Chapter Text
It had been a thousand moons since the last prophecy. The warrior code still held strong, but things had been slipping through the cracks where they wouldn’t have before.
An unexplained kit brought home in the dead of night, a scar appearing on an apprentice the morning after a Gathering, a frog brought into ThunderClan’s camp while the day was still young enough that dew gathered on the leaves and the borders hadn’t yet been marked.
They would say the scrape was from a bramble, the frog caught near the border, though there would be no explanation for Milkkit. “Milkkit is mine, you can’t take her from me,” would be repeated a thousand times, until the queen herself believed it.
Tension would follow Milkkit forever, even after she would eventually become the leader, Milkstar. Rumours and whispers would spread, and though the calm and clever leader would brush these aside, her nights would be haunted by images of unknown cats, voices from her own Clan, telling her she’d never be a good enough leader, that she was a half-Clan, a kittypet, a rogue.
But Milkstar wouldn’t be the only kit found like this.
Three kits, starlight runes etched into their fur like a promise of a brighter future, were found waiting by the Gathering place, alone. A young apprentice, known then as Milkpaw, would take them in as her kin, fighting at any cost to protect her younger siblings.
Those three kits would be known as Honeykit, Lynxkit, and Flickerkit.
Honeykit was a light brown ticked tabby with blue eyes, soon to develop a stunning green hue. Lynxkit, meanwhile, was a mottled grey-brown blotched tabby with eyes already demonstrating their forever amber, and the youngest, Flickerkit, was a deep grey kitten with no visible stripes, and eternally blue eyes.
Milkpaw had no blood relation to these kits, whether incidental or not. Her fur was pale cream with white patches, and her eyes were green. Honeykit was the only one who could be feasibly related to the apprentice.
The night the kits were found, Milkpaw had a dream. The sky was red and the trees had no leaves. She could hear the dying screams and wailings of cats from far away, three different clear voices.
Voices she recognized.
“Leave two to die.” a deeper voice said, as a faceless shadow appeared from behind her, taking the form of a cat.
“And one will thrive.”
Milkpaw stared in fear at the faceless being, whose shadowy form seemed to be a perfect, halfway mix between ethereal and eerie. The shadow-form demonstrated no emotions. No fear, no joy, no sadness either.
Milkpaw tried not to answer, but a sudden force constricted her, the shadow-form’s voice whispering into her ear from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Choose a kit, little apprentice.” It muttered, voice tinted with what almost seemed like a cruel, twisted form of delight.
“We’ll make sure the chosen kit stays safe… forever.”
Milkpaw writhed and clawed at the tendrils of smoke, but though they kept her still and unmoving, her claws went straight through them, as though the shadows were made both of air and stone at once.
The voice laughed at her attempts, calling them pathetic and useless.
“You’ll never escape,” the shadow-form said, “Not until you choose a kit.”
As the shadow-form talked, the note in its voice, the part that seemed off about it, slowly faded into the background.
The forest must have been messing with her mind, reasoned the logical part of her.
But on the other paw, choosing a kit to live would get her out of here, and nothing else would.
A choice was all it would have to be, a simple, single word.
By then, Milkpaw couldn’t tell if the voice she heard was the shadow-form’s, or her own.
As Milkpaw neared unconsciousness in the dream, almost fainting and spiralling into nothingness, a single word left her mouth.
The shadow-form grinned wickedly, bringing the apprentice back into her den.
A promise was, after all, a promise, and Milkpaw had fulfilled her part of the deal.