I'm glad I'm not the only one enjoying these one-shots! It's nice breaking off my schedule a little bit. Writing this one-shots has been kinda therapeutic for me. I've really enjoyed the themes, Scars and Faith themselves being really important to me while Decisions was just really cool. Scars and Decisions were both dedicated, Scars to those battling/who battled cancer and their loved ones, while Decisions was dedicated to Redstar and his birthday. Faith? Faith is dedicated to everyone reading and enjoying these one-shots. (And you, in the back, who's been reading and not reviewing. You're allowed to review, I encourage it. Besides, I welcome anonymous reviews.)
Faith is an interesting topic. Linked to religion like a hand to a wrist to an arm to a shoulder, it's not a topic many Twolegs like discussing. Why? Faith, for Twolegs, is very complicated. There's many different things and people to have faith in, and many ways to express many different faiths. Plus there's the added pressure of sharing your faith with others.*
Then there's different teachings for different faiths. Some things you have faith in promise eternal life when following teachings of the faith. Others promise reincarnation into a better life for the good and worse life for the bad until, when you've lived a good life in what is observed as the best kind of life on earth, you reach eternal harmony with some sort of idea. There are many others as well, all teaching different ideas and different things to do in your life.
For the Warriors, faith is simple. There's faith in StarClan, or there's faith in your own Clan. Either you believe in StarClan or you don't, it's as simple as that. Many warriors believe and trust in StarClan, and live the best lives they can so that they can help guide and protect their Clanmates, even from afar. There's the occasional cat or two that don't, but usually this doesn't stop them from serving their Clan in the best way they can. In a way, they're more free than their Clanmates, but this freedom comes at the price of not obtaining any guidance from above.
Above all, keep faith in what you believe in. That's the most important thing.
Tawnypelt distrusted Sol the moment she saw him. She knew he would bring no good to ShadowClan. The way he talked, the things he could make you believe, the things he knew, it was all suspicious to Tawnypelt. He came after predicteing something that StarClan didn't reveal to the medicine cats, which made her even more suspicious.
And now it was all coming together like pieces in a puzzle. Sol kept talking about distrusting StarClan because they warned none of the medicine cats about the vanishing sun, and now he'd convinced Blackstar to turn away from StarClan.
It was all wrong. All horribly, horribly wrong.
Tawnypelt knew that the Clans needed to keep faith in StarClan. She knew this was the place they were supposed to settle. But Sol and his persuasive voice that could make you do anything had tricked Blackstar and most of ShadowClan into renouncing their faith in StarClan. With no StarClan there were no medicine cats, no nine lives, and that's where a Clan starts to fall apart.
StarClan is the roots of the tree that grows into a Clan. The Clans depend on StarClan to stay together. Without StarClan, the Clans were just another group of rouges, fighting each other for territory and food. But the Clans were supposed to be more than that. That's why they formed the four Clans. But Blackstar was turning his back on that, and ShadowClan's decline had begun.
Tawnypelt knew she couldn't stay in a place where StarClan was not recognized. Decisions in the past or not, Tawnypelt wasn't a rouge, and if she stayed in ShadowClan much longer that's what she would be. She needed to keep faith in StarClan and go somewhere that recognized StarClan.
Somewhere where she could still be welcomed, even after all these moons.
ThunderClan.
So Tawnypelr rounded up her kits. She kept them quiet. And she took them to ThunderClan. She didn't tell them what was going on until they were on ThunderClan territory. ThunderClan found her and took her to their camp, and she slowly became accepted.
Her kits wanted to go home to ShadowClan, but not the cats they would find there now. They wanted ShadowClan the same way she did, a ShadowClan that believed in StarClan and honored the warrior code. So they complained when she told them they were going to ThunderClan, but they weren't extremely disappointed. It was either ShadowClan or a Clan that honored StarClan, and Tawnypelt knew they would all feel the same as her.
Faith.
As long as Tawnypelt kept believing in StarClan, and her kits believed in StarClan, she would never loose her way. And as long as they believed this, Sol would never win.
*Please note that I am not against faith or religion. As a matter of fact, I'm all for it. I'm simply describing this. Don't kill me, please.
It's definitely shorter, and has no speaking at all. Interesting how in the first two stories I began with the topic, but in this one I ended with the topic.
