"You did well." Cinderfoot's praise used to bring me warmth, but now I just think of the queen and the kits she lost, born and unborn alike. Doing well meant sacrificing her for the future. Her life was the price for prosperity. Doing well can be exceptionally cruel.

We walk together along the river, having brought the kits to their Clan, leaving them just outside the camp. No one saw us, though someone might have smelled me (and not Cinderfoot, lucky ghost that he can be), but they are likely too preoccupied to search out their heroes. So we walk alone along the river, pretending everything is all right, and that we are not killers as much as we are protectors.

Once, I asked Cinderfoot how he coped with the oaths. Most are like this one, requiring us to humor malevolence to encourage later benevolence, asking that we play the role of hero and villain alike. At first, he said nothing. Then he said that he just lived oath to oath, and counted his remaining moons of service when he could. Because it would be over someday, and someone else would have to wrestle with his burden instead. That someone being me. So we don't talk about it, because that's easier, and nothing else is so easy in our half-lived lives.

Where the river curves, streams pour into it, swollen from new-leaf rains. At the first of these, we branch away from the main course and head for the trees, following the path that brought us here, smelling of minnows and misfortune. The first few tail-lengths within the fringe are dry and scattered with gnarled shrubs ready to unfurl as new-leaf marches on. Then, the canopy of the forest grows denser, blocking out the light and throwing shadows across the earth, shadows that grab and reach, threatening to tear out the heart of anyone who strays for too long. In this region, we find the circle of stones that will return us to the fields of StarClan to await the next oath we must keep.

"Will you be staying?" asks Cinderfoot. I shake my head, stepping into the circle beside him. The stones glow with a soft green light that never fails to make my stomach churn, even after almost thirty moons. We travel in this way, pulled from this place and that time, back to StarClan's fields, or the reverse. Between assignments, I use the circles to visit my Clan, and in that respect, this oath is no different from any other. Cinderfoot will return to seclusion among the dead, and I will enter the one realm where I can be a ghost, in seclusion among the living.

The world blurs, swirling out of focus before snapping back in a flurry of moonlight. I sway, searching for my balance, and as soon as my head clears, I leave Cinderfoot behind. He is already loping away to his den, hidden by a stream, tucked underneath a rocky overhang. That is his peaceful place, tranquility made tangible. Mine, though, is through another portal.

He used to try to keep me in StarClan. His reasoning was that it hurt to go back, and he wasn't wrong. It hurts so much every time I look on my Clan, alive and thriving without me. Granted, it's the oaths I keep that allow them to prosper, but being a part of the grand scheme of thing feels the same as not being important at all, not that that stops me from being a glutton for punishment. By myself, I enter the other portal and reappear in a forest touched by the sun, still dripping from greenleaf rains. It is a beautiful day to break my own heart again.

This is the one world where I am a ghost, albeit not my choice. In my own timeline, no one can see me, and I cannot change anything. There are no oaths here, and even if there were, a different Oathkeeper from a different time would address them. StarClan has accounted for conflicts of interest by making me powerless in the one place that I would give anything to bring about change.

At least there is peace now. The itch to alter the world hasn't crept up on me yet, though it's only a matter of time. I follow the familiar tracks back to camp, relishing the roll of pebbles below my paws as I stroll, drinking in the old scents that have been ground into the earth. This is home, no matter how many moons go by, and every step is familiar as it was the day I died. The narrow track between rocky shelves is as worn as ever, and the ferns around the corner are out of control. Hawkstar could order them trimmed back every moon and they would still spring back, lush and so alive. I slide beneath their fronds, arching my back into the curves, and then hurry to move aside as Yarrowtail skitters through, on a mission to please her mentor if I had to guess. But today, she is not the one I'm looking for.

Sometimes, I visit her, my dear sister, deep in her medicine cat training, yearning for true independence from her mentor. Other days, I long to see my parents again, still alive, still in love, still together even if only one of their children is around these days. Today, though, I look for Pebbleclaw.

We could have had kits, I think. I would have liked that, not just because I wanted them, but because I know he would make a wonderful father. He is strong but tender, powerful but gentle, keen but kind. If he has flaws, I have long since forgotten them, as love makes one do.

The trouble is that it has been thirty moons, and while I have no one new to love, he does.

I find him curled into his nest, serene in sleep after a long night shift guarding the camp. Sharing that nest instead of sleeping in his own is Cloudleap, his feathered tail draped over Pebbleclaw's back, and their paws layered atop one another. My heart lurches at the sight, bubbling up with a vague sense of jealousy and despair. I want his happiness more than anything, I really do, but while I'm trapped in the afterlife, Pebbleclaw is slowly growing older, grey hairs peppering his muzzle, and worse, he is falling in love again. Without me.

"Do you miss me?" I ask, sitting in the den's entrance. "I know you did, but do you now?"

No answer. Even if he wasn't fast asleep, there wouldn't be one. I am a memory in his life, just a sliver that's some thirty moons gone. He has every right to move on in search of the happiness I took with me. So I sit there. I sit and I wait, trying to understand how he can be happy without me when it's so hard to be happy without him. I can't look at him directly, not while Cloudleap is twined so close, nearly a part of him. I can feel how inseparable they must be now, and it thunders through my bones.

I am not needed here.

It still takes Cinderfoot until sundown to rescue me from my self-inflicted misery. "You torture yourself too much," he says, rocking back onto his haunches at my side. "The world doesn't stop because you died."

We've had this conversation before, and it always ends the same way. "I wish it had. Didn't you?"

"Maybe once." The standard answer. "But they need warmth and love that we can't offer. Better to let them fend for themselves, move on, mend as best they can. Besides, we have a job to do. That's what lets them do this."

"And if we quit our job?"

He never answers this because we both understand that we cannot be responsible for the unraveling of the universe. Not after all the hard work, the time, the sacrifice. We cannot throw the world away just to sate our own hearts.

There is so little left to say, and when Pebbleclaw begins to stir, it is time to leave. I spare him a last glance, and even though Cinderfoot asks me not to come back again, I know that I'll never be able to stay away. I died thirty moons ago, but my heart did not, and unlike some Oathkeepers before me, I cannot separate the two. Perhaps this is why Cinderfoot refuses to let me out of his sight as we return to the portal, and even after we reach StarClan's fields again, he stays at my side.

"You can go," I say. I have no interest in conversation, not until I re-center myself. If Cinderfoot presses now, I will snap. I am brittle.

Instead of turning away to his peaceful little stream, though, he bars my way forward. In life, this must have stopped many cats in their tracks, with his jagged ear and whatnot. He could have been a brute. But I know him, so I try to push past, to no avail.

"They already found another," he says. "A new oath." Gravity laces his words, pulling the stars out of the sky all around us. Normally, StarClan finds time between oaths to let us rest, or to come to terms with the shades of grey our morals have taken on. This is unusual, to be sent off again so soon, which means it must be urgent. Truly there is no rest for the wicked.

Cinderfoot already knows where to go, and he leads me to the proper portal, a ring of stones hidden in the shadow a towering hill. Along the way, he tells me what he knows, and it isn't much. StarClan can sense an oath many long years ago, one in need of keeping, one in danger of breaking. One that has escaped their notice until now, obscured by forces unknown. The tension, according to Cinderfoot, is thick enough to cut with one claw, and any day now, it will boil over. We cannot delay.

Only once we are inside the portal do I realize that Cinderfoot has withheld our destination, and once we arrive, I see why. The lands around us are the same ones we left only short moments ago, familiar to me as the back of my paw. We are on DawnClan lands. We are in the heart of the forest, near the camp. We are in my homeland, and there are few reminders crueler than this.