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The Forsaken Path
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Chapter Fourteen
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"They call this place the Forsaken Path," Heartbreaker said ominously as all three of them slipped into the shadows. "Or, just the Forsaken. The point is, the reason this place is so empty is because, well, everyone that goes in here sorta dies."
"Really couldn't be more subtle than that, huh?" Mousepaw muttered.
They had already left behind StarClan a while ago, and were now trudging along the road, while Mousepaw wondered whether everyone else was on catnip. This place didn't look threatening at all; other than the storm clouds gathering overhead, it looked a lot better than she could have hoped for. Plus, she didn't have to worry at all about getting lost: a dirt path cut clearly through the stubby trees, and sometimes, they even caught glimpses of the occasional prey animal.
Still, Mousepaw reminded herself, it was always good to be on guard... especially when she couldn't even sense the trail Heartbreaker kept talking about.
"I can't scent anything at all," she said suspiciously. "If this is a trick, remember who I've got beside me."
She looked over at Fang, who was trailing so far behind that she could hardly be seen, but all the vixen did was stare off into the distance while occasionally pawing the ground, as though confused. Just recently, her eyes had begun to lose their spark, and had started to occasionally make strange repeated jerking motions with her head.
"I wonder what's wrong with that fox," Heartbreaker said. "I don't get why it's not attacking you. Especially after all the stuff you said it went through, it should hate cats even more."
"Because I'm her friend," Mousepaw said stubbornly. "She knows better now."
"There's something else going on," he muttered. "It doesn't seem to have any natural instincts at all. No matter if you're a friend or whatever, it's going to want to seek out its next meal. Right now, it's just following you with that blank look for some reason."
They continued on in silence, Mousepaw sneaking worried glances back at Fang every few moments. Heartbreaker couldn't be right, could he? Maybe there was something wrong with her and she just didn't know it. But what could she do about it now?
Changing the subject, Mousepaw lowered her voice and asked, "How much longer, do you think?"
"Don't know," Heartbreaker said, frowning and pausing beside a clump of cheerfully colored flowers. "The scent is faint even to me, and it seems like any other cat's scent, but... something about it is familiar. I feel like I really should know this person, but I can barely make it out."
"Seriously, what makes you able to detect the scent trail when the rest of us can't?" Mousepaw suddenly growled. "I can hardly notice anything."
"Maybe because the cat we're following is dead and I'm dead too," Heartbreaker said quietly.
Mousepaw glanced over her shoulder again. Fang was now staring off into the trees with a distant expression. "Speaking of dead cats, how many did you really kill? How did you feel when you did it?"
Heartbreaker stared at her incredulously.
"I feel extremely sad about it," he finally said. "They're the reason I can't go to sleep at night. They make me feel really conflicted inside. I get nightmares all the time about killing them. It's terrible. Sob sob sob. There. Happy now?"
Despite herself, Mousepaw found herself giggling slightly. "That's not funny," she said, while struggling to keep her expression neutral. For some reason, he reminded her of Lightning. "Those are all real lives you ruined, and they'll probably never get to go to StarClan either." Tilting her head, she asked, "How are you here in the first place, anyway? I don't think you come from a clan at all."
"I..." he struggled to find the right words. "No, I'm not. But I'm a... special case. If you identify with the clans for long enough, your spirit will sort of find its way here, I guess. That doesn't matter, though, I—"
Heartbreaker suddenly went dead silent.
Confused, Mousepaw tracked his gaze downward at the ground, toward some sweet-smelling herbs.
She pawed one of the stems aside.
The scent of blood and fear-scent struck her immediately.
Then a stab of pain suddenly went through her head, and recognizing it for what it was, Mousepaw grimaced. Of course it has to be now.
Heartbreaker recoiled the first chance he got, his eyes widened as if realizing something for the first time. "The scent trail!" he hissed. "It—it came from her. Hawkie. My sister. How—how did I—" Diving down toward the bloodstains on the ground, he continued anxiously, "They must have sent her off on this trail while I wasn't looking. Something attacked her here, but there's no body. She has to still be alive!"
"Calm down," Mousepaw said, shoving aside the plant stems. She tried to focus on the situation at hand, but she knew that soon, the voices would start taking over.
There was blood. Blood, paler than usual, looking less like a liquid and more like pooled mist.
There was something definitely familiar about this scent.
There was no sign of what had attacked her.
"This can't be it," Heartbreaker muttered. His eyes had started darting around anxiously. "This can't be it. I need to know where she's gone." He took a deep breath. "Or where... her body was dragged off to. The scent's fresh. They can't be far..."
Before she could answer, someone chuckled in the distance ahead, the sound like ringing glass.
Mousepaw started, just as the first familiar whispers started to enter her mind. Come on, you can do this. Just focus...
Exchanging a silent glance with Heartbreaker, she dropped as low as possible and subtly tilted her ears forward.
They weren't alone anymore.
THOSE MOONS. THOSE MOONS OF LONELINESS.
The heavy clouds overhead had caught up with them; by now, they had covered much of the visible sky in shifting dunes of gray. The leaves overhead started rattling as sudden gusts of cold wind blew through, but that was hardly reassuring. It sounded like the hissing of a snake.
"I can't believe you actually think you have a single chance against me, Frostfall, even after all these years," a female voice said, seemingly bored.
The single word jerked Mousepaw immediately into attentiveness. Heartbreaker turned his head curiously toward her—he couldn't have known who Frostfall was—but she ignored him, straining her ears to pick up even more.
LONELINESS YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE KNOWN.
"To be honest," the same she-cat continued, "you're not amusing anymore, Frostfall." Her voice was like the clinking of shattered glass. "Perhaps I should just end this game of cat-and-mouse and just kill you once and for all."
"Hah, you wish," a tom hissed back.
Mousepaw gave a start; she hadn't expected the Frostfall she had heard about to sound so... ragged. "I know you don't have the power to," he sneered. Despite his current situation, he managed to sneak some triumph into his tone. "Because you don't have the Scorchwing."
I KNOW YOU'RE SOMETHING SPECIAL.
JUST GIVE US WHAT WE NEED.
Maybe it was just Mousepaw's imagination, but something seemed to flit in the shadows of the undergrowth beside her.
Silence fell as the apprentice tentatively crawled further toward the voices, peering through the grasses blocking her view. The thing was, at first glance, there only seemed to be two figures standing in the clearing; the more Mousepaw stared at the second, though, the more the she-cat started to blur. Multiple, transparent copies of bits of her body seemed to be moving and twitching on their own, so that she appeared to have several sets of each limb.
Frostfall, meanwhile, seemed as fragile as a transparent butterfly. It seemed as if whatever was sustaining his existence couldn't last much longer.
The she-cat snarled at him, or at least, her most prominent head did. The other ones were all staring off blankly into space. Taking a step forward, she growled, "It won't be long now, though. Soon I'll find that thing and erase you from existence forever, and if I don't, well..." She paused, then finished, "I'll find some other way."
PLEASE.
The tom stared at her disbelievingly for a moment, then scowled. "I can't believe you were ever my former mate, Driftsong."
Suddenly, a sudden thought crossed Mousepaw's mind: could this she-cat be the same monster that Lightning was talking about? But surely...
"The feeling is mutual, believe me," Driftsong purred. "But I do admire your... persistence, however annoying it is. How do you keep coming back when you die?" She abruptly stopped to tilt her head to the side. "It's almost as if you're drawing on power from somewhere else..."
FOR MY SAKE.
Intrigued, Mousepaw held her breath. Spirits that reappeared? She had never heard of such things before. But if that was true, and if he was really the reason that the voices existed...
Ignoring Driftsong's question, Frostfall snarled, "I was right to kill you when I did. If I hadn't stopped you, who knows what else you would have done." Glaring, he muttered, "But I guess that wasn't enough to stop you as a spirit."
JUST ONE LITTLE SACRIFICE.
Driftsong stared at him for a long, long moment.
Then she finally broke the silence, saying coldly, "Enough of this."
In what would be the first murder Mousepaw had ever witnessed, but far from the last, Driftsong stepped forward calmly and unsheathed her claws. Frostfall didn't even try to struggle; he just stared off somewhere into the distance with his detached gaze like he was pretending he couldn't see her, or perhaps wishing for something.
Maybe he was wishing for an existence without constantly dying.
Or maybe a future free from the past.
Or maybe just that he'd found some other she-cat attractive all those moons ago.
But whatever it was, Mousepaw would never know.
I KNOW WE'VE NEVER MET, BUT...
Come on, come on, just stay focused, stay focused, Mousepaw told herself firmly. That's right, you're getting better at this...
Driftsong drew her claws lightly across his throat, almost gently, then dug them in as far as they would go and twisted them painfully in a complete one-eighty.
It was a silent kill—Frostfall must have been used to it—but Mousepaw dove down just before any rogue splatters of blood could land on her.
By the time he finally bled out and collapsed back onto the grass, still a cheerful green, it seemed like several eternities had passed. Driftsong had already disappeared, and as Mousepaw watched in shock, Frostfall's figure slowly began to fade. It wasn't collective; rather, it seemed that bits and pieces of him were slowly disintegrating into nothing.
Several long moments later, Mousepaw finally realized what had happened.
The voices had stopped at the exact moment that Frostfall died... and started around the time that he came back.
Something rustled the bushes beside her, and Mousepaw jumped, but she knew it wasn't her imagination this time.
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