn stalked ahead. Icepaw lulled in and out of light sleep, his tail never ceasing its movement along the den floor. Every once in awhile he grew weightless, then returned, the darkness became absolute, then lifted, just enough for Icepaw to know that his eyes were open. At one point, he was hearing a dull thump, and he realized that during one of his spells, Dawnpaw must have entered and curled up her own nest, where her hind leg kicked at the wall sporadically. Every time it sounded, Icepaw felt it too in his heart, a rich pound of longing for something that simply wasn't meant to be. It was like a heavy, powerful knock on a hollow cave that with enough force, could have caused it to cave in. His tail lashed violently, and bracken and moss swirled along the floor until the nest was torn apart.

Eventually the thumping stopped. He became weightless again, but strangely, this time, he was aware of it. Icepaw lifted his head. He must already be dreaming. Somehow, Dawnpaw's noisy sleeping must have helped him drift off.

But the darkness was still oppressive, and at no point did it give way into an image of his unconscious. Usually, he'd hear voices, like those of his siblings, or his mother swearing to always be there for him like his father never would be. Perhaps Thistlepelt would make dozens of empty promises, "You're final assessment will take place soon," but not this time. This time, there was complete silence.

"Dawnpaw?" he asked, doubting immediately that his denmate would reply. And she didn't. She wasn't there at all.

He didn't know exactly when, but he realized he was standing. He didn't feel any ground beneath his paws, but even in the blackness, he could see himself. He looked down at his paws, which flexed in search a surface to touch. Panic surged through him, and the darker fur along his spine stood on end.

Perhaps he really did die, just like he sort of hoped he would all the time.

But if this was death, then it wasn't like he believed it would be. He always imagined that his mother would be there to greet him, her soft silver pelt adorned with stars and her eyes shining with the light that had been gone from them when her body was dragged back to camp. He thought he would get the chance to embrace her and spend forever with his nose in her fur, warmed by her presence, comforted by her gentle, cool voice. He remembered the morning he asked Dawnpaw what it was like the first time she returned from the Moonpool, her amber gaze igniting into stunning orbs of light and wonder.

"It's beyond any beauty you can even imagine," she had exclaimed to him breathlessly, "Oh, Icepaw! It's more perfect than a perfect dream!"

She had gone on and on about the tall trees that seemed to stretch endlessly into a midnight sky blazing with an innumerable count of stars. Full, dark green leaves and flowers of impossible colors. Air so crisp and refreshing that anything else would have felt like drowning. Dawnpaw described it all.

"And there are so many cats there!" she jovially yowled. "It's so weird. It's like deep down, you know everyone there. Even though they've been long dead or from other Clans, you know them. I'd never felt more safe and more at peace and more wonderstruck in my life!"

Her astounded words echoed in his head now, where there was silence surrounding him in every direction. This wasn't the StarClan she had described. This wasn't StarClan at all. This was nothing.

I'm...I'm not dead, he thought with a pang of disappointment. How could he be? He'd gone to sleep perfectly healthy, save for the darkness in his mind and the longing in his soul. Icepaw felt a chill settle deep in his heart, the very center of it hardening into ice that pumped with ever nervous heartbeat into his blood. Can you even die from being so lonely?

"Willowtail!" he shouted. The sound of his mother's name didn't even echo away, it merely faded eerily into the quiet. His scream almost became substance, something long and jagged and weary, before melting against the blackness, swallowed by impermeable shadow. "Willowtail!"

Oh, how he wanted her to come rescue him. Living was so hard, and being here, wherever here was, deepened his loneliness. Every sense of isolation he had ever experienced awake in the secretive confines of his mind were felt to have been extracted from within him and projected before his very eyes. He was staring into the own holes of his heart, into caverns cut out by misery and grief, of which he could see and feel no end.

"Willowtail!"

Icepaw let the final cry collapse into silence, and he hung his head in hopelessness. He was still alone. No amount of desperation would fix it.

There seemed to be more activity behind his shut eyelids than there had been in the emptiness around him. He had never thought about the faintest of textures and colors that danced in his head whenever he closed his eyes, but now he couldn't help but study them all. He tried finding words to describe them to himself, but he couldn't, and he wondered if this was the best that could be done when he was this alone. It pained him to consider it. He prayed that when he opened his eyes again he would be in the apprentice den, and then realized with horror that imagining such a familiar place took tiring effort. The loneliness was so oppressive that even the clearest of memories were broken and warped. With a agonized yell, his eyes flew open.

Below him, there was a light. It flickered dimly under his paws, giving off no indication of color or warmth. Icepaw focused his bright blue eyes on it, wondering briefly if it was perhaps, it marked the end of this tunnel, and emergence into either StarClan, or the waking world. He flailed his paws in the emptiness, but he couldn't tell if he was moving anywhere.

The light dimmed as it started to expand, stretching out and spreading the energy thin. Icepaw felt his whole sense of direction muddle, unsure of what was up, what was down, or if such words even existed wherever he was. The light seemed to surround him, barely visible now, until at last, it became tangible, and Icepaw was no longer, in the literal sense, alone.

The cat standing in front of him was unmistakably a spirit of some kind. She was small, his size or smaller, with a dark tortoiseshell pelt that seemed to fade unnaturally into the blackness around her, as if she was merely an illusion he could blink away. The most curious thing about her, however, were her eyes. They glared holes through the darkness, not so much shining as they were burning a bright white. They were empty of all of the truths eyes should reveal, and all the lies they try to foster. There was just as much nothing to them, as there was to the world around them.

Icepaw spoke to her, uncertain of what else to do, "Hello?"

She gave no reaction.

"Can you hear me?"

He didn't see her vanish, but she was gone, and then she was closer, slightly off to the side, looking at him by a different angle. His head spun with bewilderment.

"Listen, I…" his voice was shaking, "I don't know what you are, or where I am, or what this is. I was just in my den and next thing I know I'm here. I don't know if you can hear me, or if you're even real, but I just really need someone to talk to."

Once again, there was no reaction by her, and dread crawled further and further throughout his body, electrifying his fur and making it stand in all directions. She was suddenly farther away, and then closer. She moved to and fro without a single movement at all. It was stranger than a dream.

"This...can't be death. This isn't StarClan…" Icepaw was speaking more to himself now than he was to her. "And...this isn't the Place of No Stars. It can't be. I mean, I wouldn't know what it's like, but this isn't it. I...I just-"

"I'm not real."

Her voice was rough and quiet, the voice of someone who had perhaps not spoken for moons. It was slow, low, and raspy, but behind it was a childish resonance. He trembled at the sound of it, and could only ask, "What?"

"I am not real." She was now only a few mouse-lengths from him. "Not real. Not real."

He backed up, smelling her. Her scent conjured images of a forest long devastated, seemingly burned away into ashes tumbling in a lashing leafbare wind, where there was no sign of life or anything that used to be life. It was a tragic scent, distant and light. "So, are you all in my mind? Is this all in my mind?"

"You are not here," she told him. "How can you be here if here is not here? Here is mine. I am here, and I am nothing. I am here."

"What is…"

"Here is nothing. Nothing is here. I am here. I am nothing."

Icepaw felt his throat close and then release with a choked sob. He didn't know what this spirit was talking about, and he didn't feel any closer to home. She watched him shudder with fear and kit-like dismay. "No, no, no, no," he moaned. "No, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it when I said I wanted to die. I want to go back! I want to go back!"

She tilted his head at him. Then said, "You will go back." Before he could respond, she continued, "Back to life. Life is everything. Here is nothing."

"Will you stop saying that?" he snapped at her. "Shut up! If you're not real, just shut up!"

She was once again gone. He held his breath in waiting for her to reappear again. Her scent still lingered, and in the deep, absolute quiet, he heard faint paw steps. They were arrhythmic, as if she was staggering clumsily away. Something cold settled along Icepaw's spine. The idea of her walking away from him, leaving him behind in the unforgiving darkness filled him with unease. She had told him he'd return, but standing there now, unsure of what she was or if any of this was even reality, he simply couldn't believe her.

Icepaw spun around, searching for the slight break in the darkness, searching for her ragged form inching about. He hoped her eyes would look to him, that in their blinding whiteness, she would be found treading tiredly through the nothingness. His mind ran with a million thoughts; he wondered for a moment if perhaps, she was had been like him, a cat who found themselves awake in some empty, strange land, never to return again to life. His heart raced, his ears flicking wildly. Icepaw called out, "Spirit! Spirit!"

A noise faded in, sounding like the rush of a river gliding closer and closer to him. He grew hot, overwhelmed, and the movements of his body slowed as if time was getting ahead of him. There was a pull at the back of his head, a snap, then a flash of white light.

"Icepaw, are you alright?"

He was sitting up in his nest, heaving breaths of air he didn't know he needed. Light poured in from the outside, splashing the front of the den with dull gray light flushed slightly with warm color. In the way of it was Dawnpaw, who looked over her shoulder at him with concern on her soft countenance.

"How long has it been?" he asked her frantically.

"Since when?"

"Since I've fallen asleep!"

She turned back to him, and he flinched away when she tried flicking his cheek with the tip of her tail. "Well, I don't know. You seemed asleep when I came in last night. Are you unwell? Would you like my help?"

"No," he answered, too quickly.

"You sat up in a hurry. Looked in shock," remarked Dawnpaw.

"Unless you have a remedy in there for bad dreams, I don't need anything," Icepaw told her curtly. "And you don't."

"A bad dream you say?" she asked him, and guided him toward the the den exit with her tail, "Walk me to the medicine den and tell me about it."

He glared at her, "So you can psychoanalyze me? I don't need your help. Or your pity." Or anything to do with you, he thought bitterly.

Dawnpaw's amber eyes were cast down at the path of his wary gait. She looked sullen and tired. They climbed out of the den and emerged in the camp, just stirring in the daybreak. The Clan's leader stood atop the Highledge, while some early-rising Elders laid side by side in the morning light. A few warriors were gathered in front of the deputy, who was just beginning to assign patrols. Icepaw didn't see Thistlepelt. "I'm sorry for bothering you, Icepaw," Dawnpaw murmured sincerely. "It is my job to worry."

"Only about cats that need to be worried about," he growled. "Or want to be worried about. Can you just leave me alone?"

She nodded her head softly and peeled away from him, heading in the direction of the medicine cat den. "Good luck with training today," she said impersonally.

Icepaw sat down where he was, his eyelids falling heavy over his cold blue gaze. He felt as though he hadn't gotten a wink of sleep. He didn't remember actually drifting completely off, or waking up for that matter. One moment he was in the darkness, and the next he was in his nest.

Maybe I'm going mad, he thought.

He fell asleep right there in the middle of camp, until Thistlepelt aroused him to embark on another day of nothing in particular.