Loonwhisper lifted his head at the sound of Brick's quivering voice, hardly acknowledging it, but listening all the same. His ears were focused on the minute sounds of moving things all around him. The territory yawned, sighed, and breathed a slow song of late Leafbare. In spite of the rising temperatures, the earth was still quite dead. It wrought his heart with stress, displayed only in the prickling of his feathered tail. As they came to a puddle of cold mud, Loonwhisper sank both paws into it, spreading his toes to let it seep into his skin. He wanted to sink... but the puddle was hardly a kit's whisker deep. He wiped his soiled paws on the dark parts of his pelt and continued, pressing on.
After a long while, he responded. "I know," and he crooned nothing else.
Fear was not an emotion he knew by name, no matter how he felt it. His terror, his little anxieties, they were transposed into other facets of being. He delegated the responsibilities to other parts of himself and let it fizzle. His pupils grew wide, enveloping the greens of his eyes, as he pressed fear into other places, opting to dissociate from this uncomfortable patrol into other places. Rabbit-cat: a funny chimera. He imagined her long, flopping ears twitching intently. Perhaps if she were a true rabbit-cat, she could find them prey. She could leap into the trees, twice as high as any SkyClan warrior. Loonwhisper giggled, seemingly at nothing.
"Would a rabbit-cat hunt prey, or would it consume grass?" he asked softly. "It would be at such odds with itself, and yet, it would have free will we can only dream off. It could choose at every moment to be either predator or prey. Given the choice, if you were not a cat, but a rab-cat, would you fight or flee? Right now, you are only a cat. We know that a cat cannot run when they feel pursued, because we are given claws and fangs with which we use to fight. And I figure, as we hunt together now, that you'd much rather be a rab-cat... because you'd flee, wouldn't you?"
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》Former Admin《
Rushkit | RiverClan Kit | #4b5320
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