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Forever and Ever
The barrier was crossed. She didn’t know how, nor did she care. Light broke through where everlasting darkness had been one gallop before, filtering through leaves cleaning to what had been ever-dead branches only an instant before.
Trees and undergrowth of the living world raced by her. True, firm and solid ground, the soft moss and grasses that were strewn about it, real sunlit foliage and forest . . . after lifetimes. Her fur was actually moving, air pressing against her and running through her patchy coat as she ran. It was real, and bright, and wonderful, all of it . . . but none of it was her concern, racing towards a Thunderclan that wasn’t hers, where no one any longer remembered her.
There wouldn’t be any clans left to remember anyone after today.
Darker grey clouds were creeping in from the rim of the sky beyond the treetops, and the scent of nearing rain hung throughout the air. A storm was coming, in so many ways.
“Mapleshade!”
The voice halted her charge, bringing her to a spinning stop. It was no cat of Thunderclan, nor was it any cat among the living, but she knew who that voice belonged to.
The Riverclan tom she’d once deceived and mentored was there when she spun his way, now with stars clinging about his pelt, and a perfectly-formed jaw instead of the crooked one he’d walked through life with.
She hadn’t expected to encounter any Starclan cat so quickly, far from any of the clan camps, but if a familiar revenge opportunity was so freely presenting itself . . .
“Hello, little one.” Mockery dripped from her fangs as she exposed them.
Crookedstar wasn’t alone; others from that love-lit afterlife were near as well. Whether Mapleshade heard or scented them, she didn’t know, but they didn’t matter yet, not while a more personal target stood in front of her. And her hiss only grew in the absence of any response from him.
“At least you get to be with your–”
“Mama!”
Her vitriol was cut off and her attention seized by a different voice. She still held Crookedstar’s gaze, not entirely reacting to the blow of recognition her ears had just received from elsewhere.
“Mama!”
It was more than just one voice . . . it was three. Three little voices all piling the same word atop each other.
Cold, she felt.
. . .
She could feel.
It was cold, and soaked . . . and desperate. So desperate, just as each had been that final time.
“Mama?”
Maybe she hopped. Maybe she sprang. Maybe she whirled. She turned somehow, some way.
She had to see . . .
. . . their little faces.
It wasn’t her memories of them. It wasn’t the mental images she clung to so fiercely in that place, that she fought so hard against the fog of misery to keep. It was them.
They were there.
Soft, beige Petalkit; dark, tall Larchkit; and precious little blotchy Patchkit.
They were there . . . their little faces.
Her raised, rage-puffed tail began to lose its weight, the ground slowly calling to it as the fur along it also started to settle.
“Mama! Mama, we were good!” Petalkit insisted proudly. “They said we couldn’t see you for a long time, but we were good when we waited!” She was so pleased to tell her mother.
“They said I would’ve been a clan leader,” Larchkit told her, just as happy as a kit would always be to let their mother know of their accomplishments, “so I get to be called Larchstar!” After a second though, the kit lowered his head and shifted on his paws. “But I never really did it. Are you still proud of me?”
Mapleshade didn’t answer. She was too busy breathing. Actually breathing, inhaling real air and releasing it again. It was somehow all she found herself able to do.
And then it was the sweetest, littlest one’s turn. “You’re gonna come with us now, right Mama?”
Patchkit’s eyes were the most attached . . . and the most pleading, just as Mapleshade remembered.
“You can come now.” Patchkit kept up. “You’re gonna come back with us, right?”
What he said, exactly what her precious little kit said, what it implied, it did make it through, it just . . . the reality of what she was seeing in front of her kept Mapleshade from working the meaning of the words through her mind.
“We’re gonna stay together, forever and ever, you promised.” Patchkit’s reminding plea was joined afterward by the others.
Mapleshade’s breathing swung between rapid and impossibly slow. She didn’t . . . this was never going to happen. She had never been going to see them again. That’s all she had known . . . for lifetimes in that dismal place, all she had known was that she was never . . .
But, they were here, right in front of her, once again, after so very, very long.
“Starclan?” A new voice sounded, new to the scene but not to her. To her, it was familiar, and the same dark aura that clung to her hung just as much over the cat it belonged to. Now though, the annoyance hearing it had always brought her was replaced with . . . dread?
. . .
Because of them. The three Starclan kits, her three kits, whom her eyes flicked from the emerging Thistleclaw to and back.
“I wouldn’t have guessed we’d get to spill such glittering blood so soon.” The same malevolent anticipation carried in Thistleclaw’s voice that always did.
For once, for the first time in . . . Mapleshade felt tightness within her; actual anxiety.
“I don’t know how ones so small as you wandered out here,” Thistleclaw menaced to the starry kits, “but you won’t be wandering back.”
He leapt at them, at her kits.
The river had returned for them, embodied in fur and malice . . . to steal them away from her once again . . .
But this river she could fight.
Her paws left the real ground of the living world, and along with Thistleclaw’s, her sides, back, head and all else came crashing back down to it the following instant.
The noise was Mapleshade’s to make: a feline yowl carrying far and wide, perhaps even heard by the very cats of this generation’s Thunderclan she’d been going to attack, composed of nothing, no other thing besides raw ferocity.
The two of them had been joined by a third cat mid-roll, and only upon them breaking did she find the third cat to be Crookedstar. Her eyes had left him for her kits when she’d heard them, but he’d still remained, and had leapt for Thistleclaw just as she had. Now, in the three’s separation and return to their feet, the cat she had once trained and deceived faced off Thistleclaw with her, positioning himself further forward than her as if intending to block the dark forest tom’s way.
“Go!” Crookedstar told her quickly, fully stepping between her and Thistleclaw then. “Follow them and my daughter. The way’s been opened for you.”
Mapleshade had been busy growl-hissing and setting all her fur on-end, so it took an extra half-second for the communication to register. And even when it did, she didn’t get to respond to him before the voice of a she-cat spoke to her from nearby, where her kits clustered at the new Starclan cat’s feet.
“Hurry!” Silverstream beckoned, motioning with both head and tail for Mapleshade to follow.
“Come on Mama!” Her kits all begged her to do so as well.
Now returned to her, instinct alone pulled her towards them immediately, her legs all but moving by themselves.
“You,” Thistleclaw’s voice drew her attention back, but she found him addressing Crookedstar instead of her, “I remember you. Your jaw looks so much more normal than it did while you lived. Let me FIX IT FOR YOU!”
Thistleclaw leapt, but he was taken from the side by another new entrant to the scene before he could make it, and Crookedstar and the new Starclan warrior both took the fight to the Dark Forest tom.
Were she truly looking with care, Mapleshade might have recognized the latest arrival as Oakstar, but tiny paws pawing at her front legs kept her from making more than a darting glance.
“Come on Mama!”
“Mapleshade,” Silverstream insisted, “we have to go!”
. . .
She followed her. Her kits followed Silverstream, and she followed her kits. Mapleshade followed the daughter of Crookestar, a she-cat whom seasons and seasons ago she’d enjoyed learning of the death of, and had delighted in the pain it had caused Crookedstar. Yet she was following her now. Silverstream was helping her now. Crookedstar was helping her now . . .
Mapleshade followed her exuberant kits, and they all followed Silverstream. Up the gradual incline and through the trees, as the incoming storm clouds began to push out the sunrays, and the most distant, faint sounds of what she knew was battle fought for a place in her ears. Even the screech of fox made it to her ears somehow.
The moonpool was where Silverstream took them. And with Petalkit, Larchkit and Patchkit immediately bouncing in to splash about the shallow portion just at the edge, Mapleshade dashed after them, the panic of that day so long past coming upon her as if it were mere moments ago. She paid no heed to the imagery on the surface, and never saw Ravenwing, Frecklewish and Reedshine touching their paws to the water from the other side. But when her front paws touched the water, she fell through, and her three happy kits fell with her.
Water opened into air immediately, and the direction of gravity did a heel-turn beneath them, towing their fall along with it. They hit grass, and in the kind of moment she’d not experienced since . . . since the memories of laying in the nursery with them during their few weeks of life, Mapleshade felt the three precious fluffs land on and roll off of her, landing on the same soft grass she had.
It was so gentle, so soft, both the grass and the light that shone on it, and across all else in sight around them. But, it didn’t compare to the sweet little face of Patchkit trying to bury itself into her side, or the paws of Petalkit and Larchkit resting on her as they peered over her like a ledge.
“We knew you’d come with us!” Those two squeaked. They squeaked so happily, unlike anything she had heard since . . . she hadn’t even remembered their happy voices, all that time. But she heard them now.
“Are we gonna stay together forever and ever now?” Asked little Patchkit, lifting his head out of his mother’s fur to meet her eyes.
“Yes, little one,” Mapleshade answered, finally speaking back to the three of them, as the lingering dark from where she’d been let go of her and ebbed away, “of course we are.”