this chapter contains references to canon PureClan lore and characters written by uriekuki. for the epilogue to have its best effect, please read Till Death Do Us Part and Lover, Hunter, Friend, and Enemy first (and also just because they're fucking cool and it's PureClan, what more do you want). so, of course, this epilogue is dedicated to uriekuki (without you, i never would've finished this).
He stands in front of the cave, the one with the bodies.
The tomb has no door; it was dug over as he learned to walk, covered up before he knew what it was and what is within.
It's still dark, the quiet un-morning hush when the birds are yet to wake. The horizon is cut with a thin pink line, but he can only see halves of it, standing where he is by the cave. He always tried to sleep through it but never can manage the task. He knows when morning comes, and he's afraid.
As long as he's known it, the first touch of light, the coming of the dawn, he's feared it. Maybe because he's stained by the dark – his face, his feet, where the rest of him is purely gold – but it's probably the knowledge of where and what he came from, told to him by those too-ready for the tale, scanning him for the same blight he was birthed from. As far as he knows they've never found it. The way they tell it, they'd never put up with it again.
His mothers, truer mothers than the one they tell ghost stories about, would prefer he didn't know. But that doesn't stop the morning, every morning. Before he knew, even, he was afraid.
Chillkit grew up in the oddest of times. He learned to walk as those, heavy with scars, relearned. He woke from his happy milk-glazed naps to uncertain gatherings; he learned new words at heated, policed debates, the currents of which he always missed. He thought everyone simply, wonderfully alive. His mother Sunfeather was sterner here than she ever was with him, his sisters. His father always sat with them at these times. Cariad wasn't one for many words; watching the debates he would vow he was happy for a scrap, but he never waded in with a speech. Occasionally, if the crowd cheered for something, he would cheer. Chillkit knew his father was easily led. He also knew he was not his father, that his own was dead and no one knew nothing much about him. But Cariad was close enough and not bad at the job.
His aunt Khia was voracious at these debates. Scars were what she wore, and it took her a while to warm up to Chillkit. She was one of the scanners.
"PureClan messed us all up," she would say, each time, "so we're the same."
And they'd all hush her, smooth over the bad name.
She was of the "victim" crowd. Khia believed they all were; things had been done to them that they did in turn, none of them truly at fault for any of it.
Ashflower, one of his other mothers, just said it was a bad time they'd been through, and they were trying to forget. Khia wanted them all to remember.
Fernstep said they were all complicit and they chose to be; Elettra wanted it to not matter anymore; Sorrelstorm said they were the last witnesses to all of it, the instigators all being gone. Chillkit still didn't really understand what it was, though by now he knew his real mother by name.
Morningstar.
Everyone still said it hushed, as though afraid to wake something sleeping nearby. She came up in debates and had the odd effect of uniting everyone, if only for the moment.
His sisters didn't care for the talks; Volekit and Strongkit wandered off at each opportunity, chasing moths, batting down slow, lazy-flying bumblebees. Everyone indulged them this. Chillkit didn't play, he was altogether too serious, everyone said. Sunfeather understood; she knew he was growing up with a legacy on him, the wrong one.
"So did I," was her comfort. "Look where I am now."
She was leading more and more every day.
It was hotly contested, but she agreed when they chose the new name they'd band together under. As Chillkit understood it, there'd been someone bad by the same name, not nice at all. In the end it felt right to them all – most of them, it still gave Chill the shivers.
Sunfeather gave the new name to them in a ceremony, a communal sharing, and as she said DawnClan a cheer went up, so loud and ragged. Chillkit had never felt them all so happy before, and he was happy.
The arguments came a stop after that, all at once, because they were a new entity. Chillkit found a new definition for "Clan" each day: everyone had a different perspective on it. Team, family, pack, cult (this said by Khia). They were all in agreement on one part, though; they said to him it wouldn't be what it was before. He still wasn't strictly sure he knew what it was, but it was part and parcel with his true mother and she was bad.
He remembered then growing with the Clan, a baby of a thing as much as he was. They had teething pains, the pair of them. Everything merged, old tradition mostly thrown out. His height was marked out against the measurements of a new culture.
He, Vole and Strong shed the "kit" from their names, and there was never anything to replace it.
"We're thinking about it," mused the old Clanners. "But the old way was a bad way."
This was their answer for a lot of things, by the way, but they wouldn't really elaborate, unless it was more on the wrongdoings of Morningstar. He began to wonder how just one thing, only a size bigger than he was, was capable of so much. Khia pointed to her scars, mapping them. Cariad would get this faraway look; Sunfeather rolled her eyes and shut them all up, if she was in hearing distance.
Sunfeather was a very natural leader; he thought so anyway, not yet introduced to the concept of bias. She was warm to everyone the same way she was with her children. Some of them didn't seem used to that; they were uncomfortable with it, Chill felt it. He felt a lot, caught emotions the way coughs went around. He mostly didn't mind: used to sharing, was Chill, he had sisters.
She said she'd lead, anyway, but she wouldn't take the name yet. It didn't mean much to him, but the others seemed to like it.
Others changed theirs, though. Sunfeather prefaced the ceremony with a chapter about growth and metamorphosis; like DawnClan, they were leaving their old selves behind, in the unhappy past they had belonged to. Chill was much bigger by now, one head shorter than Sunfeather and already outgrowing Ashflower. He sat hunched so others could see over him; he would hate to take up too much space. Sunfeather always put him in the front because she wanted him included.
That day, Cariad officially became Cariad again. Elettra became Briar, looking rounder than she had been; Vole told him, delighting in it (he doesn't know how she knew), that she was pregnant and the kits were Burrwing's. Vole went around like that, digging into gossip. He liked that she had a hobby but it didn't mean much to him.
She tells him that Khia – glowering in the crowd, yet still craning to see above the heads of others – was offered a new name by their mother, and refused it.
Gideon made the other choice, and Khia was very slow to forgive him. Sunfeather dubbed him Eagleheart, and still Khia stubbornly calls him Gideon. When she fell pregnant she swore to name each and every kit Gideon, but he only laughed and went along with it, posing hypotheticals with Gideon 1, 2 and 3.
Khia didn't dampen the ceremony, though. The same day, Wren was turned to Wrenmist, Saga to Sparrowcall, Quill to Quillstripe. Ru – the jovial old tom Chill liked, though others seemed to have a problem with – said he was all too happy to leave the city stain behind him, and became Bramblenose. The ginger she-cat he rarely saw (healing from a broken leg, he was told, though she was walking straight by now) pushed her way up and asked, where was hers, didn't she deserve one and wouldn't he want it?
Briar got up and whispered something in his mother's ear. She looked neutral on this, sad, if anything. Of course, said Sunfeather, and named her Brightfire, with some pretty words about her courage and spirit. Azazel-turned-Brightfire stood hunched and fallen in around the middle, looking ill. He remembers, piecemeal, what she said next, though it was mostly a jumble to him at the time.
Mostly it was: they were right, all along, they'd been right. What a poison it is. All of us should know better than to try THIS. Then, I wish you could see as I see now, the only enemy we ever had. More on the nature of PureClan, more on Oakpaw, a dead tom he hadn't know. And to end: If you really remember PureClan, you'll come with me.
She left. No one joined her. Deep in the forest she screamed and DawnClan stood still to listen.
It had been, literally, the last they heard of her.
They'd stood still for a moment, but the bad word – PureClan – was lingering in the air, and they did not like that. They'd erased it. They began chanting the new names, chanting over it, above the stain.
This is his family, Chill knows, but they do have that habit. Of glossing over, of trying to forget. It's almost a wonder he got the full story from them (of the cave, the tomb where he now stands). He'd visited the meadow, before, in tow of his sisters. It was piles of dirt, creeping baby patches of grass in the lows and highs of it. The forest – the newly made edge – stood on a lip and looked down. The meadow curved sharply to underfoot, spilling itself into a shallow gorge. The dust had settled, the dirt steadied, and even as he set paw on it, he did not trust it.
His sisters went further. They had either trust, or no fear. Vole and Strong became two ranging spots, dipping over hill and hollow, and when they came back, they said they'd seen something.
A cave, they'd said, and they'd gone a little way in, only the rest of it was blocked with dirt. Vole wrote it off as the cave-in; she was rational, like their mothers. Strong said it felt off, and did not elaborate, but Chill, looking at its form across the distance, felt that also.
Not that it was wrong, or inherently bad – that's not what he felt. But it held secrets, as he knew DawnClan kept secrets from him.
They say the meadow was ruined, but not how it came to be; they say many had died, though not of what; they say his mother was cruel, she was insane, she was a bloodmonger, but she is gone. But not where she'd gone. There are those with their scars healing still, and he wonders if she touched all of them.
He feels troubled for days, and it must show, because Sunfeather eventually asks him what's wrong, where is the trouble? Chill asks about the meadow and the cave. She looks pensive, thinks about answering. After a moment, she leaves him in their den – the nursery, he's not yet left, though his sisters have moved on – and in comes his father. Cariad. He too is silent, but Chill knows he's just collecting his words before he says them, making sure the things that come out are right.
"When PureClan lived here," he begins, "they thought it was their… mandate to hurt others."
"Mandate?' he asks.
Cariad muses. "Their duty, I suppose, their higher calling."
His father lets him think. They're both alike in that way; internal.
"I wasn't born here," Cariad continues, when it looks like Chill's done thinking. "And I didn't come here in the usual way – I also felt, I think, that it was my duty to hurt them. I tried. It got me about as far as the cave, yes, the one in the meadow. In those days it wasn't buried over, it was kept open, and it was always watched to be sure we didn't get out. Us prisoners.
"I did get out, again, just not in the way that most did. I joined PureClan and I helped put others in that cave."
"That's where PureClan kept the ones they want to hurt?"
"Oh yes," Cariad replies, flickers of something in his eyes. "It was always full."
He understands his father isn't wholly good. He's yet to meet someone who is, especially here; for everyone, there is something, their reason, he doesn't begrudge them those.
"It couldn't go on like that forever, we all felt it would end somehow. Just… the way it did…"
"We fought so bitterly we cracked the earth open," Sunfeather says softly, coming in. "You were always going to ask about this, Chill, we should've prepared something… easier to tell you."
"Us and them." Cariad is musing. "Now it's only us. We're working to be better than we were; the cave is still part of that. Sometimes I stand before it and think about who we put there."
Chill looks at his mother: she just nods. That's right, that's where they are. Everyone they killed.
"We started recovering the bodies, after we fought," continues Cariad. "They were buried only partially… we wanted somewhere better for them to lie, somewhere we could visit and think of our lost. The cave wasn't touched when we lost the meadow."
"It was eerie," Sunfeather says, "we just knew that was where they had to go."
They wait for him to say something. They know what's forthcoming.
"Morningstar? She's in there?"
His parents exchange a glance.
"We never found her," Sunfeather says. "Buried too deep, I think, when the caves collapsed. Your father though – your birth father, who we think he is – he's in there. And so many others."
For a while they go on talking – who is in the cave, to them, who used to be. Sunfeather leaves them first. There are things to run, things to keep smooth. Cariad and Chill speak for a moment about her, their admiration.
And he feels, though his question is answered, that there are many more unknowns.
Chill almost leaves, but Cariad is still sitting, shoulders bowed. As though the weight of all that dirt is on him.
He wonders what Cariad really has; his relationship with Sunfeather, born of PureClan, withered away after it collapsed; there is no one among the new Clan he really seems close with, except for his sister.
"Are you happy now, Dad?' he asks.
Cariad laughs, a little thing. "More than ever," he replies.
He stands by the cave, the one with the bodies, but not for much longer.
Someone has packed a little more dirt in, since he was first here. Now there is not so much an entrance as a divot, a pause in the landscape. Grass is creeping over in the first flush of green. Visible still in the lowing rising light: undenied.
It's the first next near-morning, since his conversation in the nursery. As usual he could not sleep the night through.
Chill knows that before morning rises and he feels afraid, he will be gone.
The moon passes, feeling like a rite. He is young and new and now exploring the world, his corner of the world as far as he can roam. It satisfies some ancient knowledge in him, and so long as he wanders he does not dwell. Chill is full of all his new things: witnessed, eaten, touched. He does not miss them all much, his family; does not think they'll be worried, though he left with little warning. He's a growing tom and, as they always do, he's jumped the nest. He expects to be back eventually and knows DawnClan will change more absent his eyes. He will be happy to see what they've nurtured, pleased to meet the new kits of Briar and Fernstep and Khia.
Wander not forever, he thinks every day, wandering, just as long as you need.
There are places he would, he could, settle. He finds lovely slices of here and there often; a glade and little waterfall, the shore of a bright and flat lake stretched further than his sight allows, a grassy den in long fields. But in every place the morning still comes, and seems less brighter for it.
The moon is a sliver at the waterfall. By the time he reaches the soft green den, it is a sliver again. Chill leaves it in the early hours and walks with the stars.
His tour has made him lean. Chill's dark paws, which seemed bigger to him once, are grown hard with the miles underneath them. Today he's thinking almost, I know it. He shivers through the morning, walks harder and faster – and when he sees the furze of trees on the horizon, he hastens towards it. Shelter. The sun is almost risen.
He pushes, head, chest, shoulders forcing, a path into the darkest little gully he can find. Ferns overhead, a little stream underfoot. A bank overhangs the side, a remnant of higher waters long since flowed away. Chill takes a seat underneath; it's very dark here, the only way he can tolerate his mornings. Almost as if, his eyes failing to see it, morning does not exist. He sits hunched here for two hours, perhaps, long enough for the sun to rise, the dawn colours to bleed from the sky, the birds to cease their early day chorus and settle into normal rhythms.
Chill emerges then, bullion-gold fur slicked back and darkened.
The stream hardly moves and barely covers his paws. Slick river algae covers the rock floor; each step is a hazardous twist and churn of a paw. He'd barely even noticed, in his haste to get in and under.
He is almost wanting the sunlight, chilled now like his namesake; he likes the sun a little closer to noon before he can trust it, but he begins to seek it anyway. Chill breaches the gully. Up ahead through deeply wooded canopy he finds a brightness.
The forest feels a quaint amount like home – maybe that's why, then, he's not surprised to find another cat within.
He comes to the threshold before he stops, notices her.
Spread soft and gilded before him is a clearing; full of golden motes of dust, pollen and small whirring insects, full of sunlit beams. It's fringed by willows and long-draping trees, and he sees her through this as one might expect to conjure a nymph. The clearing is full of wildflowers and clover and he can't help but notice her – but freeze, feeling illicit – in her coat of smoke-grey, the serious, considering tilt of her head.
His mouth is entirely dry. Does he dare venture out, drink from the reed-tipped pond he can, oh just barely, see, by which she sits? The grey nymph, lady of the glade?
Chill supposes he's spying; he's made this leap, in his indecision, from merely watching.
It's not really like him, but he can't unpick his eyes from the scene (a more picturesque thing he's never known). It's a peace just to be here, to breathe the gold idyllic air. The girl is listening, thoughtful, to the call of a wren; Chill cannot help but listen too. She turns her attention to a black-and-orange butterfly, laughing as it dances about her whiskers; he can only smile as she does. When the butterfly leaves after a moment's tango she looks down at herself in the pond, making a study of herself in mid-morning water.
Despite the quietude, his heart is palpitating.
He's not, he knows, so desperately lonely from his month of wanderlust to simply jump at the first available companion – that's a discredit to her beauty, her air, and Chill would not have that. It is something else. He does not know the word "kindred", but feels a sameness here he can't place.
Chill steps through the willow fronds.
The path is sweet grass and budding dandelions; he casts off their fuzz as he passes by and they drift ahead of him, antecedent.
In the dark mirror of the pond he wavers into being: the tips of his black ears, his dark muzzle, his polished amber eyes. Mismatched, he thinks to himself, the parts of a genealogy he'll never know, that's all that's left. Dragonflies skim across his reflected face, which looks wide-open, struck somehow.
He lifts his eyes, but somehow can't get further than the pond's edge. She's in it too, he sees, spun across by the same dragonflies as touched him.
She's young, Chill notices from here, even as her reflection ripples and wrinkles. His age perhaps, a few bright moons of living done. And she has noticed him, green eyes bright as the glen and meeting his in the mirror. She does not look afraid; he supposes that if she did, he would turn tail and run, never to show his face in this beautiful glen again.
He stoops to drink for lack of anything to say. Chill manages to straighten with a piece of duckweed hanging from his chin; he's none the wiser for a crucial moment or two.
"Very distinguished, sir," says the grey lady, levering a pointed look at his lower face.
Chill feels the damp slime hanging from his chin then and bats it away, hastily. He has never made an impression before, let alone one this bad.
"Oh, that… thing?" he asks. "I'm just testing it for… water… alkalinity. It's passable."
He thinks that's a word; he hopes it's passable.
"Are you a pond inspector?" she inquires, genteel. He's not entirely sure if she's serious.
"Ponds, puddles, very slow-moving streams – any small body of water, really. We have to know if they're up to scratch. So, well done. I think you're doing good things with your pond here."
He dips a paw in the water; nodding seriously, to sell the act. Perhaps there are such things as pond inspectors; maybe impersonating one is a kind of crime.
"Does the inspector have a name?" she asks; he has a sense this is either going very well or very poorly, but he's not met another soul on his adventure and his social metre feels rusted under-use.
Clearing his throat of a little pond-water, sticking, he answers, "Chill."
It's much shorter than the names he used to know; he wonders if she'll think it strange.
"Chill?" she repeats, his own name skipped back at him across the water. "I'm Liath."
Her name. He feels a warm blush under his skin, the intimacy of learning a new name that hasn't been taught to him, grown up with him. A stranger made less strange. Not – he thinks, policing his own mind – that there seems to be anything remotely strange about her. Liath.
"Do you live here?" Chill asks, jumping to the next thing, afraid of a silence that will stretch into leaving. For the first time he doesn't feel like leaving.
Liath looks back, gestures at the forest with a slim grey shoulder. "I live with my mothers," she explains, "and they prefer it on the plains."
Where he'd come from, probably, but he hadn't seen signs of any others. Probably he hadn't gone far enough, but then he wonders if they were hidden.
"Where all the hawks and birds of prey live?" Chill asks, smiling.
She laughs. "No, just some of them."
They must spend several hours in that meadow, and time does pass, but he can barely bring himself to notice. She teaches him the names of all the flowers and insects they can see; he mentions his family, just briefly, though not the name of PureClan. She talks about her mothers and he brings up his.
By the time he looks up at the sky, the light is paling. Colder months are closing in and the days grow short. He notices Liath notice, too.
"I have to go," she says. "Will you be here tomorrow?"
He promises her he will.
"Well, Chill. I suppose this is goodnight."
She leaves him in the meadow – he averts his gaze to her departure, hardly wanting to seem too keen, too watchful, and so when he looks up she is gone like a wisp of mist under the sun.
Chill hasn't eaten all day – his stomach reminds him now – but there's easy pickings to be had among the grass, found in the stretching shade of trees. Crepuscular birds are out in force and in song. He almost catches a nightingale, unsuspecting, as it lights from low branch to low branch, beak snapping at small insects darting through the air. A lovely light noise comes from its throat while he plans the strike, and he enjoys it too deeply to even finish his train of thought.
He catches a red squirrel instead and buries the bones of it in shallow leaf litter, at the edge of the forest. It would profane the meadow somehow, he thinks, to leave the bloody scraps within it.
For his rest Chill curls up under a juniper bush with its sharp, clear scent in his nose. And sleeps until almost-morning, as late as he ever has; rather than flee, he watches dawn colour the sky. It's clouded today and after a moment of middling pinks and yellows, all is grey and the sun shrouded. He's at peace with that.
Chill hunts and eats early, and is tidily packing the remnant meal away under some dirt when Liath arrives. Despite his promise, she seems surprised – no, pleased? – to see him still there.
"You're an early riser," Liath observes. She sits with her tail tucked neatly over her paws, a dandelion puffball dusting seeds over her flank.
He shrugs, the movement graceless. "No earlier than you, it looks like." It sounds defensive even to his own ears, and he hurries to soften it somehow. "I've never liked the morning. Residual memories of a mother tied to the name, I suppose."
Liath had been watching the sky as he talked – her attention wanders, but she seems to follow threads of conversation even so. But at this, her head swivels down, her eyes refocus, and Chill is once again the centrepiece in her gaze. He almost swallows, gulps; he hadn't expected that would mean anything to her. And yet it seems to.
"Morning," she says, "meaning, Morningstar?"
She doesn't sound hostile yet, but in Chill's experience his mother's name only evokes pain and sadness. Anger, usually. Even this far from home, any association can't be good.
When Chill's slow to respond, she adds, "Of PureClan."
Chill can't lie. He knows he looks very much like his mother. "Yes," he acknowledges.
Does he apologise? Does he flee?
"No wonder you hate morning-time," she says, as he feels a crushing relief, "with that hanging over your head."
He shrugs again, but it's a much looser, easier thing.
"Wait here," she announces, suddenly. "I have someone for you to meet."
She spins herself away into the forest again; he will never not be sure she isn't some kind of sprite, some ghostly vestigial imprint of another, unknown thing.
He's waiting a while, he thinks, the air warming, kicking up a small breeze.
Chill stares deeply into the woods where Liath disappeared. He's almost afraid she'll return with Morningstar in tow, the body of whom was never found, the death never truly confirmed.
Through the trees he sees some kind of mirage; three grey shapes, ghostly and eerily all the same. As they draw closer he can differentiate small differences, which ease his startled heartbeat. Three she-cats, but all of different height and stature: one slighter, one tall but hunched, almost, the last slender. Two pairs of green eyes, yet not the same shade, beside one set of cool blue. And, in the weak sunlight, he sees one is covered all over in scars.
Liath breaks ahead. She looks abashed, it seems to him.
"Sorry," she says. "Perhaps I should have prepared you before I ran off."
The pit in Chill's stomach lessens slightly. At least Morningstar isn't in her entourage.
The two grey she-cats catch up. The green-eyed one looks warmly at him – almost excited, perhaps, to see him? That tracks as unusual. The blue-eyed one, silvered with a pelt with old scars, seems coolly interested. He realises these must be Liath's mothers, unless she comes from a large colony of solely grey she-cats.
The green-eyed one introduces herself as Arrah: not Liath's birth mother, though their eyes share a sameness. She has Clan history in her, she says, in the blood.
The other is Memory, and doesn't mention her name and PureClan in the same breath.
All the same, she wants to know, she tells him, she should know what happened. She expects a story he's never really decoded.
Chill tells her as best he can; his patchwork knowledge, his childhood scary stories, the snippets caught from adults as he passed by. It's so clearly a child's retelling of history barely known. The adults listen to him patiently, though – and Liath, he expects, would scarcely know more about it than him. He concludes with DawnClan and likes ending it on a happy note. Relatively happy, anyway, compared to what has passed.
"Did Khia make it?" Arrah asks. It sounds like she's trying, hard, to keep the concern from her voice and the result is a strained thing. "Did she find Cariad?"
It's uncanny to hear names he knows well from a stranger. Even with her self-professed "blood".
Chill's perplexed, and he thinks it shows. "Aunt Khia? My dad?"
So they spend several minutes, dozens even, going over the discovery of their family connections. Even when he tells them the name of his birth mother, they are not offended (surely, though, Liath already told them this, and they agreed to meet him anyway). Arrah is more disappointed when he doesn't know a Sablefrost; a Smokefang; a Strongclaw. These are not bodies in the cave.
Memory explains to him the history she knows: a once upon a time story, unlike any he's ever heard before. It doesn't start well. It doesn't end well – not until it comes to a point, a line crossed. The middle is not particularly happy either.
Once upon a time, there was a predator. A symbiotic organism – he doesn't know these words – of the forest, with long stretching shadows that reached out to a place called The City. They took lives for the sake of their Code; a fiction, but a fiction lived and breathed by. Love was anathema to them (bad, Liath clarified later, like a poison). They continued this way for many years, countless years, until they made a mistake. Taking her. Memory escaped, not without her scars, but it was more than most could claim. She made her way back to the city and in desperation started something far bigger, far uglier than herself, than what she had been built for. It was an army. It was all those years that did it – generations of fear rearing up an ugly and bitter head. It spread over the city, but they recruited in bad ways, by selling and trading in bodies.
Finally, the army was ready to fight. Memory realised – her eyes looking here at Liath, full of love and light that had not sparked before, in her tale – she was not. She could not. She had made her way out of the city with Arrah, a stranger she grew to love. And there were others. Others who knew of the before, but not the after; the final victory or loss to complete PureClan's bloated lifespan. They had all contented themselves to never know.
Until Chill.
There's a little silence, in which Chill realises Memory is done with her lesson, and maybe he should thank her, or apologise. He doesn't know the appropriate measure in recanting the crimes of your forebears.
They're all looking away from him as he tries to figure this out. Slowly, belatedly, he sees they're waiting. Something is approaching through the trees, the same direction the she-cats had mistily sprung from earlier. Chill hastily follows their gazes.
Two figures. Slow. He relaxes as he registers they are not a threat. Memory's story, he thinks, has put him somewhat on edge.
Arrah whispers something into Liath's ear and the pair stand up, slipping back into the trees like the ghosts he thinks they must be.
Liath's tail brushes along his shoulder as she goes.
"Just a little further," says the first figure. He is stooped, his golden fur patchy and thin – but the red tom behind him is even more so, whiskers limp and eyes milky. The first pauses to nudge the other down to the pond, watching him bend, swaying, to drink.
They're yet to notice where he sits with Memory. Chill has never seen a being so old. Memory watches them with a soft expression, maternal, though these toms are twice old enough to be her father.
Just as Chill begins to think the red tom is blind, maybe senile (an abstract term to him, he isn't really sure what it means), his head snaps around with surprising speed, and his eyes, though filmy, find Chill with unerring focus.
"Well," he says, mostly to himself and his partner. "This is little Liath's guest?"
"Yes, Redfeather," Memory calls across the pond, pitching her voice loud, unbothered by the sudden mention of her daughter, "this is Chill, our young friend from a familiar place."
Chill starts. Redfeather? That's a Clan name if he's ever heard one.
To him, and quietly, Memory murmurs, "This is Redfeather, and Addler. They're a touch hard of hearing. Speak up."
He clears his throat, perplexed still by the prospect of a warrior here, but bound nevertheless to be polite. "Yes sir," he calls. "Thank you for, uh… lending me your meadow here. It's lovely."
Redfeather is standing up and wobbling over. The other, Addler, follows closely behind, watching his uncertain steps. Up close, their eyes are surprisingly bright and lively. Addler has a snaggletooth, Redfeather a set of thick and droopy white eyebrows. Their faces are peppered with white, in fact, and Chill realises it must be a thing of age. He's not sure what to do and bows his heading, hoping for an air of respect, as they proceed to examine him.
"Familiar place?" grunts Redfeather, in question.
Memory doesn't seem inclined to answer this.
"Oh, um," Chill fumbles, "PureClan, I suppose. Or it used to be."
Redfeather's jaws open wide and he emits a sort of hacking, wheezing sound, which Chill takes to be laughter instead of coughing. Addler looks content, perhaps, or contemplative, and doesn't so much as chuckle.
"Used to be. We've waited a long time to hear that. PureClan used to be."
"We thought, when we heard of the army," muses Addler. He has a light, soft voice, despite his age. He looks at Memory as he speaks, who's nodding her silver-scarred head. "But we didn't know. It seemed foolish to hope, yet again."
"You're from… PureClan?" Chill asks. So is almost everyone he's ever met, but on them it's new and older both.
Redfeather answers him gruffly. He's dredging something up for Chill, specially, this new export from the places he must have known. "We all are, in a way, 'cept Liath and the kids. But me most of all."
Chill feels a need to stop him, stop him from pulling up whatever he has kept carefully buried for, likely, years. His memories must be even darker than Memory's tale. "It's different now."
That seems pale, almost worthless. It doesn't erase the before.
"Yes," says Redfeather, with another barking laugh-cough. "Wiped off the map, I should hope."
"More faith in my troops than maybe I ever had," Memory mutters.
Chill shifts from paw to paw, feeling very under-qualified to be the bearer of any kind of news. He was hours-old when this even happened.
"Well, there was a battle. I'm too young to remember. Nobody… won. But when it was over, the survivors – all the survivors – came together. Made something new." This at least he can be proud of, even if it was nothing to do with him. He remembers it being made and is suddenly nostalgic for it.
"DawnClan," says Memory drily. "None of the old rules apply, though, it would seem."
Still, the two toms eye him with some small amount of suspicion. "Why did you leave?" Addler asks, not wholly un-sympathetic. "Did they chase you out because your mother was some pyscho murderer?"
Affronted, he tells them no, though his mother was some psycho murderer, as far as he knows.
"I had to leave," he says finally. "Had to see what was out there. It was still a weird place to grow up, you know." Weird doesn't begin to cover it, he's realising, but he probably shouldn't come out to strangers with it.
The old toms huddle into their own private conversation. Chill tries not to listen, it seems personal, but they are old and they do speak loudly. He turns an idle eye to the clouds, tracks a bumblebee throwing itself from yellow flower to yellow flower. Where's Liath, he starts wondering, but still, he hears them.
"You want to go back," Addler says, rasping through his words.
Redfeather shrugs; his shoulders are already so hunched there isn't far to go. "I couldn't ask that of you, my love. To go back there."
"You don't need to ask," Addler replies. He doesn't look resigned or upset or any of the emotions Chill might expect, hearing the undertone of the conversation. PureClan: a bad place to go back to, living or dead. "We can visit the resting place of an old friend. Feel some closure at last. I want that too."
"I want to remember Eaglestar and Icestar. Remember Wrenstrike in the way she asked us to. StarClan, I even want to remember Hawkstorm." He snorts. "Have I gone all sentimental in my old age, Addler?"
Addler noses his shoulder. "Despite the best efforts of some in your youth, it seems to be true."
Memory is smiling broadly at them. Chill even feels her fondness – with a sadness in it, too, laid deep.
"A return?" she asks. "I'm sure I have some things to bury there."
And so, by that evening, the plan is formed. It is decided.
Chill is going home: and so is Redfeather, and Addler, and Arrah and Memory, and Liath.
The "kids", he learns, are the toms' adopted, adult daughters: Oriana and Wren. Oriana likes to wander, so Wren has gone to fetch her and they'll catch up to the group – quite easily, probably – by following their scents. Addler tells him more about his time in PureClan, that evening in the twilight: he was a transplant like Cariad, the first beneficiary of this old rule. And yet it hardly worked as well for him as it seemed to for his father. Addler did not assimilate, he did not do the bad things expected of him. Even worse, he feel in love, a bad state to be in as thought by the Clan. (Chill is glad he knows none of the names in this story; it would feel a little too close to betrayal to hear of his babysitters as villains.) Redfeather and Addler had eventually escaped with the help of a now-lost friend.
Chill is learning so many stories.
And, going home, he knows there will be more. He wants the tales of Cariad's life. Needs to help answer Arrah's searching, seeking questions: Sablefrost, Strongclaw, Smokefang. Chill wants Memory's own memories of his father, who he's gleaned she knew. And he won't shy away from anything of Morningstar. He does have the right to know, and carry it.
That day is over quickly.
First to depart the meadow, in its pre-evening glow, are Addler and Redfeather. They say they need their sleep, for they'll set out that next morning to cover the next week – perhaps, Chill's not strong on directions – of travel. He learns these two, after so many years, don't want to waste time. It's likely they don't have much left. Next goes Arrah (who returned, prey-laden, with Liath in the late afternoon). It's full evening when Memory departs, leaving him alone with Liath with one stormy, warning look.
Even that can't dampen the warmth inside him, which pitches ever higher as he looks at Liath. Speaks with her. Learns her.
She has spent her entire life in this forest, this little ecosystem. She's happy to leave, but thinks she will come back here one day. It's too much to abandon entirely.
They talk into the night, as the pond is swallowed up by darkness, reflecting the barest hint of sky and stars. Night birds call, for a time.
Chill isn't unhappy to go back, and says this. He feels like he's returning two ancient relics to their home, their rightful, if dusty, place. It's bigger than anything he's ever done before. To him, it feels worthy of DawnClan, a new feat to scribe in their new history. It curves his lips to think of it. And to introduce Liath to his mothers, his sisters (ugh, will she like them better than him?), and to meet the new babies of the Clan – just the thought of it is a glow in him! He will tell them the whole story as he now knows it. Maybe that's his place.
For the first time he truly imagines a future – not just the present, which he has always known, or the past he's fixated poorly upon.
Before he knows it, the sky is growing rosy. Chill doesn't feel his usual shiver at morning's approach; he's not sure if that's Liath, or the prospect of the future, or the thought of going home. He just lets it be.
Liath sits closer, asleep now, as he keeps watch. More than anything else, he greets the morning sky, the clouds swelling, the stars dotting away. He doesn't do anything as sappy as tell it all he will have no fear, but he has that sentiment. Chill feels a new thing: not afraid.
The dawn comes peaceful.
well. the end.
thanks to anyone who's supported tpatp/ttatt for the past ten years – it means a lot to me as a writer and a person. i hope you enjoyed the (very long) ride.
