Recap: Khia was all set for a badass solo exit from the city, but lo and behold, who did she bump into? Yes, everyone, your favourite morally grey character: Ru! Now they're on an intrepid road trip together and Khia just wants to d i e.


"That's always confused me. Moles and voles. If they're not the same species, why do they sound related? If I didn't know better, I'd say there's a conspiracy afoot. Someone's set out to confuse feral cat populations everywhere with this homophonic witchery."

Khia's feet hurt, but not quite so much as her ears.

"Moles are slippery underground bastards, but voles are just like mice! And then you have water voles? What's the difference? Why does every little subspecies need its own classification? I ought to propose a new system: classify prey types by habitat. We can have water food, ground food, and sky food. Will you be my first petitioner, Khia?"

Her ears must be bleeding; perhaps they fell off at the last junction, or the one before that, or at the last corner they turned. It doesn't seem to matter that she can't get a word in edgewise. Rhydderch has always been Rhydderch's favourite conversationalist.

Her stomach begins to grumble. It's more vocal than she's been all day, and Ru pounces on it.

"Hungry, Spots? Pining for some ground food?" Ru grins at his exclusive inside joke.

"Definitely not," Khia snaps. The way he phrases it sounds disgusting, as though it's a meal that's slid to the floor and remained there longer than the five-second cardinal rule. She keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon, where she can see a thin strip of dark green, her proverbial oasis. It's a forest - or, at the very least, a patch of tall grass - and she hopes there will be some respite in there, some hollow or grove where she can hide from Ru for a few precious moments. Birdsong might even be enough to drown him out.

"All I want," Khia continues, a hard little edge in her voice, "is to see my brother safe and sound. Everything else is secondary."

She glances at him, just to make sure the barb hits home. She really had no choice in letting him tag along, but she doesn't have to accept it graciously. Khia will never wholly forgive Ru for the wrong he's done, and he deserves to know it. He doesn't react, but stops spouting his conspiracies. Khia could cry from relief.

"I really don't know what you're expecting to find," Ru says, disapprovingly. "There won't be any trace of him left. They don't keep cats like us around, Khia, not for very long. They take us and we die. It's tradition by now."

"Don't condescend to me," Khia snaps back. "I don't care how good you are at it." Indeed, he's like a scholar: learned and practiced, and demeaningly patronizing. He will push this education down her throat until she learns to swallow his truths. She'll leave him alone on the moors before that can happen, before he poisons her. Khia believes her brother is alive, so he will be. He must be.

Ru rolls his eyes, a little gesture she doesn't miss. "Not everything I say is to belittle you, kid. You're short enough already."

Khia squeaks in outrage and scuttles a few steps ahead.

"See?" he calls out. "That was condescending! Do you see the difference?"

It's like a switch he won't turn off! Khia thinks, fuming. It doesn't stop! Frankly, she's not sure she'll survive the roadtrip, before they even set foot in PureClan's legendary territory.

Ru catches up in a few long strides.

"Can we agree to be civil, Khia? We have a long way to go."

"What I don't understand," Khia says, turning sharply to face him as they walk, "is why you wanted to come with me in the first place, if you insist on exaggerating the rumours of Cariad's death. Why you let me leave the city."

She is under no illusions. She made no choice Rhydderch did not approve of, because there was no real choice. The decisions belong to him. To him, she's still just a kit, and she must be carried and coddled. He will never see how much she's grown, only that she is still small. He will never measure her competence with the standard he sets for others. In truth, Ru decided to usher her into the grasslands because he liked the idea. Because he could make it work for himself.

"If you just listen to me and follow me, you'll see there's more for you out here than ghosts. The city won't be safe when the rebels lose the war, and nor any other land too close to PureClan's borders. You can belong to something else, if you let me take you there."

"You're taking me to met someone?" Khia asks, strident.

Softly, Ru says, "I hope so."

Khia spins back around. She can no longer face this false father-figure, this smiling puppeteer. She was never going to save Cariad. She's failing him, again, just as she did before, and before, and before. Like the last time and the one behind it. Cariad is supposed to live or die without her help. And now Ru is selling her, though he promised he never would. He's trading her to some distant figure, and for what? Because he thinks it's best?

"You think you're cunning, do you?" Khia asks. A strange sudden wind bowls her words over, abruptly, as it approaches from some unforeseen horizon. She can't be sure if he hears her. He's never really listened to her, after all.

"I'm only trying to help!" Ru shouts. The wind snatches at him as he speaks, but it can't overcome the timbre of his voice, its resonance.

"I never ask for help! I've never asked anyone to help me! They just try and do it anyway!"

"That's because you don't admit you need help, Khia, but you do! You're too stubborn to ask for anything! You'd rather be alone than admit it!" Even though he's forced to raise his voice against the wind, he seems too loud, too angry. She wants to flinch, but he's right: she won't admit it - her vulnerability, her weakness, her failure.

"If everyone got out of my way and let me be, I'd be fine!" she counters. She has to stop walking, because the wind is almost too strong for her, and she has to dig her claws into the grass to tether herself. Khia could blow away with the next big gust, and it's not an appropriate exit to the unfolding argument.

Ru stops too, his face cold, fur ruffled. His anger emanates from his skin. "That's what you think?" he asks, in a voice sharper than the wind. "The truth is, Khia, you'd die. Because you're helpless. Because you need help. You only made it this far because everyone's looking out for you. If you want to strike out on your own - if you want to die - then be my guest. I can only hope you realize between now and then how much has been done for you, how much you owe - how everything has been done for you and how little you've done for yourself!"

The anger of his tirade is matched only by the ugly, bruised colour of the sky and the ominous swell of the clouds. Khia notices it in a disassociated way, and wonders if there will be a storm; beneath all that are the wounds made by Rhydderch and his words, and a cold chill, a foreboding.

"To death, then," Khia says, and steps away. She walks to a beat that is almost military, a march of miniature paces.

She doesn't know what's next, but she'll prove Ru wrong; she will survive, and Cariad will survive, and whoever the hell she wants will survive. She is not helpless. She's not the baby Ru took in or the child that escaped his grasp. Most of all, she needs nothing, not even him. If he says something, she does not hear it. He already seems to have aired all his present complaints.

Ru sighs behind her, more forceful than the wind, sounding almost defeated. "Khia!" he shouts. She walks away as though she doesn't hear him or the way he sounds; like she's a burden, a responsibility, a thing existing only to make his comfortable life harder. As though he knows he ought to get her back, but can't really be bothered.

This is how much she means to him. She is a liability to be managed. From now on, Khia supposes, she will manage herself.

The first order of business is making it to that green veld on the horizon. The next is dinner. Then her thoughts will turn to PureClan and her brother. But Khia has forgotten the storm system swirling above and the wind tugging at her steps. She doesn't factor these into her plan, hoping to leave the rain behind just like Ru.

He shouts her name again, but the sound is faint. She has left him so quickly, and he hasn't deigned to follow. Khia can't look back, so she pictures him, a plinth of moral rectitude, immovable. He'll look stern and stoic. He won't break. But neither will she.

Instead it's the storm; the first to break, the first to yield. The rain begins to fall with a quiet, heavy sense of urgency. The first raindrops sink silently into the moor, and Khia sidesteps to avoid them, hating the thought of wet feet while walking. Soon the dampness underfoot is inescapable; the rain is in her fur, on her skin, dripping from her whiskers. Her long pelt is soaked within in a minute, and the storm only grows, and darkens.

There goes my moment, she thinks, as her stellar exit is eclipsed by a few clouds and some condensation.

Now it is puddles she walks to avoid, and her pelt is streaming with water; Khia leaves a small telltale trail behind her, where the ground is too sodden for it to soak in. The chill doesn't reach her until the thunder does - the tintinnabulation seems to shake the very ground. Lightning sparks across the sky, and Khia thinks of the only other storm she's endured: she was trapped in Andraste's house with Etch and Gideon. Etch, of course, had been afraid, and Khia had put on a brave face. Gideon saw through it - her transparency must be ingrained, unshakeable - and the look he gave her was so soft she rolled her eyes. She'd hated the storm then, but at least she could ride it out with her friends, even as she denied her own fear and feelings. Company made it easier.

Though she's afraid - starkly terrified, unnerved by the sharp light lancing through the clouds, by the water pooling atop grass and mud - she will not go back to Ru. Concede defeat? It's not in her nature.

Ahead, the sky is split apart by prongs of electricity, legions of them, and the clouds shudder with the sound of thunder. Khia begins to falter. 'Safe' and 'city' have never been synonymous, but she thinks she'd fare better there than under the open sky. The puddles have coalesced into a lake, and the patches of high ground are shrinking fast. Khia squeals, pitifully, as water laps at her chest. She imagines she hears Ru shouting in reply, about to host a valiant rescue, but these are just thoughts. She is alone, and there's nowhere else to go.

Khia huddles against a patch of tussock and watches the water rise. It churns uneasily, as though something lurks underneath, hungry and waiting. The flood is an ugly, impenetrable shade of brown. The downpour from above falls just as hard as ever. Right now, powerless in the might of the storm, Khia would accept even Ru as company: let him be as fatherly as he wants, if it means she makes it out alive, if she doesn't have to bear this fear alone. Yet, in her mind, she sees him drown.

"No, no," Khia gasps. She feels her feet leave the ground as the flood picks her up, carelessly; she might as well be a leaf or a twig, for all the resistance she offers. The flood sweeps her along, ushers her deeper, chokes her with its weight. Whatever lurks beneath the surface has seized her, and in the water she is held, prisoner yet again.

She swallows her pride and a mouthful of floodwater. She screams out for Ru, again and again, even as the water slips over her tongue and into her throat. There's no answer, except for the thunder, apathetic and deafening, and the roar of the flood as it consumes her. There's no one left to care.

The water fills her lungs. She knows, moments too late, that Ru was right. This is the truth.


me: if i write one chapter every day i can finish the story in two weeks!

also me: marvel marathon? game of thrones? sabrina?