This fanfiction is the sequel to CHAOS IN THE CLANS and REACHING THROUGH TIME, so please read those before this one.
MEDDLING WITH DESTINY
"Her voice crackled through the room with the keenness of a whip. 'So... I was right... something happened to interrupt Destiny... some sort of MEDDLING occurred?' she asked Hiccup. 'Some sort of ACCIDENT? What was it? What was it? What was it?'"
—Excellinor the Witch, from How to Break a Dragon's Heart by Cressida Cowell
CHAPTER ONE
The girl was sitting on a bench watching the sunset when the boy walked up to her. She smiled up at him as he sat down beside her.
The watching figures shifted impatiently from their vantage point in the stars. "Is he going to do it at all?" a male voice hissed in the language of cats.
"Patience," a female voice lectured in the same language.
"Yes, hush," another female voice, this in a tone that revealed her to be human, though she was speaking the language of cats as well. "He'll get to it in time."
"Hi, Ryan," the girl said. "What took you?"
"That's what I'm saying," another human voice, this one male, grumbled. He was immediately shushed by the females.
A fifth figure, separate from the two humans and the two cats, said nothing. He was a cat, the only one who could have been seen clearly if anyone had been watching the five. He had no fur and bulging blind eyes, and he was known to the few cats who knew of his existence as Rock.
Rock looked down on the two humans. A peculiar emotion stirred in his chest, peculiar for two reasons: first, that he even felt it, as he had learned to ignore emotion long ago; and second, that it was pity. Rock rarely felt pity for anyone for any reason, but these two humans had been through far too much already, and he and his—did he dare call them "companions"?—were about to put them through more.
"Traffic," the boy, Ryan, replied to his girlfriend. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered something in it.
The other tomcat growled impatiently, but said nothing.
The girl smiled. The boy smiled back at her. They began to make small talk.
Even the females in the watching group were beginning to feel impatient. Rock did not. This would happen in time, as everything would. He had learned that lesson long ago, and was surprised that the others, who were far older than him, had not.
"Annie," the boy said at last, "I've been thinking."
The five watchers leaned forward eagerly, even Rock.
"We've known each other for quite some time now," Ryan continued, "and loved each other for almost as long."
"Yes," the girl, Annie, agreed. She seemed to sense what was coming.
"We're still both kind of young, at least to our families—"
The girl smirked. She was far older than she looked.
"—but I don't think that there's much point in putting this off any further. You're nineteen, I'm twenty, and we've been, ah, 'mates' since you were twelve." The boy pulled a small ring from his pocket. He didn't look very nervous, as he knew that the girl would agree with him.
The girl smiled slowly, waiting for the boy to finish.
"Anneliese Betheny Eyre," the boy said dramatically, "will you marry me?"
"Why, Ryan Michael Crimsen, of course."
Rock nodded, satisfied.
"At last," the man grumbled.
"Oh, you have no sense of romance," the woman sniffed.
Far away, in a parallel universe, in fact, a cat was dying.
Her name was Dovewing, known to the Clans for moons as Dovewing the Wise. When granted a wish from StarClan, she had requested to live until the end of the Clans. She regretted that decision now. As all of her loved ones had withered and died, she retreated up into the territory past the Moonpool, making herself a den and sharing tongues with her ancestors—and descendants, as the years rolled by—each night.
A few days ago, the last Clan cat had died. Most of the Clans had been wiped out a few years back by a virulent disease, and the survivors had banded together into one group, which they simply called "the Clan". Their plan was to separate again into four as more cats arrived to join them, but few came. Eventually, the Clan disintegrated, and this was when Dovewing began to age rapidly.
After a few moons, the last Clan cat had died of old age in seclusion, the last remnant of a long legacy. It was two days later when Dovewing admitted to herself that she was dying.
She sighed, wearier than she had ever felt. She felt all of her moons pressing down on her, and she closed her eyes, waiting for death to come and take her to StarClan for a few moons before they were completely forgotten and Faded out of existence.
She felt the cold black paw of Death cover her, and her eyes flickered open once more before they closed for the last time...
...and snapped open again in a different time and quite a different place.