Sorry for the long wait, but here's the new chapter! Crossposted to AO3.
Icepaw awoke with the sun, filled with nervous energy over his first real day as an apprentice of ThunderClan. Looking around the apprentice den he noticed the other apprentices were also waking up.
"Morning," Graypaw meowed with a large yawn, his long fur sticking straight up in random spots and bits of moss clinging to his pelt.
"Good morning," Icepaw mewed back as he followed some of the other apprentices out of the den.
A group of warriors sat outside of the warriors' den including Longtail, who was sitting beside Stonefall. Icepaw padded up to his mentor just like the others were doing with theirs.
"We will be touring ThunderClan's territory, specifically the borders which you will need to memorize," Longtail told him.
"Ravenpaw, we'll be joining them. Think of it as a test to see how well you remember borders and landmarks," Stonefall said. "You both should get something to eat, it will be a long day.:
After sharing a large piece of prey with Ravenpaw, the two followed their mentors out of ThunderClan's camp and Icepaw recognized the direction they were heading was similar to the one they had headed yesterday when he went to speak with his mother. The trees thinned out and he could spy a line of twoleg fence just behind the treeline.
"That is Twoleg Place, it borders ThunderClan's territory on this side," Longtail explained. "But you should already be familiar with this place since you came from there."
Icepaw actually wasn't all that familiar with the place since the first time he ever left his mother's twoleg yard was the day he wandered into ThunderClan's territory and was attacked by a fox, but he didn't say that to his mentor, a little afraid that if he did Longtail who seemed to dislike him already might turn to hate him for correcting him. They moved on and the trees turned from maples and oaks into a pine forest.
"Ravenpaw? Why don't you tell Icepaw about this place," Stonefall spoke up, breaking the silence that had fallen between the cats.
"We call this pine forest Tree-Cut Place; twolegs come in leaf-bare to cut down the pine trees, but they return in the newleaf to plant new trees," Ravenpaw mewed to the group.
What a bizarre thing for twolegs to do, Icepaw thought. He faintly remembered when he was a very young kit that his mother's twolegs brought in a small pine tree for a time. It was a fuzzy memory, but he remembered his mother telling his siblings and him not to climb the tree or play with the colorful and shiny objects the twolegs put in the tree.
"Correct," Stonefall purred to his apprentice.
The group moved on and started following a river which Icepaw was told was ThunderClan's border with RiverClan. They came upon a collection of boulders on ThunderClan's side of the river, bathed in sunlight with three strange cats dozing on top of them, two she-cats and one tom.
"Mossfeather! Mistycreek!" Stonefall called out in a friendly greeting as the ThunderClan group padded up to the boulders.
"Stonefall! Who's this you got with you?" the gray and white she-cat asked.
"This is Icepaw, Longtail's new apprentice," the blue-gray tom told the group.
"He smells like a kittypet," the black and white fluffy strange tom meowed. There was a nasty looking scar running down his face, but otherwise he looked friendly.
"He was," Longtail hissed out, glaring at the tom. "But now he's part of ThunderClan."
"Who are these cats?" Icepaw whispered to Ravenpaw, looking wide eyed at the strange cats. Stonefall was acting friendly with the she-cats, one of the she-cats erriely looked similar to him, sharing a blue-gray pelt and blue eyes.
"That's Mossfeather, Mistycreek, and Smudgepelt. They're RiverClan warriors," the other apprentice explained. "This place is called Sunning Rocks. ThunderClan and RiverClan used to fight over this stretch of land for many seasons, but Bluestar and Crookedstar, RiverClan's leader, came to the agreement to make the land neutral territory to end the bloodshed."
"Stonefall, we should be moving on," Longtail called to his friend.
The blue-gray tom paused in his conversation with the two she-cats and meowed, "I'll see you two at the Gathering. Happy hunting."
"See you then," Mistycreek purred back.
Mossfeather waved her tail in farewell to the group.
The black and white tom called, "See you around little apprentice!"
The ThunderClan cats continued on with the territory tour, but Icepaw kept thinking about how similar Stonefall and Mistycreek looked. Were they related? If so why were they in different Clans? His mind was so occupied by those thoughts that when they arrived back at camp, he walked right into another cat.
"S-sorry," Icepaw stammered out as he stepped back to see who he walked into.
Towering about him was the large spiky-furred gray patchy warrior Owlshadow. Icepaw had mistaken the large she-cat for a tom the first time he met her, he had never met a she-cat so big before. A splash of white on her face highlighted her mismatched eyes, one green and one amber, as she stared down at the apprentice. "It's fine, but you should be more careful next time," the she-cat mewed.
"I will," Icepaw meowed.
Owlshadow nodded before turning to join her mother, Spottedheart, by the warrior's den.
"Hey Icepaw, over here!" Graypaw's voice called out.
The black tom turned toward the sound of his denmate and saw him and the other apprentices were sitting around the stump outside the apprentice's den. Icepaw hurriedly padded over to join them. Graypaw nudged a mouse toward him once he arrived and Icepaw gave a thankful pur before eating it.
"I hope I get to go to the Gathering tomorrow," Graypaw meowed.
Icepaw blinked, there was that word again, the Gathering. No one has explained what that was for the time he has spent with ThunderClan. "What is a Gathering?" he asked.
"The Gathering is when all the Clans meet under the full moon for a time of peace," Sandpaw meowed in a know-it-all tone. "Something you would know if you were Clanborn."
"Do you think I will be allowed to go?" he asked.
"Of course!" Graypaw mewed before she-cat apprentice could say anything. "I bet Bluestar will want to pick you to come. Maybe you'll get to meet WindClan's former kittypets. Ravenpaw told me you already met Smudgepelt, RiverClan's former kittypet."
"Do you know the names of WindClan's former kittypets?" Icepaw asked.
"Dawnheart and Jake are their names," Ravenpaw replied. "Jake almost always comes to the Gathering, so he'll probably be there for you to meet him."
Icepaw blinked. This was the first he heard of an outsider joining the Clans and keeping their old name. He wondered what kind of cat Jake was that he wanted to keep that connection to his old life.
Next chapter should be coming out quicker than this one now that my laptop is fixed.
Yes, I turned Treecut Place into a Christmas Tree farm because I felt it was silly that ThunderClan had a regular logging place on their territory.
I'm curious to see if anyone will guess what twist I've done to Bluestar and her kits before it's revealed.
Also I'm working on allegiances and they will probably be what will be posted next.
One last note, I may be interested in finding a Beta for this story to go over chapters and find errors and bounce ideas off of.