Watch the Stars to Lead Us Home

(ooc: set the day RiverClan came back to the territories)

Darkness surrounded him, dreams pulling at the edges in swirls of memory that called distantly. Nothing reached him as he lay, unmoving, the rise and fall of his flanks the only movement. Beside him, the cold, long dead form of a tom rested peacefully, as though sleeping. A ginger-patched pelt next to a darker ginger, fluffier pelt. One dead, one alive, though in the barest sense of the word.

In the distance, birds called, and the river burbled gently as it had always done. A gentle breeze sighed through the reeds, rattling them with a sound akin to insect legs scuttling across pebbly shores. Close, but at the the same time far away, the gentle murmuring of conversation drifted over stout reed walls. Sounds that normally would lift a cat's mood, and bring them out of a deep sleep to smile at the day.

He heard none of them.

All of it may as well have been frozen in ice, the rattle of the reeds a cold sound reminiscent of hard raindrops falling on craggy rocks, the sounds of birds the harsh mocking calls of better days. Even the river - winding its quiet way through the territory he had once called home - no longer seemed friendly, the distant edge of an angry roar evident in every slapping wave. The world was not a nice place. And this place of all places he wouldn't have wished to see even if he had been conscious, with memories of bloodstained snow and cold, stiff bodies too recently uncovered.

He lay still, and didn't wake, even as the sun crept further towards the horizon.

When her chartreuse eyes landed once again on the familiar pelt of her fatherly figure across camp, tears seemed to prick behind her eyes, and it was all she could do to stop them from overflowing onto the grass beneath her. She was laying on the ground with her head resting on her paws, not bothering to move as warriors and apprentices passed her by, each of them with a somber look on their faces that she couldn't quite put a claw on. She merely flicked her ears in response to their well-wishes and pity, not wanting to accept the fact that he was gone… But in order to move on, she supposed she had to. Her eyes flickered up briefly to the sun, which had just begun to slip past the horizon. It was sending beautiful hues of purple and orange into the sky, which seemed all too cheery for the occasion, to her.

She picked herself up, slowly getting to her paws and stretching her muscles as she looked around for Sparkfrost.

Berrycloud was wounded, barely recovering from his wounds when he finally realized what had happened. The tom was speechless as he walked slowly to the limp body of the ginger-patched tom. After all the emotions he had gone through during the fight in the mountains, this was just the breaking point. Letting out a pain-filled yowl, he let himself fell next to Starlord's body, remembering all those sweet days where he played with him and his sibling as a second father next to Jaystar. He let him go. He didn't fight for him to stay. And now, he was dead. Was this his fault too? Berrycloud shook his head and simply dipped his head into the fur, hoping in vain that the tom was just asleep and that in just a few moments, he was going to wake up. But that was a fantasy. Starlord was gone... Finchstream was dead... Goldeneye hated him... Galepaw was drowned... why did most of his family die? Why couldn't he do something about it?

The yowl was what caught his attention.

Sparkfrost had found some semblance of purpose in the idea that there were cats here that cared for him. Even if there was no recollection of the bonds they had supposedly built over the moons, there was something here. Something. All he remembered were the fuzzy memories of a long-forgotten kithood. Few things beyond the faces of Ivykit, Berrykit, Starlord, and Goldeneye were ones he recalled. Galekit... had been lost. It was a tough knowledge to swallow for the dilute calico. His world had shrunk from an entire clan of connections to what few faces flitted through a distant knowledge. The stinging pain of loss had set heavily like a stone, numbing his chest. If he were any other cat, perhaps it would have been given more merit. But the warrior thought little of the sensation that spread like the frost of his namesake.

His head whipped around to see Berrykit, er, Berrycloud standing over as still frame. Ivypaw was only a few taillengths away and he found himself subconsciously meeting her gaze for some semblance of solace. He knew somewhere deep inside that the mourning cry was meant for them all, that the broken body laying unmoving was one he cared for. As if in a dream, his legs stumbled forward towards the physical remembrance of Starlord. The disjointed movement of his underutilized limbs had since been healed but this was a different kind of injury that wracked him now. His coat brushed up against Ivypaw's and his dull gaze fixated on the late tom. For several moments he said nothing, just stared on with almost deadened, dull eyes. But after the abnormal silence, a single word crackled through the faintest movement of his maw, "S-starlord."

Something cracked through the blackness. A sound, splitting the dark in two. Cracks spun from there, forming fragments of light he tried desperately to place back together. Anything would be better than... than.... Muddled noises broke into his ears, the shattered darkness forming into memories that brought with them a crushing pain that took his breath away.

Light greeted his eyes as they fluttered open, a patchy golden colour that brought no warmth. Pain, it coursed through his entire being, a heavy weight that felt like it was drowning him beneath a raging wild river of sadness. The sounds in his ears began to make sense as his mind struggled back to some semblance of normalcy, echoing through the empty hole where his heart had been. With an effort, he turned his head to see where the sounds were coming from.

There were others there. He watched, some part of his mind idly curious as he observed a large, fluffy tom with his head buried in... in Starlord's fur. Another cat - a tom he remembered faintly as Sparkfrost - was also there, along with a she-cat. He felt almost as though he was floating separated from the scene as he watched their faces, like an impostor imposing on a precious moment between these cats and the one they obviously knew and loved. I never knew him. What right do I have to stay here and say I loved him? He gazed upon the light playing across that ginger and white fur, giving it a glow almost like the stars. A ginger pelt he and his siblings had shared, their laughter like a shining band running through his life, cut off to leave him in the dark. A dark he would never leave.