The Welcome Committee (short story)
Bloomwhisker flinched back, blocking his throat. But it quickly dawned on him that the scenery had changed. No longer did he have Fringesong lunging at him, he was alone in a forest rank with the scent of blood. The trees were massive, littered with countless claw marks with roots the size of Bloomwhisker’s head twisting out of the ground like gnarled fangs.
He was surrounded by a cluster of sharp-edged boulders. He could feel them beneath his paws, rough and scraping even though he barely moved. Puddles of crimson-red mud–or what he hoped was mud–filled the hollow gaps in the stone.
As everything set in, sights, and sounds, and feeling, Bloomwhisker realized where he was. It wasn’t long after that that a tune reached his ears, a sing-song whistle like birdsong, only with a strange slowness, and as if the tongue was snagging in all the wrong places. It made Bloomwhisker’s hair stand rigid along his suddenly very icy spine.
He whipped around in time to see two surprisingly small warriors–apprentices?--leap onto one of the boulders. They stood in such a way that Bloomwhisker wasn’t entirely sure that one wasn’t the shadow of the other, movements so synchronized it made him dizzy. But one was spotted brown and black with yellow eyes, and the other was dark with a darker back and some spots, with blue eyes surrounding slitted pupils so intense that they had Bloomwhisker backing up until his back hit the wall of another large rock.
He jumped away when laughter sounded above him. He whipped around and saw a she-cat, definitely older than the two, but very similar in appearance to the black-and-white cat. Her eyes were multicoloured, one of them icy like the dark cat.
She raised her chin into the air and sniffed, shaking her head while smiling. “It’s been too long since I’ve smelled such terror, and we’ve only just started talking. Take it in, girls, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.”
That only served to make Bloomwhisker’s heart thump harder. He turned again, to the side this time, and slipped on one of the puddles.
“Graceful,” a new voice chimed in. Bloomwhisker looked up, eyes bulging out of his thrumming skull. A brown tom with lighter forelegs stood on the highest rock, standing with his pads on the pointed stone as if it didn’t bother him at all.
“I–uhm, uh…” This was a trick, a joke. Bloomwhisker knew what to expect, Nettlefrog had warned him. “Where’s Ferndoe?” The kind she-cat. She was supposed to meet him, she meets everyone.
“Sorry, spotty,” the tom grinned. “We’re the welcome committee today.”
--There’s no way Myrtle will just stop killing. But killing cats in Starclan, though he’s done before, is way too complicated, and he can’t do it often. If he kills soemone in the Dark Forest, cats throw a fit.
But if he kills someone new, too new for anyone to really be bothered by it beyond disgruntled annoyance? Most cats here are murderers, after all--they’re not going to be shocked by more murder.
--Aw, and look! He decided to bring his daughter and grandkits! He does kill with others, it was just their time today. Scab and Blight are young apprentices at this time.
--Yes, Fallen questions why she’s so evil, but she still does evil things.
--Bloomwhisker’s story is very vague, all I know is that they and another friend, Nettlefrog, were doing evil stuff at the same time. Nettlefrog died first and was visited by Ferndoe before going into Bloomwhisker’s dreams and telling him about it.
That’s why Bloomwhisker expecting Ferndoe to greet him.
--Bloom is spotted, which is why he’s called ‘spotty.’
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