Prologue

The air was thin, much too thin to breathe in. The once clear blue sky was replaced with a swirling grey mist that advanced closer and closer, covering up the beautiful starry nights. The trees had begun to die, the leaves couldn't hold on any longer and silently drifted to the ground, vanishing as they landed. Birds fell silent and just seemed to be gone. The joyful cheers, laughter and words between loved ones with no borders just wasn't here anymore. Where had it gone? All that was left was emptiness.

It was dark and heavy in a parallel section of the universe. Dark, black, bloody… like always. A metallic smell forever hung in the unsettlingly quiet atmosphere ahead. The black sky never seemed to shift to day, and the stars and moon? Oh, even they hid from the fangs and claws that scraped and clashed together everyday here.

This was the Place of No Stars. But it was different.

A dim, eerie silvery light with no apparent source drifted through the chilling air. Occasionally, the unnatural breeze would make the bare trees' gnarled branches clatter and whisper in a hoarse, slithering voice.

But something had changed.

An old, dark grey tomcat, his pelt smoky with a white outline in the faint light, padded through the shadows of the trees and emerged from the darkness into a more lit-up clearing. His fur, torn out here and there, reflected the light that settled on his body unevenly. His piercing ice blue eyes were slitted and glared through the darkness, sliced through the ghostly atmosphere, and stared defiantly into nothingness.

Then he sighed and everything inside of himself came crashing down and collapsed. He heaved, as if not catching his breath, and under the call of a distant raven, his thin shape seemed more frail and weak than ever. Frail, weak, and…

Disappearing.

"Greyfang! Father!" A worried voice rang through the tall, inky black trees that loomed overhead. A lithe shape bounded out of the pitch dark, revealing herself to be a smaller she-cat. She crouched down beside the grey tom and her eyes suddenly grew wide at the sight of her father, once so strong and determined, and now only grief, worry and defeat strained his narrowing blue orbs.

"Father, what's wrong?" she growled, helping the fallen tom. She could feel him leaning on her, almost depending on her entirely to just stand up. Then she noticed something that made her breath catch in her throat.

"Wait, why are you…" the light silver tabby she-cat breathed, her voice starting to tremble even as she tried to stay strong. His pelt, his body, his entire being, it was just… fading. Her tone was unsure and her voice was nothing but an almost inaudible whisper now. "You're… You're disappearing."

The tom turned his icy eyes to stare right into her soul. "Not just me."

She bared her fangs and whipped her head around, as if something physical was attacking. Flashes of a dark brown tabby spun around in her mind and suddenly came back to her, but she only shook the thoughts off, focusing on the current situation.

"B-but why?"

"Memory, Silverfall," he groaned as he felt his bones creak even under the support, hissing at the she-cat and trying to stand up, only to fall down again. He leaned against a large boulder that jutted out of the dead, frozen earth. "It's the memory that keeps us here. That keeps them there." He spat "them" like it was poison on his tongue.

"What… What do you mean?!" Silverfall panted as her voice almost rose to a yell. The smoky tom's body was getting fainter and fainter, and one could clearly see every pebble, every dried leaf, every speckle of dust that lingered in his place. His shape started distorting and sweeping away like a fast-moving fog.

Silverfall could almost feel tears sting her eyes, tears that she never knew existed, as she watched the close friend lift up into the air, floating away as only a few swirls of mist was left. "No! Don't disappear!" But as her heart pounded in her chest and her vision started blurring from running after it, she knew her cry couldn't be heard anymore.

"FATHER!"

Her voice cracked as she yowled his name again, but that being she once knew was already gone.

"Silverfall…"

She hung her head and silently sobbed as her paws stopped dragging herself forward to no destination.

No… No…

A murky tear fell to the ground and vanished into silver mist, then vanished into thin air. Everything around her suddenly came crumbling down.

Why?

The once beautiful trees, hung with vines, gorgeous green, golden and scarlet leaves, and streaked with lines of dewdrops were all gone. They were dying and everything around them was dying.

"It's getting worse, Whitesky," a deep voice meowed. A dark ginger tom padded out of a grey land and emerged to join a white she-cat. His fangs were bared in a pained snarl at himself. He clawed the ground angrily, but the land beneath his paws simply started shrinking away.

"I know," Whitesky sighed and replied solemnly, her green eyes depicting no apparent emotions, but the ginger warrior knew she was as concerned as any spirit here. "And you know why it's happening, Blazestorm."

Another cat, a sleek tortoiseshell, overhead their conversation and jumped down from the branch of a tree, her orange eyes flickering with worry and doubt as she joined the two other StarClan cats.

"We are spirits," the last one mewed quietly, staring at the ground and lost in thought. "We cannot survive like normal cats, ones that are alive, can. We depend on their memory to live here in this afterlife. If they forget us, then we will–"

"Disappear," Blazestorm interrupted and turned his head away, flexing his claws nervously.

Whitesky fell silent for a moment and turned to the other she-cat.

"But how, Leaftail?" the white warrior asked, her tone desperate now, almost like the wail of a kit. "How can we be forgotten? We are StarClan! Hundreds of cats before us were here, and thousands more will call this place home afterward. How can all of this just be a distant past?"

Leaftail didn't avert her gaze from the ground, which was cloudy and drab.

"Truths were passed down, which eventually turned into stories," the tortoiseshell replied quietly. "Stories shifted into fantasies, fantasies became lies, and now those lies just faded as fewer and fewer cats believed it and talked about it."

"No, there must be at least one cat who still believes we are real!" Blazestorm defended, his eyes narrowed in determination, but maybe just one to mask his true fear of what might happen. "There has to be one that still remembers us, and we can connect to them."

"If there is," Leaftail mused, "we must find that one. If there isn't…"

Whitesky calmed herself down and shook her head. "No. No "isn't". There must be, and we will bring all those lost spirits back. We will resume order to the clans without it being the chaos that it is now."

"There has to be something we haven't discovered yet," Blazestorm hissed. "Ages and ages of trust can't just be destroyed like that."

"Maybe there is," Leaftail murmured. "But we need to find out quickly…"

They heard a loud crash in the distance, as if there were actual pillars holding the heavens up, and everything was beginning to collide and crash down.

"…Before it's too late."

And they could only watch in silence as the world around them and everything they've built themselves upon came tumbling down in a heartbeat…