recap: ember's taken it upon herself to investigate morningstar and uproot her from PureClan. it's flawless and there's absolutely no way it can go wrong. meanwhile, though, everyone's been distracted by a little storm…


The remnants of the storm are not so easily expunged from the camp. Two weeks after its fleeting, riotous reign, the cleanup is still in progress: cleaning mud and debris from the clearing, shifting broken branches as best they can, patching up the dens, all of which still leak in at least three places. It's crude and demeaning work for a warrior, but Embershade does not mind. She can just as easily watch the Clan from in the thick of things, and here their words are a little easier to catch. Her pair is disgusted. Cloudstrike is more suited to preening and grooming his long white fur than any sort of menial labour.

The clearing's geography, however hard they try to revert to the comfortable norm, has been irrevocably altered. Embershade herself bore witness to the act of change. A great tree on the edge of camp has been toppled, struck by a strange and savage bolt of lightning as the wild storm raged on above. She'd watched on with more than a little fear, first as it blackened and died, an ungodly light glowing in its center, then split itself in half, then fell graceless to the forest floor. At that moment her own perch, high in a tree on the camp's periphery, began to feel a touch unsafe. She'd made her way into the warrior's den, but couldn't help staring at the corpse of the tree, severed both from its roots and its own self. Now, it is a fixture in camp. A gift from the hagridden force of the storm. An omen, perhaps.

Morningstar has yet to acknowledge it. In her mind, Embershade sees the tree, sees the same fate befall her dear leader. It doesn't seem so impossible. The storm will rage on, if only for Morningstar herself.

However, if Morningstar refuses the very sight of it, Dawnshadow has all but made it her home. The circle has elevated itself, barely, to the myriad branches of the tree. It now seems like a mark of hierarchy: those she merely tolerates sit low in the ladder, her favoured friends perch above them, and she reigns above them all, sneering down at camp with her dark little eyes. Now, Embershade collectively calls them the Deadwood, referring to each and every member as a Twig. Not Dawnshadow, though. She seems more like a fungal infection that sets in to feast after the death of an organic being, not a small working cog in its machinations. Still, she has her uses. Embershade is quite sure of it.

This is how Embershade comes to find herself a reluctant member of this group, an uncomfortable piece of the Deadwood coalition. It involves parking herself on a branch - not too low, but not on Dawnshadow's lofty level - and sneering at passersby. Easy enough. Today, they are watching and not quite sneering at Morningstar, who is storming around camp in a manner all too similar to their recent weather. Warriors scamper around as she tasks them with her bidding, stern and cold and somehow lacking in her might.

"Are you an imbecile?" she screeches to Sparkpool, but the effort doesn't seem to come to her as naturally as it once had. Now, she must stretch.

"I've never seen her so on edge," Dawnshadow muses. There is greed in her voice, a hunger for her mother's discontent.

"It would not be very hard," Embershade says, pitching her voice soft, contemplative, though she knows it carries to each Twig. "To put her down."

She does not look up, but she can feel Dawnshadow staring at her, very hard. Perhaps she is looking for her angle. She doesn't seem to find one. Even Cloudstrike glances at her, from his little seat just above her, a seat that measures his superior rank in inches.

"Are you mad, Embershade? Look at everyone who's tried," he says.

"Peppermask dead, Waterstripe executed, Iceface exiled. Your parents didn't even make a play for her power and they're still dead." Dawnshadow lists them all with an air of pragmatism, as though she's examined these very figures before, and their multitudes of failures. Embershade doesn't doubt it.

Flippant, she says, "Ah, but that was a different beast."

"It's true," Willowfang says. "She's changed."

Concaved, she thinks, eroded, eaten herself away. Still, she is lying when she says it will be easy. It will only be bloody, and hard.

She looks up at last: Dawnshadow looks blank, but her eyes are full of scheming wonder: to her right sits Willowfang, her burly brother, and to her left sits Firestorm. It's only these three she must sway, the supposed hyper-elite of PureClan. The rest should simply do as they say.

"Besides," Embershade points out, sounding purely congenial, "look how many of us there are. There's only one Morningstar. And I think she lost all of her support moons ago."

Not exactly 'all', she thinks wryly. But, here, enough.

The conspiracy then seems tangible, a thing they all see before their eyes. Embershade has painted the picture, and is now confident they will seize it, perform a faithful rendition. She could almost smile.

Cloudstrike taps her on the shoulder - not gentle, but far softer than she'd expect - and ushers her away from the group, the stratified and visually terrifying circle of Deadwood. The others keep talking in hushed tones. Embershade has pushed a pebble down a very steep hill indeed, but the moss is not slow to gather. The pebble being, naturally, assassination, chaos, and disorder.

"Are you trying to get all of us killed?" Cloudstrike asks, cloistering himself in the shade by the roots of the fallen tree. "Do you hate me that much you want everyone dead by association?" He doesn't look stern, but there's a current in his voice Embershade has never heard before.

"Dead?" she asks innocently, blinking widely. "Who?"

Unimpressed by her charade, her pair gives her a knowing look.

"Involving yourself in politics, darling? I didn't know they were to your taste."

Embershade has no taste, only what seems to suit her in the moment. And in this moment, she finds she has no taste for being chastised by Cloudstrike. He's hardly a fount of wisdom.

"I'm being hypothetical," she says, sounding out the big word slowly for his especial benefit. "It means I'm not serious. Like, what if Morningstar was out of the way, how nice, let's move on. I'm not actually suggesting we all rush Morningstar right now and attempt bodily harm."

She gives him a smile that doesn't reach her eyes- one that doesn't even try.

"But you could if you wanted to," she adds. "I'm not telling you what to do, considering you're a big boy now, and all."

He actually rolls his eyes. "I know I was hardly your first choice," he says finally. "But you don't have to give me hell every second we're around each other."

"Choice? Oh, I had a choice?"

He looks away, searching for resolution in the shadows, before glancing back to her face.

He begins, "I know I don't try-"

"Stop substituting me for my brother," she says instead, before he says something that could completely ruin her day. "Oakpaw's gone. Get over it. Everyone else obviously has."

She leaves him frowning, still trying to think of something to say. Embershade saunters straight across camp, as obvious as she can make herself, steps as loud as she's ever let them be. Strolling, waiting for the sound of-

"Embershade!" Her name sounds strangled in the leader's voice, but that familiar imperial tone is ever present, comfortably, knowingly demanding. She stops and waits.

Around her, though they keep working at an inscrutable pace, the other cats tune in their ears and listen. The takedown is inevitable.

"Embershade!" Morningstar hisses again, stomping into her line of vision. "StarClan, child, are you deaf?"

She just smiles blandly. She wishes.

Morningstar rolls her eyes, but snaps them back into place in a fraction of a second as she scans the camp, her warriors, every leaf bolstered by the breeze. The pathetic wound on her shoulder has healed, evidently, but there's a trace of something else in her system, a residue of paranoia. Perhaps she should listen closer to her own treasonous, larger-than-life daughter.

"Well?" Morningstar asks. "You're currently productively contributing to the Clan… how? As you might have noticed, the state of this place is atrocious, unliveable… Do you want me living in filth? Squalor?"

"Not at all," Embershade replies. She offers nothing else.

Morningstar speaks no words for a few seconds. Embershade begins to wonder if she's forgotten where she's standing, forgotten her half of their conversation. Then she looks up, those indefatigable eyes staring down at her once more.

"Well?" she demands again, but there's a sharpness to her tone that cows Embershade, makes her feel once again like a small and docile apprentice. "Be vigilant, child! I need you patrolling the forest, you hear me? Come to me if you so much as see a proverbial hair out of place. You understand? My trust in you is still well-placed?"

She lies, but it does not feel hard. It doesn't feel like something so far from the truth. "Of course, Morningstar. I'll get to it right away."

That part she does. A direct command is much harder to squirm away from.


She feels as much a part of the forest as any leaf, twig, or root. She has grown up here, always escaped here, never been so safe as she is in the treetops. Nothing has touched her here. Nothing ever sees her. That's just what she's meant to be: a shadow. No one ever pays their shadow a second glance, ever wonders why their shadow follows their steps.

It's true she has always called herself a shade, a wraith: but now she really feels the change coming over herself, the new waking of something deep inside. It is not enough to watch unseen, to hide, to spy. The business with Morningstar is beginning to trigger a metamorphoses. Embershade is emerging into the shape of a new creature. Something, she believes, dangerous.

Embershade wanders a little further, combing the reaches of her domain. Nothing's unchanged. The forest, while damaged in the storm, is regrowing itself with fury. She must be careful where she steps; branches are newly weakened, creaking ominously with the burden of her slight weight. Another condition she must take into account, another weakness to foil. But here, while she's by herself, she lets the noises go on. Even a warrior wouldn't deign to look up, she thinks. The confidence of infallacy has an infinitude of faces in her Clan. Harangued, on edge, assaulted almost daily by the thing they call a leader, they still would not have the faintest inclination to look up.

She snorts, and as the breath recoils back into her lungs, she becomes aware of it: the scent, both old and new, familiar yet strange as sin. Drifting high in the wind, languishing on leaves and branches, greeting her slyly as one would surprise an distracted acquaintance.

The City.

Alley cats, feral rogues, street brawlers… here, in her forest, reeking in that way-

Not here, she tells herself, calming perceptibly. The scent is faint, a rogue itself, drifted away from the pack. It mixes with the mud-and-pine scent of the distant forest, the vague bitter odour of the river.

Perhaps it's nothing to do with the Clan. Quite possibly it's a pack of loners, driven from the borders of the city by superior forces.

But she can't fool herself. She remembers Ice - fleeing the Clan, running towards something, a kind of freedom. One, perhaps, he intends to deliver here. Kits and training and soldiers. Nefarious city plots. It is all coalescing, taking shape, rearing a contemptuous head.

Embershade feels chilled. Despite herself, she follows the scent, tracing its vague pattern all the way to the river. She stays on her side - the right side - and skips the pine forest altogether. She doesn't trust that place. Below, the forest floor is all mud and sticks, and the river, still a deep, unsettling brown, runs high. She crosses the meadow quickly, holding no great love for it, and leaps back into the trees. Her limbs are quick and steady with purpose. The forest begins to taper and narrow, and eventually seems to die, so she continues through the grassland, light-footed and insatiably nervous, waiting for some great discovery to mount the horizon at any moment...

She doesn't find the City's army.

The only trace is that infernal scent, blowing every which way over the moorlands. She could chase it up and over every hillock and never spot a trace. Instead, Embershade keeps finds a sparse crop of trees and scales its tallest member with bald determination. Something is afoot, and she'll be damned if she doesn't even catch a glimpse.

But there it is - even as she protests its futility, there comes a glimpse. She doesn't see him until he is almost upon her- hidden in the long grasses, moving with the malign grace of the predator. Her eyes snag on the ripple of gold in the field, stirring the deep, sated greens of the grass which has grown riotously in the wake of the flood. Sheathed from her view, almost like a native.

But he's not. She knows his mark as soon as she sees him: lean, hungry, the wildness about him entirely tame and repressed by the overtures of the City. Embershade watches his careful trajectory, the way he swims through the blades of grass like a minnow through reeds. There is something slippery about him: uncaged, yes, but wary of the bars.

Should she confront him? Ambush him, drag him back to camp, drag answers out of him like so much blood from his veins? It's the way taught to her by Morningstar. If she were in a more careful mood, she might obey it. But she's more inclined to stay perched in her branches, secreted in sly shadows, content to observe. If you can see your enemy, she reasons, you know that little bit more about them. And she's safe here: she can see he's strong, leanly muscled, and trained for a fight - his muzzle is peppered with small, handsome scars, the likes of which she's seen earnt in the training arena, the likes of which she has dealt and received in spades.

No doubt the army is leery, ready for any kind of victory they can wrangle from the Clan. Reparation starts, after all, with the death of one. Better to watch from above while your quarry remains unaware.

Embershade has no reason to doubt herself: it's a game she has not played for a long, long time. And so she doesn't. Not as the City scout steps closer, scents the breeze, begins to look up.

No one ever looks up. No one ever sees her. No one ever realizes she's there.

Embershade looks down into his eyes. Round, a lucent blue, a little too pretty for a tom. Something runs under her skin - a current, a fear, a thrill - as those eyes lift to meet hers.

And her deplorable pride, bloated as it is, begins the long fall.

"Hello," says the tom. She barely recognises it as a word.

Embershade has gone a little stiff, turned the bark between her claws to mulch. Such a state of shock has never been visited upon her… apart from… that awful distant time, the one she puts behind her with every step…

If she wasn't so surprised, if she had a shred of her wits left standing, she'd take action; incapacitate him, escape. Ensure no word got back to the City entity she can now give a face to. Now, it's all she can do not to fall out of the tree.

The tom sits, flicks his tail smoothly over his golden paws. He's still looking up at her. He seems like the mirage, the thing that might not be real, the secret in the shadows that should not be seen.

"My name is Thaddeus," he continues. He fills in the blank ends of the conservation, the parts where she might speak, so politely. "And you are?"

He doesn't know I'm a warrior. Can't smell the bloodstains. And he doesn't have to know.

Embershade rises from her crouch. She feels the sun behind her, framing her dark fur with a soft golden light. Perhaps the light will catch his eyes and blur the memory of her face. After another moment of inner debate, she gives it up: it's served her before, and it might do well again.

"Sable," she replies. There's a rough catch in her voice but she hopes he might mistake it for a natural cadence.

Still perched in the tree, and without wholly meaning to, she says, "You noticed me. No one ever notices me."

And then she descends from her loft. It's useless now.

"I must have known there was something worth noticing." Thaddeus' head is tilted. He considers her. On the great scale, Embershade wonders how badly she must weigh it down.

"Strange name," Embershade says, squaring up. He may judge her, but her opinions are spitfire. "Thaddeus. I dislike it."

He shrugs. So cavalier, for a city cat. "My friends call me Thad."

"Is that so, Thaddeus?"

Embershade measures out a careful periphery and begins to edge around it, keeping him in her sightline. He watches her mark her orbit: he may as well be some great solar mass, confident in the inescapable tug of his own gravitational force. He has that aura - the smug air, the ineffable sureness.

"Where are you from?" he asks. She watches him blink: one long slow action he executes without a single ounce of trepidation. It's clear she's no threat to him (false, of course she is, but she doesn't need to give him a reason to believe the opposite). "I haven't seen you around here before."

She has to scoff. So this is the game: each pretending to be other than what they really are, while they toe the line of sedition and acrimony? Pretending, though it may be clear, that they are not on diametrically opposing lines of the oldest war?

Embershade says, "Around." Keep it vague. She should leave soon, find a natural segue out of this encounter. If one exists.

The enemy twitches a whisker. He looks handsome as he does so. "Funny. Me too."

There's a beat in which they just look at each other, and tense silence looms, threatening to break like a riverbank in flood.

"Well, Sable," Thad says. Her heart jumps, and she thinks he might actually accuse her of the truth. "I'm looking for someone. Real short she-cat, young. Pale fawn, dappled. Feisty type."

The tension snaps in her chest, although it's not entirely relief she feels.

"How disappointing. You found me instead." She sounds coy. Embershade doesn't understand it - the tone of her voice, the way she delights in the words leaving her mouth. She arches her brow and searches for the disappointment in his eyes… the likes of which, of course, she spies no trace.

"A happy coincidence," Thad purrs. "If you believe in that sort of thing. I'm partial to it."

"I could learn to," she says. She stops, somehow poised for a flight she won't make: it seems right to pose herself that way, with the threat of her departure hanging over him.

Her pride is dead. It has struck a chord in her, a resonance that goes so deep she cannot feel it. Embershade feels, insensibly, liberated. Morningstar is a shrinking shadow in her mind, reduced to a corner, a vein, a niche. The lines of Code in her mind are faint now.

"Do you have to go?" Thad asks, staring at the strain in her, the utter transience of her look.

"I should go," she says, but the reluctance in her voice is obvious even to her.

At last, Thad stands. He's a tall, imposing figure, aristocratic in build and beauty. She wouldn't have believed an alley-cat could look so handsome; in her mind they're cowed, beaten-down, faceless. She could never picture fighting him in the arena; in fact, Embershade can't connect the idea of him with PureClan at all.

"I can give you a reason to stay." Is this flirting? StarClan, is that what she's doing?

The scent of conspiracy is all over this.

"You're a stranger," Embershape replies, feeling the twisting duplicity of her words, knowing he can't know the absolute danger she poses to him, "A dark, tall, handsome stranger, of course, but…"

Trusting, completely sure she won't raise teeth or claw against him, Thad rolls onto his back and bares his pale belly. The light shines on his soft fur and she remembers what she's done.

"I would not," he declares, "hurt a flea. Unless they asked me to."

Embershade sinks into something lower than a crouch. "I'd bite the flea's head off and ask questions later," she says, smirking. Upside down, as though they are opposite and untouchable Poles, his eyes stare into hers.

This isn't rational. But in this moment, her love of all rationality is draining from her. The rules are Morningstar's rules. And the zenith of her reign is an obscure height now far above them.

"I should go," she says again. "I'm sure I'm supposed to tell you now this would never work, I can never see you again, you have no idea who I'm supposed to be…"

"You have," says Thad, with soft words, "a choice."

"I've never had one of those," Embershade says, feeling small, feeling somehow okay with this stranger seeing all her vulnerability.

His nose touches her cheek. She lets him.

"It's all yours. Whatever you want."

Embershade likes the sound of promises that can't be kept.


She leaves him sleeping, looking very young, deeply beautiful, curled in the hollow of tree roots. She feels a fondness for him she will never speak aloud. It's as she said: she can never see him again, and there's immense relief in the fact.

The walk back to camp turns into a run. She feels sprightly, chasing something that seems to hover just in front of her. A dawn, perhaps, lingering below the horizon. For once, she chooses the ground.

The sun is setting as she reaches camp once more: the sky is streaked with euphoric yellow and pink, shades of picturesque complicity.

The camp is quiet, the Deadwood stacked with its assemblage of meaningless cats, mere puppetry. She steers clear of them. Even Morningstar is gone, banished once more to her musings. More foreshadowing, Embershade reasons. Her timing has been beautifully struck.

Except for one small burr in her side. That odious, fluffy white burr she can never quite excise from her side.

"I missed you today," Cloudstrike says from the shadows, looking as though he has reveled at her absence.

She turns to him.

"I had business," Embershade says, though she can't stop the smug quirk of her lips. He mistakes it for a sign of their uneasy ribbing, as he always does.

Cloudstrike shakes his head. "Be careful, darling. I know you're trying something with Dawnshadow's clique. I can stop you with one word to Morningstar."

She stops dead. He wouldn't… but she has no reason to assume that, knowing full well he would.

"Tell me where you go," he demands. "Every day. Tell me where you go."

"Well," she says, considering. "Around."

She leaves him like that. He's now a factor she will have to carefully consider, maneuver, outwit, but he already seems to be a distant problem. She is too full of a feeling she likes to give him much thought. The practice always inspires a headache.


stay safe at home reading warriors fanfics y'all!

ngl quarantine would be good for me now because i'd have the time to FINISH this story