Recap: One of the city's scouting parties was dragged into camp and, suffice to say, it (or they) ended badly. Emberpaw got her warrior name though, and she is now Embershade! Yayy! Eternal servitude beckons. I think it's also been a REALLY long spring/summer season but whatever this is what it is.
She wonders how the forest can still be so serene. The sun turns the leaves above her burnished gold and the air is heavy with the final vestiges of summer heat. The bird song is relentless. This place doesn't look like a nightmare, doesn't betray the nature of the beasts that dwell here. The blood never stains.
Embershade sits by the river and thinks. It's been days since her warrior ceremony, since her acknowledgement of her role in the Clan as nothing more than Morningstar's handmaiden. Knowing it is some kind of constant weight. Since then, nothing has really changed. Even her relationship with Cloudstrike remains unaltered: they snap at each other, and he endeavours to tease her, not wholly kindly, and she always retreats from his advances into the forest. The forest, who has seen so much, and still shields her. Sometimes, she looks at him and sees glimpses of her brother, who must surely be dead by now. Nothing else would stop him returning to PureClan: she knows he was a better servant than she'll ever be, or ever want to be.
She dips a paw into the cold surge of the river. The water comes from the north, somewhere chilled and distant. She thinks it is fed by snow and sluggish, half-frozen tributaries. Embershade thinks about following it, if only to sate her curiosity, to see if it will led her to mountains or sea or something else entirely. Then she wonders how far Morningstar would go to drag her back.
Far enough, she thinks. As far as she needs to go.
Shaking her paw off, she stands and stretches. She's on an errand run, and this is the last of today's chores.
Turning from the river, she finds the tree she needs and begins to climb. At first, months ago, she could wade across with relative ease. The current has only strengthened since then, so she supposes it's a lucky thing that she prefers climbing to getting her feet wet. Reaching a long branch, a sturdy, thick thing, she detaches from the trunk. Embershade has mastered this, and barely thinks about it as she moves. The precariousness of it all isn't even enough to quicken her heartbeat.
The branch creaks and sways as she nears its end, somewhere over the middle of the river. When she was an apprentice, she hadn't weighed enough to make the branch even twitch. Narrowing her eyes and measuring the distance, Embershade crouches and marks her target. The next branch is half a metre away, dappled and warm with sunshine. It reaches like a lifeline over the water, a welcome, an olive branch. She calculates the leap in her mind and executes it: the branch sways and groans but does not crack. Embershade thinks that one day her luck may give out, but today is not so special.
She waits for the swaying to still, and then edges her way forward, still not wholly trusting the wood beneath her feet. The crossing feels too easy; Embershade is always waiting for some wrong thing to happen, for something steady and solid beneath her feet to be tugged away at any moment. As of late, the ground she stands on has begun to feel a little unstable.
Embershade makes her descent quick. She's probably been out here too long already, although Morningstar doesn't question her absences as long as she hears the news she wants to. She keeps her eyes wide open, scanning the undergrowth as she lands. She's not seen him for a couple of weeks, and even though she knows he wasn't caught up in the rogue fiasco in camp, she wonders if something did happen. Maybe he's simply realized the forest is no place for a cat like him.
Embershade touches down on the forest floor, dry leaves beneath her feet. Sneaking is harder than ever with such a carpet to walk on, but she manages. Besides, there's hardly anyone to hear her on the this side of the river, and fewer still to care. Eyes wide open, she stalks through the undergrowth, tasting the air.
"Skah," she hisses, abandoning the pretense of stealth. He must be wearing half the forest floor by now, all mud and leaves and twigs. She might step on him before she spots him. "Skah."
She keeps the river to her right and moves downstream, a little irate. She'd hate to waste her time out here chasing ghosts.
Something cracks and snaps sharply in front of her, as though in alarm. She pinpoints the spot, tempted to roll her eyes, and moves toward it. "Skah," she says, before having a horrible premonition- it's someone else in hiding, someone poised to report her seditious ways to Morningstar herself. She closes her mouth and parts the ferns before her, thinking of a public and humiliating death. To her relief, she's only greeted by a pile of mud and sticks, a rather lumpy one with two mismatched eyes.
"Skah," she says, annoyance in her voice. "You're not supposed to hide from me."
The pile of refuse seems to relax. "Well, when I hear an angry she-cat calling my name, I tend to run the other way."
Embershade snorts. "We have a kind-of deal, you know. An obligation, as it were. Your life for information. What have you got?" Morningstar hasn't asked her for anything as late: she's been preoccupied with the slaughter at camp, and for once, her own daughter is at the forefront of her attention.
Skah reclines further, showing a patch of yellow-and-brown underbelly. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
He's grown cockier over the weeks, swollen with the confidence that she won't kill him, given their awkward alliance and the team they seem to have formed.
"Yes," she replies, flatly. "I would."
The chunk of mud between his brows creases, as though he's unamused by her apathy. He clears his throat.
"I have some gossip for you, actually. A couple of weeks ago, a tom came crashing through the river and into the pine forest. Looked like he was running for his life. A tabby tom. No one followed him, or even came looking for him later."
She mulls this over for a second. This is nothing she can give to Morningstar, but… Peppermask. Her estranged uncle, a familial figure who's never paid her a second glance. Not dead after all- not yet, at least. She remembers the confusion of that afternoon, and the way Morningstar contradicted herself; she'd come roaring into camp looking for someone, only to say moments later the perpetrator had been killed. That was the day she abolished deputies, denounced any kind of secondary authority at all. Embershade had thought the whole thing was strange, but the whole deputy fiasco occupied most of her thoughts. Morningstar's foes disappeared- she'd come to accept that much long before Peppermask's doomed coup. It only seemed to matter that he was gone, not the how or why.
Skah is watching the miniscule changes in her expression.
"And he got away?" she asks, making sure her uncle didn't break his neck on his way up the riverbank. "Was he wounded?"
Skah shakes his head. "He had a scratch here and there, but they were probably just from running through the undergrowth."
Embershade sticks out her tongue for a moment, in contemplation, before she remembers herself.
"That's interesting," she says, though her tone doesn't match her words. "Anything else?" Anything she can use, she means. Anything that might make her useful. All she has right now is sedition and secrecy.
He rolls further onto his back, dislodging some of his camouflage as he goes. "That black tom," he says, vaguely. "The rogue you lot adopted like one of your own- you couldn't do that with me, by the way?- I think I may know where he's from."
"The city," Embershade says, narrowing her eyes. She's guessed that much.
"No, no," Skah says dismissively, as though that's public knowledge. "He came from where I come from. A house on the southside, a place of… business. A cattery with a high reproduction rate. He must have been sold into soldiery."
"Soldiery," Embershade repeats. Kits and campaigns. Give them my regards.
She'd overheard something, a long time ago, a conversation between Iceface and one of his Tainted friends. They mentioned kits and trades and some kind of operation- and now it seems Voletooth must be part of it all. She wants to ask Skah more questions, find out everything he knows.
Skah's lips twist as he decides what he wants to tell her, what line he wants to walk. "There's a local revolt in the city. You've heard of it, I assume."
"You could say that," she says. "And Voletooth has a hand in it?"
He shrugs in return, as though he's depleted his supply of information and must wait to refill it. "I think that if he's here, in the forest, he's been sent. To do what, I couldn't say. But if he's still here, he hasn't done it yet."
It feels dark suddenly, though the sun is still in the sky. This part of the forest feels twisted too, tainted by its proximity to the river. She has a lot to think about, but she wants to know more.
"That's speculation," she says, twitching her tail. "You're here for information."
"That's what I have," he retorts, finally sitting up. "If you want something else you'd better go find some other hapless tom."
"I just might have to. You need to leave, Skah. Things are changing in the Clan, and in the city. Morningstar leaves for hours and hours and no one knows where she goes. It's only a matter of time before you're caught here, and then they'll catch me."
"Leave." He says the word with only a small amount of disgust. "And where would I go?"
Embershade shakes her head. There's a broad, vast world out there (she's sure of this much, anyway). Where couldn't he go? "You can't go back to the city, obviously. Some kind of storm is brewing there, and soon it will come here. Or more of it will come here. Go somewhere north. Follow the river up and out."
"Sounds idyllic," Skah says.
Embershade shakes her head and prepares to leave. "If you're caught by the Clan, Skah, after you refuse to go, I will personally sneak into whatever cave they hold you in and snap your neck before you can spill any of your secrets. Think about it." She flexes her forepaws for good measure.
"I'll think about it," Skah snaps, looking terse. "Keep your paws to yourself, Sable."
The name of her mother in his mouth grates on her. She holds out a paw and twitches it a little, for good measure. She makes sure to leave as quickly as she arrived, back through the bushes and up into the trees, over the river and back down to the other side.
The trek back to camp is a slow one; she is filled with thoughts and musings, mostly centered on Morningstar and her tenuous grip on the Clan. Her web of lies seem to be outgrowing her.
She shakes her head as she enters camp. The web might be tangled, but she'd be a fool to think Morningstar might somehow fail, subsume herself in fallacy, or fall prey to her own mistakes.
The camp, she sees, is a hive of inactivity. Ever since the slaughter, a strange mood has fallen over the clearing, an uneasy sort of quietness. They have no answers: no one knows what a group of Tainted were doing within the borders, or what it might mean. Morningstar's anger has made it very clear they've all made a mistake. Cloudstrike sits with his fellow warriors, a young group. She likes them even less than her pair. To her disgust, he waves her over with a flick of his tail.
Embershade walks over, rolling her eyes. He'll want to pester her again, no doubt. It's one of his pastimes. His group is a vicious kind of circle, filled with Morningstar's youngest spawn and their pairs. Dawnshadow, of course, the instigator of the slaughter, and her pair Scarpelt; Willowfang sits beside Flurrycloud, a respectable distance between them; Firestorm sits far away from Mossfall, but they're paired anyway, and forced to suffer the companionship of the same group; Goldpool and Mallowblaze, her littermate, are on the outskirts of the group, as neither are really related to Morningstar; then there is Cloudstrike. And her. How regrettable.
There are other young warriors, of course, but Embershade gets the sense that this is the elite circle, the cats that are happy to be here, and the rest know to keep to themselves. Littlefrost, Morningstar's youngest son, prefers to stick to the outskirts and shadows, where few can see him. He must disappoint his mother in this way. His pair Flutterwing acts in much the same way, although Embershade has rarely seen the two together. Sunfeather, Voletooth and Strongclaw have their little trio, occasionally joined by Ashflower, who is by now a lonely spinster. She'll likely be paired to Duskpaw or one of the younger toms. Embershade knows, though, that the pair she was meant to have disappeared into the woods one day, never to be seen again.
Embershade summons a brave face and sits by her pair, closer to Mossfall than the wild and uncontained fluff of his own pelt. "Afternoon," she says, to fill the sudden lull in conversation. It seems to be more of an observation than a greeting.
"Oh, is it?" Cloudstrike asks, tipping his head back to look at the sky with mocking wonder. "I had not noticed."
"Yes, well, while you've been here, talking your rather sizable ass off, time has progressed. As is its way," Embershade replies sweetly, lacking the fortitude to even summon up a smile.
"Hey, watch your own ass," Cloudstrike says, brandishing his tail. "I'll help."
He had always teased her before, of course, from his distant and irritating position as her brother's best friend. This thing of theirs has gotten twisted, warped itself out of shape, now that they have been forced together in some facsimile of a relationship. She thinks he resents her; the feeling, she knows, is mutual. She sneers for a moment and looks away, phasing herself out of the conversation. They're talking about a raid, and where it might take place now that the city is out of commission. She focuses on the cats in the camp: or who, rather, is not in camp.
Morningstar, once again, is missing.
This absence is not out of the ordinary; she's been gone for long stretches of time in the past few days, as though she can't bear to spend time in a camp full of thieves, monsters, and murderers. Embershade is still figuring out what's changed within her, but she doesn't dare follow the leader out of camp when she disappears. Embershade is adept at stalking, but Morningstar knows most of her tricks, and is more paranoid than most warriors combined. That doesn't stop the urge, of course, to sneak and creep and uncover. It seems like a deadly sort of temptation.
Embershade distracts herself by watching the other warriors. Ashflower has left the oddball trio to their own devices; Fernstep enters the clearing but takes a wide berth to avoid Voletooth, the tom who made a mockery of her brother and his death. Nettlecloud peruses the fresh-kill pile, picks a rabbit, and meanders out of camp, the prey swinging heavy in her jaws. She's never known her aunt to be anything but secretive, mysterious, and absent. Perhaps she's off to collude with Morningstar in some clandestine hollow, though this doesn't seem likely.
She listens half-heartedly as Cloudstrike waxes poetic about fighting stances. He still reminds her of her brother.
Suddenly, with all the warning of a summer storm, Morningstar comes striding into camp. The bright gold of her fur outshines the bronzed, autumnal canopy. She makes her way across the clearing with purpose, greeting no one. The other warriors watch her move or dip their heads, uncertain of her mood. Embershade is not sure herself. The queen disappears into her den without a word. The conversation does not resume for a whole terse minute. Embershade waits for another minute before she climbs to her feet.
"Afternoon," she says to the group, pointedly. She does not wait to hear Cloudstrike's elaborate repartee.
Embershade walks back into the forest, the scent of Morningstar hot in her lungs. It's cloying. It cloaks her. But she walks with purpose, straight-backed, into the shadows. She sets off to spy upon the spider.
