as we fade in the dark,
just remember you will always burn as bright.
— the light behind your eyes; mcr
It was running thick between his paws, congealed in between the fur of them and his claws. He frantically dips them into the stream again, running calm with ice cold water, pristine and blue only to be tinged with the faint pink of blood. This was the battle he knew he would have to take part in. He hadn't even known that dead cats could bleed this much.
Darkstripe began to follow the stream where it dipped down the hill, into a slight copse of willow trees that dipped over the bank, roots just barely managing to break through the soft earth to greedily suck up the water as it flowed by. The only sound left was the stream. The birds, it seemed, and every living creature that hadn't been hunted down under merciless claws had fled anyway, off to find safer grounds. He only wished he could follow their path.
A Dark Forest warrior bounded past him, white and gray pelt a blur as he ran. Thistleclaw. It was then that he spotted the body, waterlogged in between two boulders barely peeking out of the water. He felt the bile rising in his throat when he saw the blood bubbling at the throat of the dark pelted body, because it was Dustpelt and he had mentored him, had raised him to be a warrior and then turned around and betrayed him.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm so sorry-
"Darkstripe! What are you mooning over? Everyone is gathering in the clearing," Thistleclaw called, voice muffled around a mouthful of dark tabby fur as he heaved Dustpelt's body up onto the grassy shore. He finds himself averting his eyes, casting them down to the ground when Thistleclaw's sharp amber gaze falls on him, cold and calculating. They called him a coward behind his back for a reason, he supposed.
He turned around, eyes still looking anywhere but the blood spattered across the grass, now unnervingly empty without the StarClan cats roaming across the fields and meadows and endless hills of thick forest. He can hear them still, as the Dark Forest cats crept up behind them and slaughtered them from behind, their joyful cries of a good day of hunting turning into horrified shrieks as they began to fade into the sky itself, disappearing forever into an afterlife that didn't exist twice. No one had questioned where they would go, or if they would just simply vanish into thin air, never to be seen again.
The stench of blood was strong in the air as he approached the clearing where most of the cats still alive were gathered. When he sees it, he nearly turns tail and runs as fast as he can in the opposite direction, because anywhere had to be better than seeing this.
A mountain of bodies has been stacked in the center of the field, small rivers of blood finding homes in the cracks between limbs. After so long, after he had watched countless pelts slashed open and bloodied fade into the sky, they had simply stopped disappearing. No one could explain it, yet perhaps the void the StarClan cats traveled to when they floated skyward for the second time was filled too quickly, and like a swollen stream bed, the ones left were left to the whims of the Dark Forest.
He could recognize countless cats he knew, so many of ThunderClan that it shook him to the core. And at the top, like a statue carved from the stars themselves, perched Tigerstar, standing proud and tall with his amber gaze glowing like he had knocked the sun itself out of the sky. Mapleshade crouched low at his side, a slender shadow of ragged fur and thorn-sharp claws.
This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
Burning amber eyes fall on him, and he can't bring himself to meet Tigerstar's gaze. For the second time he finds himself turning tail to the sight, looking anywhere but directly into the judgement he can't face. It's like Tigerstar can see inside him, he always has, and whenever those eyes fall upon him he's reduced into a shivering mass of nothing with only bones to hold his lifeless body up.
It's his fault this is happening.
When he turns he makes out the shape, small and slender, standing at the edge of the cliff not far from the clearing. But the sight that twists his heart more is the stars behind her, falling in a beautiful yet disgusting way, he thinks.
He's beside her, Blossomfall, he realizes, before he recognizes that he's made the conscious decision to move. She's deathly silent, hardly moving except for the barely there rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. During the battle, the living one, that is, she was one of the Clan warriors that sided with the Dark Forest and killed her own Clanmates, although it's no longer his place to judge when he's done the same thing.
"It's called a meteor shower, like the stars are dying."
He flinches at the sound of her voice, so cold it almost sounds like she's detached from the outside world. He can't find the heart to respond, and instead follows her gaze to where it's locked on the myriad of stars leaving sparkling trails across the night black sky.
"It's terrible, isn't it? The most terrible place there is," she says quietly, eyes on the horizon.
"The Dark Forest is nothing but shadows and the darkest crevices of the mind. It wasn't designed to be pretty," he responds, more harshly than he intends to and this time it's Blossomfall who flinches.
"No, here. StarClan, that is. When you were a kit did you not imagine coming up here one day and hunting among the stars, watching over those you loved for the rest of eternity? Now look at it, fallen to ruins, and a twisted sort of reality only exists in its place."
She was surprisingly wise for one so young; could see through him like he was the one fading instead of the others.
"They told me about the past sometimes, when I was younger. About you and what you did. Well, Longtail did at least. He said he was your friend."
He is, he though bitterly, but maybe that too was lost in the past, because he had seen Longtail's body, restored to youth and sight in that pile, and his friend had died a second death while he remained. He said nothing to her in return; too afraid to meet the leaf-green gaze that now stared at him, too afraid to see the disappointment written across her face like everyone else who met him.
He can't begin to understand why she's still here and why she hasn't left him like everyone else does. She has Clanmates here, living ones like Birchfall and Mousewhisker who saved themselves rather than be loyal.
"They made me kill my sister to prove myself. Tigerstar gave me a choice. Briarlight couldn't escape anyway – ThunderClan was beyond saving the crippled by that point. So he told me to make a choice, and I did. He held down my father by the neck and made him watch while I slit my sister's throat."
He snaps his gaze to her and she's shaking now, voice cracking and it's like he can see the walls she's spent so long building up shattering into fragments.
"I hate him," is all he manages to get out, and her tear-filled eyes follow him as he turns back to the clearing.
Darkstripe has no trouble picking out Tigerstar, a little lower on the pile of bodies now, barking instructions at a group of cats he barely recognizes. He crosses over to them, desperately trying to stop his limbs from trembling beneath him.
"Ah, Darkstripe. Finally decided to make yourself useful?" Tigerstar has the gall to laugh, and a few other cats around him follow suit. When Darkstripe says nothing in reply he can visibly see Tigerstar's eyes narrow, and the crowd around them goes silent.
"Not surprising that you've got nothing to say. You've always been a co-"
He's made his choice.
"Darkstripe, don't!"
He leaps.
All he hears is Blossomfall's bloodcurdling scream as he crashes into Tigerstar's side, a coiled mass of what feels like a rock wall as they go tumbling down the pile, a whirlwind of bared teeth and snarls, sending random bodies flying as they hit the ground, hard. Within seconds he's pinned to the ground, a huge paw pressing down on his windpipe while the other three cage him in.
"Who do you think you are?" Tigerstar snarls, and now there are reinforcements pressing in from all sides, repeating the words in guttural growls.
He can't come up with an explanation, but he never has. He's never had a single defining trait, or even one that could begin to unravel what always went on in his head. He shudders around the paw continuously pressing down on his throat, and he slowly turns his head, finding Blossomfall in the crowd, who's standing shock-still with her eyes blown wide.
"Why don't you ask yourself that question?"
He sees Tigerstar's eyes widen the slightest bit, and for a brief second he swears he sees betrayal flicker in their depths but it's gone moments later, replaced by unrepressed hatred that's been there since the beginning.
"Just know that wherever you end up, it's where you've belonged since birth," Tigerstar replies, and he sees the quickest baring of fangs before they wrap around his throat and then it's impossible to think, when your lifeblood is spilling out and marking the ground beneath in an ugly shade of scarlet.
The pressure on his throat releases but everything's fading, white spots threatening to cave the edges of his vision in as he releases one last sickening gurgle.
For the first time in years, he meets Tigerstar's eyes.
He was falling, spiraling into an endless abyss of darkness and a freezing, unbearable cold that seemed to leech its way deep under his pelt and encase his heart in lock and chain with the key thrown into the chasm he was twisting through. He couldn't tell if the terror running through his veins burned or freezed more; simultaneously he could feel the force of a thousand freezing rains and ice storms and roaring blazes tearing through his body, so similar to the one that destroyed ThunderClan - no, his clan, because it was, it always was and no one, not even StarClan could take that away from him.
But he was fading, plummeting into the silence, ceasing to exist – he never had, really – not standing next to Longtail so many years ago under the shadow of the Great Rock and not next to Hawkfrost in a forest filled with nothing but darkness, not fighting against Thistleclaw or standing at Tigerstar's shoulder on a battlefield. He was overlooked, put aside, forgotten about. Isn't that why he did the things he did? All to get somewhere, to find a purpose and be one of those stars hovering above the living heads of those he once knew, watching, not falling like the ones he had seen earlier, leaving a trail of crackling fire across the sky before disappearing over the horizon forever.
He couldn't see the light anymore that he had started falling from; all around him was a void, an endless land of black and silence, a deathly sort of lack-sound that made his ears ring, and he was descending still, entering a place of nothingness.
He never hit the bottom.
Part two to a tragic story. Though, Darkstripe's always was, in my opinion. I have a weird, twisted affection for him and couldn't let him die a coward. Well, at least not a full one.
Reviews are love.
- Rowan