Brick's Moonstone Journey

Dennis lay in his den, head resting on his paws. He wasn't sleeping, of course. The baying of dogs, whether they were real or just figment of his imagination, was keeping him up. Just as well, he supposed. He had a moonstone in... Ah, now. He got to his feet with a sigh, tiredly taking the two herb bundles he'd prepared and limping over to the apprentices' den. Tonight's apprentice was... Unconventional, to say the least. For one, she was considerably older than the other apprentices. Additionally, she'd been an Asylum cat. He hadn't been around for the horrors of the Asylum, but he felt a pang of sympathy for the poor she-cat. It must have been horrible being a part of it, from what he'd heard about it.

He nudged Brick gently. "Time for your Moonstone, you ready?" He ate his own bitter herbs and waited right outside the den.

Brick awoke a big groggily, her fur plastered to the side of her face from where she slept. Her moonstone..? She didn't have anything like that, did she? She sat up, confused as to why the healer had come to call for her, thinking hard. 'Moonstone? What does he me- oh! The Moonstone.' She shook out her bare tortoiseshell fur, grooming it down before putting on her hare pelt. The little herb packet stared at her. She had to eat it. In two swift bites it was down but despite holding her breath, she could still taste it in the back of her throat. Blegh. Now all ready to go, she exited the den to meet with the rather odd-looking tom. "I'm ready, Mr. Dennis!" She stood facing the camp exit, excited and nervous at the same time. They'd have to avoid the dogs and Twolegs on their way there and back, and she wasn't even sure StarClan would see her when they got there. She was raised an Asylum cat. Would they... would they be angry that she was trying to be a proper RiverClan cat after everything that happened?

Dennis smiled at the use of 'Mr'. It was mostly a foreign word to him, but he understood the intention and it made him chuckle quietly. Now that both he and Brick had eaten their herbs, Dennis began to limp out of camp and beckoned the young she-cat to follow.

Dennis sighed with relief as they neared Mothermouth. Another day not being jumped by dogs was a great day (though he refused to think about the way back, which was equally likely to be disturbed by the beasts). "Alright, stay close. The tunnel's dark- though I suppose you're old enough that you can navigate things like that on your own... For my sake, though, please stay close." He smiled weakly at Brick. Even this far away from the horrid things, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was a dog hiding just around the corner. He pressed a little closer to Brick in the tunnel than he usually would.

It was a minute or two before they got to the Moonstone, but once they did Dennis sat down and most of the stress left his body. He could relax here. StarClan, untrustworthy as they could be, probably wouldn't allow dogs into a sacred place like this. Probably. "We're here! Whenever you're ready, press your nose against it. We have all night, so take your time."

Struck dumb with awe at the sight of Mothermouth, Brick simply nodded at Dennis’ request to stick close as they picked their way through the darkness. She quickly noticed even through her pelt how much warmth the tom radiated, perhaps due to his lack of much fur. Her mind drifted as he led her down what seemed to be the right path. ‘Does he get cold easily? I should make him a pelt so he doesn’t freeze in Leafbare. Would that be weird? Would that be insulting?’ She frowned, quite deep in her own strange train of thoughts, when they suddenly turned a corner and came face-to-face with a blinding light. All she could do was squint until her eyes adjusted. She was about to ask if they’d gotten turned around for so long they were outside in the daytime, until it finally became clear. This was the Moonstone. “Wow!” She let out a meow of wonder as she approached. As far as rocks went, this one was pretty cool!

---

After some time, Brick found herself waking up in… the middle of nowhere. Baffling. She looked around expecting to see or smell anything familiar, but there wasn’t a single thing. Nothing but trees and reeds and streams she didn’t know the path of. And indeed as she looked upon herself, even her beloved hare pelt was missing. “Ack!” The apprentice shrunk down and scurried into a clump of water weeds. She couldn’t be seen like this! It was indecent! At this point she’d put two and two together - although it had taken a bit longer than most - and determined that this was StarClan. Either that or she was having a very strange lucid dream. Her nose picked up on the smell of another cat nearby. That wasn’t right. Why did they smell familiar? She peeked her head out ever so slightly, ever so warily, trying to catch a glimpse of who it might be, and her jaw dropped.

“Mr. C-“ She corrected herself quickly before she’d even finished. “…Mr. Snowflight?”

For being the birthplace of the Righteous Few, StarClan was pretty boring most days. Snowflight spent his time fishing. Today (or tonight, whichever it was) was no different. He had just tossed yet another star-speckled fish onto the growing pile beside him when something in the air shifted. A scent from nearby, RiverClan and alive—and, he realized as he raised his muzzle to the air, faintly familiar. He pushed himself up in time to hear something from his right side—and stopped in his tracks. His mismatched eyes went wide. Though he didn’t recognize the mottled face poking out of the weeds, he knew that voice. Moreover, he knew exactly what that voice had been about to say.

“Brick?!”

In death as in life, Snowflight refused to care about anything Asylum. But Brick had seen him slip through the ice, terror on his face, limbs frozen by shock as much as cold until everything went dark. It was only fair he got to learn her name in return. He might have learned more as he lingered over RiverClan, pacing unseen among his Clanmates when he could reach and among the stars above them when he couldn’t—but then there had been a scuffle in ThunderClan, and he had left his homeland’s skies to watch one of his dearest friends get torn to ribbons.

Not that it mattered, now. “What—how—” Snowflight continued to sputter, his plume of a tail casting stars as it lashed back and forth. Finally, he wrestled a single coherent thought from the storm. “Where’s the hare?” He shook himself from head to tail, and jostled a better question loose in the process. “What are you doing here?”

Her mouth opened and closed like a gaping fish. It was Mr. Cool Eyes , er, Mr. Snowflight. This cat looked, smelled, and sounded like him, so it must be him. He seemed about as bewildered as she was. Where was her pelt? Oh, talking to another cat without her hare made her ears flush pink. She frowned and shyly took a step further back into the reeds. “I don’t- I don’t know where it is, I think I fell asleep with it on, but it was gone when I came here! Please don’t look at me!” This was embarrassing.

She couldn’t quite look Snowflight in the eye to answer his actual question. “Mr. Dennis brought me to the Moonstone so I could talk to StarClan. I didn’t think it would actually work.” There was a moment of silence before she realized what that sounded like. “It wasn’t that I don’t believe in StarClan, of course I do! It’d be even harder not to believe now that you’re here. I was scared - I was afraid StarClan wouldn’t let me in. Because I was Asylum.” She looked down at the ground and scuffed her paws. “I can’t undo what Captain Lyralei and the others - or even what my sister - did to RiverClan. But I want to try anyway. I want to be a warrior.” Brick looked sheepishly up at the white tom. Was that too much? Did it sound insincere?

Now that she thought about it, that was extremely rude. She couldn’t even save Snowflight when he fell in the water, how could she think she could help heal the scars of war RiverClan got from the very cats who raised her? What a stupid thing to say. “I’m - I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It doesn’t feel right when I couldn’t do anything for you.” Her ears flattened with shame. Stupid Brick.

Though he remembered the limp hare-skin being…unnerving, its absence was somehow worse. “Okay, okay—” Snowflight averted his eyes as Brick huddled into the weeds. It just felt right. He took her answer as his cue to glance back at her. (A bunch of starry water weeds were still a far cry from Brick’s usual pelt, but at this point he’d take even the tiniest step toward normalcy.) So she’d made it to the Moonstone. Stars, how much had he missed? Letting “Mr. Dennis”—an outsider’s name if he’d ever heard one—pass without comment, Snowflight tilted his head with the open skepticism of a cat who’d never not believed in StarClan. It faded into a frown as Brick backpedaled. He couldn’t blame her for being afraid; the StarClan he’d grown up with were awfully judgmental.

She continued, and he kept his mouth shut, eyes narrowed, good ear angled forward to make sure he didn’t miss anything. “I want to be a warrior.” Snowflight should’ve scoffed at it. But though he scrutinized her face, her posture, searching for the cat who’d pinned him down as Asylum stormed into his home and held claws to his Clanmates’ necks, she sounded…sincere. Her belief in StarClan, her desire to fix things… Even the apology seemed real. And she was here. Dreaming her way to Silverpelt like any warrior-to-be.

Maybe Brick was just too strange to hate. Whatever the reason, he found the suspicion within him giving way. “That wasn’t your fault.” Yes, Asylum deserved to drown in the blood on their paws; yes, their presence had played a part in why he’d walked onto the river that day—but they hadn’t killed him. Brick certainly hadn’t. It had stung when he’d first realized that, and it stung again now. Snowflight gave a not-wholly-unaffected shrug anyway. “No one goes through warrior training without learning about thin ice. I got mouse-brained, and I fell through. Not much anybody could’ve done about that.

“Here’s the thing: You’re not going to redeem Asylum for us.” No point in dancing around that. He couldn’t forgive them, and he hadn’t even lived long enough to see things get worse. “But you don’t need to. You’re not them anymore—you’re what you do. If you want to be a warrior—” Raising a forepaw to give it a swift lick, Snowflight shrugged again. “Put the work in, and you’ll get there. Ivystar wouldn’t let you stay unless she wanted to give you a fair shot at it.” That, he was certain of.