Enter: The Ghosts of Our Past [Closed]

This seemed like a good place to die.

On all sides, flowers of various pigments bowed and swayed underneath the gentle breeze that stirred the moorlands. It was beautiful and calm. A sense of peace washed over the tom. His sides rose and fell with shallow breaths. Every moment seemed laborious. For a couple moons now, the loner who had previously been surrounded by cats his entire life, had been left behind to be carried by his own frail sense of survival. Hunting was the one thing he happened to be decently skilled at, and even that seemed to often be left up to luck. Everything had made his slender paws nervous; each step seemed uncertain.

But things were manageable until rats attacked the Hidden Outcropping. Blood still stained the camp where the Nightstriker group had temporarily called home before abandoning it. This was where Koshin had been left without direction. Nothing had ever prepared him for this and his battle skills left something to be desired. The area was festering with the disease-ridden creatures. They had appeared through the dark, gnawing at his legs and shoulders, even attempting to tear at his stomach as he dragged himself away. Time passed and the wounds, despite his futile attempts to keep them clean, had become raging with infections. Fever burned his paws and ears. It had taken a while to come to the decision to drag himself towards Windclan territory. There were civilized cats there... and he hoped they could help.

Now, there was the bet of whether or not the infection of the Windclan cats would kill him first. It was a futile hope. The raccoon pelt draped across his back for protection would tell a story no doubt they would understand. But it wasn't worth thinking about now. Struggling to keep his eyes open was too tiring for now. Whatever fate came at this point, he'd tried to fight. The sun was too warm, and the grass offered a comfortable pillow. Flowers sweetened the air. Koshin resigned this to be his final moments if it was willed. It was perhaps the most pleasant memory he had ever held.

Ravenstar rarely visited the Flower Fields without a friend or a patrol pulling him along—not because he disliked the flowers, but because they were different from the common-as-rabbits heather, and he didn’t want to trample them during his customary sprints. Today, though, his paws had brought him there. Memories of pink petals and a near-perfect day at the Gorge burned on the backs of his eyelids. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but as the breeze pushed at his face, chasing away the harshest parts of greenleaf’s heat with sweet flower-scents, he decided it didn’t matter. It had been a while since he’d gone somewhere just for the sake of being there.

A ragged gray-brown lump nestled in a flattened patch of grass nearby. As Ravenstar opened his mouth to greet said lump—friend or stranger, it hardly mattered—he noticed the ringed tail attached to it. Raccoon! Turning his meow into a choked-off hiss, he scrambled back. Strangely, the raccoon didn’t follow. He straightened up to peer at it again through narrowed eyes. A second passed, then two; then the sticky air turned sharp in his throat as he realized what he was looking at. The ears were too long, the muzzle too short, all of it the wrong color…

This raccoon had a cat’s head.

Terror shot down his spine, followed by a horrible, gut-wrenching sort of relief. At least it found me first. By a miracle, the beast had run into the only moor-dweller who could die and still drag himself home to warn the rest of them. He swallowed around the lump in his throat. In all likelihood, that was how it would go. The beast-cats had managed to outwit Finchstar and Aspenheart together; Ravenstar, though he rarely resented himself for it, knew he wasn’t half as clever as either of them. All he could do was stay on his guard and hope for the best.

With one ear angled toward the nearest tunnel entrance (as if he could hear anything over his heartbeat), the small tom crept closer. Nothing bolted out of the earth. No shadows rose from the grass. He held his breath as he closed in, stopping some tail-lengths away. The bitter smell of illness crawled into his nose. Combined with the beast-cat’s dazed expression, it made him wonder if there was an ambush at all. Bristling anew, Ravenstar shoved that thought aside. There was a fine line between hope and trying to swipe at the stars. ”Who are you, and what are you doing here?” Though he kept his voice soft, the words snapped out of him.

After what seemed like an eternity, Koshin was convinced he must have surely transcended to the afterlife. The flicker of consciousness only came with words that danced at the edges of his hearing. If this was death, surely it could not hurt this much unless he had been StarClan forgive us to a dark resting place. It would make sense after the life he had lived. Curiosity was but a myth. He was contented to succumb to the pain and lacked the will to fight it. Finding the meaning of the words took even longer. At the back of his head, it had drifted through his thoughts slowly before specific utterance came to light. There was a question. The rulers of the afterlife would know these answers, wouldn't they?

The little tortoiseshell put in the most minimal of effort to twist himself to his back and peer up towards the voice. His raccoon pelt slid to the side, now only covering half of his body. Dull agony made it feel like he had swam for endless hours, pure exhaustion. Rays of light were obscured by the flowers overhead. What sunlight did reach his gaze caused him to flinch. Koshin blinked, trying make out the fuzzy mess that his vision had been rendered to. There was a blurred black mass that could faintly marked the outline of another cat. After a moment, he rasped back with a raw voice, "Koshin... I-I'm Koshin. And I think I'm dying."