This is the first thing I have ever posted here on Fanfiction, so please read and review. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated, as I am an aspiring part-time kids' author and this is great practice for me! Big thanks to SnuffSnuff for advising me on some parts that needed improving.
He woke to cold darkness and eerie silence.
The small black cat reached out with his single white paw and, using his dog tooth– tipped claws for traction, pulled himself up from the damp ground onto his paws. Shaking moisture from his night-dark pelt, he glanced around in confusion at his strange surroundings.
Where am I?
Who am I?
The black cat could not remember. He glanced warily at the trees all around him—yes, he recalled something about trees from his past, something important—but could see nothing among them except a few scattered colonies of odd glowing mushrooms sprouting from their bases.
"What is this place?" the cat demanded of no one. He heard a rustling of fallen leaves somewhere behind him and spun around. "Show yourself!" he yowled, hackles raising. For some reason he felt a sense of power over other cats, but he couldn't summon up the reason in his blurry mind.
A dark gray tabby tom padded calmly out of the trees. The black cat dug his claws into the leaf-strewn soil and bared his teeth menacingly, hissing, and the gray tabby stopped advancing and held up one paw in a peacemaking gesture. "I see you've finally come to join us, Scourge," the strange cat meowed with a curt nod. "So, welcome to the Dark Forest, or the Place of No Stars as some call it." His yellow eyes bored into the black cat's ice-blue ones, as if wrenching something from deep within them.
Scourge! I am Scourge! And along with his name, a thousand memories came flooding back to the black cat: His leadership of BloodClan in the Twolegplace; the pact with the forest cat Tigerstar that had gone wrong, all wrong; and how that same cat, Tigerstar, had died by Scourge's own claws... every memory up to his very last—his throat trapped in the jaws of that ginger fool Firestar, blood leaking endlessly from the terrible gash they'd opened in his neck.
Scourge instinctively lifted a paw to his neck, but the wound seemed to have miraculously healed; his paw pad swiped over nothing except soft fur and the cat and dog teeth that had been strung into the gruesome collar he always wore. He scored his claws deep into the damp soil, bristling with rage. How much pleasure would it give him to rake a gash along Firestar's belly the same way he'd done to Tigerstar!
"You have served myself and MoonClan well, Scourge," the gray tabby—Bane, as Scourge now remembered he was called—told him. Bane seemed to note the black cat's anger before continuing, "And now you shall have powers such as you never could have dreamed of while alive. StarClan are nothing compared to us."
"StarClan?" meowed Scourge, the fur flattening on his shoulders. "The forest cats mentioned the name, but surely there isn't really such a thing, Bane?"
"StarClan are as real as you or me," Bane growled. "I give you my word on that much. They walk their own paths in the skies beyond our borders." Scourge grunted, irritated at being proven wrong. "But our purpose as MoonClan is to torment the wicked dead"—Scourge's ears pricked at the word torment—"of the Clan cats. The cats who, in life, put their own ambitions before loyalty to their Clanmates, and were rejected as members of StarClan. StarClan hands those twisted cats over to us, MoonClan, and here in the Dark Forest we stalk them like mice, torturing all we come across."
"Torturers of the evil dead," murmured Scourge to himself, mulling over the possibilities.
Bane's nose suddenly gave a twitch. "I think I smell your first victim," he mewed in an undertone, a terrible gleam shining in his yellow eyes. The gray tom pointed with his tail; Scourge's ice-blue eyes followed.
Stalking silently through the trees several foxlengths from Scourge and Bane was a huge dark brown tabby tom, amber eyes flickering with a dark fire. The tom had not noticed either of them. Scourge immediately knew the cat's identity; he'd know that treacherous shape anywhere.
"Tigerstar," he hissed in a voice just loud enough for Bane to hear. He kept his eyes fixed on the forest cat, but from the corner of his vision he could see Bane wink at him.
"You'll discover your own powers as a torturer soon enough," Bane told him. "Now, go. I'll be watching."
Scourge did not need any coaxing. Screeching, he bolted toward Tigerstar, his huge reinforced claws unsheathed, his mind roaring with a black rage as he ripped through the damp undergrowth toward his despised enemy.