His lover once asked for his life, pled for it. But it was poison and he cut her away: it's not yours to have.
He'd give it to her now. She would safeguard it, keep it whole for him, and all he's done with it is throw it into the middle of a war. Oakpaw is wasteful and he is wanting. There is room for none of this now, in him, this contemplation, because he must be a killer.
Only – who to kill? His jailors, except those who treated him well? The warriors who had hated him him, called him less-than, for the crimes of his parents? Her, for trapping him, again and again, til he'd learned to live caged? Oakpaw fancies finding some hill to stand on, to shout and bring the fight crashing to a stand-still. Work things out some other way, just so he doesn't have to choose. They would not hear him; worse, they wouldn't listen. They all want this.
He stands in what might as well be a cosmic collision: implacable forces imploding against each other, as distant and cruel to him as the stars.
He's silent.
They've been raging for minutes now, minutes he counts with each new spray of arterial blood, seconds that stack up almost as quickly as bodies on the field. No one touches him, the minute-man. Scorekeeper. Oakpaw's sacred to them, or confusing; like he's struck dumb, and it's taboo to cut down an idiot puzzling his idiosyncrasies. Likely each side thinks he fights for them, confident of their charms and the won loyalty of soldiers. Oakpaw never learned to be a soldier proper… so the fault, maybe, is theirs.
He remembers wanting to kill something, tear something out and down and apart – only a few days past. Because Az had never been his lover, really; because all he'd been was a test and a theory. She'd never told him. In fact, she'd promised to erase it all, if only she could devise such a trick.
Maybe that trick is here and it is final. Death for all of them; no room left for memory and no space for caring.
And if the thought has occurred to him – the heavy one, the brooder who broods without thoughts – then it occurred to her first. She had seemed so earnest, hoping only for a way to undo each and every thing they had ever done to each other, from the barest of looks to the oldest of sins, and all of it crime, and now she has the way. It's all around them.
Oakpaw backs one step away from the last of the soldiers who remains to guard him. There's no effort involved, not concerning Oakpaw; he's occupied with the melee, with the one sticking him with claws.
And then he goes in. It's like the first step into the river, long ago, when all he had wanted was to slot into that imperfect family, the large and loveless tangle of them. There is nowhere to slot here; all receptacles are broken, but the air is cold like water and the current of battle drags at him. He could just go under.
But Oakpaw will find some better death than drowning.
He looks for a part to play in all of this – Azazel's shining rescuer, should she ever need one, a defender of the ones he has recently come to call friends, or protector of his sister, if she's even here, if she even lives still. He can see none of them.
Just Ice.
A chip of frost on the battlefield, unthawed if not unbloodied. No, he is all blood, now; tipping back the throat of a tiny, wailing tom, and treasuring the silence after the snap. It's Littlepaw he holds, undoubtedly a warrior now, and irrevocably dead, neck sheared from spine and limp all over.
Oakpaw has come closer without realising. Ice is Clan and rebel, both and nothing, and if Oakpaw can't touch the rest of them, this villain will very much do in their stead. For the first time in moons his claws come rushing out and oh, they are as sharp as he remembers. Ice looks up and for a moment he is happy; one of Morningstar's brood dead, the legacy a little smaller now. He sees Oakpaw who stands, a pillar, without a word. There is just the look on his face, the old PureClan killing light, and Ice knows well what it means. That it's for him.
Ice is better than him, sharper and older and full of all the things he wants to tear from this life to pad his own. Oakpaw has nothing, no fetters, and Ice has made him thus.
Oakpaw tips his head, a mocking bow before the duel.
Ice runs. Not for the first time. Maybe for the last.
He is gone from Oakpaw's sight, like a blip, like a glitch of his futile ever-trying mind. But he knows what he saw – sees still, Littlepaw so extremely dead on the ground – and follows him. Down. A darkness blights the surface of the meadow, a deep vein brought to the surface. Oakpaw remembers there are tunnels here, that he stands upon empty underground capillaries. Ice has gone down to their heart.
Not for the first time, maybe for the last, Oakpaw follows the running tom.
He thinks of the hole in the wall, his hole – home enough for a while. His eyes remember the darkness and within a moment he sees the path forward; not sloping down but running straight under the meadow, the ceiling thumping with blows struck and bodies, dominos, knocked down. Dust makes a fine curtain in the air, weeping down, displaced.
Through their blotting, their seepage, he spots his runaway figure. The tunnel must make a sharp turn, or dropoff, because as he watches his mark cuts away from view. Oakpaw curses. He begins to hurry. He runs too.
He rounds the corner out of breath already, because he has been stagnant, a thing left rusting. Ice puts his face to the tunnel wall, unkindly, and his ear fills with dirt and his eyes oscillate between murky tunnel darkness and the real, pitch thing.
A dead-end, then: Ice has stopped with nowhere left to go. As Oakpaw worms away, straightens, he sees they must be on the edge of the forest; wiry, thin roots hang down, lovelorn and entwined, from the ceiling.
Oakpaw shores up. He blocks the exit, and watches Ice's roving eyes. There's a twitch in his lip, regular as a heartbeat, miniscule and grotesque.
"Going somewhere?" Oakpaw asks. He is never so witty as when it doesn't matter, when his words will be forgotten and skated by, when no one is really listening.
"The little lost boy," Ice says, "come home."
"The Clan disgrace," Oakpaw counters, "showing his face where it's not really wanted."
"Hm," says the other tom, standing tall, dirt now patching what once was blood. His tail seethes through the air, tangling in fine-lined roots. "That's the crux of it, I suppose. Both of us unwanted, willing to do whatever it took to be needed. Well, now I am. Are you?"
Oakpaw snaps his teeth. Never has been, never will. There's a semblance of freedom in that.
"Really, what now?" asks the tom. His voice is thick; there is dirt and dust in it, the ceiling juddering with breath. "You want to stop me from killing Morningstar? You'll be her darling little hero, is that it?"
He coughs.
Oakpaw says, "She won't die." He knows it's truth. It will take a truly unique weapon to kill Morningstar, a purpose-forged tool, and Ice is not that.
"Morningstar doesn't want heroes," he says, as though he had ever been one. "She kills them. When your parents died I truly began to wonder why she's here, is what she is. A perversion. It isn't love, any fool can see she let that crusade sail a long time ago, but she's still here. All the power is hers. She revels in it."
"She's not even here," Oakpaw snaps, but Ice is speaking in an unbroken kind of way, without interjection and interruption. The way, Oakpaw thinks, he's never been allowed to speak before.
"If it wasn't love, it would be some other measure. Some new control. She wants what's hers, wants to keep it. It's the only thing that's ever been hers, fully, ever wanted to be."
He affixes steady, glowing eyes to Oakpaw's face. "And I'm going to take it from her. Because I can."
It's implicit in his stare; no city-tamed wretch, no lonely unnamed brute will take it from him, his one and only victory yet impending.
He moves too fast and Oakpaw is still mulling it over; Ice flips him into the air and he goes weightless for a moment, gravity severed, and hits thickly into the tunnel roof. The air goes out and dirt goes in; even as he falls, dirt is falling faster, little chunks raining down, sunlight peeling through new cracks in the earth. Illuminating his body, where he lands.
Nothing is broken this time.
Light bleeds over him as he rises into an unsteady crouch. A parody; the real thing, remembering the weight and stance, long gone from him.
Ice is coming, to corner him, beat him down so that he might go to Morningstar with a bloody face. Proven.
Oakpaw does what he did not do, a long time ago, and ducks.
He comes winging through the air, a soft brush of grey in the gloom. Oakpaw presses tight to the floor and feels Ice lunge above him, snarling as new screams filter through the broken earth, perhaps screaming for their general.
He does not feel Ice land.
He meets with something else entirely.
Oakpaw turns slowly; afraid of what he'll see, though he knows death and dying fairly well, was born to the art. Ice is all strung up, once again the puppet and not the puppet-master, tangled in tree-roots that strain to hold him. He is thrashing, until the roots are a knot and at the centre is him, held up like a prize.
I'll leave him here, thinks Oakpaw, almost merry, and he will miss the whole thing, until he sees the wreath around Ice's neck, the fetter remaking him just a creature of earth and blood; part of the forest, part of the tree. It is tight. It is cutting. It leaves no room for breath, though Ice is heaving, gasping, trying for air harder than he has ever tried for anything before.
It is so predictable, then, to find him failing.
Oakpaw's not sure why he does it, when the glow of murder is still in Ice's roiling, dying eyes. He saws through a root holding the tom up, then another, even as it tears a claw from the soft pad of his foot. He is still hewing through roots, roped like intestines and strung like muscle, when Ice goes quiet. When the twitching stills and that look of murder, so well-worn on his face, falls away.
Oakpaw backs up. He feels it; the brand of failure, hot and shameful on his neck.
"You were only a bitter old thing," he breathes, in the direction of the strung-up corpse, as though to absolve himself. No absolution is forthcoming.
He lets the quiet take him for a moment. Then shouts come echoing down the tunnel – Come here, rat – and he wants to go, quickly. He makes his own way through the newly thinned earth, punching up into bright air and sunlight like a thing born.
He is almost stunned he doesn't emerge under someone's death, doesn't shunt aside some poor body left already to rot, but it is certainly all around him. The war rages on, unabated, though now it is clearly fuelled by fewer, far fewer, bodies.
Oakpaw sees Meadowmist, bathed red; he sees Nettlecloud laughing or screaming (only knowing her mouth is tipped wide open, not knowing what sound spills out); he even sees Strongclaw, standing untouched, watching everything unfold with a soft confusion on his face.
He looks back. The forest is beside him, he borders the meadow. Behind is the gorge yawning wide and hungry. Filled with his father's bones, and no less greedy for them. The she-cat Brava is fighting on its edge, pushed desperately close. The warrior opposite gives a heaving push and Brava goes wheeling backwards, suspended for the barest second over the mouth of nothing. Then gone.
Guilty, swallowing down a death that doesn't belong to him, Oakpaw turns back to the fight. For what he's really looking for. One little spitfire, in all this mess.
His eyes, after all they have seen, don't fail him. Maybe it's the consequence of so many days, watching the army ranks for one head, one set of eyes, any sign of her at all. And finding her; he seems to know how.
He finds her, but then he sees her; digests the scene with a pause and a stutter. She is not hale, she is not dead, but here mortality is a flash in the pan, a light that's bright and then gone. Azazel fights oddly. Strangely hampered, crouched above something grey and red and slick with the colours. The thing she's fighting is streaked with gore and taps at her almost lazily, pressing buttons to dismantle her bit by bit. But her capitulation has already begun, Oakpaw knows, because she fights over the body of her brother.
Beelzebub.
Azazel bending their heads together in conference; Azazel bringing him a meal with a soft-toothed smile she never shows anyone else; Azazel training him, painstakingly, battle moves that will save his life. That didn't. Just a glimpse of the things he's seen over the past few days; of the kind of love he hadn't understood, until he'd been shown, and knew love came in more forms than words in the dark in the hole in the wall.
Oakpaw is stamping through red-touched earth, through puddles and viscera before he thinks the word vengeance. It's not his to have but he'll wreak it, for destroying so utterly the purest thing he's ever seen.
He flashes by a face he knows – Thaddeus, not dead, he is surprised in the passing – and keeps going. To the centre of the melee, the beating heart of violence. Where his own heart lies, and where he is surprised to see it so completely out of his own body. He's not surprised. He knew already.
Oakpaw arrives with a thud and a road – the roar his own, the thud the sound of the warrior gone sprawling to the ground.
In the barest of ways, the fullest of moments, his eyes catch against hers, slide and give and hold. It's yours, he wants to say. I'd let you drink that poison now.
But there is black-winged horror in her gaze, the shadow of her brother's slack body. As Oakpaw holds down the warrior – strangely still, unmoving except for the hummingbird flutter of its heart – Azazel leans down and touches her claws to its throat.
"Wherever you're going, I hope it fucking hurts," she whispers. Then there's blood.
For the scantest of moments he closes his eyes. When he opens them again – though they're heavy and the darkness is a respite – Azazel is gone. Beelzebub is slumped over his stomach on the ground, though his eyes have fallen closed and Oakpaw wonders if she did that, if she had a moment for goodbye. The warrior under his feet is not yet dead but on his way.
Oakpaw looks down. The warrior is staring up at him, full of wonder and little fear.
"You came back," he murmurs. Oakpaw sees the fur on his muzzle is not merely blood, just a bright and shining shade of ginger, like his legs. Beneath the blood is white. He is a sunset rendered flesh.
"I waited. I waited for you, always."
"But–" Oakpaw is full of memory. The days he thinks of are tinged with some colour, a kind of happiness.
"They gave up. She gave up." He's vehement. "Not me."
He reaches up to touch Oakpaw's cheek with a gentle, trembling paw. Oakpaw feels the warmth of blood.
"She named me Cloudstrike," he breathes. Dearest friend. Brother. Partner. All he'd had, that he'd let himself have.
Oakpaw gentles. He leans down, presses his nose tight to Cloudstrike's forehead. "I missed you," he says; it was true, some days.
Cloudstrike pushes his head back, some strength still left in that lofted, shaking paw. He wants to look Oakpaw in his eyes, then, as he dies.
His throat is stilling, new halves growing colder. "They gave me to her. S-sister."
"My sister?" asks Oakpaw. He feels a flash of something – worry or fear, something closer to jealousy? – and doesn't dissect it. Won't waste his friend's last moments like that.
Cloudstrike's eyes close once, like affirmation.
"I never … touched her. Because … all I wanted…"
Wanted seems to hurt him, the air in his throat makes the sound hard; or it's something else, deep and inner, that Azazel hasn't torn apart. A pain the tom has carried for a longer time. Age-old, broken as the Code. Oakpaw wants to shush him. He'll feel this guilt for all his days, this wonderment of what if. But it's all Cloudstrike has left and to stop him would be cruel, worse than cruel, and Oakpaw has been gentled. Tamed.
The y-sound is easier to shape, the vowels soft and almost effortless. He tries to feel nothing as Cloudstrike says, "You," and doesn't quite manage it. He feels everything.
Oakpaw just licks a spot of blood from his cheek. There is too much; he'd be hours at this task, and all Cloudstrike's time is unspooling.
"Don't … regret me," he says, with a bubble of blood blooming on his lip.
"Never," Oakpaw whispers. He wonders if Cloudstrike catches it in time. Even as he forms the word he knows his old friend is already dead. Says it anyway, for his ghost to know and cherish.
Standing up takes pain and eternity. Something cold has frosted over his joints and he is numb, all numb. He closes Cloudstrike's eyes, though his nerves don't even feel the touch of fur and skin as he presses softly down. Bright and happy eyes. He wishes he never had to see them dead. He turns to Beelzebub, pillows his head more comfortably on the ground.
Then he leaves the tableau, with the hope to never return and the knowing that he will.
The forest is cool and its touch is home. He breathes in deep and the stink of blood, almost, not quite, close enough, leaves his lungs. Leaves and clean air and the soft rot of undergrowth, fallen things. There are bird calls. Oakpaw does not recall the last time he saw a bird, living and whole. Underneath it all is the thread he followed, the scent of Azazel strung across the battlefield and into the woods.
He sees her up ahead (he has run, to catch her); nothing but a sandy blur through the trees. She seems to ascend, as though something has plucked Azazel up into the air, but she is only climbing a tree quick and sure. Oakpaw feels the crush of nostalgia, feels it in his leg. He skids to a stop below the tree, the type of which he has no name for, not anymore. Leaves shred and bruise beneath his touch.
He sees her peering down, a green coronet around her head. Leaves shudder; she is shaking. There is nothing of recognition on her face.
"Azazel," he says, to remind her.
"Undo it all," she cries, "undo it, please."
He is reminded of the start and the ending it's now begot.
"Never," he says, the last echo of that word still in him. A different promise.
"You were an experiment," she says. "You were a task to me."
He is silent. He knows.
"But I was part of that experiment, too. Test subject. Little soldier girl, doing as she's told, only they never told me to you fall in love with you. But you said you'd never break your Code for me, so how could I do the same? How could I walk anything other than the only path I'd ever been set on?"
"Come down," Oakpaw says. He fears now.
"I think I'll stay," she says, words gone smooth and eyes faraway. "Closer to my brother, up here. Further from you and all you stand for."
"All I stand for," he murmurs. It's never been much, and after her it'd been nothing at all. Platitudes propped upon fronts, and behind it all the aching, his heart. "All I have is my life, Az, but that's yours. It's been yours from the moment you snapped my damn leg. I didn't need some hypothesis, and I don't need a way back. Past, present, and future tense: I love you in all of it."
She's quiet and her eyes swim away; she recedes into the tree for a long moment. He thinks about climbing. Would it be invasion or rescue?
"Please," he urges. "Let me be the one to break your fall. Every time. My bones are all yours to break."
The leaves above rustle, suspiciously, and he's hit with a flash of panic despite the promise he's just made. He remembers this moment, so long ago. It hurt.
Then she drops neatly into the dirt beside him, her eyes wide with all things said and unsaid. Grief and hope tangle there; Oakpaw is poor at reading emotions, at guessing expressions, but knows there's something lovelorn and beautiful there. For him.
"You fool," she says, against his ear. "You want another broken leg?"
"It can be arranged," he replies; then they crash together, embracing, and Oakpaw wants all the lines of him to press into all the lines of her. A single atom, a beat in the dark. Closer still.
"Really?" she whispers into him. "Not a single thing, you'd keep it all?"
"I'm better for it. So much better for it all."
She shudders. He reverberates with it.
Az can't say it back, not yet; her brother's death is too fresh, not yet dry, and all of their moments led towards it. Maybe one day she will separate the two, love the one and grieve the other, but until then he has the weight of her feeling. The depth of her is all his.
She tells him she loves him and she never stopped. That her lies are done and she wants something new. That they will find it, but only once this thing is done.
They go back to the battlefield.
It's different; clumps have broken off, fights are slowing, and eyes have turned to a single titanic figure.
"Achilleus," says Az, in confusion. Her eyes skip over that blight on the field, the place where her brother lies. "But he …" She doesn't have the words for his disgrace, his mistakes, and trails off lamely.
Few know, really know, what he did.
But this is his redemption, his shining moment. Even Emory watches his triumph. He's all the army has and he is winning. There's a glut of bodies behind him, as though he's scythed his way onto the battlefield, and this is his telltale path. His black pelt betrays no blood.
Some warriors are cheering; a rasping sound, throats hoarse from death-making. Willowfang is the subject. He's a big strapping Morningstar son, dark and tabby like Oakpaw but much larger. He's moving towards Achilleus. Heavy, limping. Az and Oakpaw finds themselves creeping closer – half the forces do, in part respite, in part entertainment in the want of revenge. All little battles have broken up. Those who don't move, can't.
Oakpaw and Azazel press together. They don't exchange allegiances, don't cheer with the rest and don't want to know. Perhaps they don't have a side, anymore, but neither are they impartial.
Achilleus kicks aside two dead warriors to make way for the new fight. Charpool and Mallowpaw, he thinks; he's wrong in name, never knew Mallowblaze as a warrior.
The city cat moves like a shadow; flitting and horizontal. There comes the sound of tearing, spilling, and Willowfang slumps over dead. What little noise the warriors make comes to an end. Oakpaw thinks Willowfang was half-dead already and Achilleus has just made a show of it. Easy opponent to make easy fear. It does work.
Something tall and imposing rises in the corner of Oakpaw's vision. Her sigh carries across the distance: impatience, notes of fine, I'll do it myself.
A new ripple goes through the crowd; with a jolt, Oakpaw sees they've all formed a ring, like so many assessments held in hollow of camp. The last, the final test.
Her name is hush, fear. Dawnshadow, say the Clan cats, and it's taken up by soldiers. None of the cheering or the bravado, just expectancy.
Oakpaw remembers her as an apprentice; just a shade, nothing he'd ever paid attention to.
Dawnshadow has certainly changed. She commands attention, now.
"I think I have you to thank for my new role in life," Dawnshadow drawls, drawing up close to the tom. "Not that I wouldn't get there without you."
"We'll see what role you're left with by the end of this day," sneers Achilleus back to her, hate marrow-deep and mirrored. "You almost look like your mother, you know … though far uglier."
"I hope you loved her. She would've hated that," she snarls, and leaps.
Achilleus is water-quick and slips aside but they see, they all see, the pawful of black fur Dawnshadow clutches as she lands. Shock flickers across his face. He's not used to being touched or to losing first blood. The warrior's deeply unsettling smile grows. All teeth. She has something of an underbite.
He goes for her throat, or seems to. Dawnshadow's paw crunches into his nose and he goes down, pinned by the forehead. Writhing, he gouges some deep line across her ribs. She doesn't flinch, never seems to feel it. She delights in letting him try. In fact, she leans in closer to whisper some new pain to him, evading his snapping jaws before they gape, hang loose in surprise.
Achilleus renews his efforts, twisting his body until he finds his feet, but none of it matters. Dawnshadow's foot grinds his head into the ground, even as he pushes against her inert, gravitational power.
More force. Doubled struggling. Then comes the crunch, the thick noise that washes over them all. Dawnshadow pulls her foot out slowly, savouring the drips and dribbles running from her claws. Slowly, she shakes. Her tongue comes swiping over her lips. Fat, pink, swollen. The crowd just watches that tiny movement, the in-and-out of it.
"No need," she says to the body, "to lose your head."
No one else laughs but she is chuckling. Dawnshadow laughs until she wheezes.
But she's the first to see.
Other heads swivel, following her gaze, looking to see what has struck that chord in Dawnshadow's fathomless eyes. Peer into the forest; ask your neighbour what the hell is that. The ring breaks open but does not fall apart. It just makes room.
Out of the dark stretching shadows comes Morningstar.
two chapters to go babeeeey
