here's the end (excluding the epilogue)
it's been a while (my bad) so i do recommend going back and refreshing with maybe the past five chapters.
Embershade, fighting tooth and nail, curses herself for a fool.
It's a crushing weight, worse the wounds that burn down her shoulders, than the scratch gaping a little too wide on her throat. She has sent her Clan into capitulation; she is low, she is shallow, worst of all she is witless. Never as smart as she thought she was, and dumber by ten thousand degrees. She led them here weaponless. A half-Morningstar, a shell of a void, is better than the nothing she left behind.
In her opponent's eyes – Kenna, she thinks dimly, remembering back to a forest long ago when spying was new and thrilling, and she thought herself good at it – she sees herself reflected small. The snarl on her face is weak, could peel off from the tiniest of blows.
They have fought their way across the battlefield to each other, two shadows detached. They might be twins: lank and dark-furred, except Kenna's eyes are a murky, muddy amber and one has swollen half-shut. Embershade doesn't think she's killed anyone to get here. She thinks Kenna likely has.
Giving it all up, ready for evisceration, Embershade bowls forward into Kenna. Morningstar, dear mentor/murderer/master, has not left her without a few tricks.
Kenna's jaws snap closed on the flesh beneath her elbow. She howls, kicking her feet rapid-fire into the other she-cat's stomach. It's the pain she deserves. Embershade tears herself free, feels skin give, and knocks Kenna's head hard into the ground. Little scraps of black fur catch on the air.
In the next moment they're broken apart as cats flood around them. Fawnflight, running from some calico she-cat, tears by. Embershade wills her to flee. Then, as a tabby tom – the leader, she remembers, the one named Emory – goes past, the crowd of warriors stampeding after him catches her under their paws. Fawnflight is swallowed under the noise of stamping, grinding. Over the divide, the cats streaming past, Kenna is grinning wide.
The stampede draws away and Embershade doesn't look at the bloody little smear that was once her friend. She howls and leaps for Kenna again.
The soldier crouches, bracing for the incoming knock, but even her legs planted strong in the dirt can't protect against the heavy kick Embershade delivers to her jaw. The smile goes slipping off. Kenna gasps through broken bone. Something thick falls into her throat – a tongue, maybe, and Embershade goes rolling away, feeling her own go strangely dry in sympathy.
It's war, she tells herself. You can't just watch this time.
Embershade doesn't want to look for the next fight, but she does. She will fight until this is over, or until she is. Either one an end.
But the air – clouded, copper-tasting – is changing. Little groups are fighting amongst themselves, but even this is stilling. Attention is caught and drawn to a new black figure cutting his way into the meadow. Embershade stiffens. She thinks she knows this new tom; knows, at least, what he's done. He draws a line towards Willowfang, striking down any cat unfortunate enough to get in his way.
Willowfang, standing heavy on the spine of one dead soldier, turns. He sees this threat yawning wide, new and ready. One joint in his shoulder hangs loose beneath its skin, but the warrior stands straight anyway. Doesn't stop his claws coming out, nor slow the fighting stance he spreads into. Embershade has never liked Willowfang but she can admire him. It's undoubtable, to look at him, that he has come from Morningstar stock: nothing worse, or better, than that.
Some, the hopeful few, take up his name. Make it into a chant, point it up at the sky. As though anything is listening to them.
Even Willowfang doesn't seem to hear. Embershade is close enough to see blood run from his ears, wick from the corner of a bloodshot eye. She's disgusted. The black tom is smart, but low. Pick on the big one, yes, but that one's the almost dead already. She should stop it; leave the Clan some hope, mark a rally point in the ground with her blood.
But she is not that close to dying.
The tom finally draws even with Willowfang. Wounded as he is, the warrior still cuts a hulking, imposing figure: his claws are still sharp. Ready. The other quirks his head to consider for a moment.
Like fluid, he comes across the ground. He goes low, knocks through Willowfang's prone leg, and cuts up.
For a long moment Willowfang rears up before he falls down.
The tabby shakes the earth as he lands, or seems to, or maybe it's just the collective hope of PureClan dashed. They are down one hero and in need of far, far more.
Behind her, Embershade hears a growl. The timbre is gutturally low and belongs, she knows, to Dawnshadow. The hulking she-cat composes herself for a moment, then pushes forward, blowing past her with the force of a well-contained gale. She issues a stare to those before her – warrior and soldier alike – and a sigh. Weary and consigned. But Embershade had noted the look in her eyes as Dawnshadow thudded past: hungry.
The Clan-held hope must perk its ears again. Embershade is not so sure. Anything that catches Morningstar's eye must be dangerous, must be lethal. And she had seen Morningstar more than look at this tom, do more than notice, as Embershade followed, followed, followed a trail she wished she had avoided.
Dawnshadow saunters up to the tom. The movement seems familiar, in the way of things that have come before. "I think I have you to thank for my new role in life. Not that I wouldn't get there without you."
She says it without gratitude. Embershade wonders who else truly knows what she means, and how Dawnshadow came across this scrap of information.
"We'll see what role you're left with by the end of this day," says the tom. "You almost look like your mother, you know … though far uglier."
Her face twists; bringing to life the insult, but perhaps it's not so much the allusion to her looks than her parentage. For a moment she scrapes for some repartee.
Embershade holds her breath and wonders, when the wind changes, who will die.
"I hope you loved her," Dawnshadow spits out. "She would've hated that."
Then her claws are out and swinging wild.
She must go for the jugular, it is her favourite spot, but before she can wrench into it the city cat has rolled away. Deathly quick; Embershade is afraid to blink. Not so much to miss it, but to never know what happened.
Dawnshadow comes down heavily on the earth.
Black fur flutes beneath her paws for all the world to see: first blood.
The Clanner spreads a wide and unseemly leer across her face. It sparks a rage in the soldier, even as his shoulder glints bare and bloody in the weak sunlight. Snarling, he comes for her now. He knows he will need to end the fight, and quickly, but Dawnshadow has her other plans. Violence shivers and settles into her skin; her best layer, her winsome cloak.
Someone calls bright and loudly: "Achilleus." This time there is no chant.
Ready for him, Dawnshadow flings out a paw as though to repel him. The soldier's face runs straight into it and she uses the force to put him down. Embershade knows it's over now, but Dawnshadow won't let it be that quick. Her bloodlust must be succoured, sweetly, and it must be witnessed. Dawnshadow just grinds her foot against his head, between his ears, even as his body goes wild in fear of death. Even as Achilleus scours a bright dripping line across her ribs, she does not move. She is breathing deep and even.
She whispers something into his ear.
Embershade will never really know what, but she can guess. She's more enlightened than most. It seems confirmed to her, when the tom gasps and writhes renewed. She's told him what he, oh so recently developed, stands to lose.
She must look away. She knows where it will end: the hollow eggshell crunch, the murmurs of horror and victory both. Fixes her eyes on the forest and readies for it: her gentle treetops, waiting for her.
But then she is looking lower than the treetops. At the eye-catching glint within. Coming forward. Watching all.
In the shadows, like the sun all in darkness before rising, is Morningstar.
Embershade's heart gives a warbling, tearing beat of joy and fear. Saviour: come to kill, and maybe she will not stop. In the same moment the crunch and echo of bone rings out around them.
In that moment Dawnshadow must seem untouchable, a great gilded warrior upon the triumphant field. Unmarked, except for blood that is not her own. This is her zenith. Only Embershade has seen the figure in darkness, the absolution staring out.
She comes unannounced, stepping out into the meadow, into the blood, which ripples and clings gently to her paws, a supplication. The votive offering, asking to grow. She is more Morningstar than Embershade has ever known her to be: the broken bone reset, the shell refilled with the rising tide. She knows this all from a look, from the utter fullness in her eyes, the peace upon her face.
The peace is a lie; it is fury, only she's happy for it.
The ring hushes, piece by piece. Dawnshadow stills. The blood of Morningstar's lover is gloved up to her elbows, dripping down, drying dark.
The city summons something forward then. All it has left, its best and brightest chance, even as the connection between mother and daughter, staring down the field, snaps and roils with tension.
Embershade watches the newcomer: he steps out to cries of "Emory! Emory!"
The city will cheer until he dies, she knows, Morningstar will barely touch him–
But something comes barrelling out to intercept him, as Morningstar picks her slow way across the meadow, in the way a heron cuts a path through water. Embershade's heart picks up; she sees the lacework of scars around the old warrior's throat, sees Emory see it. Thornstreak, grandfather. Her throat is tight. She has never spoken a word to him, to all the pittance of family she has left. There were so many things she could have told him.
The soldiers are chanting and drumming fiercely now, so she cannot even hear the thud Thornstreak makes when he hits the ground. Emory fended him off wildly, uncertainly, but it's clear the old tom is not getting up. His chest looks wrong, odd-shaped. Blood comes to his lips.
She should go to him – across that, before so many eyes? – and yet she doesn't move. It's Nettlecloud who goes to stand with him, looking… more than Embershade has ever seen her. If it's grief, it's a strange colour, a stranger candidate, but Thornstreak looks wordless up at her as he dies. He seems to recognise it. He accepts it. The warrior she-cat sets bright eyes onto Emory, who is trying to recover his poise, pointed at the oncoming path of the serenely gliding Morningstar, but Thornstreak touches one greying paw to hers, and she just stays.
All I thought I knew, Embershade thinks, and knows it is just a small drop in the river. She will never know it all, now.
Someone else comes for Emory, only it's a city cat. Holding him back, she suspects, before the city loses the one thing that centres them. He looks sick enough, unsure enough, to be swayed.
Morningstar has not even glanced his way. Not spared a look for her fallen pair, father of her children (though not all of them).
Dawnshadow is still, except for the twitching of her tail. A nervous tic maybe; but she has never known nerves.
They meet midway through the meadow, a match of two perfect halves. Morningstar is already bloodied, but not weary. Dawnshadow is wearing her grin again, the wide unbecoming thing. She doesn't seem to realise that her mother is whole again – full of purpose once more, which she herself has gifted to her not once, but twice today.
Morningstar pauses long enough for words. Short ones. "You foul bitch," she whispers.
And she crests like the dawn, falls like the sunset. Dawnshadow's throat is between her paws. She cradles it, puts Dawnshadow on the ground. Her perfect half is blinking, her claws flashing and rising and reaching between them, but she is so slow. Morningstar rends her throat into pieces. She carries on, sweeping downwards. Her carnage is meticulous. Dawnshadow is still blinking in bemusement as Morningstar plucks out her heart.
She holds it aloft: the copy unmade, the devourer consumed. Morningstar fixes a long, searching stare onto the crowd of faces.
I am next, Embershade thinks, the words becoming the rush-roar of blood in her ears. Iamnextiamnext.
She backs out of the ring. She feels the cowardice settle in her. She accepts she is without the power to change.
She is not the first to flee; she sees some soldiers retreating, like tidy lines of ants, into the recesses of the meadow. Embershade is the first of PureClan to go, but she owes them nothing. Embershade is not like them. She hasn't been from the first.
The trees have always held her; they are so close. So far removed from the violence, so beckoning. Embershade creeps past a pair of heads, bent together in hushed conference. After a moment she startles and looks back – Emory has battled past himself to reach Morningstar, who has not acknowledged him, as if he must tap on her shoulder to beg her attention – at the most familiar of faces. Nettlecloud, no-mother. Strongclaw, not-at-all-father. A set of never-ever parents. All she had, because she was clever enough to destroy the real thing so early on.
Nettlecloud, conniving, looking earnest, whispers in Strongcloud's ear. For once, she thinks it is one conversation she would shudder, would fear, to eavesdrop upon. It might demand some action from her, some play at redemption.
She is nothing close to redeemed; she is tarnished, complicit, and cowed. She goes to her trees.
Behind her, someone loudly is dying. It's slow. Embershade sinks her claws into bark and hurries upward, with the last rising chants of Emory, Emory. It fades with brevity; not Emory, though, the insurgent is made to suffer.
In the treetops Embershade makes her last stand; a cowardly standing, silent.
Looking past the wreckage of Emory and the disarray of the army – ready to win but come to die – she finds Morningstar standing in a new way. There is pride in the set of her shoulders, a winning grimness to her mouth, and she is sleek in red.
She peers down benevolently at the soldiers yet living – though she is not on a height, they stand on the same ground. Somehow she looms.
"If you come as willing prisoners," she says, and it is known that extends to her little PureClan rebels, the ones who would see her dead, "you may live. For a day or so." She laughs, light and pretty, only the sound has rust in it.
For the third time, Embershade notices Nettlecloud. She steps boldly out into the ring. Her claws are already bloodied. Behind her comes Firestorm, errant son; Meadowmist; Mossfall. All converge on Morningstar howling, swearing, promising blood.
Firestorm cuts over her, or she cuts through him; the heft of the tom falls to one side, unmoving, as Nettlecloud feints and dances with Morningstar. The crowd is stamping on the ground again, drumming hard, pleading for death. The only one that will not come. Embershade knows she is the safest one of all, the only one assured of tomorrow, and all because she is not in direct eyeline of bloody vengeance.
Morningstar catches Nettlecloud by the scruff of her neck, as though carrying a wayward child back to bed. She snaps down and with a sigh, with relief, Nettlecloud welcomes death. Down she falls with peace on her face.
Meadowmist and Mossfall work in tandem, though the younger warrior is not so skilled and slips up, too soon. For a while the other two fight on. Morningstar cuts and cuts, weaving a story in scars and blood. The white she-cat curses to her last breath as she bleeds out.
Embershade closes her eyes and hopes that StarClan is a place; or that StarClan has a place, for them. When her eyes flick open again, compelled, a soldier is launching herself at Morningstar. A ginger she-cat, yowling. On her heels is a tabby tom all grown. She can't place him for a moment. He's been gone too long and she's let him fade. Missed him too little.
But she knows him still.
"Oh, Oakpaw," she says. It's a farewell. She knows he can't survive her, the hateful swelling tide of her. Sablefrost comes to mind; she imagines her mother, ready to welcome him, two lives choked by the same golden vine. Hell, she almost wants that reunion too and that closeness they could have in death, never held in life. She wants her mother; oh how she wants her, needs her, and forgiveness.
She is lifting her eyes to the sky – searching, if only not to see her brother die. But her gaze snags. Distantly fleeing the battle, emerging as if from the ground, are two figures. One dark shadow, one creature of light; one who staggers, limps, and one who carries. Going across the meadow, gone, vanished into little nothings.
Staring after them, longing, she misses the first trembling of the branch below her. The crack, as though of bones broken. The battle-ring is seething, stamping; more cats pour after her brother and the ones still standing drum, drum, drum. The ground heaves and seems to breathe with their rhythm.
Finally the cliff-face edge of the meadow cries a warning before it crumbles into air, down to bury the bones of her father. Too late she is aware. Awareness eclipses itself into falling, into giving way, ceding to gravity, the tree ripping its embrace dead away. All of its pieces catch at her on the way down; not to save, never to save. Leaves whip at her, sharp edges cut in.
Clouds meet her like falling upwards. But it's dust, just dust, from the buckling, swaying, hellbound earth. There comes screaming, there comes roaring. Even through her falling there is one final glint of gold, of Morningstar standing unmoved – laughing, it cannot be that she is screaming, that she does not delight in catastrophe…
Something touches her eyes, closes them. She lets it.
The meadow collapses into jagged moving parts. The cliff pushes itself into the gorge. Only perhaps, now, it cannot be called a gorge any longer.
There is nothing waiting to catch her. Nothing lovely, nothing kind.
She wakes up. It's not night-time. She can feel sunlight on her fur, warm and abysmally out of place. Embershade feels it is not yet night. Only feels.
All is black.
Panic is hard to tamp down, but she does it. Assess, assess.
The smells are familiar: the sweet grass and many-cat scent of camp; the bald and bitter note of herbs in the air, lying on top of something. Burying it. Blood. Her face is heavy and her pain is dull. She lifts a paw to her eyes – a blessing, something that still works – to find something chunky and wet plastered there. A poultice.
A warning current runs over her skin. Something has survived. Something deigned to care for her and carry her and heal her. And she cannot guess at the motives of anyone who'd do that.
A new smell swims out at her. She calls it regret.
Embershade grimaces; the new presence takes it for pain. She hears his footsteps patter in and waits for his touch, to flinch. But he catches himself, knowing he does not know her. Can't trust her, though that should've been obvious that moment he found her, scrying from above.
"Strange nursemaid," she says, really meaning unwelcome. He's from another moment, a thing she needed once and never again.
"You're awake," Thad says, then catches himself. "Embershade."
It's not the name she gave him. She hates that he knows more now, knows things about her she'd never choose to give away.
Deadpan, she says, "No," very slowly.
His hesitation hangs on the air between them. She's actually grateful she doesn't have to see it play out on his face.
"If you're here to urge me into recovery, get out."
She will not be tended to. She will not be helped.
"Oh, no, anyone can see you'd rather stew here in your blindness," Thad retorts. It almost makes her smile, but she is more practised than that. Even though she hadn't expected it, or him. "I just thought you might like to know what happened after the ground collapsed in on itself."
Flashes: she knows it's memory, because she can see it. Gold, Morningstar. Earth and blood. Everything gone.
"Everyone died, I imagine," she says shortly, though she can hear voices in camp clearly contradicting that. "The end."
She puts her head down.
There's moss beneath her, a nest. She thinks of Thad in the forest, pulling green clumps from wood.
"Mostly right," Thad concedes. "But some didn't. Anyone who survived that had the smart idea to come back here and not cause any trouble."
She picks up the subtext: Clan and soldier, working together, greater good, blah blah.
"Some were buried. Some ran. And they haven't found her yet. Morningstar."
"She's dead," Embershade snaps. If she weren't dead, she'd be here. She can only be gone.
"I saw you." He changes tack so fast; she feels winded trying to keep up. "In the trees."
Cowardly, in the trees. Glad you saw that.
"And I tried to come to you – before it… if I hadn't seen, wasn't moving, I think I wouldn't be here. Wouldn't have made it."
Gratitude is welling up in him, a spring from the ground. For something she didn't do. For her, the fool and coward, who never willingly saved a life. Thad thinks she's responsible for this unbidden thing; for saving his life. If she doesn't nip this soon, put it down, it will only worsen. He'll dote, he'll care for her, the cripple. Embershade will never be rid of him. She wants a pair of eyes; not his, though, just her own, as they were. All she wants is herself whole.
"My eyes," she says. "They'll heal, yes? It was just a scratch."
She remembers the gentle touch of something as she fell. There had been no pain.
Now, silence from him.
"It doesn't hurt," she says, but it does.
StarClan above, where are the real medical professionals when you want them? Only as she gripes, she remembers: others are very much dead and dying, and a pair of bloody eyes won't warrant much attention when there are lives to be saved. If they can be.
"Who–uh," Embershade asks. "Who's here?"
"Your…leader?" he says uncertainly. "Sunny something."
"Sunfeather?" she demands, incredulous. "She's going along with this?" With all of you, she means, because where there's Thad there must be ten more soldiers behind him.
Thad laughs at her. "She's broken up five fights already, so she must be. Those who haven't died, haven't run, have stayed here. On either side that counts for something."
Mostly, she thinks, it can only signal the reticence of the Clan to accept change, even as it moves all around them. They'll sleep and rise again in the morning to eat, hunt, train, pretend all is as it was. Even as they deal with guests they never wanted, never expected. And what's to really change, if Sunfeather's in charge? Another child of Morningstar to yoke them, yet again.
Embershade is tired; as it changes, it all just repeats. Nothing is truly new, except for the wrongness of her eyes. Blindness. She should've fallen into the gorge and died with Morningstar, died making sure the other was truly dead.
Thad seems to think she's waning. "I'll go find you some food," he says, humble servant, beginning to recede.
"No," Embershade says sharply. The sounds outside the den are changing, becoming charged. "Something's happening in camp. Take me out there."
He starts to resist, but she's already standing, and badly. She leans against him as he helps her walk – stupidly slow – into cleaner air. He smells nervous.
Everyone is gathered; city and Clan scents have amalgamated, mingled. Cariad's is fresh. She curls her lip.
"Thad," says a new voice, a small one. Embershade can smell blood from where she stands, a foot away. "Is that Az?"
Embershade listens as someone pushes their way into camp. Ghosting along with them is the smell of fresh dirt, newly turned. They shuffle, a three-beat pace. One of their legs is not working, or is gone entirely. Unfamiliar voices are murmuring – the soldiers, she thinks. One of their own has stumbled home (or home as they've claimed it).
"It must be," mumbles Thad. She hears, more than a feeling, him concentrating, searching. "But she's covered in mud. And where's Oakpaw?"
Embershade recoils from his shoulder and nearly falls. "Oakpaw? The hell do you know–"
But Az, the newcomer, is wailing. She's fallen into the rabble of the army, making sobs that are neither sad nor hurt. They're angry sounds. Embershade knows anger.
"Her leg," says the little voice.
"I see it," says Thad, grimly. He's pretending he doesn't know Oakpaw, but it's clear to her there's something there, and she wants to know what exactly her bull-headed, PureClan-championing brother got himself into. She'll needle him about this later, even if it means spending more time in his presence.
"What about her leg?" Embershade says. It's painful, to know substantially less than those around her do.
"Broken." The little one says it, a shudder in her voice. Like the worst thing she's ever seen is a broken leg.
Poor dear, thinks Embershade, but doesn't say it. She's lucky if that's all she got. Bones heal.
Az is pushing her friends away, their feet scuffing the ground.
"Follow me," she pleads. "Help me. Follow me if you want to find him."
She starts thumping out of camp again, beat-beat-beat, awkward and lunging but undeterred. Voices confer. They're clearly reluctant but they begin to follow her, whispering all the way out of camp.
"Who?" Embershade asks. She feels like an owl, by this point, or a child: all who's, what's and why's.
"I–I should go," Thad says. He calls someone over, with an unfamiliar Twoleg name Embershade can't be bothered to memorise. "Just, look after her, yeah? Make sure she doesn't wander off."
"Sure!" the new one squeaks; he sounds happy, thrilled even, but there's a scared catch in his voice. She wants to smile toothily, in his relative direction, but can't quite pinpoint it. Maybe she couldn't manage it anyway; she thinks she's about to receive the news that she's the last of her line, her fucked-up little family. All gone, and what's been left? She shouldn't be smiling. She should collapse like Az, manage a wail or two.
Embershade wouldn't even know how to start.
"Don't bother," Embershade growls at her new minder. She turns and, concentrating with a new and uncertain stiffness, wobbles her way back into the den. Not quite the exit she'd pick for herself, but just managing one alone is a small boost to her esteem. Just inside the entrance, tucked away in what she feels are shadows, comes the waiting.
Slowly some of the search team trickle back in, she hears. Embershade overhears rumours the way she used to. Each one cuts and cuts at her, though she thought herself ready to say goodbye, only hours ago. A noise echoes through the trees, dying occasionally, eventually growing closer and closer. Strangely out of place now, when this morning the air was full of screams, and one more would've gone missed. Az screaming, howling. When it's a small distance from camp Embershade can make out the words: He's not dead! Dig him out, give him air! Oakpaw's not dead! Over and over she hears Oakpaw is not dead, and each time she feels it more fully, knows it to be true. Of course he's dead. Of course he'd die, in pursuit of the fight, when the fight was about to end.
Az is dragged into camp, repeating her mantra, those who know her hushing and soothing her.
Embershade feels her face crumble: her eyes, good as gone to her, burning with blood and grief both.
No one comes to see her for a good long while and in that time she cements her mind. Of course there's nothing holding her here anymore. Anything good, or for that matter bad, is gone. Who needs a spy when wartime is over? Who needs a spy who can't see?
Sorrelstorm replaces the poultice: even when he peels it damply from her face, when the obstruction is gone and her eyes open, she sees the sum total of nothing.
"Just a few more days," he says, plapping a new leaf mix across her face. She doesn't kid herself that he means the return of her vision, even in pieces.
Thad doesn't visit her that night; she's not even sure he's returned, he might still be digging for the body of her well and truly dead brother. In the morning comes the news: bodies found, many, but among them none is Morningstar. Among them, Oakpaw.
Az comes into the medicine den to have her leg set. She doesn't seem to feel the pain of it, even as Embershade hears the slide of bone into bone. She wants to talk about her brother but is afraid to hear it. The other she-cat is whispering, the repetition again.
"He broke my fall," she says, "he broke my fall again."
Love and Oakpaw. It's strangeness to her. She supposes he was lucky – for a while.
Az is being stood to leave. All to herself and a little to the air, Embershade whispers, "You must be a particular kind of special. I've never known my brother to love anything."
After a beat, Az leaves without a word. Not even her mumbling.
Congratulations, she thinks for a while later. You just made that so much worse for her.
It's Embershade herself who has a visitor a little while later; not the medicine cat, who has a steady supply of them, who is running low on everything he needs. The den smells less medicinal by the minute. It is, anyway, the little voice from earlier. She still smells bloody, though it's rusty now. Drying down as all blood does.
"Ember…uh…shade," she says.
The Embershade in question says nothing.
"I'm Khia," supplies the other, unprompted. "Well, I heard you were the best source of information still alive around here."
"On what?" she asks dryly. If she could still glare; if only she could glare.
"On warriors," says Khia.
"You're surrounded by them right now. Why am I the one you need to ask?"
"Oh, no," Khia clarifies. "Dead ones."
She snorts. "Surrounded by those too, today."
"I think they're quite dead."
Embershade wonders what she wants, what use old dead warriors are to her. A little while ago she would have been curious, thrilled with curiosity. Seems that old fatal flaw of hers might finally be gone. Not a moment too soon. When she doesn't say anything, Khia stutters nervously.
"I'm sorry, I think – anyone who might have really known them is dead, by now, and I only want to know what they were like – what happened, actually, no one's told me that, and since Oakpaw is, well, anyway, I was told…you know things–"
"Who are you talking about, and what's the point?" snaps Embershade. Oakpaw's name does something in her stomach, poorly digested. Her head besides is throbbing with all the words.
"Smokefang and Sablefrost? My–"
"Uh uh," says Embershade, too fast and jumbled. Not now and not today. "Out."
Khia stops, but she doesn't leave. She wants answers: Embershade knows there are never answers, never the things that are wanted. And she knows she will not hear this out, where this is going, that's one more thread to follow and she's done with threads, with finding out more awful things she has no business knowing so she can feel special and important and further removed from the mistake of her mother's death (even if she thinks she has seen – but no).
"I don't want to humour whatever this is so get OUT." Embershade is too loud, but she doesn't care. She says it again, feeling good: "OUT."
Khia doesn't say anything, and she's so light-footed her exit can barely be heard.
Embershade waits, trembling, but there's no more entreaties for her help, her services, or anything her eyes once told her.
A few days later, something seems to be happening. Something is coming together in camp: opposing and completely unfitting halves, doing a merger of sorts. Mostly, they're arguing, but it's about what to do going forward. A hateful phrase, she thinks, implying some sort of future. Clan and Army now some new sect, proposing unity and continuation. Has nothing been learned? She could stand and scream at them. She doesn't care enough to do it.
Embershade just stands and glowers: there are only a few light cobwebs now in her way, sticky, through which she can see some kind of shadow. Sorrelstorm tells her she may get better, in fact, but she's witnessed him saying that to all his patients, even one with a crushed lung.
"Don't coddle me," she's taken to saying, when others offer their sympathies, drop off food, or even just talk to her in that slightly gentle way. "What use is it?" Unsurprisingly, they stop coming.
When she overhears someone, in one of their frequent camp-centre debates, propose a new Clan (and the others – agreeing!), she can't help her derision. Her unwillingness to be involved, and who would have her, as she is? What use is she to this mismatched group, who think it is still okay to have ideals, so long as they're the "right" ones?
She almost wishes someone would come to her, ask her opinion, value her in any way – but they don't care anymore for what she thinks she knows.
Thad comes by, one night.
"You could leave the den," he tells her. He doesn't know her anymore than he did, that first night. "It wouldn't kill you."
"Someone out there could," she says, and Thad laughs, asking who would assault the blind.
He's much more comfortable with it than she is. Then again, he can see.
She knows that's also unfair, that he likes small and harmless jokes to break the tension. But they never work on her. And their tension wasn't meant to be solved.
He sleeps outside the medicine den, as he usually does (she knows this by now, the sound of him sleep and waking, taking up space in her brain where the useful stuff once was) and that's why she sneaks out the back, through a well-worn, Sorrelstorm-shaped hole in the back.
It's very early morning, so she can see shadows by the barest hint, but it's mostly trial and error as she makes her way through the woods; skirting around camp, trying to take the path she knows best and wondering if she's going in circles instead. She pictures herself going right back round and tripping over sleeping, prone Thad. Probably he'd take it as some kind of advance, a seduction. He's not flirted in days, though, so she thinks that's over.
For the best, isn't it?
She shakes her head as she walks, ruining her precarious sense of balance, and tips over into a tree.
Embershade heaves out a quick, short breath and finds her feet. If Morningstar could see her little spy now: blinder than a bat, and even they can avoid the trees in their path. Strangely enough, Morningstar is motivating. Morningstar, blind, would still be ruthless. Morningstar would kill her for decaying.
Pleasantly moralising, she thinks, a way she hasn't felt in a long while. She sets off brisker, the shadows clearer, and she begins to decipher their particular blurs and edges. Embershade even knows the path she's on – she's walked this very one with Morningstar, moons and an age ago.
Soft, sleek conversation grows closer, one-sided, and she feels a homecoming. The river, her river. How long ago had she stood before it, wondering where it came from, what it would be like to follow it? Formless mud is beneath her now, no path, though she intends to make one. Cool air brushes her face, and she taps out a hesitant path to the river's edge, stopping as her paw touches water.
"What we've seen," she says to the river, though where it is eternal and constant, she has been a blip.
Embershade tests the current. The way it drags against her, compass-like to her now. She raises the paw, shakes it, remembers her feet are clean white though her mother's had been all shadow. Puts it down again. Sets off.
Two days. It's easier to gauge than she thought; the warmth of the day, so simple to tell from cooler night; the restless, afternoon birdsong transition to silence; the darkening of the shadows in her eyes to absolute blackness.
Yeah, that's the easiest part.
By day one's end, she's hungry. Day two, ravenous. Embershade can't catch a thing, and even bending down to drink is dangerous; she seems to be walking up some kind of slope, the water level of the river falling further and further from her. It's still her constant, she can hear and track it, but she can't trust it to sustain her without tricking her into its embrace.
All afternoon she tries to hunt. Things, scuffling in the undergrowth, turn to nothing when she pounces at them. There are the bones of very old dead things she finds in a nest, barely the smell of death on them, and they just taste chalky when she crunches them up.
Embershade returns to the river's edge, determined to fill her belly with water if nothing else. A bird startles and shrieks away into the air, pumping its wings with more force than she ever remembers hearing before.
And then she stumbles across something dead.
Small, yet warm. Unbloodied; her paw feels out its broken neck, its brushy tail: squirrel. Embershade can't pick what killed it but she's in no mood to be fussy. Maybe it just fell out of its dumb squirrel nest.
She sinks in her teeth and eats: bone, blood and fur.
Afterwards she buries the little scraps left over, afraid of attracting foxes or dogs. To be safe, that night she sleeps pushed deep into the wide-hanging branches of a bush, half-covered in leaf litter.
Day three brings purpose again. Embershade pulls herself out of her narrow, prickly nest when she feels the sun. It has been warm overnight. She can hear the river still; not too distant, she never leaves it, really. And still, it sounds further from her today; when she leans to drink, it does not meet her.
Embershade stretches down, feels a little panic. She needs the water, she has nothing else.
Expecting to find it, needing to, she reaches out a paw. Nothing there but the air. Her panic makes her wobble, makes her unsteady. Makes her go down.
The riversides are steep and rocky now; she tumbles against one bank, sheer and uncatching, until she hits the water. As though of great thirst, she's already taking in water.
She thinks she hears her name, from the river, uttered in white-water rush, welcoming her at last.
Embershade strikes out for anything to hold; more water splashes over her head and she latches on to some warm solid thing, furred like algae-coated rock. It's moving. It begins to hold her back.
It's dragging them against the current, Embershade kicking and struggling and unsure if she's actually helping. They bump against the steep-sided wall of the riverside, Embershade and her rock-shaped rescuer.
"Can you swim?" it shouts.
Embershade regurgitates water, takes more on board. Water and spit coat her nose and she is sightless, scentless.
"We have to climb out!" the voice persists. It bumps her into the wall, determined bumps, as though she will catch like a burr. She could've once done this with her eyes closed, she knows, but that was when she had the choice.
The river dunks her under one more time and she floods with panic. The wall is soft and easy to grip but it crumbles at first touch. Too cold to even feel her feet or her claws rip away from their padding, she swings from foothold to foothold, her scrambling legs showering the river below with grit. Something is below, lifting, as she reaches the top, and with a heave and grunt throws her over the edge.
Embershade lands ungracefully and uncurls from the pile made of herself, straining for sounds of the rescuer. He's wheezing; she waits until she hears him spill over the ledge with a heavy damp thud.
She finds his throat with surprising ease. Enough claws left, she thinks, to keep the meaning of her threat. She places them there above the wet skin.
"Thaddeus," she snaps. There's enough water left in her lungs to make her voice low and unlike her own; the unhappiness there, though, is all hers. "Following me?"
He coughs up a little water, the trembling of his throat passing into her claws, staying there.
"Just out for a swim, love."
She rolls her eyes; it doesn't hurt anymore, that, and she's relieved. "How long?"
He's reluctant to say, so she presses her advantage closer.
"That first morning… since you, fell, you know, into that tree," he says eventually. She can feel his smile, knows it isn't even mocking, just fond, and she grits her teeth at it.
"Do not mention the tree," she says sharply.
"Okay, okay." He is smooth, moves his paws up underneath her to hold them out in supplication. "Tree never happened."
Embershade flicks her claws away; sits down, with the appearance of neatness, tail flicked tidily over her paws, though she must look a drowned-rat mess. She'd like to see Thaddeus, see him dishevelled. Teach him to laugh.
She hears him get up, shake out his residual water. The mist that touches her is warm.
Thad clears his throat. He's rubbing it, maybe, clearing off her marks. "When I said, gee, Embershade, you could leave the den once a blue moon, this isn't what I meant."
"Was it not?" she says, mock-sweet. "How foolish of me. I've come all this way."
Her tail thumps, splashing them both with muddy drops.
"You running?" he asks, stern.
What's left for her to run from?
"No," she says, vehement, but he's going on.
"What's out here, for you, then? What are you going to?"
Are you out here to die, his tone says implicitly, and she could almost point out she ate his stupid food offering, didn't she, so it's hardly likely. (She's hasn't decided, actually, but here is not the place.)
"I'm–" she falters. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Looking for something when she can't see. The worst of it, she knows Thad won't judge her for it, and maybe she deserves to be judged. She knows she does. "The river has always been a part of PureClan. A weapon to us. The river has seen… what I've seen… it knows what Morningstar made me do."
He's silent. It makes her skin crawl, still damp and chilled, and this need to explain – she's never had one, before – is forcing her words out.
"A long time ago, I wondered to myself where it came from, the journey it took just to reach us, and I thought I'd never know. That's all. Now that I can, I want to know."
Birdcalls start up above them. She listens, hungry again.
"Okay," he says, simple and resolved. "Let's find out."
Embershade is aghast. "That wasn't an invitation."
Just a part of herself she'll never get back, now, open in the air between them.
"I'm all for healing yourself, finding yourself, doing what you need to do." Thad's put on his convincing tone. "But only so far as is safe, Embershade, and you aren't safe by yourself. It's not a weakness you need to admit. It's just what it is."
This is his clincher, it's a won point, she has to concede it. She'll never make it to the river's genesis if she can't eat, can't drink without nearly dying. And who will be there to tell her, at the end, what she's found? She grunts at him, a little rudely, and start grooming little pebbles and river bits out of her fur. Thaddeus huffs at her in turn; not mean-spirited, she thinks, just her own energy mirrored, but maybe he wants something from her after saving her life.
Very softly, she mumbles it.
He perks up. "What was that?"
"Thank you," she says again with acidic enunciation.
"Worth the dip just for those two lovely words," Thad replies, with the fake sweetness he's stolen from her. "I'd do it all again."
"Yeah, well, stop me before I fall into the river next time, genius. Save a bit of trouble."
He feeds her again that night, and in the morning. Pretty good for a city boy, she tells him, and he just tells her he grew up catching rats. Rats fed an army.
She's not sure what to make of that so just says she will not be accepting rats on her menu, thank you.
Still, it's strange to rely on just Thad for food. An entire Clan's worth of cats fed her before, but the task is much more intimate when it's just the two of them; giving her things whose lives he has taken, just for her, and because she can't. It's a kind of debt and it grows every day. On top of owing him her life, of course. The imbalance is so high and wide. She cannot begin to bear it.
Nor can she bring herself to be very nice to him, either. He's, one, something she needs against her will; he is, two, witnessing the great downfall of her life, and he does it with such grace; he has, three, left his brother and friends behind without question, for her, and Embershade doesn't understand it. There's so many unrequited things in this situation and giving voice to one would unravel them all.
Four, he'd been watching her, for three entire days. That is entirely her trick. She is unsettled by it, though he did it for a good enough reason, and hers had all been bad and self-serving.
Embershade keeps herself airy and acerbic, focussed on the task at hand; surviving long enough to find the river's source. And if she should cast herself into it, then, that's her choice and Thad is fond of those.
The tom is good at marching along; sometimes he seems to forget, and she hears him pause, wait for her, start up again at something like her pace. Mostly she tries to walk in his close footsteps because she can trust him (just) not to lead her into trees or muddy puddles. Before long his footsteps are all she needs as a guide. Sometimes he talks and she follows his voice instead, pretending she is not.
He talks about Gideon, Gideon's "friend" Khia – she winces through this story, not least of all because she learns Khia stood her ground against Morningstar and that is something she herself will never claim. He talks about the army, where Cariad came from, and the kidnapping of Oakpaw. She asks often about Oakpaw, surprising herself. They have days enough to fill with stories.
Embershade knows he will have to go home eventually, that she cannot keep him wherever she fetches up. Talking about his friends, his oddball family, she hopes he remembers he needs to. She knows he'll go once their journey is over, because what is there to stay for? When there's everything he's got to go back to?
Maybe he's expecting she'll come back with him, but–
Her? Embershade? No leader to serve, no family left to speak of (Thornstreak, Oakpaw, Strongclaw, Cloudstrike, Nettlecloud all gone). No, there's really nothing she needs to go back to.
She learns hunting again in shades. Thad guides her at first, 'til she improves: in pinpointing shallow prey heartbeats, decoding tiny snuffles and scrapings into distances, the spans she must jump, using the barest shadows she sees to aid the kill. There is admittedly more challenge this way and she doesn't mind. It feels good to expand.
Embershade knows more than feels: her eyes are fully healed now, this is all they'll ever be.
"Thaddeus, my eyes," she says one night. It is before sunset, she makes sure to ask in the light. "How do they look?"
Sounds of movement, warm breath against her muzzle, she feels him move closer. Study her. She tries to sit patiently, not fiddle, but she hadn't quite expected the full weight of his attention. She wanted an offhand comment; to know he'd noticed, but not very closely. Thad tips up her chin with his nose, a deft soft touch, and she remembers his eyes are blue. Very blue.
"Hmm," he whispers. Ominous. Perhaps they're awful.
"Tell me," she insists, impatient and frowning at him.
"Green," he murmurs, "very green." She could roll the very things they're talking about. She's known that for the longest time.
"And what else?" she asks. "Are they bulging? Crusty?"
He's leaning in closer.
His reply is very slow and considered. "No… and no… They're very green, but in the middle, white and clouded. The scratches are all healed."
Strange that her pupils are white, now that all she can see through them is darkness.
"Like a cloudy sky through the treetops," Thad's saying, loyal to some romantic notion. Master of the spin. Blind is still blind.
But she does miss the treetops. At least she has a part of it, with her.
"Beautiful," he finishes. Thad leans down, rests his cheek against hers. Then steps away.
They both clear their throats.
"Thanks," she says briskly. "Very good to know."
In her imagination, he sleeps a bit closer that night.
The forest comes to a slow end. Earthy-smelling beech trees cling to rocky soil, then fade entirely to sharp-edged grasses brushing her chest, her whiskers. The gradual incline they've been climbing seems to steepen, suddenly. Thad keeps her a bit closer, telling her he is watching the sky. He has seen large birds wheeling through the clouds and he's not sure what they eat.
The tall riverbanks have eased away again and they are able to drink easier, though here it is much faster flowing. Thad thinks it's deeper here, and not half as wide.
"A good sign," Embershade says, feeling they are close. She compartmentalises how she really feels.
"We're headed up into some… very big hills? I see snow at the top," he says to her as they walk.
"Mountains," she explains, knowing the city Thad hails from is only flat.
Sometimes the path is gravel and sometimes it wanders them up and over rocks, so she concentrates very hard. Neglecting Thad, possibly. Nevertheless, she does it mostly all herself with the power of guesswork and half-seen shapes. Thad only comments if she is at imminent risk of plunging over a clifftop.
They pack in for the night in a little cave, so close-quartered she brushes against him with every exhale. Thad has fed them both with little fluffy mountain mammals.
He tells her he thinks they will reach it tomorrow. It seems close. She feels apprehensive at its nearness. Maybe they won't find the right thing, the place to fix the rot in her. She has not walked out the things she has done, betrayed, nor the final cowardice that should've been the end of her. Embershade feels a thing she has long fought away and hardly recognised: guilt.
What she really wants – instead of a river – is absolution. And, probably, no amount of water can give her that.
She finds herself telling Thad about PureClan, in this little place, so very far from the thing that was, a thing more gone by the hour. He listens so patiently, though the things in her voice are awful. Deaths at her paws, the trials of her apprenticeship. The mentee Morningstar; sometimes, Embershade whispers, I think I loved her as much as I feared her. Even the match she'd been made, Cloudstrike. Her brother's dearest friend, and even this commonality hadn't brought them together, not even in friendship. This brings her to meeting Thad, making the first choice of her life, and telling him this is the second.
Embershade even dredges for long-lost things. The ending of her mother and father (Sablefrost and Smokefang, names she had been asked for, and she thinks one day she will be ready to return and tell Khia, face her questions and ask some of her own, just not yet this day) and the plans she, Embershade, had played into. Strongclaw – I knew, she says, he saw me as my mother, he couldn't help it, so I was cold to him. Didn't help him.
Did so much wrong.
And she doesn't feel any better for telling it. No lighter, no less burdened. It's full dark when she finishes speaking, moon risen high, yet she hasn't stopped herself.
Thad doesn't tell her it's okay, because it's not, it's still not.
He tells her first about Tillman's; growing up in the dark, in a crush. Sold as a child mercenary to be a Clan-killer, that purpose drummed into him every day. About Miss: fearful leader. The experiment of Oakpaw, the test of love and Az. All of them, marching to their death and mostly knowing it.
He pauses before their first meeting. It's already been spoken, rehashed, and neither is sure if the other thinks what they think.
After the battle he'd found her, buried under snapped branches and roots like a pyre. He hadn't even noticed her eyes, lifting her out, until they'd made it back to camp and Sorrelstorm began to clean the blood away.
"And you had dreams of nursing me back to health," Embershade says, wry, but not to mock. It's more a comment on herself. She can speak some of these out loud, now.
Dry as well, he says, "For all of five minutes, yes."
She feels him against her ribs, breathing out heavy in amusement. Something is in her chest cavity, filling it, mellow and yearning. Like the night she'd met him, only it is by shades changed. Embershade breathes in sharply to dislodge the feeling.
He shifts and begins to apologise, mistaking it for something else…for the way she just is.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean–"
The cold comes in, into the minute degrees he puts between them.
"Thaddeus," she says, impatiently and without meaning to speak. "Don't go."
He puts himself back: closer, she thinks. Thad's waiting for her to speak, she thinks, but she won't. She's said enough.
"Get some sleep," he says, nursemaid again. Putting himself where they're both comfortable, in the space that fits, even as he curls a foreleg across her ribs.
"Big day tomorrow," she agrees, pushing back into his chest.
Sleep does come, and in it a dream: she takes Morningstar down to the river and drowns her. Lets her go into the deep. The river, hungry, doesn't say thank you.
She catches her own breakfast that morning; another of the small mountain rodents, which she can only describe as fluffy. Embershade thinks of Thad, but he's already hunted and eaten before she's made her catch, and she began before him.
It's good to practise independence, she tells herself that. She asks Thad if he's ready – though it's a question that should be asked of her, and she's not sure she is. Ready.
"Lead the way," he says, and remembers. "Or… lead the way in spirit."
Embershade won't give in to his lame humour, so he just coughs and starts walking, his footsteps just-heard over the tumbling rush of the river beside them. Is Thad walking faster today? Is he rushing this?
"Excited?" she calls to him. She must be loud, over the water.
"What's that? Why?"
"You're walking so fast," she points out, and he slows right down so fast it's almost comical.
He just wants to see the river's start, she thinks, though it doesn't make sense; it was always her thing, her need. The sooner he can leave me, is the other voice, and this one clicks. Is sensible.
But now he walks so slowly her nose brushes into his tail, ushering up a deep sneeze.
Thad turns, he sounds like he expects some retort against him, this. When she tells him it's fine she can nearly see his confusion.
Unsure, Thad just says, "I'll just keep it out of the way."
She could almost tell him to do what he wants. But the heart's not there.
A few minutes later, tersely, he announces they'll have to cross the river. The path ahead is not a path; it's just a cliff, sheer and impassable. Thad leaves her to range up and down the riverbank, searching for a safe crossing.
The words are on her tongue: let's not, let's stop.
He would stop. He'd turn, and meekly lead them home.
Embershade feels, more strongly than any morality she's ever felt, that it wouldn't be right. She goes to the river's edge. The water is bitingly cold here, and quick-flowing, but not so strong as the torrent she fell into perhaps two or three weeks ago.
"We can swim," she says to the clattering of rocks that announces Thad coming back to her. He won't think it a good idea.
Diffident, she's in to her forelegs before he can reach her; her chest, when he shouts for her to stop; swimming (probably) when he splashes in after her.
"Left!" he's calling, through water in his mouth. "Veer left!"
So cold: the river-rushing in her ears begins to sound like nothing, a white noise.
Rocks form under her feet. She drags herself numb out the other side, coughing just mostly from the chill. Embershade listens to Thad splutter his way across the river. His shadow, clear for just a moment, takes shape in her eyes. It vanishes as he closes in.
"Am I forever doomed to rescue the same she-cat from the same river?"
He's cross; it endears him to her.
Embershade twitches her nose at him, feeling like she's maybe smiling. "But you didn't rescue me that time, did you?"
Thad concedes the point to her. "Well, fine. Try to keep yourself out of the river for a while, won't you?"
Left on the other side of the river, the doubts that plagued her sit on the shore, calling her name. She's shed them, if only for the day, if only for the journey to be over. Embershade walks off so quickly Thad scrambles to get ahead before she plunges over some mountain peak.
The river veers around the ridge they've just passed, a steep left, and Thad has to nudge her into the right direction. Embershade doesn't let herself waver; realises that the rush and thrum of blood in her ears is outside. They are close. Their journey has a few moments left to live, but no longer. Thad tells her a rock is in their path, it's climbable.
"You can leave here," Embershade says, to a heart-stopping silence. Uncommon for Thad.
In a momentary madness, she wonders if she hallucinated him, all of him; maybe she's talking to the wind and scrub-grass, and he was never here.
"Leave?" he asks lowly. "Do you not want me… here?"
"Well, you can see what's there, of course, where the river comes from. You have come all this way. But, I thought, it would be better if we said our goodbyes here. Easier than in the moment."
"You don't want me here." The question is dropped but she hears it all the same.
She wishes she could look him in the eyes as she tells him he's not hers to keep.
"I'd rather the moment – you know, the ultimate moment – isn't disturbed. When you go."
She can hear his breath, quick and angry. It ghosts across her face, cool already before it touches her. Embershade tries not to treasure it the way she does; she's never held a sensation so closely, wanted to remember anything more. That, and the way he held her last night, despite knowing all she's done.
"You don't want me to ruin the moment," he says.
She wonders where his own words are.
"When you go," she finishes for him, since they're quoting her.
"Because it would disrupt the experience for you."
Finally, a word that's not hers.
"Yes," she says (the journey's final sensation, she doesn't know what yet it will be, will pale against what she'll feel when he's gone, homeward bound and without her). "I'm sure your friends, Gideon, will be glad to see you."
Embershade wants to brush his cheek with her nose, but she doesn't know where to find him. The shadow looming before her must be the rock, the last obstacle – she prays –so she turns and marks it out. Doable.
"Goodbye, Thad, and go home," she says, hoping he is still there, still listening. Then she mounts the rock with a leap that is almost smooth, up and over the other side without much in the way of stumbling.
The river is much louder here, a small thunder to her ears. It's coming from a height, splashing down into a pool. Mist clings to her whiskers, her eyelashes. It feels cool on her unseeing eyes. Waterfall, she thinks. It must spring from the ground, because she can hear it go back no further. The river truly starts here, cold, clean and earthborn.
Embershade closes her eyes – not that it achieves any kind of effect, really, but she feels closer to herself. Inward.
The water dawning here will wind through PureClan nevermore. The land it will soon touch won't know them, anymore; the river won't remember. Even the meadow will grow over every trace of them. Embershade feels both things: PureClan is dead, and she can't go back. As long as she lives, something of PureClan remains. With the distance between them, a river's worth, that thing inside is weak and fragile. To go home is to revive that piece.
Embershade will never heal if she's living with the ghost of a Clan; holding all its secrets, keeping them alive in her head. PureClan won't rest if she replays it in her head, on repeat, the days of its life.
Here on the barren, windswept mountain, washed clean in the falling water, she will not think of them. She will make no plots, follow no orders.
"Die," she whispers to the wind. It will carry. "Die, finally die."
Like taking a last breath, it does. At last dead to all, and, most of all, to her.
Embershade sits a small distance away from the waterfall; outside the reach of its spray, sick of being wet, but the wind spreads it to her every so often. It reminds her it's there. Forsaking her memories, she's trying to think ahead instead. Planning for winter; probably she will have to make her way down to the lower lands to avoid freezing. Maybe she'll venture away from the river; something totally new for herself, at last. She hardly minds she won't see it; seeing a thing isn't what makes it true.
Hard scrabbling, the clatter of rocks, has her immediately on edge. One of the mountain birds, come in to roost? Hungry, too?
She's barely raised her hackles before the thing coming at her begins to yell.
"Home? Where's home? That's your home, Embershade, I've never had one!"
"Your family lives there," she snaps back at him, immediately forgetting about wheeling, swooping birds of prey. "If that doesn't make it close to home, I don't know what does. Mine doesn't anymore – they're all dead!"
Thad's over the boulder, coming to a stop before her. He didn't go; or if he did, he didn't get very far. That doesn't track, for Embershade, she can't understand it. She feels a hot rash of annoyance, actually.
He pushes up into her face, so she knows he's there, knows exactly the shortening distance between them. He asks, shades away from a real question, "So you're just going to stay here – on a mountain – where you'll never be able to know if your next step will be your last? Alone?"
Her shadow-vision flashes red, for a moment.
"I can't go back there – not now, not ever, maybe," she says, facing it. "You have to. You have things left to go back to."
"Am I ruining your moment, now, Embershade?" he asks. "The thing you came here to do?"
"No," Embershade says crossly. "I've done that. You missed it."
Here he says nothing but he's prompting her all the same: and?
"I've had my epiphany–" she hates to call it that, reduce it somehow, "–so the way I feel when you have to leave won't overshadow it, much as I wish you did it when I asked."
Currents of a small wind touch her as Thad moves back, rescinds. He's a blur of darkness to her but there is familiarity in that; she thinks she could pick his shape from a hundred shadows just the same. But she senses she's made a mistake, said something too-much. It dawns on her that he doesn't want to go, which is a folly of a notion and something she shouldn't hold on to. Yet – is she? Has she been, this whole time?
Leading her, very deliberately (they both know it), he says, "And you would feel…"
"Not good?"
"Try again."
"Very upset, in fact?"
"Because…"
She guesses at the words. In another lifetime, she'd be dead for this – but, as she's just established, that life has recently passed on.
"I – much to my surprise, I suppose I have, you know… real feelings? For you, I think. Thad, I'm going to say too much, stop me."
Palpable smugness. Nothing else.
"And I know you've been helping me because of your downright overblown sense of duty, you couldn't let me go rampaging off into the woods alone, and I thank you for that, truly, but I can't let you stay here – on a mountain – with me, when you have very real things to get back to, and I am just better away from that place. That's all I meant, Thad: I wanted to do this for myself, and I couldn't… break it… when you'd realise it's done, and you have to go back."
"I will go back." He's saying it slow, and long, and she feels it on her face. "Not now. Not for a long while, maybe. And if you never are ready to go back there, then I will stash you somewhere safe for a moon, and come back to you. Do you see?"
"Thad, they'll worry, they don't even know where you are."
"True. But it's not like I left without a goodbye, and it's not like they won't do fine on their own. Fact is, Embershade, I've spent almost as much time apart from my brother as I have with him – and it hasn't killed us."
She hears a smile in there.
"And this?" He moves closer again, he's indicating at them. "Isn't duty, Embershade, it's very much the opposite. Very selfish."
Embershade says, "Oh," though she'd known that, really, for some time. Hearing it admitted, and accepting it, prompts a different reality.
Thad clears his throat. "You could say I have some real feelings? For you."
Embershade reaches out with paw into the little gap between them: half of a bridge. Thad understands. She feels the warm weight of his own paw settle on hers, roughened and chapped from the journey, though with a softness nonetheless. She continues biting her own tongue off, before she says what she says.
"You know I could never begin to feel that I deserve this," she murmurs. You.
"This isn't something you need to deserve," he replies. "You just have it. Me. And if one good thing came from… that day… then let it be this."
She stares up at what would be his face. The memory of it is still clear, clearer than anything she carries from those final days of sight. The steady weight of his paw is still atop hers, and she has almost never been touched like this, in trust.
Embershade will, today, tomorrow, or soon: she will let it be this. And for the first time in a new age, she does see something real: a flash of colour that lingers.
It's blue.
