Chapter 2

By Icyz10

Dark blue eyes glowed with interest, a sliver of horror in its depths.

"What happened?" she asked faintly. Softly. A small voice barely brushing the breeze.

"Tragedy," the tom responded, his dark gaze looking more alive than ever. "My mother... her name... I never knew her name." He trembled the slightest bit. "She was dead before I could open my eyes and see life beneath her's. You must know what that feels like, to lose someone you loved. But to a kit as young as me when I witnessed her death, it was terrible. In fact, it was my first sight, laying my eyes on that cold, still corpse of her's."

His words rose in the swift air as if they had melted into smoke, ominous and filled with dread, of the past, though, not the future. His entire body arched up, his tail was coiled up and over, and his eyes were flowing with an old sadness.

"But... didn't you live with the Clans then? Weren't you a loyal warrior of them?" the she-cat mewed finally.

"Yes—of course," the tom answered. "We always suspected the same thing that happened to my mother happened to the cat named Doestep. They both died the same way, their eyes sharp and blood-shot, as if they were insane. Didn't eat, didn't sleep... her last moments were of giving birth to me, and then I guess it was too much for her to bear."

The she-cat thought of how she had seen her mother die, how loudly she'd yowled when she saw her mother's dead body, the pain she'd felt when she'd stumbled away into the darkness, not feeling anything but a numbness deep within her.

"Her pelt was clotted with dust, as if she'd been long dead, and her fur was tangled and matted," the tom continued. "Of course, her death was nothing like Doestep's, which is the reason I have hope she didn't have the same sickness the others had." He gave a short pause, perhaps remembering the events in his mind, and the fur along his spine stiffened.

Icy silence fell through the air like a stone.

Overwhelming apprehension prickled in the she-cat's paws, and, like a smooth liquid, traveled throughout her body.

"What—" she started to say.

"She was murdered." The tom curled his claws in. "Her throat was slashed brutally, violently, across her neck, and another scar was on her right side. Perhaps LightningClan was sick before that and they just did something to her... I'm not sure." He heaved a sigh, letting the memories swirl between them.

"Now, with this information, I'll continue the story. The half-dead cats... we—the ones who weren't sick—thought they would die sooner or later. But it turns out StarClan had no mercy on them. They lived, yes they did, but they became wild creatures. They prowled around at night, which made the well cats feel nervous all the time, and we discovered they were leaving signs clawed in the leader's rock."

"I found the first one when I was going to get some fresh-kill. We didn't know how a cat could've scraped into a rock as thick as that, but we paid no notice. For, on the carving clawed deep into stone, it said 'Kill, cat, kill.'

The she-cat inhaled sharply, her nose twitching. "Kill cat kill?" she echoed. "Was that a signal for the sick cats to start killing?"

The old tom chuckled, which sounded like a deep rumble of rock grinding against rock, and spoke in a haunted tone.

"No, they did much worse, young one. Much, much worse."