Some character art from @dividedskiesrp! Blizzardstep, Hailfeather, Dipperwing, and Lavenderstar. Divided Skies is open now for applications! GO GO GO GO!
styofa doing anything
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

★
i don't do bad sauce passes
Claire Keane
DEAR READER
NASA

titsay
Show & Tell
Today's Document
todays bird
Jules of Nature
One Nice Bug Per Day
$LAYYYTER
Cosimo Galluzzi
cherry valley forever
Sweet Seals For You, Always
KIROKAZE
occasionally subtle
Three Goblin Art
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@kudossi
Some character art from @dividedskiesrp! Blizzardstep, Hailfeather, Dipperwing, and Lavenderstar. Divided Skies is open now for applications! GO GO GO GO!
Cougarfall, Bearfeather, and Elkheart from @dividedskiesrp! Cougarfall and Elkheart are both BriarClan adoptables. Divided Skies is open now for applications!!
Lavenderstar's reaction if you don't apply for this opening of @dividedskiesrp. Go go go go!
@salmonstar's Tallstorm from @dividedskiesrp, which is currently open for applications! Go apply!!
we're excited to announce that DIVIDED SKIES is opening for our sixth wave of applications!
our focus this time is primarily on adoptables for a mini-event to help introduce new players to the group. alongside this, there are some non plot-related adoptables, and the ability to create OCs based on some pre-established connections to help integrate into the Clans!
the mini-event will be focused on cats who receive visions by StarClan to join together for a brief quest, spread across the Clans to encourage a sense of unity despite the ongoing and past struggles the Clans have been facing in recent moons.
our selection of adoptables — both questing adopts as well as some unrelated to the plot — and offered connections for OC creation can be found here! (to be transparent, we will be prioritising applications submitted for our mini-plot adoptables!)
applications can be submitted here and will close at 11:59 PM CST on December 27th, 2025. we can't wait to meet you!
Hope to see you there!! <3
the sun always rises
She plunges into the starlit water, Silverpelt given form. It swirls around her, licking at her fur and splashing over her spine and against her skull. It is not wet, this water-that-is-not; her blasphemy leaves her dry as she wades deeper, her paws set upon their path.
The blood clings, angry, to her skin; there’s a perverse sort of pleasure in this, bringing filthy, unclean consequences to the dead. StarClan is beyond such trifles, or so they think; they believe themselves incapable of such inhumane acts as killing. Instead, they sit curled in their nests of stars and dispense judgment to those whose paths were not so unlike theirs, in their own lives.
Hypocrites.
She ducks her blood-covered muzzle into the pool, claws curling with grim satisfaction as the stars seem to writhe away, leaving the evidence of her crime in their wake. And hadn’t they drawn blood, once? Hadn’t they fought for their Clans, hadn’t they made mistakes, hadn’t they slit throats and cut open stomachs? Hadn’t they once been what they now condemn?
So feel it, those of you who think you are high and mighty and untouchable, she curses at the disturbed surface of earth-brought sky. Feel the mind given body, the ichor that spells life or death. Let it be ash amongst stars, soot smothering light. May you remember that you once lived, too; may you remember the trials of your days here walking the earth instead of the heavens.
The blood boils against her skin. The Moonpool is achingly, brutally cold, even though it’s not the icy water of leafbare that it should be. No, she is standing in a scraping of stars, unfeeling and frigid with distance. They had the capacity for warmth, or so she’d been taught, but what did kithood stories matter now? There is drying blood flaking from her muzzle; it is caked against her chest and clotting in her claws, and she feels nothing at all.
There have been times where she’s wondered if she was destined for hatred, born to it like her brothers were born to starlight and her mother and aunt and grandfather were born to walk in sunlight. The night embraces her and her paths, the cold dark wanderings of a lonely soul.
There’s a body behind her, positioned just so to let the blood from his wound pour into the Moonpool. It’ll be gone by sunhigh, taken somewhere no one will ever find it; or, if they did, not until it was bone and scraps of shriveled-up flesh.
Never let it be said that she doesn’t plan, doesn’t execute, doesn’t think.
What will her father say to her if he finds out that his little thinker had thought up a murder all on her own? That she’d brought the corpse into the Clans’ most sacred place, that even now she dared StarClan to intervene? “Smite me!” she commands aloud, baring bloody fangs to the sky. “Or can you? All that wisdom—all that power cats think you command,” she laughs, “and you can’t do anything, can you? You can’t even cover the moon! Go on,” she grins at the full moon above her, the cloudless sky evidence of mistaken power. “Do it!”
She turns in circles in the pool, laughing incredulously. “You control no sky but your own,” she realizes. “And even that—ha, even there can you control your own borders? Any cats who don’t worship your light? Is he” — and she gestures explosively to the corpse, whose eyes she hadn’t even bothered to close — “among you now? Traitors, hypocrites, this whole system—”
She breaks off. She can’t feel her paws anymore; the feeling of cold-heat-cold has left them, leaving nothing in their wake. Such limited power for such absolute control. “Powers that the stars know not,” she murmurs, and turns another circle. “Or powers that the stars have never had? Could never have?”
Her fur feels damp in places. She glances up, startled; more time has passed than she had thought, and light has begun to seep through the gaps in stone and between the cover of bare branches. So StarClan can’t hold the power for long enough, even, to make it to the day, she thinks, the implications bringing her to a halt in the steadily warming water. The starlight can’t cool what it can’t see, and hazy clouds of red — the blood washing from dirtied paws — begin to rise in the pool. Feeling bold, she rinses her muzzle in the water, wiping her face roughly with a paw to be rid of the blood. It would always be here, now, in this chosen space, in this sacred place. She glances to the body; the red of its blood is a mire against the formerly-clear not-water, and she revels in it, the knowledge that StarClan can’t control even this. Weak, pathetic, powerless Hollyleaf; weak, pathetic, powerless StarClan. “We’re not so different,” she says to the water as the starlight continues to fade. “Will you ever admit it? I doubt it, but—” she breaks off, tilts her head, and does something she hasn’t dared to since she was six moons old, bright-eyed and so desperate to be important. She drinks from the cold, bloodied waters of the pool. Immediately, shapes begin to form around her, but they’re watered-down, weak in the growing sunlight, and they’re contaminated — red like the blood she’s spilling into them. Their expressions are a mix — outrage, disbelief, downright fear; confusion, disgust, interest. She smiles at them, watches as they waver and try to remain even as daylight begins to streak through low-lying branches. “Nothing to say?” she goads, and gestures to the bloodless corpse. Only the barest trickle of fluid leaks from him now. “He’s not much for speaking, either, I’m afraid.” The spirits flicker. Whether it’s from her statement or the blood in the water or the predator in their holy space or the sun itself rising, she doesn’t know.
What have you done? manages one, garbled. Her slate gray pelt wavers with every syllable.
“What you did, once,” she says easily.
Do you think we are to be trifled with? a blue-pelted molly manages.
“Hypocrite,” she accuses. What do you think this will gain you? asks another, golden-pelted.
“What did compliance ever get you, Goldenflower?”
We are not your enemy! exclaims one more, silver-pelted with a plumy tail.
“Aren’t you?” she asks, curious now. “Wasn’t StarClan your enemy, when you were alive? Haven’t you all made choices that damned you in their eyes? Weren’t you different? Weren’t you hated? Weren’t you cast aside? Weren’t you asked to do the impossible? Didn’t you die in vain?”
They’re fading rapidly now. She can’t catch their body language, much less an expression.
I hope you don’t regret this, murmurs a spotted molly, the clearest of those remaining.
She casts her gaze to the corpse and back. “What would you have done?”
A hard look. This last shade is holding on, defiant in the face of all the defilement. What you did, Brindleface admits. Seasons ago.
“Would you have regretted it?”
Yes, comes the reply. And I do regret it for you. Your life will be harder now, Hollyleaf of ThunderClan, no matter which path you tread.
“I know,” she acknowledges. “Thank you.”
What you have done cannot be undone, Brindleface says, stepping forward onto the water. It holds her; she wonders if it’s determination — something not cited in tales, but it wouldn’t be, would it? — or her son’s own blood that holds her there. What you do now cannot be washed away either.
Silence, then. Brindleface’s form fades away, leaving her alone in bloody water.
But your life is not over, the soft voice comes once more. Make it count, Hollyleaf.
The sun crests the horizon, bathing the Moonpool in light. Anything left of Brindleface is gone, now, she knows, but—
“I will,” she promises empty air, empty water, empty sky. “I will.”
The sun rises still, and she will answer it in time. The moon deserves no such mercy.
caught in a snare
@corvimalice's shiverpaw from @dividedskiesrp!
wind, terra firma, and unparted sea
A lone ThunderClan cat sat primly by the stream, gray pelt fluffed against the—oh, StarClan, not again. It was Dovepaw, her dark face pointed neatly in the direction of Hollyleaf’s patrol.
“Is that Dovepaw?” Swallowtail questioned rhetorically. Hollyleaf didn’t even bother to groan, instead waving her tail to dismiss her patrol temporarily to hunting.
Hootwhisker narrowed his eyes at her, pelt bristling. “Again, Hollyleaf?” he asked, disgust plain in his voice. “Anyone would think you’re making some sort of plot with your ThunderClan relatives.”
“Just go,” Hollyleaf sighed, feeling exhaustion creep into her bones. “Dovepaw’s a little obsessive, but she’s not dangerous.”
“If you say so, patrol leader,” intoned Leaftail, sarcasm threaded into his words like grasses into the nursery. He swept away, making sure to bump into Hollyleaf as he went.
“Yeah,” said Hootwhisker, eyes still narrowed. “If you say so.”
Hollyleaf gritted her teeth, planted her paws for Hootwhisker’s overly-aggressive nudge, and turned determinedly away, loping down the hill with an angry kind of grace. “What are you doing here?” Hollyleaf asked the wind, knowing despite their distance that Dovepaw could hear her perfectly well. “Again?”
Dovepaw opened her mouth as soon as she seemed sure Hollyleaf could hear her, bounding over the stepping-stones until she was sitting square in WindClan’s scent markers. The black she-cat was sure that the smell of the markings was overwhelming to her, but didn’t comment. She surely wasn’t going to the ThunderClan side of the stream, and the annoying furball deserved all of the sensory overload she got in another Clan’s territory. “Hollyleaf! I’ve been waiting ages!”
“Anyone would think you’re defecting,” Hollyleaf mewed caustically. “Or spying for WindClan. Or trying to get me to spy for ThunderClan.”
“You know me better than that,” Dovepaw said, seemingly offended.
“And whose fault is that?” Hollyleaf shot back. “I’m a WindClan cat. I have been since you were a kit. What do you think they think, seeing me here talking to you? Do they think I’m loyal, Dovepaw? Do they?”
“Oh,” Dovepaw mewed, voice wavering. “I’m really sorry, Hollyleaf, I am, but — I just need your advice about the prophecy. You’ve got to help me, please. Jayfeather just scowls, and Lionblaze is dragging his tail in the mud again, mooning after Cinderheart, and I can’t do this alone, I jus—”
“You need to understand something,” Hollyleaf interrupted, feeling her hackles rise along her back. “I am not part of the prophecy. I am not your mentor or your confidante. I’m not even your Clanmate. I spent half my life chasing that fool's errand, and I refuse to spend any more time trying to save ThunderClan when StarClan has decreed that to be your job.”
“I never asked for it!” Dovepaw protested, claws curling in the soft streambank mud.
“Then what makes you think that I did?” Hollyleaf’s meow had lost her previous vitriol; she could taste the bitterness in her mouth, sharp as Ashfur’s blood. She’d wanted to be important, but it had turned out that she never had been. Not to ThunderClan, not to WindClan, not to anyone. She could feel the weight in her chest, pressing dangerously down until she could barely feel the earth beneath her. Dovepaw was speaking, but Hollyleaf couldn’t hear her; all she could hear was blood rushing through her ears, drowning everything else out. “You need to go.”
“Go? But Hollyleaf, we’re family—”
Despite herself, a pang shot through Hollyleaf’s chest. Dovepaw was so young, so alone. What would have happened, if WindClan hadn’t made their claim? Could they have been as close as sisters, sharing everything? Could the prophecy have been for Hollyleaf, too, or had she ruined it before Dovepaw’s birth, when she’d clamped her teeth around Ashfur’s throat, feeling the life drain out of him? Had she been born special at all, or was she the leftover, the one to be scrapped and sold? “Go,” she said, harsher now. “Or I’ll make you.”
Dovepaw backed away, head lowered. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And then she ran, disappearing into the cover of ThunderClan’s trees, the wide oaks sheltering her from the breeze of the moor and from Hollyleaf’s eyes, staring after her with something like regret.
Not my Gathering, Hollyleaf thought to herself desperately, digging her claws ever deeper into the muddy streambank, not my mouse-brains. But still, part of her wanted to chase Dovepaw into the treeline, wanted to sit her down and talk until the sun set, wanted to go back with her to ThunderClan camp, to the dappled shade and high stone walls—
But she couldn’t. There was no sense in dreaming — there was no going back, only going forward with what she had. With a sigh, Hollyleaf heaved herself to her paws, staring helplessly into the forest. Oh, Dovepaw. I’m so sorry. This weight shouldn’t be yours to bear.
lost under the weight and the earth of an age
Drowning a cat takes time, Jayfeather knows. It's a lot like suffocation — cats don't realize how much time it takes for the remaining oxygen to cycle through the blood. But Jayfeather knows. Dripping wet as he is, Jayfeather can almost picture the way Ashfur's struggles slow — can hear when they stop entirely. Even then, when the water has entered the lungs... even once the death throes stop, there are ways to revive the victim.
Squirrelflight steps away, panting roughly. Jayfeather hears the drip-drip-drip of her pelt. He knows he has little time before there's no saving Ashfur.
"Well?" Squirrelflight asks, her threads ragged and pulled apart.
Jayfeather's paws twitch instinctively toward Ashfur. It's a conscious decision not to move. "Was it a lie?" he asks instead of answering.
Squirrelflight doesn't respond, working now to free Lionblaze from the fox trap, freeing Hollyleaf's torn, blood-slicked paws. "Would he have modeled it after Hawkfrost?" she murmurs nonsensically. "We were all there, weren't we? All of us."
"Answer his question," Lionblaze demands, jaw finally freed enough to speak.
Squirrelflight laughs. It's a bitter thing. "I thought about saying something when you were given your names," she says, voice clipped. "But what would that have done? No, it wasn't a lie. I didn't bear any of you. Not you, not Jayfeather, not Hollyleaf. But I raised you, and loved you. You are my kits. It doesn't matter to me that I didn't carry you. Why would it—why would it matter?" she asks brokenly. "And then for you to — plot murder—"
"I had to," Hollyleaf manages, her voice a rough whisper, fear-certainty-terror. A spike of alarm — Lionblaze’s — twists Jayfeather’s own gut. He wishes he could silence it, sometimes, the emotions from his siblings, like he’s able to with everyone else. Squirrelflight is silent. Her breaths are still uneven, but there’s a creeping heartbreak to them, something betrayed. "You had to," Squirrelflight repeats, exhaustion creeping into her tone. "As if you could surprise him? As if he still wouldn’t be hunting you, waiting for you—"
"She didn't do anything wrong!" Lionblaze snaps, and those words were something like treason, Jayfeather thinks, but he can't bring himself to care.
"Don't you think I know that?" Squirrelflight answers. Her emotions are brittle, embittered, long-since-burned. "This has nothing to do with Hollyleaf — or maybe everything," she sighs. She takes a deep breath; Jayfeather hears her claws scrape through mud and into the stones on the bank as she tries to center herself. "I'm not angry with you. I never have been. I was angry with—" she stops. "It doesn't matter that it was a lie — I've taken care of you for your entire lives. There's nothing more important to me than you." You’re lucky I was here goes unsaid. So does the idea that she had spent the interim between fire and water watching them, watching out for them, as she always had.
Hollyleaf shivers bodily. She smells of blood and desperation, his stranger of a sibling, the first to plot against Ashfur and the last anyone would have expected. Who would suspect rule-abiding Hollyleaf to stoop so low? No—Lionblaze had to be the first to die, didn’t he? Trusting, naïve Lionblaze — it had been easy to lure him here under promises of reconciliation and then into the loop of a fox trap.
They’d been lucky, stars-blessed lucky-lucky-lucky, that Ashfur had underestimated the blind sibling and overestimated the strong-but-fractured morality of the other.
And that he’d forgotten — perhaps had never known, for all he professed to love her — Squirrelflight’s sharp intellect, her unflinching loyalty, the way she’d do anything to protect those she loved.
Ice begins to settle in Jayfeather's veins. There’s something he’s missing here, that they’re all missing. Not right, not right, not right, his brain screams at him, drowning out the rush of the stream with the rush of his own blood. Squirrelflight's words ring of truth, but Ashfur is dead. The threat is gone. Isn’t it? "Who are you angry with?" he asks, barely able to hear his own voice.
"Who did bear us?" Lionblaze demands in the same breath.
Squirrelflight shifts, surprise in the motion. Jayfeather has the sense that this is all unraveling — what Jayfeather has long known as the image of his mother twists and untwists as if it were a storm, lashing and boiling and tearing asunder. "Is it even mine to tell?" she asks distantly. "Does it even matter? Ashfur is dead. No one will ever know," she says, harsh the way she's never been with them. She pushes a paw against Ashfur's corpse; Jayfeather can't see it, but he feels the connection — flesh against dead, cooling flesh — in his bones.
"Of course it matters," Hollyleaf asserts, voice gone high and reedy. "We couldn’t have been born rogues — Firestar wouldn’t have turned away kits, no matter where they came from. The Clan would have taken us in, and Ferncloud and Daisy would have raised us, and we would have been just as welcome as Mousewhisker and Berrynose and Hazeltail. There was—there wouldn’t have been a reason—”
"ThunderClan takes in kittypets and loners, too," Jayfeather agrees slowly. "What would have made you so afraid for us that you'd claim us as your own?"
Something in Squirrelflight splits open. The emotions catch Jayfeather like a monster might catch a rabbit — he's slammed backwards with suppressed ambition, with lonely nights and rage at the stars, with duty replaced steadily by affection, with the amount she loves them, enough to fill a lake of its own.
Jayfeather could have drowned in it and been at peace. But he has a duty here — an obligation. To himself, to Lionblaze, to Hollyleaf — to this prophecy hanging like a falling tree above them, anchored to the forest floor by only a few, weak roots.
Squirrelflight is speaking, he knows, but it doesn't matter. With how much pain spills from her, unabated like the stream trying to catch and pull at Ashfur's body, it isn't hard to fall into her memories.
Some truths, once known, can never be unknown.
The stars shine down on them, just as cold and unfeeling as they are in Squirrelfight's best and worst memories.
"Why?" Squirrelflight asks him, and the fractures throughout her body spread, spread, spread, until she is more broken than whole.
Some truths should never be known.
no one else to blame
“You don’t want to do this,” Leafpool says, certainty in her tone. There’s no pleading, no bargaining, no hesitation. You don’t want to do this, she’d said, and she believed it.
“Don’t want—don’t want to do this? After everything? After being lied to all our lives, you think I don’t want to do this?” she asks. “What do you know?” “I know that the Gathering didn’t make it better,” the stranger in front of her replies, even though the question hadn’t been meant for an answer. “I know that it’s too late for me, but—Hollyleaf, my precious daughter, it’s not too late for you.”
“I am not—” Hollyleaf breaks off, panting heavily. There’s drool running down one side of her muzzle; she wipes it viciously with the back of her paw, feeling the droplets scatter from it and onto the ground beneath. “—your daughter.”
Something cracks behind Leafpool’s eyes. “No,” she agrees finally. “You're not, are you?”
Silence, heavy as stone. “I could have been,” Hollyleaf says finally. The words pain her. "If you'd wanted."
“I did want,” Leafpool replies, voice soft. She hesitates, and then: “I wanted to be a healer more. This Clan needed a healer more.”
A fresh wave of anger crashes over Hollyleaf’s pelt. “So why did you do it?” she demands harshly. “Why couldn’t you have just done your duty? Why, then, did you break your Code?”
Another moment passes in silence. Then, bitter amusement rises from Leafpool’s pelt, acrid and choking. “Do you think StarClan would have been content with that?” she asks. “Do you really?”
“I—” Hollyleaf starts, and then stops. Her chin hits her chest. Each deep, heaving breath is shallower than the last, and her heart races, blood cycling into and away from her paws. Run, run, her pulse commands. It's getting harder and harder to ignore. The stone above her seems to be pressing down, down, down. “You’ll be banished, won’t you?”
Nothing.
“You’re going to die, aren’t you?”
Again, nothing.
“Speak to me, damn you!”
A laugh. “Haven’t you damned me already?”
“It was your choice—you—” she breaks off. The cat before her is young — horribly, terribly so. She had been younger than Hollyleaf was now when she had borne them, hadn’t she? Led by StarClan into a decision that had killed her mentor, had made her give up her kits, would see her be thrown away like crowfood after a hot greenleaf day.
Leafpool sighs. “That wasn’t fair of me,” she murmurs. “For what it’s worth — I forgive you. I know I don’t have the right, but—I want you to know that. After I’m gone, I mean. I don’t blame you. I won’t blame you.”
“Why not?” Hollyleaf demands. Her blood still sings from standing in front of the Gathering, from spilling the truth like one might relieve the pressure of bad blood from an infected wound. “I doomed you.”
An amused sort of exhale. “I was doomed a long time ago,” Leafpool refutes. “Long before any of this. Long before you or your brothers. And… despite it all, I can't regret it. Any of it.”
Hollyleaf makes a disbelieving noise in the back of her throat. “What kind of reason could you possibly have?” she asks. “Why wouldn’t you regret all of it, every bit?”
“You,” Leafpool replies simply. “You aren’t mine, not in the way I wanted or dreamed, but—” She pauses. “It was enough, to see you grow up happy. To see you grow up loved.”
She’s going to be banished. She’s going to die, and it will be Hollyleaf’s fault.
“Lionblaze and I—we could teach you,” Hollyleaf suggests, the weight of what she’s done drying her mouth and locking her joints. I’ve killed her, she thinks, wild and desperate and breaking. “Hunting, fighting. Enough for you to survive.”
Leafpool sighs, but the sound is fond. “I have been a medic from the moment I could want,” she says. “I have lived as one, and I will die as one. No training can help me now. It will only hinder you, and hurt your brothers’ futures. Do you understand?”
Hollyleaf feels her face contorts. No efforts to smooth it seem to quite succeed. “You’re throwing yourself into the fox trap,” she accuses.
“I threw you first,” Leafpool says, and the grief in that sentence is the sun-drown-place as Squirrelflight had described it in kithood — vast and powerful and oh-so-blue, stretching far beyond the horizon. “I made a choice, then. I had no idea what refusing StarClan would bring — what could I do? I obeyed. I wish every day that I hadn’t, but when we realized Jayfeather was blind… what if their wrath had fallen on you or Lionblaze, too? You were — you were kits, not even halfway to your sixth moon—”
“You were barely an adult,” Hollyleaf counters, realization coating the words with an invisible, rancid kind of blood. Her voice is a hollow sort of thing, tinny and quiet. “I want to forgive you for what you’ve done,” she admits, and crushes the red berries beneath her paw, scrubbing the useless poison into the stone, “but I don’t know how.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
Silence.
“I love you,” Leafpool says. “I know that’s hard to hear, especially from me, but it’s true. Look after your mother, won’t you? And your brothers — will you tell them, too? That I love them?”
Ice wars with fire inside her chest. “If it’s what’s best for them,” she chokes out.
“Thank you.”
Hollyleaf has had seasons to forget her birth mother, if she’d ever remembered at all. She does not remember brown tabby fur or a white belly, does not remember curling next to her to sleep, does not remember her as anything but an aunt, overly-concerned but distant all the same.
But she does remember Squirrelflight. She remembers how her mother taught her the hunter’s crouch, showed her how to stalk across the ground until she — as a kit! — could ambush any of the apprentices with ease. She remembers how she calmed her during thunderstorms, how she participated in playfights, how she rolled her eyes as Dustpelt taught them the warrior code.
She can feel Squirrelflight’s steadying paws beside hers, can feel the ghost of her whiskers as the cat who raised her whispered I’m proud of you after every meaningless accomplishment. She can remember so clearly how fiercely Squirrelflight had protected them, fought for them, loved them all their lives.
She knows with every certainty in the world that Squirrelflight will be there for her until her dying breath, and Hollyleaf loves her with a fierceness not unlike the all-consuming sensation of battle, her veins singing as she swears her loyalty to the forest again and again with each drop of her own blood spilled into the leaf litter.
Hollyleaf loves her mother, and her mother loves Leafpool. Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps loving someone is enough to love someone else in turn. And so—
“I’m not doing this for you,” Hollyleaf whispers, and slips silently from the den and into the night.
and I know old heavinesses shake you
He feels Squirrelflight sit down beside him. For a long moment, neither cat says anything.
Finally, Squirrelflight sighs. "Your great-aunt's name was Spottedleaf," she says quietly. "She was Sandstorm's sister. She died—was killed—when Sandstorm was still an apprentice."
Jayfeather feels irritation spark in his chest, warring away at the numbness. "I've heard this story," he spits. "Featherwhisker died young, Spottedleaf died young, Cinderpelt died young, and now Leafpool has died young. Are you here to discuss my mortality or do you want to leave me in peace?"
He feels anger rise like licking flame in Squirrelflight’s chest before his deputy — his mother, his mentor's sister — snuffs it out as easily as one might trap a leaf between their paws. Jayfeather wonders, in a vague sort of way, how many times Squirrelfight has had to do that in her life — the smothering.
(He wonders if Squirrelflight was angry after Hollyleaf's death not because she was angry at her but because her life had been wasted, taken away, never given the chance to get better, to be truer. Jayfeather himself can only remember an all-encompassing rage tempered by desperate sorrow.)
"I don't see how guarding Leafpool's body could be peaceful," Squirrelflight comments.
"I'm not doing that!"
A wisp of amusement. "Leafpool would tell you not to blame yourself. She'd say she made her choice."
Jayfeather shifts. "She would? Not you?"
Squirrelflight is silent again. "Leafpool wasn’t only my sister," she says. "She was my closest friend. But—the stories won’t tell you that. To the elders — those now and to come — Leafpool was a tree in a forest. There will always be healers."
"Not to you," Jayfeather acknowledges.
Squirrelflight lets out a breath. "Leafpool was my sister. Cinderpelt was like an aunt. Yellowfang was her second mother, and Firestar’s beside — a grandmother I never got to meet. You are my son. It has never not been personal."
"Healers don't get to keep family." A pause. "Leafpool tried."
He can almost feel Squirrelflight’s gaze burning into his pelt. "I know," his mother says. "I know," she repeats, sagging. "I wish—" she stops, and Jayfeather knows exactly why.
(There is treason in the next word, left hanging in thin, desperate air.)
divide what's memory and what's dream
Hollytuft dreamed of ThunderClan camp, of trees arching over carved-out rock and of a trickling, shining stream. The water was winding its way through camp, glistening brilliantly under the midday sun; she was reminded, viscerally, of the lake at first sight, of the WindClan stream churning white from stormwater.
She followed the stream languidly, stepping forward and back over the twisting water with a purr, and stopped at her leisure to pick lavender, so deep purple it was nearly black. So concentrated was she on the stream, on the delicate scent of lavender in her nostrils, that she didn't quite realize the water’s shine had faded until storm clouds had clumped aggressively overhead. It was a swirling, angry mire, blocking out the sun entirely; when she looked around, shadow had fallen deep over camp, as if day had suddenly given way to night.
Fear set in quickly, turning her bones to ice; she tried desperately to move, but felt her head bowing almost against her will, bringing her gaze down to the stream. It was much darker now, running over her paws in a warm, sluggish current; she pulled her paws from it, screeching madly into the darkened camp, but no one came to her aid.
The trees, stripped of their greenleaf-broad leaves, swayed dangerously in a cold, sodden breeze; the dens crumbled where they stood, revealing piles of old, stripped bones. They were white, almost blindingly so—bleached by a sun that was no longer there, replaced by storm clouds so dark they couldn’t be distinguished from nothingness.
Hollytuft began to run, sliding along the bloody stream in her haste—she had to leave, had to retreat, couldn’t stay—there was something desperately wrong here, in this destroyed ravine, but as she ran, she realized she wasn’t moving anywhere at all. Her paws moved, yes; the blood churned with her steps, yes; but she didn’t leave the bones behind, didn’t escape the encroaching dens. And yet the stream bent and flowed, leading her onward until she had to come to a screeching halt, blood splashing at her underbelly and sides.
The blood trail, the stream, ended at a black-furred form, hauntingly familiar, and at once Hollytuft realized that this solution—this source—should have been obvious. The origin of the stream was what had once been a throat, but now was ribbons of flesh and blood and tacky, clumping fur. The cat was obviously dead, with rot beginning to creep into its tail and paws; it was sprawled underneath the high ledge, and the ground underneath its throat was stained a deep, horrible, blackened crimson.
This area was much deeper a shade than what formed the stream, as if blood had been pouring into this particular spot for countless seasons, collecting and coagulating and staining. Even as Hollytuft watched, the corpse seemed to degrade further, dust gathering in its joints and the flesh around its face fragmenting, pulling steadily away.
She stepped forward, cautiously, to a point next to the body’s head—when, pulled by a force she couldn’t name, she leaned down to lay the sprig of lavender on the dead cat’s fatal wound. And—the body shifted, its jaw unhinging. Hollytuft startled back, a yowl pressing at the back of her throat, and met clouded, intelligent green eyes. What will you do? the hollow eyes asked. Who will you be?
And then the corpse—and the hollow—crumbled quickly into dust.
VERY late posting this (first ever!) Artfight attack here on tumblr (and I'm only going back and posting my divided skies art because dev asked me to)!
This is squiingus's character Sparkwhisker of StormClan!
ALSO YOU SHOULD GO JOIN THE RP THIS CHARACTER IS PART OF OVER AT @dividedskiesrp! OPEN NOW GO GO GO
Artfite me irl here!
Another early Artfight attack, this time on @recaptchaai's Sorrelpaw and @regiformes's Silkstone! They're off to meet his new white baby, the result of a political litter between MistClan and BriarClan!
Intrigued? Go check out the roleplay these characters are from, @dividedskiesrp! They're currently open for their new wave and I'm not biased at ALL, OBVIOUSLY, but best roleplay ever. GO JOIN NOW GO GO GO DO IT.
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lost under the weight and the earth of an age
Drowning a cat takes time, Jayfeather knows. It's a lot like suffocation — cats don't realize how much time it takes for the remaining oxygen to cycle through the blood. But Jayfeather knows. Dripping wet as he is, Jayfeather can almost picture the way Ashfur's struggles slow — can hear when they stop entirely. Even then, when the water has entered the lungs... even once the death throes stop, there are ways to revive the victim.
Squirrelflight steps away, panting roughly. Jayfeather hears the drip-drip-drip of her pelt. He knows he has little time before there's no saving Ashfur.
"Well?" Squirrelflight asks, her threads ragged and pulled apart.
Jayfeather's paws twitch instinctively toward Ashfur. It's a conscious decision not to move. "Was it a lie?" he asks instead of answering.
Squirrelflight doesn't respond, working now to free Lionblaze from the fox trap, freeing Hollyleaf's torn, blood-slicked paws. "Would he have modeled it after Hawkfrost?" she murmurs nonsensically. "We were all there, weren't we? All of us."
"Answer his question," Lionblaze demands, jaw finally freed enough to speak.
Squirrelflight laughs. It's a bitter thing. "I thought about saying something when you were given your names," she says, voice clipped. "But what would that have done? No, it wasn't a lie. I didn't bear any of you. Not you, not Jayfeather, not Hollyleaf. But I raised you, and loved you. You are my kits. It doesn't matter to me that I didn't carry you. Why would it—why would it matter?" she asks brokenly. "And then for you to — plot murder—"
"I had to," Hollyleaf manages, her voice a rough whisper, fear-certainty-terror. A spike of alarm — Lionblaze’s — twists Jayfeather’s own gut. He wishes he could silence it, sometimes, the emotions from his siblings, like he’s able to with everyone else. Squirrelflight is silent. Her breaths are still uneven, but there’s a creeping heartbreak to them, something betrayed. "You had to," Squirrelflight repeats, exhaustion creeping into her tone. "As if you could surprise him? As if he still wouldn’t be hunting you, waiting for you—"
"She didn't do anything wrong!" Lionblaze snaps, and those words were something like treason, Jayfeather thinks, but he can't bring himself to care.
"Don't you think I know that?" Squirrelflight answers. Her emotions are brittle, embittered, long-since-burned. "This has nothing to do with Hollyleaf — or maybe everything," she sighs. She takes a deep breath; Jayfeather hears her claws scrape through mud and into the stones on the bank as she tries to center herself. "I'm not angry with you. I never have been. I was angry with—" she stops. "It doesn't matter that it was a lie — I've taken care of you for your entire lives. There's nothing more important to me than you." You’re lucky I was here goes unsaid. So does the idea that she had spent the interim between fire and water watching them, watching out for them, as she always had.
Hollyleaf shivers bodily. She smells of blood and desperation, his stranger of a sibling, the first to plot against Ashfur and the last anyone would have expected. Who would suspect rule-abiding Hollyleaf to stoop so low? No—Lionblaze had to be the first to die, didn’t he? Trusting, naïve Lionblaze — it had been easy to lure him here under promises of reconciliation and then into the loop of a fox trap.
They’d been lucky, stars-blessed lucky-lucky-lucky, that Ashfur had underestimated the blind sibling and overestimated the strong-but-fractured morality of the other.
And that he’d forgotten — perhaps had never known, for all he professed to love her — Squirrelflight’s sharp intellect, her unflinching loyalty, the way she’d do anything to protect those she loved.
Ice begins to settle in Jayfeather's veins. There’s something he’s missing here, that they’re all missing. Not right, not right, not right, his brain screams at him, drowning out the rush of the stream with the rush of his own blood. Squirrelflight's words ring of truth, but Ashfur is dead. The threat is gone. Isn’t it? "Who are you angry with?" he asks, barely able to hear his own voice.
"Who did bear us?" Lionblaze demands in the same breath.
Squirrelflight shifts, surprise in the motion. Jayfeather has the sense that this is all unraveling — what Jayfeather has long known as the image of his mother twists and untwists as if it were a storm, lashing and boiling and tearing asunder. "Is it even mine to tell?" she asks distantly. "Does it even matter? Ashfur is dead. No one will ever know," she says, harsh the way she's never been with them. She pushes a paw against Ashfur's corpse; Jayfeather can't see it, but he feels the connection — flesh against dead, cooling flesh — in his bones.
"Of course it matters," Hollyleaf asserts, voice gone high and reedy. "We couldn’t have been born rogues — Firestar wouldn’t have turned away kits, no matter where they came from. The Clan would have taken us in, and Ferncloud and Daisy would have raised us, and we would have been just as welcome as Mousewhisker and Berrynose and Hazeltail. There was—there wouldn’t have been a reason—”
"ThunderClan takes in kittypets and loners, too," Jayfeather agrees slowly. "What would have made you so afraid for us that you'd claim us as your own?"
Something in Squirrelflight splits open. The emotions catch Jayfeather like a monster might catch a rabbit — he's slammed backwards with suppressed ambition, with lonely nights and rage at the stars, with duty replaced steadily by affection, with the amount she loves them, enough to fill a lake of its own.
Jayfeather could have drowned in it and been at peace. But he has a duty here — an obligation. To himself, to Lionblaze, to Hollyleaf — to this prophecy hanging like a falling tree above them, anchored to the forest floor by only a few, weak roots.
Squirrelflight is speaking, he knows, but it doesn't matter. With how much pain spills from her, unabated like the stream trying to catch and pull at Ashfur's body, it isn't hard to fall into her memories.
Some truths, once known, can never be unknown.
The stars shine down on them, just as cold and unfeeling as they are in Squirrelfight's best and worst memories.
"Why?" Squirrelflight asks him, and the fractures throughout her body spread, spread, spread, until she is more broken than whole.
Some truths should never be known.
Initial (older, the first) round of revenges for Artfight this year! None of these characters belong to me, but I hope I did them justice!
Forestdusk
Cometshadow
Mistyblaze
Stonenotch
And, as always:
Artfite me irl here!
Very late to posting this, but here's one of my first artfight attacks this year featuring dev's character Cloversplash and basil's character Hailfeather! They're on a date <3
I'm actually not sure what either of their tumblrs are, BUT you can find them over at @dividedskiesrp, which is open NOW RIGHT NOW GO JOIN!
Artfite me irl here!