"Fortune is not on the side of the faint hearted."
-Sophocles
SkyClan
Leaf Fall
859 Moons Ago
Four miles northwest of the DarkClan camp, in a drafty nursery den beside a convoy of young ferns and bramble, a tom is born. He has wet amber eyes, glittery silver fur and a rugged face. But he does not cry and he has no spring in his legs. He falls to the ground, shivering.
The medicine cat backs away. The kit's mother carefully curls her ashen gray tail around his fragile body and silently licks the blood away from his pelt. The sweat on her body turns cold; dread eclipses joy. Pregnant twice and she has not yet lost a baby, even believed herself, perhaps, blessed by StarClan in a way. And now this?
Spottedpaw, her oldest, left minutes ago to summon the father from his patrols; they'll be hurrying home by now. The two youngest daughters of the same litter glance between themselves as if determining if their brother is acceptable. The medicine cat sends one to the trees to collect mint and the other to bring poppyseeds for the pain and its fully dark and then they hear pawsteps from the entrance.
The father and Spottedpaw come through the den, their eyes wild. "We came as fast as—" Spottedpaw says, but when she sees the kitten's collapsed body on the ground, she stops. From behind her the father holds his breath and terror fills the den; the medicine cat edges toward the exit, a dark and primeval fear warping her expression.
Slowly the father comes to his first and only son's side. He is wordless but his expression says enough: heartbroken, scared, desperate. Cautiously he grabs the kit's scruff with his maw and peels him away from his mother and he doesn't flinch.
"Stormclaw…" the mother whispers quietly as her mate carefully places her son onto the loose topsoil, and he replies somberly, "rest, love." She tucks her head into her tail and stares lifelessly forward. Afraid.
Behind them, whispers. Warriors and apprentices alike crowd the den entrance, and words spread like wildfire.
"Is he a cripple?"
"I heard that he is cursed by StarClan itself."
"Shame their first son ends up that way…"
"Will Stormclaw have to throw him into the river?"
The kit looks at them all with deep, memorizing eyes.
(ooooooo)
The leaves fall from the trees and she sends a prayer to her ancestors that if her son had some role to play in this world could he please be spared. But in the last hours before moonhigh she wakes up to find Stormclaw standing over her. Shrouded in shadow, he looks like a phantom from an elder's fable, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her father and her mother in the never-ending valleys of StarClan, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like losing part of herself.
(ooooooo)
The night is silent, the sky starless. Far away, she hears the screech of an owl. The brackish leaves on the aspen trees rustle quietly in the soft wind and the damp grass sticks to her fur. It has been thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds since Stormclaw left. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
Every second, lightning erupts in her abdomen. She hears the cries her son did not cry and the kicks he did not kick. He crosses the river of death now.
Or now.
Or now.
Before dawn, the apprentices wake from their slumber. She rises and limps from the nursery den. A gust of wind, high on the treetops, lifts a cloud of brown and orange and red and yellow into the clearing. The pressure inside of her is near intolerable.
For a long moment nothing else happens. Then Stormclaw comes up the forest undergrowth with something bundled in his maw. The birds explode; Stormclaw quickens his pace; her mouth quick to take what he carries even as her mind says she should not.
The child is alive. His eyes are closed and his breath is slow and he shivers in the cold but he is alive.
"I took him to the river." Stormclaw paces with her into the nursery den, kicks the dust off the moss; his legs tremble. "I set him down."
She sits as close to her mate as she dares and tucks the kitten into her pelt. The two interlock gazes for a long moment and a sense of familiar love cools her heart, and Stormclaw shivers. "I started to walk away. He was so quiet. He just looked up into the trees. A little shape in the undergrowth."
The child mews softly and the den goes silent. Stormclaw looks at his shaking paws.
"I could not leave him."
(ooooooo)
Before sunhigh the clan erupts. The child is weak, he would bewitch the warriors to moons of bad luck in battle as he bewitched his father into carrying him back from the swamp. He harbors a demon inside, one that will destroy the clan.
Inside the den, the family gathers. The girls crowd their mother and Stormclaw drags moss onto the ground and the kit's eyes catch the glint of the sunlight.
"Owlkit," says his mother. "We will call him Owlkit. One of wisdom and peace."