The sky is blue and cloudless, the smell of prey is in the air, and the world she knows is fracturing like ice in the sun.
"That's not the scent of any clan I know!"
Bluestar stands on the Highrock, proud as ever, her strong shoulders blocking the green-leaf sun. By her side quivers a small orange cat, dwarfed by the leader in every way. His ears lay flat against his scalp, and the fur on his hackles rises under the cautious eyes of ThunderClan.
As it well should- Sandpaw recognises his smell at the moment Longtail calls it out.
"He's a kittypet!"
The rumbling of the crowd falls away with the abrupt drop of a hawk to its prey. Not even a hiss scores the silence- but Longtail presses on.
"Once a kittypet, always a kittypet." His tail lashes, and Sandpaw takes a step back. She's not the only one. Up high on the rock, the kittypet's eyes go even wider.
Longtail's voice rises again. "The noise of your treacherous bell will alert our enemies, even if your Twoleg stench doesn't!"
And the kittypet- she doesn't know how to describe it, but for a moment she sees it. He stands taller, and his eyes fill with something fierce, something proud- more intense in that flash than anything she's felt in her training fights so far- and he leaps.
Sandpaw finds herself backing away, farther and farther from the fight, though she cannot look away. Her father is out on patrol and she cannot see her mother in the crowd, and the dirt that she had rolled in as a kit is drinking ThunderClan blood. This is- it's not been done before. It's against the code. It's wrong.
And she cannot get the look in his eye out of her mind. It had been too much for a kittypet so small, an intrusion beyond anything she'd wanted to see. In his eyes she had seen that the rolling momentum of an avalanche in a moment, a declaration unintentional, its resolution porting with it the feeling of prophecy. She had seen the promise that challenge would meet its rightful end, in the dirt and bleeding as her clanmate is today. A shiver digs cold claws into her spine.
"From this day forward," Bluestar called, with a certainty that Sandpaw longs for, "until he has earned his warrior name, this apprentice will be called Firepaw, in honor of his flame-colored coat."
Sandpaw does not join in the hesitant cries of his new name. She instead makes her way to Dustpaw, who frowns at her approach.
"Can you believe this?" Dustpaw drawls. "That kit thinks he's got what it takes to be a warrior? Has everyone here gone mouse-brained?"
Shaking her head, Sandpaw settles by his side and begins the monotonous process of grooming herself. Its repetition will settle her.
"I don't like it either," she says.
"And winning with a surprise move like that- it's not honorable at all!" Dustpelt wrinkles his nose in disgust. "He's already proven that he's not cut out for the code."
"I still can't believe that Longtail lost, though."
Dustpaw's eyes narrow. "He didn't lose," he argues. "Bluestar broke up the fight."
"Still-"
"Still, if they'd been in a fair fight, Longtail would've won, no doubt about it."
Sandpaw dips her head in acquiescence. "I just wonder how many fair fights there are," she murmured. "And-" recalling his his righteous, burning eyes, even brighter than his coat- "How to know if you're on the right side." Some part of her knows in that second that if he if he remains as he was today, one day she will follow him into battle. The thought comes sudden and disconcerting.
Ravenpaw bursts into camp like night darting over the mountains. "Redtail-" he gasps. "Redtail is dead!"
No.
Sandpaw catches the eye of the kittypet from across the clearing and she lays back her ears. "You're right, Dustpaw," she says, her voice thick with grief. "He'll never be a warrior." She stands and walks numbly to her mother's side.
This kittypet brings change on his back and now her father is dead; despite the irrationality of it all, she cannot help but feel in her bones that this is his fault.
It is then that Sandpaw decides that she hates him.
She hates him, because he is arrogant. Because he is soft. Because she is born of ThunderClan blood to continue a long line of warriors, and he is a change that will set the whispering leaves to fire and make the forest shift its roots.
She hates him so much that the stars could extinguish one by one, and the moon could dip into the mountains and never return, and still her loathing would burn so bright that it would be as day- she could hate him enough to burn up the night.
And we'll see which flame eats the other. We'll see which one of us wins.
