circle of stars [solo]

The expansive flower fields that covered part of the moor were illuminated by moon and starlight as the first breath of life came into a world healing from the chill of the coldest season. A flash of bright green eyes and the rustling of grass beneath near-silent pawsteps were the only signs that anything at all was out of place as the figure settled peacefully, lifting her gaze to meet the sky.

It had been some time since she came out here for this purpose, to speak privately to ancestors that never dared to answer. Lately all of her prayers had been rushed, hurried things, frantic thoughts and whispers in the midst of danger. Now, though, the dust had settled; and there had been resolution for most of what would be resolved: lost kits returned home, hostile forces scattered to the winds.

Most things had come to some sort of resolution, but not all of them.

She had always felt closest to her ancestors here, in the flower fields that most closely resembled the home of her youth.

"I wonder if you have wondered at my absence," she mused. "Or if you were watching, still. I've wondered, sometimes, if you can reach this far... Then again, that sense of doubt... It seems almost sacrilegious, doesn't it? I remember being told you would follow anywhere we went. I have seen the extraordinary with startling regularity since I settled here, so I suppose I shouldn't be doubting the possibility of anything at all. All the same, I doubt anything I have done is interesting enough to catch and keep your attention."

It was an attempt to delay what was inevitable. It was all too easy to redirect a one-sided conversation.

Still, she'd made her way there for a reason, knowing that there was something left to say, and it only bothered her more each moment she said nothing on the subject.

"I suppose, if you can see me - and I have seen nothing more than silence to suggest that you cannot - you know why I stand before you now. You know what I have done, and you know what I wish to do."

She hadn't been able to put it out of her mind. She hoped that maybe this would help.

"I have not come to ask your forgiveness, but your understanding. Please, I pray that you will understand what I have come to tell you, if you haven't yet forsaken me..."

As she spoke those words, she was startled to realize the possibility. That there was no one watching her, no spirit to guide her any longer, no one listening when she whispered to the sky; the last solid connection she had, single-sided as it was.

"I have taken the life of another, one who was beyond any other salvation. There was no hope I could offer, there was no other solution... Had I not acted, I am certain there would have been far more casualties than there were on that fated night. She had stepped beyond her place in the world, upset the order of things, and she strayed further still with each life she stole from us. I... I wish I could feel guilt, or shame. I know that I should."

And therein lied a part of what bothered her, the thing that had kept her from peaceful rest for days on end: not guilt, not shame, but the lack thereof.

"All the same, I do not. She stole so much from us... Lives, freedom, and for some time hope. I truly believe that the only honor Theron of the Nightstrikers could find was in her death, and I truly believe she deserved her fate. What more fitting end for someone who reveled in such senseless death and destruction?"

A deep sigh escaped her, lingering in the quiet of the night.

"I hope she has found honor or some other meaning in her death, and that some form of peace finds her spirit. Undeserving, perhaps, but... Someone saw something in her. Her subordinates, the cats she claimed as family... They must have. Perhaps I saw it for just a moment, something that had once been there; though it was too late then... Little more than a shadow of the past. All the same, she certainly had those that cared for her, and I believe that she must have cared for them in some way. Though her fate was inevitable, I would not wish them her prolonged suffering."

She wondered what Theron had dreamt of, when she thought of death. If there was anything at all. It was an answer she would never receive, but she could make her peace with that.

Life, death, the meaning of anything and everything... The world was filled with unanswered questions, and not nearly enough time to deal with each of them.

Some, though, were more pressing than others.

"I hope that the shadow of Asylum could not reach you. There isn't any way to know, not from here..."

It was only very rarely that she thought of StarClan's interference in the lives of the Clan cats as preferable to her own ancestors, who left the living to their own free will and had, as far as she knew, never spoken directly to anyone. But now, wondering about her sisters, her mother and her father, she almost wished for it.

No answer came, and she hadn't expected one.

"I hope that I am not alone."

She sat silently in the soft breeze that promised a kinder, more gentle season, and quietly wondered if she could trust it to bring the world back to life. She wondered about every little thing she could see from where she was sitting, nothing more than a passive observer of a still and silent world, until the sun began to rise. A clear and silent call that it was time she returned, though she already knew that no one would be waiting for her in her nest of feathers.