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Palemoon dragged her paws along the barren earth. The dead trees around her rattled in the faint breeze, their wood groaning from the small stress. Tiny shrubs still dotted the landscape, leaves worn ragged from moons of being pelted by dust storms. A tiny, bony mouse skittered between the shrubs, desperate in its search for food, and it frantically ran upon Palemoon's approach. She didn't chase after.
Above her rode the sun, high in the sky, casting its sickly light down through the small gap in the cloud cover that was as gray as her fur. It did not burn Palemoon, though—the sun had long since lost that power. Where once was something to be feared, looming and threatening, now sat something small and white, barely able to break through the blanket of clouds. Palemoon wondered if it was still twisting inside with rage. She hoped it was.
In another time, perhaps in her youth, she would've rejoiced at the idea of the sun no longer posing a threat. But now? Such a thing wasn't even a suggestion in her mind, the idea of celebration as disgusting as maggots. There was hardly a thing to ever be happy for, and Palemoon had learned that long ago as an apprentice when Ivypaw had died. Happiness was meant only for kithood; and sometimes, not even then.
A phantom pain raced through the marred flesh on Palemoon's face, and she grimaced, stopping for a moment to rub at the scar. Willowshade had claimed such things were normal to experience, but Palemoon couldn't help but question her on that. Her paw traced over the scar, felt the unnatural smooth skin and divots in it, how it ran over one of her eyes, rendering her blind in it, how it ran over the side of her lips and exposed her teeth in an eternal sneer.
She could remember well how she'd gotten that one. Out of all the scars that covered her body, given to her by forgotten faces and nameless bodies, Palemoon would forever remember what the sun had given her; its final act of blistering hate for her, for all living things.
Palemoon set her paw back down, cast the memory away with a sigh, and continued on her walk.
The dust and loose earth under her paws slowly turned more solid, into cool baked earth and exposed rock, and steadily rose higher as it did. Palemoon came to a stop at the cliff's edge, staring out at the blasted ground. The earth had been turned to sand here and then glassed, an endless expanse of black glittering glass that would have stretched toward the horizon had there not been a plateau surrounding it.
A cloud of dust lazily rolled across the glass plane, and the sight of it made something stir in her chest when there had been nothing but a dizzying emptiness. Just as soon as it arrived though, it vanished, just as the dust cloud did as it hit the side of the plateau. Palemoon breathed in, deep, then let loose a quiet sigh and cleared her throat. The world stood still for a moment, the weak breeze ceasing in running its claws through the dust and leaves, the clouds peering down curiously as the sun hissed and spat behind them.
"Hello," Palemoon greeted, voice cracking. It was only then she realized how dry her mouth was. Her throat ached as she took a spitless swallow, and suddenly was aware of the heartbeat in her ears. Her paws shuffled anxiously, subconsciously, and for a moment it was like she was an apprentice again, before Ivypaw died. When she was an apprentice, and she spilled her heart out to Tigerpaw…
Her eyes closed, and for a few blissful seconds, she was there again. Tigerpaw, looking at her with his big, luminous amber eyes, shimmering with the moonlight. He had always been so understanding, so loving, he never minded when she talked too much or too loud. He never made her strain her ears until she cried, or got angry when she did cry. Just for a precious moment, she was there with him again, before everything went wrong and the life they could have led together was torn apart.
One heartbeat, then two, and a dust cloud rolled over her. The moment was gone, and she reopened her eyes, looking out across the glass once more.
"I'm back. I would have come sooner, but being a leader is busy work, especially now. Everybody's fine, by the way. Nobody's sick. The injured are healing well…" The few that didn’t die immediately of shock, but those words stay within Palemoon’s chest. Her face twitched, recalling Mousewhisker and Blossomfall, both of whom had received the worst brunt of the sun’s final fury: fur patchy, skin red and lumpy, eyes milky and mouths drooling. It’d been a mercy when they died—maybe Palemoon should’ve felt bad for thinking that, but she didn’t.
The hollow ache inside made itself more prominent and Palemoon sighed. From somewhere in her head, the roar of the Great Battle ran itself harshly through her, vision full of cold and gnashing teeth from corpses who should’ve rotted long ago. “I still think about that day a lot. I need… You all should know that. You should. You deserve to, because…” The gray molly trailed off, unsure what to say. The ebony glassed expanse before her groaned, settling deeper into its foundation. Knocks from inside rang out, reverberating around the plateau and cresting over the cliffs a small ways.
“I’m getting to it,” Palemoon snapped, though her insides remained dull, unmatching of her tone. “Be patient with me, okay? I…” The plane didn’t respond, meeting her words with silence. Palemoon shook her head, then let out a small, mirthless laugh. It sounded like bones cracking as it echoed throughout the plateu. “I still remember what you said to me, Jaystride. I remember it so well. It was the Great Battle, and you… You had told us, Lionclaw and I, that perhaps with our powers combined, we could save everybody from total extinction. You were right, I’m sure, but I was just… Too late, I guess.”
Palemoon knew well why that had been the case. She had gone to see Tigerheart, desperate for the comfort he gave, desperate for somebody to hold her before she did something that would surely lead to her death. It hadn’t mattered anyway in the end—Tigerheart had been the one who died while she had lived. She would've rather had it the other way around, but she supposed it was just another way that MoonClan had mysteriously worked.
"Jaystride, you were dead by the time I got there. Lionclaw, you were halfway to that point." The words still left a tiny pinprick of pain in her throat, an odd sort of grief that never quite went away. Palemoon wasn't quite sure why she felt that way about Jaystride—he was a mean son of a bitch who had a way of ruffling others' fur with ease, but he was also her friend, in a way. But he had hurt her, perhaps not physically but emotionally, much like how Lionclaw had. So why did she miss him?
Palemoon stared down at her paws for a moment, thinking of her mentor and his brother. They'd both been well-respected warriors in not just ThunderClan, but every Clan. They were so great, so then why did they treat her like… Palemoon closed her eyes. "I don't feel particularly bad about that, I need the two of you to know. My only regret is that I wasn't there to see it happen." The words leave a little bitter tang, but they feel right and good, so she doesn't take them back.
"I didn't want to listen to you at first, Lionclaw, when you had told me to run," The image of her mentor in that moment was seared into her brain: half of the golden fur on his face burned away, flesh exposed and raw, burned, bloody, sinewy and bits of white bone poking through. He hadn't looked very far off from any of the Dark Caverns cats at that moment. "I never liked listening to you much, but when you screamed at me to just go, that there was nothing left for me to do here and that you'd handle it…" Palemoon trailed off, then sighed.
She'd felt like in that moment, she should've been choking on tears, gaze misty and throat closing up, pelt burning and heart thumping. In truth, though, Palemoon still felt the same hollowness in her chest as when she arrived. Save for a few occasional jabs and pricks of emotion, most of Palemoon's days were spent in 'apathy', as Willowshade had called it. It was something that couldn't be helped, the medic had also claimed, that it was only a body's natural reaction to everything it'd been through, the special way that Palemoon's mind tried to shield her.
Palemoon couldn't help but feel like it wasn't something that couldn't be helped, but she also couldn't bring herself to care enough to argue with Willowshade. And so, she'd left most of the emotional appeal side of leadership to her deputy, Breezepelt, while she handled the logistics. It was a fine enough system. Breezepelt seemed to handle his job just fine, mess of mood-swinging nerves that he was.
"So I listened and ran away, and you died. I don't know if you actually ended up being the one to handle everything, but if you did, you did it really badly." Palemoon remembered how the sun had grown intense, breaking through the dense storm clouds summoned by MoonClan, searing flesh both living and dead. Her scars still ached from where Hawkblaze had struck her, his fur singeing from the heat, the dried blood caked around the root stabbed through his throat creating an awful, acrid scent that had almost choked her.
She remembered watching many other cats fall down, too injured to get away in time. She remembered seeing their blood boil and evaporate. She remembered finding Tigerheart, having managed to crawl into the mouth of a tunnel, bleeding from too many places for her to find him help in time. She remembered holding him, fur becoming thick and matted with both of their blood, watching the light fade from his eyes. She remembered him telling her that he loved her, just one last time. I love you, just one last time, something that hurt so much but felt so good.
Maybe that was the day Palemoon's emotions had left her. Something told her she should've felt upset about that, but she didn't.
"You fucked it all up," Palemoon mewed. A simple statement, but the wind ran up against her, rubbing her fur the wrong way like it was disgusted by what she'd said. "Cats don't like to talk about you, but not for the same reason that I have—they're sad that you're gone. Cinderheart especially." Palemoon laughed again, a smile pulling her lips up with all the grace of a collapsing tunnel that took away your sister before you were even warriors. "She had kits. Three little ones: Crowkit, Adderkit, and Lionkit. Did you even know she was pregnant?"
Her words hang out in the air, the silence only filled with further knocks from the glass plane, and those—Palemoon fancied—sounded a little angry. The smile stayed on her face, though it wasn't something that needed to stay. It would leave eventually, like everything in her life. Almost everything. "I have kits too, you know. Three little ones, same as Cinderheart. I'm not telling you their names, but they're Tigerheart's. Lionclaw, Jaystride, does that make you angry? I hope it does. I know you two hated me talking to him."
It was a strange kind of thing, talking to nothing but an expanse of black glass, and Palemoon had wondered on more than one occasion if that meant she had gone mad. But if Willowshade had said that her apathy was her body's special way of protecting her, then this was Palemoon's special way of getting her thoughts out. The thoughts that she couldn't just dump onto Breezepelt before telling him to never tell another soul, anyway.
There's knocking from the glass again, and Palemoon elects to ignore it.
"One of them was born missing some fur, but it's fine. Better than most other litters I've seen around. One of Ferncloud's kits was born without a head, so I figure one of mine having no fur on their face is good." Poor Featherkit. But it was just how life was. Palemoon paws played at the edge of the cliff, knocking small stones loose from its jagged tip. She felt the urge to look down, but not yet, no, not yet. Soon.
"Two daughters and a son, if you're wondering. All of them are brilliant." That was a bit of an overstatement, and Palemoon knew that. Tigerkit was the smartest of them, wry and witty, enough so that she could talk anybody out of giving her a timeout. Ivykit was a little less so, more ditzy and easily distracted, content to lay and listen to what few elders remained for stories for hours at a time. Shadowkit, bless him, was nothing but a paranoid wreck riddled with health issues, born with missing fur—yet, somehow at the same time, seemed eerily well aware of his surroundings when he wasn't shaking in what little fur he had.
It was an overstatement to say that all of them were brilliant. But it was a mother's job to lie about how great her kits were, wasn't it? Whitewing had done it many times, when she had claimed that Palemoon and Ivypaw would become great cats.
The silence stretched on. Barren branches swayed with the breeze, dust rolling across the wasteland, clouds floating by without a care, the sun angry and small and white behind them. Palemoon was running out of things to say. What was there to say? The world was a slow mess now, dying and taking its sweet time to do so. Things weren't okay, and no amount of talking about kits or whatever would change that. They weren't going to be okay for a long while. Probably never. Certainly not while she was leader. It'd just keep getting worse, and worse, and she could do nothing but stand at the edge of a cliff and talk at ghosts all day and pretend to feel things. Talk at ghosts who sat behind glass and knocked at her when she took too long to talk.
There was knocking behind the glass. Palemoon looked down from where she stood on the cliff, down toward the expanse of glass that waited for her. There was no use in delaying the inevitable. She always looked down.
Their faces pressed against the surface, faces twisted and gaunt, teeth bloody. Their eyes were pale and milky, sightless, yet somehow still managing to stare at her, to judge her like she was behind all of this. Lionclaw and his half-burnt face made its way to the forefront, teeth bared and glittering with coagulated, black and rotting blood. His fur was no longer golden but black and brown, just like the rest of the cats. Palemoon didn't know how she told them apart, she just did.
Cats of all sizes and ages and ranks slammed their paws against the dark glass, maws opening to reveal broken teeth and let out soundless wails. They always did that and yet never made any progress in getting out, as not once had Palemoon seen a crack form in the glass's surface. Either they were incredibly weak, the glass was incredibly strong, or both, she didn't know. Maybe it was a good thing that they couldn't get out. Maybe they only tried to get out because she was there. Maybe they hated her because she had failed to save them.
It wasn't like Palemoon could blame them—she'd hate herself too if she had been like them. She already did hate herself for that regardless of not being dead, but it was all about perspective, she supposed. Or maybe they didn't hate her for that, but for the fact that no one but her knew of this place's secret, how she had neglected to tell anybody else, neglected to tell their families. Or, perhaps, just on the slightest chance, they had become no better than the Dark Caverns cats, cold corpses who wanted to kill and eat and do nothing else. Maybe they wanted to kill and eat her.
It was possible, maybe. Palemoon didn't know how the Dark Caverns cats really worked, but neither did anybody else. The idea was just as plausible as the other ones. Maybe it was a mix of all of them, a terrible concoction that would spell doom if they ever broke free of their pitch-black prison.
Whitewing, Thornclaw, Brackenfur, Toadstep, Rosepetal, Hollowflight, Jaystride, Lionclaw, Smokemoon, Applefur, Redwillow, Pebblefoot, Mallownose, Graymist, Beechtail, Petalfur, Kestrelflight, Crowfeather—all of them and so many more stared at her, pressing against the glass, crowding and shoving at each other, desperate to be let out. Or perhaps for a different thing. For her to come down, to join them, to…
There was a familiar flash of brown tabby fur, eyes that, despite their mistiness, still shone amber. Tigerheart looked up at her, and unlike the rest of them, didn't appear desperate or angry. His cheeks were sallow, fur somehow mostly unmarred by the sun, eyes drooping and sad. He wore a tight frown, and Palemoon couldn't quite decipher if that was because he was upset or that his lips had fused to his teeth. She decided that she didn't want to know.
Palemoon tore her gaze away and looked up again.
"I'll be back again soon, I can promise you all that. Goodbye for now."
Palemoon turned, began to pad away, back into the stretches of dead land and tired dust clouds, ignoring how the glass knocked and pleaded for her to come back. They'd wait for her to come back again. They always did and she always did.