Recap: Oakpaw escaped (or did he?). He also beat up Gideon, misplaced Khia, and got lost. We've come to expect nothing more, right?


It seems like the end of the world. The army is marching, and maybe death awaits it, but that death is clueless. It doesn't know just what danger storms the horizon. It has confidence in its infallacy. Maybe it's so, but the army will break itself on those bloody shores, shatter itself against the enemy and leave splinters in their skin.

Or maybe they won't lose. The army could win. The idea seems like blasphemy, but it might just be the truth.

Oakpaw just watches and wonders at the future. Death is the only thing he can predict, and he can't say whose it will be. He's lived with them, been imprisoned by them, witnessed their 'might.' Their thirst is unquenchable; they want only blood. In that, they might match PureClan. Oakpaw wants to tell them the two forces are not so different, not so black and white and conflictingly defined. Their causes even seem complementary. They'd hate to hear that.

But he doesn't approach. They may bar the way home, a blockade of bones and breath, but he's not stupid enough to go near them. Nor is he confident enough to swim across the river, or walk around them to take the long, long way home. He knows but one way, and so does the army. He's forced to tag along like a dog on a leash, stalking their shadows, hiding like a thief. He keeps a day, maybe two, behind them, and it doesn't seem like far enough. Oakpaw walks in their footsteps, in the wide scathe they press into the grasslands like a scar. It seems a kind of warning: if this is how we mark the land, what do you think we'll do to you? It's a shame no one can know they're coming. They make such poignant threats without even the need for words.

In between his moments of fear and awe, he thinks of her, of where she might have walked. If his paws have touched the places she has. Does he want to, or not? He's strangely, compulsively torn, by the want to be close to her and his need for vindication. Azazel has wronged him, more than once, and if he does not desire outright revenge, he longs for a kind of karma or a shred of justice. A right. A way to balance the scales. And if it happens, he does not see it. He lingers too far behind, and it's better that way. Oakpaw dreams about it instead.

For a week and a half, he slinks along at their heels. They move at an agonising pace: Oakpaw has time to imagine, and enact, a whole montage of himself, languishing on mild slopes and hill tops, staring pensively into the river, completing energising sets of stretches and practice fighting routines. He seems to sleep just as much as he did in the hole, with the warehouse as his prison walls. He thinks about swimming and can't muster up the motivation to actually do it. It's no longer summer, and the water level is not pitifully low. It seems high enough to drown him. As far as Oakpaw's concerned, that's too high.

And, in a purportedly roundabout way, he thinks of Khia. Where she might be. If they caught her. If they blame her. And, of course, (inescapably, like a kind of torture) he wonders how they're connected. The only names she knows are Smokefang and Sablefrost, and she's looking for no others, save her brother. The one she knows. The one she's lived with. She has green eyes, just like Emberpaw, just like Sablefrost. She even looks like Nettlecloud, albeit smaller, softer, and kinder.

Oakpaw tries to remember the facts of his childhood, but it's hard to separate truth from his own muddled imagination. Was he really born in the city, or did he make that up? Khia herself seems irrefutable proof. If he sees her again, he'll tell her. While looking for her brother, she happened upon another. What she does with this revelation is her own business.

Perhaps, Oakpaw thinks, at the mark of a week and half, if she can't have her parents, she'll settle for me instead. When she finds her real brother dead she might enlist another.

Why should she? Why, for another matter, should he want this? This ceaseless wandering has made him lonely, and he just wants a place to belong. It can't be PureClan yet - or ever again, maybe - and it sure as hell can't be the army.

But it doesn't matter. He doesn't see Khia again, as he lurks in the shadow of the movement. She must be far from here: so should he be. But if he can't get past, and he can't swim around, then where is left for him to go?

Oakpaw really has no answers. He was never meant to.


Oakpaw watches the crest of the hill shrink as he nears it. Each step is a new altitude, but the hill is really a mild thing, a pittance in the face of mountains. To conquer it is a pale challenge, but any accomplishment to Oakpaw, these days, is a healthy boost to his self-confidence.

But over lip of the hill lies more than he bargained for.

At first he sees a shadow, as he sets one foot on the edge. It materializes into something - a great many somethings - resembling a hulking caravan. An invading force. An army of revolutionists.

If it looks like such a thing, it's because it is. After days of lurking behind, walking as slowly as he dares, he's caught up.

Oakpaw throws himself out of sight as quickly as he can, tripping and rolling a few feet as he does so. It's comedic. He wishes he could laugh. His heart beats so fast and so furiously that the sound might come out garbled if he even tried. Oakpaw listens hard for cries of alarm, for the assemblage of the proverbial pitchforks and torches. He hears nothing but a faint undercurrent of conversation, unperturbed.

After a minute, he dares to breathe. Then he begins to beat a quick and humble retreat. He feels like he might even walk back to the city, just for a healthy semblance of distance. He can probably make it by dawn.

"Oakpaw!" He hears the hesitation in the word, in the hushed shout, the pause between the two parts of his name. It's as if she wonders what suffix she ought to use, or which she has the right to. Her voice sounds like a memory.

And, as though caught in snares of a stupid dream, he turns. Slowly. There, silhouetted against the sky, perched on unattainable heights, stands Az. The sight of her burns his eyes, and when he closes them, he can still see the shape of her.

He really should run now.

"Oakpaw, are you really here?" she asks. There's a tone of wonderment to her, as if he's returned for a second chance, to serve the army he's always despised. She thinks I've come back for her.

The urge to put her down, as forcefully as she hurt him, swims to the surface.

"I've found my way here through no intention of my own," Oakpaw says, in a low tone of voice he's never heard come from his own mouth. "But, seeing what's here, I have every intention of leaving." He keeps his eyes on her, waiting for the barb to hit home. She descends the hill, stately, graceful, as though he hadn't spoken. He needs her to bleed, but his claws are blunt.

"What are you doing?" she asks, reaching his level at last; lowly, base, shallow. "I thought you'd be long gone. I thought you'd be racing back to PureClan to warn them of our coming."

"Tried that," Oakpaw retorts. "Your so-called army moves slower than a snail."

Az glances at the river, and they both remember a dewy morning, long ago, when he'd almost thrown himself in as a means of escape. The water hadn't seemed so cruel then.

"I thought you'd all be in the territory by now, slavering to rip out throats and gut the young and old alike," he continues.

She gives him a look, a flat, wordless accusation of hypocrisy.

"Everything I've done has been for liberation, Oakpaw. I'm sorry I used you, but you've so institutionalised I can't do anything to help you."

"You didn't need me for information!" He fights to stay quiet, to leash his anger. Maybe he's failing. "You have the damn deputy! I don't even know a fraction of what he knows. And then - and then you had the gall to tell Miss and her goons that I was coming around, that I'd fight and spy for you? Because you think I'd go against my code for you?"

"Wouldn't you?"

"No!" The word is loud, and he doesn't think before he speaks. The thoughts are a fraction slower, a hint more seditious. She looks like he's given her all the answers she needs.

"I really am sorry, Oakpaw. There's so many futures out there and I'm only trying to help create the right one. You could too. We could do good things together."

"Was it all a lie?" he spits. Every touch, every look, every laugh. "Did you hate me as you seduced me? As you broke apart every law I'd set for myself?"

"I never hated you," she says. Her voice is still soft, as though she - for once - sees the value of secrecy. "Apart from the day I fell on you and broke your leg, I guess. I've always seen someone who could be better than he is, and I tried to make that happen. I can still try."

Oakpaw rolls his eyes and paces a step. "You think I'm institutionalized? PureClan is my birthright. Your cause bought you, like a possession, and trained you how to die. Now you think it's your choice."

"I know my own history. Maybe more than you know yours." Az is so resolute. She's always been stubborn. She's always known where to hit.

He feels breathless, run ragged by a mere argument. Exhausted by her, though she's yet to move a muscle.

"So it was a lie," he says, submerging the pain, pushing away all the bitter things he should not feel. That is his real birthright. It's what she can guess at, but never know.

Azazel just squares her shoulders. "I couldn't lie to you. I just hid the truth. I loved asking you things, as much you loved telling me, and I loved you."

The world constricts and all he can feel is something crawling beneath his skin like the physical manifestation of a kind of poison, the dreaded and spurned taint. It's everywhere.

"Past tense," is all he says. His smile is cruel. He feels unholy.

"Don't bother telling me how you feel,"Az replies. "You'll only lie."

"You don't get to-"

Oakpaw is so rudely interrupted. The dark mass of them swarms over the hill like ants, a bleak force, a portent. His careful hiding has been for naught, undone by a single cat. It couldn't work better than if she'd planned it. And then it strikes him - maybe she has. Of course she has.

The army is here and so is he. What a reunion. Oakpaw's eyes flick between the rebels, who begin to bunch around him, erasing any means of escape, and her. Azazel has been his downfall since the beginning: now, she has completed a hat-trick. She looks faintly stricken.

The rebels are shouting, cat-calling, uttering sounds of triumph. What was once lost is now found, and it feels like a small victory. Though he expects to see Miss, she's nowhere to be found. Instead it's Iceface that approaches him, looking stoic and clinical and slightly relieved.

"The child has washed ashore," he says. "All the damage he's caused has been undone."

Oakpaw bares his teeth. "You have no inkling of the damage I can wreck."

But he's wrought it on himself. Iceface, the cold fool, can't begin fathom the depths of it. Oakpaw is the only casualty here.