Chapter 9

Trying to expel the burning, there are so few things that matter.


Aspenpaw writhed in his rest.

His eyes were shut and yet they moved all around, unable to focus on any thought.

He was conscious, hardly, still reeling with animation, no idea of what would come next.

It was what he was trying to avoid, but he could certainly put up with being left ignorant for some time.

Apollo had instructed him to rest before she would tell him anything further about her decision to allow him to remain in the commune.

Aspenpaw didn't fear the war, not more than he feared being left alone.

Suddenly, his body flinched, and Aspenpaw felt the rough touch of a paw prodding his pelt.

He opened his eyes and looked through the old dust kicked up from the dilapidated floors and recognized the cubist face of Roco, the medic, as the role was called by Aranyer, who was there standing in the background, hawk-eyed and cross.

Roco's eyes were bloodshot, as if she had been crying.

She noticed him studying her face and turned away, only enough to still keep him in view, "Ho-How well c-can w-, can y-you, can you w-walk?"

Aspenpaw began to stand to show her, but Roco veered back, letting out a yip and causing Aranyer to take a step forward, distaste brewing in her eyes.

Aspenpaw moved slowly, not even dragging up his tail to meet his body.

All his muscles were stiff, but as he bent his joints and made movement, it was all completely natural,

"Ap-Apollo said, says th-that you can, you can rest un-until tomorr-to-" Roco gave up finishing the sentence and retreated to the safety of the tunnel and to Aranyer, who glare without mind passed the she-cat and at Aspenpaw, who was feeling his way from one place to another, being reminded of being alive out in the world.

He had never been debilitated like that before, never sick before. He didn't even realize when the two cats left the room entirely, slowly waltzing with himself in the mystical, windless air.


The day passed by like mud, and Aspenpaw disguised himself as a sleeping body to any onlookers throughout.

Expectations engulfed his overly-ready mind, and he could find no resistance in his body.

For the first time he felt the path was clear; it was as if he had a future.

But after laying for so long, his brain shut down without him even realizing it, still consciously dreaming about what could be when the first images of sleep wrestled him away.


He dreamed that he was in the sea, floating like a branch, unaware of his own movements, the soft, tired paddling.

His strokes brought him nowhere, no further along, no higher, no lower.

The sky was cloudless, and waves rushed through it as they did to sweep Aspenpaw's dead weight along, pushing him without contest to where it designated he go.

There were a thousand waves that washed over his face, and yet he did not feel the drowning.

He thought he must be dead now, and this is what came next, a return to the primordial ocean.

His limbs cut the thin water back and forth in tiny rotations, and his fur flowed freely as he moved.

The wind sounded heavy here, and Aspenpaw wondered how high up he was, how far this sea stretched in every direction.

His eyes were fixed on the sky, watching the shades pass by, occasionally being wetted by a silent flood that seemed to disappear when it reached his ever-unblinking eyes.

There was an anxiety of floating desperately.

He had no place to land, no guarantee but to continue on.

He didn't pray for ground, nor did he try to swim, he just allowed the feelings to come into him.

It was freedom in its purest form, the kind that cannot yet support life. No god came down to create a world, to raise the land and to give it life.

It was like this place had been forgotten.

Aspenpaw reached out his paw and caught full with cold, whipping wind, watching the droplets disconnect and rain back to their homeland.

It was tiring to hold himself here, but he couldn't sink, no matter how hard he tried.

Still, he felt warmth surrounding his body like a parasite huddled in the folds of some unwilling host.

A voice called from the misty depths, Aspenpaw's own voice, distorted by such a powerful mass between the speaker and the listener, "Where are you? Where are you?"

"I'm here. I'm here," The water moved tentatively, a song without a singer, his words overpowering the wind and ricocheting into the depths, some impossible communication with an alien double.

He tried to speak down to it, though with his head to the bright and sunless sky, but as his mouth opened and salt washed over his papillae, the voice rebutted words that Aspenpaw would never say,

"It's dark here, tell me what the sky looks like,"

"It's just the same," Aspenpaw didn't question the request. It seemed to make sense in the moment, "It's a blanket of nothing at all. We're seeing the same thing, we're both just a little bit off,"

"I wonder what the sky really looks like," The voice had changed, it was no longer recognizable, choking through the ocean swirls,

"This is it. This is all there is," Aspenpaw argued. He wasn't reimbursed with a reply of any sort.

Some more time passed, time where he floated by unaccompanied.

He wondered if there really was a world down there where the voice came from.

His muscles were burning, and the ocean couldn't relieve them.

There was smoke in the air, he could smell it so distinctly, the same scent that percolated through the city.

That place had seemed so far away from here, but now he felt like he was right back on that roof, overlooking a world he could never take part in, the closest to death he had ever been, and the closest to the stars as he ever would be.

A guttural howl belted out across the sea, traveling the tide and coming back around to the owner like the echo of a great mountain range.

Aspenpaw wailed out; he could taste the blood in the air.


White opals, through the crux of his arm, calmly disturbed by the sights and sounds of his dream.

Aspenpaw gathered his fallen breath and felt his muscles deflate as they relaxed.

He was sore all over from the strainful vision and sat thinking about it for only a moment before coming to the sense of where he was.

Aspenpaw sat up, rolling his neck and waiting tensely for somebody to show.

It was as bright as it got in the desolate room, meaning that morning had come, and the time approached for Aspenpaw to involve himself in the war.

He had heard many glorifying stories of wars from his father and others, and he knew of the war in the forest, but had never involved himself in it.

He knew that it couldn't be like what those stories said, but it couldn't be so bad that he would rather have the alternative happen.

The air was still, and Aspenpaw stood, padding to the entrance hole that he had looked at longingly for quite a while now.

He slipped his sleek body against the serrated wall and the slimy barricade that kept them all hidden.

Instantly as his face impelled into the morning sun a breeze ground against his fur.

Aspenpaw longed to feel the freedom of water around his body again.

There was nobody outside.

Looking right, the narrow-way abruptly ended without another turn to it.

Structures surrounded the three sides closely, but to the left there was an opening, and beyond it, a thunderpath and a sporadically populated field of gray, like the abandoned twolegplace he had gone through with Di, but with not a spot of grass that Aspenpaw could see from here.

He wondered where the young tom was now, and if he would ever see him again, or if he could even survive on his own.

Aspenpaw ducked back behind the barricade, feeling his way through the darkness until he stumbled into the opening, shaking dust and grime off his pelt as he entered.

A she-cat stood near the center of the room, completely still, and she locked eyes with the dirty loner.

It was Deya, her face drooping with exhaustion. Aspenpaw slowly fixed his posture and dipped his head.

She quickly returned the expression and backtracked as if feeling guilty for doing so, and started to explain herself without giving Aspenpaw the opportunity to even begin to wonder why, "Hey, I see you're well up,"

"Yeah, I just got up," The small talk was awkward and forced, and the silence lasted for several uncomfortable seconds.

Aspenpaw must have looked like death in this moment.

His fur was knotted and filthy, having collected dust and dirt for so long without a proper cleaning,

"Have you eaten yet?" Deya offered an excuse for breaking the silence, and Aspenpaw eagerly obliged,

"No,"

"Alright," The white she-cat backed away, her legs bending in weird, sharp angles as she thought too hard about her exit.

Aspenpaw sat, feeling lightheaded, as if the wind had traveled through his ear canals and was subtly whisking his eyes back and forth.

He breathed a few times, holding his breath in his mouth and swirling it around before slowly blowing it out into the air again.

Deya returned through the tunnel carrying a scrawny mouse, a worthy catch in leaf-bare, and a similar size meal as to what he was always presented with.

She laid it in front of him and backed off a bit, leaning herself up against the sturdy wall and keeping watch as Aspenpaw lowered himself further, "There ain't much 'round here for eatin'. You should know that if you're goin' to be here,"

"That's fine," Aspenpaw was used to it. He hadn't eaten well in a long time.

"So what's your name then?" Deya asked as Aspenpaw took his first bite, adding, "If you don't mind my askin',"

"As," He responded cooly, though with some food distorting his sounds,

"Weird name. Don't suppose somebody's given you mine?"

"Rese said it was Deya,"

"Well aren't you just gettin' to know everybody around here," She smiled, and Aspenpaw realized that he enjoyed her presence far more than any other cat who lived in this commune.

Nobody else had talked to him in any way that would imply that they recognized him as a fellow cat.

She looked a lot more weary than most of them however, maybe save for Apollo, who never seemed to have a moment that wasn't filled in some important way,

"I'm guessing she ain't told you, but Apollo sent me to show you around a bit, that's why I'm here," Deya suddenly explained herself, and Aspenpaw looked up from his mangled, nearly finished meal, "So we'd better get goin' right once you've finished. The only piece of advice I can give you with full certainly is that you never wanna get on her sharp edge, it'll sting,"

"Where are we going?" Aspenpaw asked suspiciously,

"Out, I don't know quite where yet, she didn't tell me and I've never done this,"

Aspenpaw had finished his mouse and was staring at the remains, fragile bones, so many of which had snapped as he was eating.

There was no dirt to bury them in, a custom that Aspenpaw had always participated in, even when he didn't believe in the divine punishment that was threatened if he failed to comply.

He had always just had that small bit of respect for the dead, and he couldn't quite rationalize it.

Deya noticed that he was in confusion and projected, "We throw 'em out in the dumpster outside," When Aspenpaw didn't react to her words, she added, "The big thing front of the entrance,"

Aspenpaw slowly nodded, not even realizing before that the structure was hollow.

Deya wasted no time once Aspenpaw had finished his meal and hounded him outside, wind again bursting from nowhere, sending cool sensations through his open mouth, carrying the mouse bones.

He leaped atop the barricade and peered inside to find that it was nearly completely hollow, the walls hardly thin enough to hold all of its contents in.

And for the first time, he noticed just how foul it reeked, like rot and disease.

He quickly dropped his load and fell back down to meet with Deya,

"So where are we going then?" Aspenpaw asked again, not entirely sure of what this plan entailed.

Deya didn't seem too confident either, but she spoke with the same subtle enthusiasm,

"I'll take you through some of the byways, get a bit of a lay of the place, I'm not really sure what Apollo wants from me mostly,"

"Jingo said it doesn't rain much around here," Aspenpaw implored with the same hope he had had when he asked Jingo, but was immediately shot down,

"You should be glad to know that it really don't, not much, that storm was probably more than we've ever gotten while I've been here. Were you here for that? It was a complete wipeout,"

"That was the day I got here," Deya didn't respond, she just started walking, turning the corner with Aspenpaw by her side as he looked out for the first time to the new world that he inhabited.

The grayscape was matched perfectly with the early morning foggy blue, as if this was the true reality of the city, and all else was just a dead mirage.

Smoke emanated from the rooftops of the distant building, but the ones where they stood seemed all but abandoned.

They walked alongside a thunderpath without a single monster coming down the way.

Aspenpaw found that his paws were quickly becoming sore and unsteady, but he didn't complain about it.

He bit at the corners of his mouth, trying to pass the consuming seconds of silence.

There really was nothing out here, this land was barren.

The poisoning quiet was broken only by their burgeoning steps, Aspenpaw being forced to move faster as Deya sped through this empty place,

"This is the bad part of the city, this whole region" Deya suddenly spoke, slowly down just a bit to walk beside Aspenpaw, "It's fine out here now, but if it was night, we'd wanna take our traveling up to the rooftops,"

"It's dangerous?"

"Quite a bit," Aspenpaw felt stupid for opening his mouth and let the conversation die out again.

The vagueness of her warning got his mind racing a bit as to what could awaken here when the sun fell, what creatures roamed this land.

The thin poles lining the way were all bent, and underneath there were the sharp remnants of clear stone.

The tattered paws, or likewise equivalent, of monsters lay around once and a while.

Deya seemed unphased by the dire world. Her eyes were fastened straight ahead.

Aspenpaw couldn't quite figure out her feelings towards him, which in of itself was a feeling he had grown to hate from his own repeated failures to find such things out before.

Most of the other cats in the commune treated him with fear or disdain, and had no problem letting him see their disgust, but Deya just stood passively by with a strange fascination that Aspenpaw disliked just as much.

She was the easiest to talk to, save maybe to Aranyer, though she certainly didn't like to, but Aspenpaw always felt like some toy when she was around, as if she were a god looking in on her creation and seeing what she had done wrong.

He hoped that some of the cats at the commune would warm up to his presence.

It was disinspiring to see the state of this lonely place, with not a single other living being around.

It seemed like a waste of sunlight to illuminate it.

There were narrow-ways between nearly every coupling of structures, and Aspenpaw wondered what secrets hid in them, who stayed in the darkness to watch them pass by, and who were too afraid to step out into the light, or if they were even there at all.


When several minutes had further passed of the two cats wandering the negative space, the sun finally showed them closure.

Up ahead there were clusters of things like monsters, still as strong trunks and anything but uniform in appearance.

Aspenpaw hesitated to go on any further, but Deya continued walking ahead without fear,

"What are we doing here?" Aspenpaw yelled up to where she was, a good few tracks away, and with a slight accusation in his spit.

Deya turned back and was met with a gust of wind against her face,

"I gotta show you this, it's not dangerous! Come on!" She shouted back against the breeze.

Aspenpaw, still wary, caught up with his guide, not wanting to be separated from her in case that she was lying or simply wrong.

They stepped off the side-way of the thunderpath when it ended, but Aspenpaw wasn't able to enjoy the feeling of dirt beneath his paws.

The ground was cracked and dry, as if nobody had ever so much as spit on the earth.

The jagged lines in the crust were like derelict sandbanks corroded by wind and wash.

Not a single crumb of dirt came loose as they pushed down against it along their way.

As they neared the closest of the structures, Aspenpaw circled around to put Deya as a barrier between them.

The towhead she-cat stopped in her step and shifted her expression to meet Aspenpaw, "They're just trailers, not a spark of life to 'em,"

It didn't reassure him, but Aspenpaw went along with it, his eyes shot with adrenaline and paranoia all the same.

As if to calm him, Deya began to explain the area they were in, the mass collection of rectangles and dull colors, "This is the salvage yard, or at least, that part over there is,"

She pointed with her tail to a heap of metals and cutting stones, not unlike Corrina's camp, but built up like a mountain range that hid the horizon, "We just call the whole thing a salvage yard. This is where all the scavengers and diasporas go, y'know, cats who can't find their way with any way they been presented,"

Aspenpaw nodded slowly, looking around for cats, "They've taken up the trailers. Don't know why they were all abandoned,"

Aspenpaw was caught completely out of his element with the explanation.

It hadn't seemed to tell him much of anything, but then again, he didn't know how much there was to be told,

"How many cats are here?" He chose as his first question,

"I don't know. I've never had any sort of a meanin'ful talk here,"

"Then why are we here?"

"We trade here, what little there is to go around," As they round a vaguely defined corner between trailers, Aspenpaw spotted the first cat he would see on this daytrip, an old, black tom, lying on the lowest step of what could be presumed to be his residence.

Barely a few rays of sunshine hit his sleeping back, "Information, mainly," Deya was still speaking, as if she hadn't even noticed the tom, going on about the relations between the she-cat commune and this salvage yard, "They don't have much else they can get us,"

Though she seemed to be ready to continue on, Aspenpaw interrupted at just the moment her mouth closed,

"Who's that?" He knew that she had said she didn't know any of the cats here, but Aspenpaw was fascinated by the sight of the elder, his bones protruding out from the dangly flaps of skin and fur like the face of death had already touched him.

Deya met eyes with Aspenpaw for just a second before staring forward, formulating what she would say next,

"Old timer, been beat down so many times he don't even try to get up anymore," Aspenpaw opened his mouth, but could only gape, no words catalyzing on the icetips of his teeth.

Deya waited for him, giving him the agency to move on, and slowly, he did, silently questioning the world he had found himself in, the world he felt he had pulled crashing down from the skylands.


Past the flowing rows of trailers, the two travelers sharply changed course.

The salvage yard had been so off track from the main center of the city that the buildings were only sticks in the distance, but now, as the sun warmed the sky, those structures only grew taller and taller.

The last stop had unwound Aspenpaw, and he put his trust in Deya.

She seemed to enjoy being a guide, telling him of landmarks and anecdotes from her short time in the city.

Aspenpaw wondered where she had lived before this, but hadn't the nerve to ask about it, mostly nodding along to her stories contentedly.

There was grass here, and the whole scene felt so much more alive, with small bugs flying around, hornets and crickets and wasps and dragonflies.

For the moment, there was silence, and just the wind blew.

The salvage yard had completely faded from view when Aspenpaw looked back, "Where are we going now?" He asked, his mouth dry and his tongue sore from a spot where he had bit it without caution,

"Into the city somewhere," She answered as Aspenpaw swung his head to meet the words, "I think nobody should approach us, but you'll hafto do the talkin' if it comes to it, 'cause I can't,"

Aspenpaw listened intently, knowing that if he failed in some way during this journey, he would never be able to return to the commune, "You'll hafta tell 'em that I'm your ancilla maxima, and that your on business to the fair north,"

"Alright," Aspenpaw obliged, taking the words to heart.

He had never heard them before, but he could extrapolate the meaning of them and had no desire to ask for elaboration,

"You've got that?"

"Yeah,"

"Okay," Deya sat down to rest for a moment and invited Aspenpaw to do the same by slapping her tail against the even grass, which folded down like limbs tucking in as they sat, "And can you fight? Just in case," She asked, which confused Aspenpaw.

It seemed to mean that Apollo really hadn't told her anything,

"Yeah, that's why Apollo let me stay," He said, trying to decipher something of the leader's character by mentioning her, but Deya ignored it,

"Well, that's good then. That's why she let me stay too," She smiled, and Aspenpaw wondered if his body would look like hers one day, covered in deep scars, mercilessly plastered all along her face and sides, as if every attack that the commune engaged in was an attempt on her life.

Aspenpaw had been conditioned by the strange honor that the clans tried to uphold.

It was in the warrior code that a warrior does not need to kill to win battles, but the phrase was so vague and respected that every fight that Aspenpaw had ever seen, lurking in the shadows, seemed as much a battle of minds as of blood.

It was a strange realization to make that this set of rules which he had had drilled into his head since he was a kit was irrelevant in this land.

He hadn't even thought of it before now, "You ready to get going?" Deya was stood up and stretching, despite it only having a been a couple of minutes that they were resting,

"Yeah, alright," Aspenpaw mustered, still caught up in his own mind as he stood.

Deya was looking off at the fortress battalion ahead,

"Into the heart of darkness," She said, "At least, that's what my-my-" She drifted off for a second, as if she had spoken in haste.

She forced herself to finish the sentence, "-my brother called it," Aspenpaw looked to her eyes, drawn to see if there was a soreness in them, but he saw none of it, only slight embarrassment for a moment before they began to move, prepared to step straight into that darkness.

Until I write again,

-Gojira