Recap: big storm, etc.


Even as she dreams, she does not escape the bars. They hang before her, blind her to the outside world with that crisscross scowl of cold metal, radiating almost a sense of pain, of longing. The toms would be pleased to know she is always trapped. It's their preferred mode for the likes of her.

The lesson remains. Time is lost to meaning, and I never will be free.

But the ambient sounds are missing: the coughs and sneezing, the maladies of illnesses untreated; the lambent cries, the curses both soft and harsh; most temporal, most fleeting, the confused and largely happy noises of kittens. She always knows she's dreaming then, her mind quite unable to replicate the permanent disquietude of Tillman's. And still it's no relief. She often thinks she might dream of the forest of great legend, the myth from which she hails, even if it is a bloody and cruel, hard place, because she'd prefer an evil she can see, a sin realized into flesh. Her imagination fails here too.

Paws manifest before the gridwork. They are reddish-brown, dainty for a tom, and she knows if they touched her they would be gentle. They are not his chosen weapon.

But the bars begin to fall away, and the hatred she holds in her heart cracks, unseated. It's not gone. It never will be gone. But she remembers, after a long, long time, the feeling of light and warmth on her skin.

She blinks open her eyes and the wide, vague emptiness of the land before her scares her. For a moment. There is nothing to obstruct her vision, nothing blinding the world to her. There are no bars.

Dawn explodes across the horizon: pink, yellow, a violence to the colours she can't remember from her life before.

It is too early to wake: she stares at the sky until she thinks this could be the dream.


The moors are vast, a flushed and fertile green, and all but abandoned. The wind drifts by, meddling with the long grasses, touching no living thing. It's just her. Her and the other one.

Two grey ghosts, passing without sound, as inconsequential and fleeting as the wind. The first is tall, slender, and the softness accrued from a year of captivity is slowly dripping from her bones: they have walked far. They will walk further still. The other is heavier, slower, though she has been free for longer, shackled only by the memories her mind can conjure. It is an infinitude. She grows rounder by the day, as if each memory is a manifestation inside her body with weight, heft. That's something like the truth. The first sympathises with this condition. Only, when it was hers, she had not traipsed for miles every day over the hinterland, but sat snug, if not serene, in her bastille.

That one, burdened, enceinte, has no name.

The first, harmoniously, begins to forget hers. They have no need for names here, more labels, descriptors chosen by older and 'better' superiors. From the moment she was born and flung into the river as the storm orchestrated its symphony, she was nameless. It is a return to her younger, better state, when the ills inflicted on her could not be named, termed, understood. Life is very basic here: hunt, eat, walk, sleep. She should be the same.

But like her companion she remembers. And she dreams. They are one and the same. What she flees, conscious, in the daylight returns to dog her in the dark. Her cage; her children, only rarely; her jailor. If she can call him that anymore. Whatever disgrace his title bears, he deserves it, only marginally less than he did before.

They pass by a rocky outcropping and she pauses for a moment, scales its surface with quick familiarity, only to find exactly what she expected: the same wide moors, the same pleasant heather stretched to the horizon, the same dark hint to their left. The forest. The place they daren't venture, because they know the rumours, the myths, the legends are true. It may not be the forest. It doesn't matter. It's their domain anyway. She doesn't ask her companion about it, though she could be considered to be most concerned, most wary of their indelible power. It seems to be her past life. She never brings it up. She has never once heard her even broach the topic of death. They keep walking, but the forest is kept firmly on their left, just within their sight. If the food here, scarce, runs out, they will need to venture to the trees.

The other glances back at the rocks. It must remind her of the place they sheltered during the storm, an outcrop much like the one this dawn has presented to them. It was tall, but only just enough to keep their paws out of reach of the flood, the great and calamitous ocean that rose where only grassland had abounded. Perhaps, if she's being suspicious, she's wondering if they're walking in circles.

She is trying to lead them straight. She is. But she's never before ventured outside the city, and for a year or more remained in a state of slow entropy, bordered on all sides by the walls of her cage. And she'd still been guided to the edge of the city, overseen, as always.

Her friend falters. She hasn't explained the situation, inferred a slightest hint of context to her, but her own imagination is robust, and she fancies her guesses are both educated and correct. Besides, she knows the symptoms. Tillman's had been devoted to those symptoms. She slows her steps, then halts altogether. Rest breaks are almost scheduled in their frequency. She doesn't mind, for they are almost as beneficial to her and her dead muscles. In a month of walking… a month, or longer? She still feels the lag of her body, the fatigue tagging her limbs. She hopes to shake it soon, but it may require more than simple walking.

She sits, carefully grooms the broken blades of wet grass from her paws. Much can be blamed on her vanity. It is more a habit than a trait now, and she continues it regardless. The other lies down and sighs. It will be another early night for them, and the search for a suitable den is proving fruitless. They will need one soon, even if it leaks in the most opportune of circumstances.

The forest looms and beckons. It is their last resort, but they have few left. The list grows short, and it was brief to start with. She will stash her companion in some safe moor hollow before she lets them both venture blind into the forest. That is her plan, two days hence. Time suddenly has meaning, an imperative, an alarming brevity.

Ahead, she spots a small copse: an inchoate glen of young saplings strangled and snapped by the blight of the flood. Leaves and tender branches are strewn across the ground, and while it looks damp, it might prove a worthwhile shelter for the night. She conveys this politely to her companion, who agrees with equal gallantry. Their unfailing etiquette is a barrier between them both, an unspoken agreement not to bring up any of their past ailments, one that seems to leave them little in the way of conversation material.

The other rests a moment longer. Her bloated stomach swells further when she sits, looking comical, bordering on obscene. She has heard nothing is more natural than motherhood, but the mechanisms of it always strike her as strange and alien. She had raged and despaired in her own pregnancy, the primeval force of her new maternal attachment warring with the knowledge her kits were not her own, that they would be taken from her, that she could not love and cherish them as she too had not been loved or cherished. Such was the nature of the transaction. The terms of sale had not been broached with her in the beginning, but she'd come to realize soon enough - the second the bars swung shut behind her, the deafening moment the latch closed. Safe. That was the label stuck on it. Well, to hell with safe.

Turning to the other, she smiles. They begin to move again, almost as one symbiotic entity. The distance they must cross to reach the copse is hard to judge: her eyesight is poorer now than it once was. Natural lighting had, for a while, been hard to come by. The dips and furrows of the plain are hard to pick out, even harder to appraise. It takes them a long while of slow walking to arrive. They're both relieved: they can stop for the day, consider their prospects, solicit a meal.

Carefully, she scans the broken coppice. Several of the bigger trees have survived, largely intact, but the smaller plants lie in pieces, veritably splintered by the vitriol of the storm. Branches, uncleanly cleaved from trunks, lie at odd acute angles, forming patchy lean-tos that could be coerced into proper forms of shelter. She will need to inspect the moors around them, particularly the prey supply, but she has a confidence in this place. It just might do.

She wanders into the debris. The twigs are sharp underfoot, and she treads lightly. Just as well. She steps into what might be a patch of mud, or a small pile of mouldering leaves. It is warm, its soft fur spiked, its eyes open but blankly unconscious. She screams. The sound is so loud and surprising it hurts her throat, stuns her, but she catches the movement of the cat as it sits up and whispers her name.

"Arrah?"

It takes her a long moment; first staring in astonished confusion; discerning, next, the face from its assemblage of dirt and detritus; coming to the unlikely conclusion, just as confused as she had been to start with, but markedly happier. The true wondering and concern is delayed, setting in heartbeats later.

"Khia!" she says. "Is it you? Khia?"

But it is. The small, slender face is the same, the tiny stature still pubescent, hardly grown at all. Arrah sweeps forward and presses a legion of licks to her muzzle, tasting, regrettably, the stale residue of the flood. She steps back and gives her a critical eye. Her niece is gaunt, her flanks stirred by reflexive tremors, her pelt matted. She is a dire sight to behold.

"What happened to you?" Arrah gushes, confused and concerned in proportionate measures. "How are you here?"

"Walked," says Khia. "Flood." The words emerge: parched, leathery utterances, shaped by a mouth dry as bone and a rusty, unpracticed throat. It's clear she can say no more.

Arrah focuses a stern look on her face, hoping it looks both strict and maternal. She is out of practice of parenthood. "Stay right here," she says, fussily brushing dirt from her fur, and angling a branch first this way and that to shield her from the damp steppe wind. Khia seems inclined to obey: she can't even nod her head.

The wonderment and curiosity are shoved aside: she is turned to practicality, to reviving her niece-turned-daughter as best she can.

Her companion looks barely, scantily intrigued, sitting with her tail held at altitude, safely out of reach of the scattered debris. She doesn't seem to be one for appearance - not with all those scars, legendary as they may be - but she keeps herself tidy, as hygienic as a kittypet. So she thinks. Arrah doesn't know any.

"This is my niece," Arrah says. "She needs our help… please… if you could just watch her, I'll catch us all some food. And she'll need water, clean water, if you could find some."

"Of course," she replies, with that warm voice, the tone that easily lends itself to sympathy. It's this soft charisma, Arrah believes, that begot her all those followers… that, and her handsome tom, more so than the allure of revenge. But all these things accrue.

Arrah sets a quick pace for the woods. All the way, she tests the air for a hint of PureClan: she still remembers the taste, the heavy texture of their smell, though she'd encountered it but once. That unassuming alley, that unexpected night where she had found her sister and lost her again in the same instant. She had known, innately, they shared blood… but Sablefrost had worn the scent of PureClan like armour, a foul and heavy cloak that would have been her birthright, if she was born a full minute earlier. But that smell does not linger here. For all intents and purposes this is simply a forest.

It takes her longer than she would like to admit: catching a blackbird, hunting down a vole, slapping into submission a stranded fish, lying in a shallow pool after the flood had liberated it from its river home. She buries the bird and rodent, carrying back the fish to their makeshift camp. It will be easy for Khia to eat. She will eat the vole, and their scarred unnamed friend can have the blackbird, and use its feathers to line her nest.

Her return to the forest is, unexplainably, uncomfortable. As she digs up her hard-fought conquest, she pinpoints the feeling: the sensation of being watched, of wearing one's gaze on your skin. She leaves quickly.

By the time she returns with the last two pieces of prey, the sky threatens to grow dark. The other she-cat has crafted a tidy den from a splintered sapling: she has stacked fallen branches and sticks against the thin trunk, and while it is not spacious, it will be warm. Khia lies inside, and has eaten a meagre portion of her fish. Arrah fusses for a moment. She likes the feeling.

The other sits softly, noiselessly, at the edge of the den. She peers out into the burgeoning night. Arrah thinks, very briefly, of warning her: but then, what is the threat? She had felt alarmed? She was struck by paranoia? This one is not the warrior: she had hired ranks for that. Instead Arrah delivers her the blackbird. She looks grateful; the expression comes easily to her, practiced. She has lost much, but been given plenty. Arrah settles with her own prey and savours the taste. Nothing in the city even hints at flavour this compelling.

Khia is waiting when she finishes.

Already, she looks alert: she has groomed, now remarkably tidier, far away from that look of half-deadishness. Arrah's heart swells at the sight of her. After farewelling her sons at Tillmans's she had never expected to meet family again. And here she is now, never happier at having been wrong.

"How did you get here?" Arrah asks. "Rhydderch told me you were… well, with the army."

She lowers her voice. It feels improper to speak the word.

Khia has no qualms. "And he told you he sold Cariad? To the highest bid, so he could throw his life away in a hopeless wild-goose chase in the petty quest for revenge?"

Arrah feels that same spark of indignity, the quiet loathing and crust of resentment. He had mentioned it, but was all too happy to gloss over the fact - Cariad is dead and gone, but look, on the bright side, your cage is unlatched! She'd fallen for the bait. It had proven tantalising to resist, since she'd known for moons the army possessed Cariad, and his cause was scheduled for a violent and unequivocal end. The unlocked cage was new. It was absolute.

"I knew," says Arrah. She feels a guilt that cannot be absolved. She already knows she is faultless, but the shame lies in her anyway. "I'm so sorry Khia… you two were always very close, I know… the fraction of the pain there is in losing a sibling."

"The Clan took him," Khia says bluntly. Such a stern resignation, for the face of one so young. "But he's not dead, Arrah, I know he's not."

"There's hope for him in the Clan, your mother-"

"No," Khia says. She looks away for a maladroit moment. "She didn't make it. She didn't… survive PureClan. Now I'm wondering if Sablefrost couldn't weather their apoplexy what hope does Cariad have?"

Arrah is stunned, as surely as if Khia had reached over and struck a blow to her head. The sister she never knew - the one whose life she had purloined as her own in the depths of her fantasies, imagined living truly free and wild. Dead. It gives Khia pause. She seems to regret her bluntness, as though she considers this old news, or universal knowledge.

"I don't know how. I'm sorry, Arrah."

She resolves to grieve out of sight. Khia seems complacent, but perhaps the wound is too distressing for her to contemplate in its entirety.

Arrah rests her cheek against Khia's head. "Cariad has both the Clan and the City in him," she says, mustering the mothering tone she set aside days ago, supposing she had no further need for it. "He will survive through sheer force of will - your own, I believe. Sleep now. We'll talk in the morning."

Khia's mouth opens, she looks as though she will say more - but a pulse tremors in her cheek and she stops. Frustration and fatigue form a gruesome amalgam on her face. But she lies down, and sleep comes quickly.

Arrah joins her friend, still looking out into the dark, although now with heavy-lidded eyes.

"It's my fault," she says. "I'm sorry. Children should never be sent to war… but I thought there was need for it. I still do."

"You'd do it again?" Arrah asks. Inside, she is walking upon a wire; on one side, her companion has clearly changed, gravitated to a new mission, and she has been dealt grave injury in the past; still Arrah knows she is not blameless, that she has perpetrated pain in order to heal her own. She is a grey figure indeed.

"I don't know." She sighs. Then, like a cloud passing, she brightens, even stoops to lick her stomach. "Ask me in a month. I suppose I'll call it differently."

"I nursed that kit," Arrah says, thinking of Cariad. "Raised him. My PureClan sister sent them both to me in the hopes I would save their lives. And you sent him right back to that place."

She doesn't look shocked at the revelation. "I'm both guilty and sorry," she says. "What else can I say?"

"I hope you remember him. And everyone else."

Arrah turns herself in, but the other she-cat remains at her post. Perhaps she is memorising the very long list of deaths she will soon be accountable for.


Khia sleeps a very long time. The adults take their cue and begin assembling the den properly. It seems, with Khia in no fit state to walk, they will sojourn here a while. On second appraisal, Arrah is happy to see the copse is not as ruined as they first thought. The taller trees have survived.

Following instinct, not wholly sure of what she's doing or how successful she'll prove to be, Arrah picks a snarl of wide, exposed roots and begins to dig under it. The tree is not so tall as the others, but much wider. She finds a framework of stone beneath and dirt and delves around it, until she has all but excavated a sizable portion of earth. Several large rocks sit at the entrance to the new burrow, the stern facing she hopes will ward away the wind and the worst of winter's chill. The tunnel is narrow, gently curves, and deposits itself into a shallow burrow. Working as though divinely inspired, Arrah stamps down the stirred dirt and builds nests of leaves.

Arrah emerges filthy, unrecognisable, and inherently proud.

The other she-cat blanches a little at her appearance, but it's a problem easily fixed: a quaint pond lies over the next hillock, and though the temperature is far from enjoyable, the wash leaves Arrah feeling finally clean.

Her niece is already awake as she returns.

"What are you doing with Miss?" she asks immediately. Perhaps it has just struck her who their travelling companion is, or, more likely, she wanted enough energy to pursue this argument.

Arrah sits her rump firmly on the ground. She is settled for a long battle. "I didn't get myself out of Tillman's. I'm not ingenious, or brave, or stupid enough to attempt anything like that. It was Rhydderch who came to me, proposed an idea… he was going to free me, but knew I didn't have anywhere to go, anyone left to turn to… So he unlatched my cage, escorted me out of the house and through the city, and left me by an old bridge. And… Miss was there. She needs my help. So I will."

"That's it? She-she's a murderer! Worse! She hired others to do her murdering for her!"

Miss, she thinks, is well aware of their current conversation.

"That was her reaction to an awful lot of trauma, Khia. She's moved past that. She's ready to atone."

"If that's what she really wants - atoning, as if- she'd be at the head of that army ready for the same death as everyone else."

"Well, she can't," Arrah says firmly. "This time it's not just about her. She has others to think of now."

Khia falls into a queasy silence. The realization is a little slow to dawn, causing her some measure of embarrassment: she, too, is from Tillman's, and she's seen the signs more often than most.

"Tell me what happened to you," prompts Arrah, eager to change the tone of their conversation. It seems Khia has already lived twice the life Arrah has led.

"I… I can't," she says at first. "Just looking for Cariad, trying to follow him to PureClan… he's the closest thing I have to family…"

Arrah cocks her head. There's a lot Khia never learned, and it might be time to tell her. "Well, what about the other kits? Your siblings?"

Khia's jaw attempts dislocation. "My what?"

"You two were born in the city and stayed there, it's true, but there were others. Two, Ru told me. A little tabby, a tom, and a black she-kit just like your mother. They believed they would be safe enough in PureClan… but you were too obvious, too unfitting."

"And Cariad? What, didn't he look like the she-kit and Sablefrost?"

"They didn't want to send you off alone, I think," Arrah says. She is still warmed by the thought of these PureClan warriors - thought of only as arrogant and brutal creatures in the city - acting with such compassion. By all accounts it shouldn't make sense.

Khia is staring at her paws. "So it's my fault," she says. "That he was even with me in the basement… sold into servitude and death… my fault again."

"Khia, no," Arrah says. She has a strange feeling beating in her chest, much like the sensation she'd felt before the storm broke. "What do you mean? What was your fault?"

Khia looks up. Her eyes are still the wide, beguiling green of her childhood - Arrah's own eyes, the mark of their shared maternal heritage. But there is strange depth in them that Arrah does not recognise: more than that, a colour of guilt and shame. And the fear begins creeping in.

"It was a nice house," she says. "A really nice house. We left her there… she was going to be so happy, she was going to grow old there. I didn't understand it then… but now..."

Arrah draws herself up: she recedes from her niece like a tide, in uncertain flux. The words haven't really taken hold, but hang heavy from her throat and threaten to draw closed like a vice. She feels an inch away from death - and not her own.

"W-well, there were these toms, too… it was just Gideon and me, they were going to hurt us. Etch saved our lives. I can never repay her." Khia is looking down again: beyond her paws, staring hard at the dirt as if this very patch of earth might hold answers. She swallows, and elaboration seems unforthcoming.

"Why can't you? Why can't you repay her?"

"She's dead! I'm sorry, Arrah!" Khia's profuse apologies become muffled, nonsensical, as Arrah crouches over her, feeling the urge to protect her while feeling nothing else at all. Not nothing… a kind of numbness, a blessed anesthesia. She is a blur, a figment, and the hands of grief pass feebly through her. Had she known? Had she woken one morning, felt a pang or premonition, and digested it as she would a bad meal?

The words are very slow, form insubstantially, but she thinks, I knew. We found her here alone and I knew this thing had happened. Arrah closes her eyes, and not even the sensation of movement can touch her. The fall from light to dark is all she knows.


Night spills black and slow across the sky like ink. It is a long moment before the stars appear: she sits in apprehension, thinking - the stars might not dawn tonight. Perhaps they will disappear from her life like so much light before them. And she's relieved to find that first star, the tiny silver blaze in the sky: inconsequential and meaningless, but so permanent. Untouchable.

It has been a day, perhaps two, and she has dragged herself from dark reverie to remember her place: help Miss, help Khia, to find in the duties a semblance of selfdom. If she can.

Miss' face blooms in the faint moonlight as she emerges into the night: gray and scared, a brightness to her countenance that does not speak for her past.

"If you blamed me it would not be undeserved," she says, sitting softly beside her. Arrah wonders what she thinks of when she looks up to the stars.

She says, "Not for this." She feels blank, strangely clean, like a path washed by the rain. "I never thought I'd see her again… I just didn't think no one else would either."

Miss licks her shoulder. It is the closest contact they've ever trespassed on one another. Arrah does not mind.

"I understand if you don't wish to help me," Miss replies. "I can do it on my own, if I must."

Arrah is affronted: it is the strongest emotion she's felt in hours, and it comes as some relief. "No!" she implores. "Please. I have to."

"Thank you."

"It will be a new chapter for us both," Arrah murmurs. Not one in which to forget, but to move on, to live new stories.

Miss quirks her head, meets the very edge of her gaze, makes a small wry smile. "Is that a promise?"

Arrah is not ready to smile, but she feels a little lighter, as though the grievous burden on her shoulders is melting in the starlight. She may feel displaced tomorrow, the day after, the day after that, but some irremediable quality is gone from her, purged in her mourning. Arrah will wake, feel the pain, and get up anyway.

"Quote me."

"I don't know what I'll do now. If I'm not fighting, not hunting my vengeance, what am I? What am I to do?" Miss asks.

"It's not our place to fight anymore," Arrah says. "It's to remember."

"I like that," she replies. "I… I think I have a name now."

"Hmm?"

Miss straightens her shoulders, as though shrugging aside the touch of something stagnant and long-dead. Sternness and stricture in her posture, the touch of something soft in her mouth, a calescent glow in her eyes. This is not the same creature Arrah began her journey with, but a reprisal. She is watching the assembly of some new person from old splinters and ghostly shreds of personalities past.

"Yes," she says. "Call me Memory."


lockdown: happens
me: still doesn't write

i apologise for everything i have ever done to arrah she DID NOT DESERVE IT and i didn't even realize i was THIS MEAN to her