Another challenge for Night Stalkers. This was fun to write, it's been a while since I took things from this viewpoint.

Hope's Fatal Error

Wailing, shrill wailing, the call of grief without cease. It filled the camp every morning, wrought chilling air with its piercing pitch as it wrenched and tore into the hearts of these cats. These brave, helpless cats. They didn't know what to do, how could they? They were just scared… so scared. Scared and helpless.

The unknown has a way of doing that to you.

I remember being terrified, my muscles stricken as if I had contracted the plague. It wasn't the plague I had contracted. It was something much more… sinister.

There was a spirit in my body- malicious, deadly. It had eyes that seeped into my soul, and I swear that it had the scent of death and stifling blood, of putrid sickness and withering disease, of hate and malice and draconian nature. The scent drank in the chaos, the hatrid, the malice, feeding off our despair. You may not believe me, but the scent was there. It was real.

And it was pure evil.

Evil has a way of seeming harmless and cliché in the tales told to kits. It seems purely there to be antagonistic, a joke to be pushed off as the hero's success. That's not evil as I know it- this was true evil. A spirit that held everything terrible in this world, that wanted nothing more than to watch it burn. It radiated such a presence that I swear flowers wilted in its wake, that with a whisk of its tail sickness spread like the plague, that death followed its every footsteps and tears created a river behind it. It held everything terrible about this world, everything unnatural, everything sickly, everything dastardly. It was the being of hate, power, lust, revenge, darkness, fear, sickness, death, despair, the unknown, all in one terrible package. It was nightmarish, demonic, sending hellish scenes of death and disease, of carrion and crowfood. There was no good in this creature, there was no defeat in its wake, no hero could slay it with one blow, nor thousands dealt with the sharpest blade.

Sometimes it's hard to accept that.

That's the way it was with my clan. Cats fell asleep in fear every night, and shrieking and wailing was the rooster's call. Cats fell like mice beneath the spirit's claws, their deaths hidden in a cloak of darkness, the predator's turned prey in their own dens.

Of course, no one knew what was causing these nightly murders. That was what frightened them most. How do you fight an enemy, if you don't know what you are fighting?

But I know who it was.

I woke up one morning with blood on my claws, my shadow engulfing my presence. I had sensed the spirit inside me before, but now I knew what it meant.

Yes, I had killed them all. Killed them all while my body slept, and the spirit ran rampant in my mind. I imagine myself looking crazed, with a look of death in my eye, blood seeping over my coat, cats falling around me, light fleeing at my presence. I imagine anyone who saw it tangled their paws in terror, eyes wild and heart leaping at the pure evil in it all. I'll never know. They're all dead now.

Of course I told the clan right away. I had seen with my own eyes what terror it was bringing, how each death tore the clan apart like silk with faulty seams. I didn't wish to keep my own life if this is what it caused. I was a good cat, there was no denying that.

None of them believed me. How could they? They said I was a loyal cat, said I would never do anything to them, said they had always trusted me with their life, and always would.

Fools, I'll admit, but what were they supposed to do? Exile the only member of the clan holding them together?

I wouldn't have done it differently if I was them. The answer was clear as day. She was just trying to help the clan by telling them the threat was gone, cooling their jumbled nerves. The tenser one gets, the more paranoid they become.

Any good cat would have done the same, and there was no doubt I was a good cat.

Poor fools, destroyed by their own faith.

It makes my heart weep.

I'm dead now, I've gone to the stars, the spirit has departed from my body. They don't hold it against me. I was a good cat- no one doubts that.

The spirit hasn't left, though. No, the spirit still haunts this clan.

Why?

Only it knows, and I can't imagine it ever telling us. We would be dead before it could speak a word, hearts shredded just by seeing the beast's presence. This being is so far out of our understanding that if we realized the true evil it really is, our heart's would quite likely burst. We're a weak race, no matter what anyone says. It's because we hold hope in our hearts.

Hope that something good is there.

And when you realize that there isn't?

What will happen then?