Devotion to Lilith
Your love for Lilith runs through the soul
She is so bright and glorious.
For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the dark Moon; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans
But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.
By the time they returned to camp, the sun was setting and Pantherhaze was starting to feel feverish. His vision had slightly improved but he felt so ill that he kept his eyes closed anyway. Oddstripe gave him some dandelion leaves and told him to get some sleep and Fogstalker said she was going to try and find something to cast a protection spell, whatever that meant. He thanked her anyway and eagerly went to bed.
That night was all in and out, shifting restlessly between confusing, fleeting dreams and half-wakefulness. At one point, he thought he heard Fogstalker and Slateheart arguing in whispers nearby but, by the time he woke, he wasn’t sure.
“How are you feeling?” Russetfrond asked when he managed to hobble out of the den in the late morning.
“Um…” Pantherhaze squinted around the camp. His vision had mostly returned to normal, although certain patches of grass felt like they were fuzzy, in two places at once. His paws were still clammy and despite having overslept he had very little energy.
He settled on, “I’m hanging in there.”
“Fogstalker says you got cursed?” Russetfrond said, raising a brow skeptically. “Sparrowsway says he didn’t get a good look. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Pantherhaze said genuinely. He let his vision fog as he tried to recall details about the incident. “The coyote had been scratching things on the ground and it was threatening Fogstalker and… I don’t know, I just got the feeling that it was about to do something so I threw myself in the way and then…” He frowned, his head tilting towards his shoulder, gaze falling over the blurry grass. “There was a big flash of light and I felt sick to my stomach, like I’d been thrown from a high place suddenly and, when I opened my eyes, everything was double.”
“A flash of light?” scowled Russetfrond. “No one else mentioned a flash of light.” Pantherhaze looked up to see him sheathing and unsheathing his claws in thought.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, “that’s just what I saw.”
“It’s alright,” sighed Russetfrond. “You just focus on feeling better, okay?” He gave Pantherhaze a few licks around the ears and Pantherhaze closed his eyes and sighed into the feeling. It had been a while since they’d shared tongues. He missed it.
After a moment, Russetfrond pulled away and said, “I’m off to check on the boys training but I’ll check on you when I get back, yeah?”
“Okay,” smiled Pantherhaze, shivering suddenly. Russetfrond gave him a concerned frown and touched noses with him before heading out.
Pantherhaze got breakfast, then went back to Oddstripe who confirmed that he did, in fact, still have a fever.
“Get some rest,” Oddstripe told him. “Let me know if you feel any worse, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, feeling weary and disappointed. He wanted to do something for the Clan, not be laid up in bed. Still, he reasoned that the sooner he got better, the sooner he would be back to helping out. So he went back to bed.
Fogstalker was there, lifting up the moss of his nest. “Oh! Sorry,” she said. “I was just putting a ward under your nest to help you sleep.”
“A ward -- that’s like a spell?” he asked, feeling very warm under his fur.
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, is that okay? Sorry, I should have asked.”
“It’s fine,” he said, too tired to care.
Fogstalker smiled apologetically. “Okay. I’ll hurry up.” She finished arranging poppy petals in a little circle she had drawn into the dirt. In the middle was a small pile of crushed thyme and the smell was honestly very soothing.
She dropped the moss back down and smoothed it out, then turned to him and said, “There you go. That should help you sleep peacefully. Hopefully it can flush whatever Hui-che did to you out of your system.” She winced and gave him a little, hopeful shrug.
“Thank you,” he said, moving to settle into his nest. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with the coyotes.”
“It’s alright,” Fogstalker sighed. “I don’t think I approached it right. I’ll figure it out.” She shrugged again. “Get some sleep.”
“Okay,” he said, curling up into a tight little ball. He took slow deep breaths and tried to relax and soon enough he drifted off to sleep.
---
Pantherhaze was standing in a thick, white fog, or rather a tunnel made of fog. The walls and floors and ceilings were fog, yet when he took a step forward or poked a wall with his nose it gave resistance as if it were moss instead. He opened his mouth to scent the air but the only smell was fresh water.
For lack of something better to do, he started walking. He came to a fork from which split two identical fog tunnels. He cocked his head, glanced back and forth between them, and tried a cautious, “Hello?” His voice was swallowed by the walls, leaving him in an unnerving quiet.
“Hello?” he tried again, louder this time.
Nothing. He sighed and tried to pick between the tunnels, looked over his shoulder and considered going back, when suddenly--
“Hello?” the faintest sound of a raspy voice carried down the tunnel on his left.
“Hello?” he said, ears snapping upright. He quickly made his way down the tunnel towards the voice. “Hello, there?”
“This way!” the voice was getting louder. “I’m here!” It sounded like a tom and that tom sounded relieved, elated maybe.
“I’m coming,” called Pantherhaze. He took another turn and suddenly found himself nose to nose with another cat, much sooner than he had expected given the volume of his voice. Shock hit him like a pawful of water to the face.
“Darkmoon?!” he gaped, eyes wide.
In front of him stood the former EarthClan deputy, his speckled black fur slightly rumpled and unkempt, adorned with a coating of glittering stardust. Darkmoon stared back with a naked surprise that Pantherhaze had never seen him wear when he was alive.
“Pantherhaze?” he croaked. “Oh, no. Are you dead too?”
“I- I don’t think so,” said Pantherhaze, suddenly worried. “I thought I was just having a dream.”
“A dream…” Darkmoon mumbled to himself, eyes roving erratically over the tunnel walls. Pantherhaze’s brow furrowed in concern.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Darkmoon twitched an ear dismissively. “You look solid. Not like the rest of us.” He looked Pantherhaze up and down after he said it, like he was confirming what he’d said with himself.
“The rest of us?” Pantherhaze asked. “Are we in StarClan?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Darkmoon shook his head. “Come, I’ll show you. But stay close. It’s a maze. You’ll get lost if you’re not… not careful.” His eyes flickered over the space some more, only increasing Pantherhaze’s level of concern.
Before he could say anything, Darkmoon turned around and headed deeper into the tunnel, muttering to himself. The walls seemed to swallow the words and, as Pantherhaze followed, he realized their pawsteps made no noise either. He wondered -- if this was real -- how long Darkmoon had been in these strange, silent tunnels.
“Up, here,” Darkmoon grunted beneath a tunnel that went into the ceiling and hopped up, claws shedding scraps of cloud as he hoisted himself up. Pantherhaze looked down the featureless tunnel ahead of them with a growing unease in his stomach.
“Hurry up!” said Darkmoon impatiently. “Don’t get lost.”
“Right! Sorry,” Pantherhaze called with an apologetic smile and hopped up behind him.
After a few more turns, he started to hear very soft voices.
“-eventually. We have to be close to finding a way out.”
“Maybe. Or there is no way out.”
“No. No, there has to be a way out.”
Darkmoon took a right at a fork and suddenly, they were in a small, round chamber with several branching paths splitting off of it. The two cats snapped to attention as they saw him, one of them freezing where he had been pacing.
“You’re back,” he said, identifying himself as the first voice. He was a smallish, young-looking, masked brown tabby with sharp, green eyes. The cat behind him was larger and well built with a flat muzzle and white fur that made it hard to distinguish him from the wall. They both glittered with pinkish starlight. When the first tom’s eyes landed on Pantherhaze, they widened, and he added, “and with company.” Both of the toms tensed slightly.
“This is Pantherhaze,” said Darkmoon, stepping to the side to let him in. “He’s a Clan cat like me. Pantherhaze, this is Harley. That’s Twister.”
“Nice to meet you,” Pantherhaze said, slightly reeling by the sight of more cats in this strange place -- loners to boot.
“He doesn’t look dead,” observed the larger cat -- Twister.
“No,” Harley agreed, eyes narrowing calculatingly. “No, he doesn’t. What brings you to the Clouds, friend?”
Pantherhaze blinked. “The Clouds? Like literally?”
“Yes,” Darkmoon nodded. “You’re supposed to travel through them to StarClan but without our guides, we got lost.”
“Without your guides?!” Pantherhaze’s tail bristled in concern. “What happened to them?”
“They were attacked,” said Harley. “By a cat twice Twister’s size.”
“Razor,” growled Darkmoon.
“Razor?! He- Okay,” he was trying to stay on board with everything but he was learning a lot in that moment. He’d always been told that cats outside the Clans ceased to exist after death but here he was, talking to two loners who were dead about a dead rogue who had attacked their StarClan guides -- or, was it just guides? He shook his head, overwhelmed.
“He killed mine,” Darkmoon said. “Turned him to stardust in one swipe. I… I ran, like a coward.” He looked down at his paws in shame and Pantherhaze frowned sympathetically.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Harley soothed, stepping closer. “We did what we had to do.”
“Yeah,” nodded Darkmoon. “Right.” He seemed shaken, despite his attempts to calm himself.
“So how did you get here, again?” asked Twister, pulling them back on topic.
“Oh!” Pantherhaze blushed in embarrassment. “I… I’m not sure. I just went to sleep and woke up here?”
“That’s- That’s it?” frowned Harley. He wore a petulant little scowl that completely took over his face.
Twister flicked Harley with his tail who glanced at him and seemed to remember himself. He shook his head and pulled a more relaxed expression onto his face, but the calculating edge returned to his eyes. He cocked his head to the side and approached Pantherhaze to get a closer look at him.
“Are you… here? Like physically?” he asked and then, without waiting for a response, raised a paw to bat at Pantherhaze’s ears. Pantherhaze flinched backward but Harley seemed satisfied by the result. “No, look at that, I passed right through him.”
“Interesting,” frowned Twister.
“What does that mean?” Darkmoon growled, mostly to himself.
“I don’t know,” Harley squinted and began to pace again. “This is quite the puzzle…” Pantherhaze blinked a few times, completely overwhelmed by everything that was happening, but let Harley think instead of asking questions.
After a moment, the tabby stopped and asked, “How long has it been? Like what time of year is it?”
“It’s hard to tell the time here,” Darkmoon added, looking at Pantherhaze.
“Oh, uh, let’s see…” he thought aloud. “You died at the end of Newleaf, right? Now, it’s nearly Leafbare of the same year.”
Darkmoon sighed in relief, a tiredness evaporating from his eyes. “Not too long then.”
“Leafbare,” Harley frowned, “which season is that?”
“Uh, the one with snow,” Pantherhaze offered, and Harley nodded seriously.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let me think.” There was a long stretch of quiet where Harley paced and muttered to himself, his voice being soaked into the clouds around them, and the others sat and watched.
Eventually, Harley said, “Okay. I think we just don’t have enough information. What we need is for you to try and figure out how to get back here again and see if we can learn something about it when you do. Until then, we keep trying to map the tunnels and see if we can figure anything out on our own.”
Twister rolled his eyes. “Great, so the same as always.” Harley’s tail rippled angrily and he pressed his mouth into a thin line as if he were trying to resist a scowl which seemed to amuse Twister greatly. Pantherhaze glanced awkwardly at Darkmoon but the former deputy was frowning at the floor, lost in thought.
Harley spoke again. “Does that sound like something you can do, uh…”
“Pantherhaze.”
“Yes,” Harley smiled. “Panther Haze. Do you think that you can try and help us out?”
“Sure,” Pantherhaze said, straightening up with the responsibility. “I mean, I’ll try.”
Harley’s smile flattened slightly in frustration but he nodded. “Well, I suppose that’s all we can ask for.”
“StarClan,” Darkmoon said.
“What?” Harley’s ear twitched as he raised a brow.
“You have to tell StarClan,” said Darkmoon, looking up at Pantherhaze. “The River of Stars. Someone has to let them know we’re here, maybe they can find us.”
Harley shifted awkwardly. “Maybe… We don’t know what they would do to Twister and I.”
Pantherhaze frowned and took a step closer. “They won’t do anything to you, I’m sure. I’m sure they would help you try and… get wherever you were supposed to be.” He screwed his mouth to the side as he tried to think about what that would actually be. This whole interaction had left him with so many questions about an afterlife he had never really questioned before.
“We’ll see,” said Harley, clearly unconvinced.
“StarClan will know what to do,” Darkmoon said determinedly.
Harley sighed. “If you say so. Let’s just hope something changes soon. I don’t know how much longer I can-”
Pantherhaze sat up in his nest with a sharp gasp.
“Sorry!” winced Yellowpaw around a mouthful of moss, his hind paw shooting up and away from Pantherhaze’s tail.
Behind him, Bluepaw tensed. “Yellowpaw! I told you to be careful!” It looked like they were in the middle of changing out the nests.
“I said I was sorry!” whined his brother. “It was an accident!”
“It’s fine,” Pantherhaze said quickly, lurching to his feet. “What time is it?”
“Uh, nearly sundown, sir,” Bluepaw said, straightening his posture.
“Is Goldenstar around?”
“I think she’s getting ready to leave on patrol,” Yellowpaw said.
“I have to speak with her!” Pantherhaze hurried towards the entrance to the den, then turned around suddenly and added, “Don’t touch my nest, okay?” Both of the boys flinched in surprise.
“Uh- okay!” Bluepaw said. “We won’t!”
“Thanks,” sighed Pantherhaze. If Fogstalker’s ward had done anything, he didn’t want to mess with it. He had to try and get back to the others somehow.
He hurried out of the den, slightly nauseated but energized by his mission, and cast about for sight of Goldenstar. He eventually caught sight of her talking with Russetfrond and Branchbark on the edge of camp and he threw himself into motion to close the distance between them.
“Goldenstar!” he shouted, completely devoid of any concern for how frantic he looked. All three cats turned to look at him with varying degrees of concern and surprise on their faces.
“Pantherhaze, is everything okay?” she asked, stepping towards him.
“The boys didn’t wake you did they?” scowled Russetfrond.
“No, they’re fine,” he lied immediately. “That’s not important. I had a vision!” All three cats started.
Goldenstar asked, “A vision? What happened?”
“I’ll get Oddstripe,” Branchbark offered and bounded off to the Healer’s den.
Pantherhaze watched him go but didn’t wait to answer Goldenstar’s question. “I don’t know exactly what it was, it didn’t feel like a sign from StarClan or anything. I woke up in this strange place, they called it the Clouds, I think…” He frowned, trying to remember the little details of his encounter.
“They?” asked Russetfrond. “Who’s they?”
“Oh! That’s the crazy part!” said Pantherhaze. “Darkmoon! A-and a couple of loners, dead ones.”
“Darkmoon?!” Goldenstar gaped. “But it wasn’t a sign from StarClan?”
“No,” he shook his head. “He said that- that Razor had killed his StarClan guide? And he and the loners were stuck in this place between here and StarClan.”
Oddstripe and Branchbark arrived at that moment and Oddstripe’s big eyes were wide with amazement. “A place between here and StarClan?”
“Razor killed a StarClan guide?” growled Russetfrond uneasily. “After death?!”
“Apparently,” Pantherhaze said to both questions. “And whatever guide was supposed to take the Loners wherever they were going.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Branchbark said. “Loners and rogues are destroyed when they die.”
“Well, I might have dreamed it all,” said Pantherhaze, “but it felt weirdly real. Darkmoon told me to send someone to talk to StarClan and see if they can find them from the other side.”
“Darkmoon? Oh, this is fascinating,” said Oddstripe. “I’ll gladly go and talk with StarClan. Please, tell me everything, from the beginning.” He laid his tail over Pantherhaze’s back and started to guide him towards the Healer’s den.
“Of course,” he nodded and fell into step.
“Do you think this has something to do with the coyotes?” Goldenstar murmured to Russetfrond as they left.
“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “I’m skeptical but this feels too strange to be coincidence.”
“We should tell EarthClan,” she said. “Send someone to fetch Stormwhisper.”
“On it,” he said, and the two parted, Goldenstar bounding to join him and Oddstripe.
“I have a feeling you’re going to be answering a lot of questions for a while,” said Goldenstar with an apologetic smile.
“That’s alright,” Pantherhaze said. “If I can help, I want to.”
“Just let me know if you feel unwell,” said Oddstripe. “Your recovery still takes priority.”
“Alright,” he said, but he honestly couldn’t feel a single symptom. He was tired, sure, but he’d been completely revitalized by his vision. Despite the troubling implications, this was exciting. This was the kind of thing they told stories about! He just hoped he would be able to get them all to a happy ending.
Introducing New Character for Future Lore: When The Moon Meets Its Eclipse (WTMMIE)
Zain Rashid Al-Sayyid.
Simply Mr. Al-Sayyid.
Basic info:
Zain Rashid Al-Sayyid is a 42-year-old billionaire COO from a powerful Middle Eastern family, raised in a world driven by wealth, influence, and control. Tall and solidly built, he carries an intimidating, commanding presence that matches his sharp, disciplined mind. Known for his strategic thinking and dominance in both business and social circles, Zain is the type of man who gets what he wants- efficiently and without hesitation. He is observant and calculating, often reading people with unsettling accuracy. Beneath his composed exterior lies a morally gray nature, making him as dangerous as he is respected.
[UPDATE]
Relationship with Hayati (WTMMIE Timeline):
Zain and Hayati meet in a bad, unexpected situation that leads to a temporary arranged marriage meant only for appearances. At first, their relationship is purely forced (on paper), he’s a confident, narcissistic (yes, he's diagnosed with NPD) man used to control, while she’s a guarded pessimist who expects the worst, making them contrast each other. They argue and banter a lot, rarely agreeing on anything, but neither of them backs down either. Despite the tension, living together slowly brings them closer, revealing sides of each other they didn’t expect. What was supposed to be fake and temporary gradually turns into something real neither of them planned for.
// Still developing the story in my notes app, but feel free to ask in my inbox !!
I have this little interpretation while I was trying to study how his crown looks. Please hear me out 🙏 the crown is moon-shaped if you looked and believed hard enough 🫴🌕
