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Clear Sky's fur began as a beautiful light gray with eyes as blue as his namesake. In the tribe he was as hidden as a mountain stone, and they respected him for it.
Then Fluttering Bird died and a patch of white appeared over his heart.
Perhaps it would have been contained if he had just stayed in the tribe. Maybe it would have ended the same- but ambition dies quickly in the mountains.
When he died, it was leafbare. They lost his body in the snow, and found what the vultures left behind in spring.
-
Cloudkit was born with white patches on his shoulders. The growing dread in Skyclan seeped into him before he ever had a choice.
Flystar was summoned by Fawnstep to view their newborn omen. Fawnstep dreamed the night before of a young cat in a void of snow. He was alive and well, a triumph in leafbare. What is life but survival?
(Fawnstep was young. Fawnstep was desperate. Fawnstep didn’t understand: everything she knew was dead from the beginning.)
“It’s a good sign.” The last medicine cat of ancient Skyclan said. “To have the same pelt as Skystar."
-
Cloudkit grew into Cloudpaw as the fog in Skyclan territory grew stronger. Apprentices made songs to hear each other through the mist, and their mentors followed suit. Sometimes Cloudpaw sat upon a stone in his territory and listen to the whistling of the wind and a distant voice. He'd close his eyes and fall into a place with no prey, nor other cats. No expectations or future. Just him and the nothingness.
It was encouraged during vigils for cats to become one with the endless expanse of the sky. Few were chosen, but the ones who were came back changed. These sky touched would feel the wind of the high trees even on still summer nights.
Cloudstorm’s vigil took days.
He swirled in the lovely blue, higher than any bird. Every time Cloudstorm looked down and saw the tiny specks of Skyclan territory, terrible joy came. This was divine. This was death. His eyes were open on the ground and in the sky, and they were the same crystal blue as flight.
But he wasn’t staying in place. He was hurtling now, falling into the light misted cold of a cloud. He sank into the chilly air, his breath coming out in smoke and wreathing around him. Until he was completely surrounded, and spinning from vertigo on solid snow. Cloudstorm looked around through the wreath of his own breath. Nothing but white.
Cloudstorm walked until his paws and ears went numb. There were no trees to take shelter or climb. But this wasn’t Windclan, where rabbit tracks were visible no matter what time of year. Nor was it Starclan territory, where the snow would have been sparkling dust. Cloudstorm collapsed as he let out a long visible sigh. What was the point if he just kept walking into more nothing? Was this all there was to the sky, emptiness from beginning to end?
“Not yet, you fool.” A tom’s gravely voice said. “You have more time until you end up here.” Cloudstorm looked up. A form vaguely outlined by the falling snow, with the sky as his eyes.
“Are you even here?” Cloudstorm said.
“That is the question.” The tom said. “One day I will not be, and it will be your fault.” Finally, he formed. White as the fallen snow with narrowed blue eyes. “And mine.”
Cloudstorm’s mouth went dry. “Skystar.”
The tom sneered, from what Cloudstorm could tell. “Yes, who else.”
“Where are we?”
“Our territory.”
It was then Cloudstorm noticed that the fog around Skystar did not dissipate. It simply hung in the air. Each breath joined itself to the endless expanse, blue and gray and white.
“Spirits aren’t supposed to breathe.” Cloudstorm said.
Skystar laughed cruelly. “No, a wonder there is any air left for anyone else.”
"But-"
"Did you know that the higher you go, the harder it is to fill your lungs? The mountain folk learn this from their first days on earth."
"Who?"
If he thought Skystar's laugh was cruel before, it was nothing compared to the choking howl contracting his throat now. The wheezing gave way and Cloudstorm fell, the earth coming towards him faster than a monster on the thunderpath-
He woke up screaming in the medicine den. Fawnstep shoved poppyseeds into his mouth and clamped her paw over his maw. The camp was too terrified to sleep that night.
-
The laugh followed him wherever he went- but so did the screech of the sky. They fought, blasting wind against his face or scoring leaves into his legs as he walked. Sometimes, they were calm enough for Cloudstorm to rest.
"Are you falling asleep?" Birdflight, she of the tallest trees, rested her head on his shoulder. Cloudstorm drifted back to press his head against hers. He blinked for the first time in what seemed like hours.
"No," Cloudstorm pressed his cheek against the top of her head and purred. "Just daydreaming."
"Don't get lost, my dove." Birdflight hummed. "Oh sweet, fog time love."
"The leaves reign gold supreme. Goodbye, goodbye to green." Cloudstorm responded. This ditty was only for mates to sing to each other, and oh how lucky he was that he was the only one privy to this gift. His voice was a low tide to her bird song, and when one sang alone, the rhythms of their voice cried out for the other.
"Leave your sorrows on the brush below, " They sang together. " No time for crying, in a world so slow."
When Birdflight sang with him, her voice was the only one he could hear. The sky couldn’t beat the melody of a love built despite it all.
-
Thunder left, his namesake followed with lightning flashing. Clear Sky raged back to camp. His cats cried after him, but all their faces were the same, none of them were his son's. Clear Sky screamed and suddenly they were gone and the camp is blissfully empty. He curled up in his den, tail wrapped over his paws.
When he was younger, Gray Wing played with his tail often. He slept on it just as much. Clear Sky had hoped his children would do the same, but Storm was dead and Thunder was not a kit anymore.
When he woke the next morning, his tail was pure white. Clear Sky shrugged as he rose. It was more beautiful this way anyway.
-
Flystar died in greenleaf, season of rich prey and sunlight. He misjudged a jump, and fell too fast for anyone to grab him. For a clan that was losing territory fast, to die where one was supposed to be safe sparked panic.
"This is the risk we live with for daring to fly." Cloudstorm said. "I doubt he would've wanted to go any other way."
Cloudstorm marched forward to the moonstone with the hopes of the clan pinned on his back. When he saw his reflection in a part of the river with still water, he stopped moving. White seeped in a line down his spine.
Fawnstep sniffed the white stripe. She moved her paw along it and asked if Cloudstorm felt any pain. Finally, she shook his head. "This sometimes happens where cats have patches of white that spread over them. It won't hurt you "
"This fast?"
Fawnstep shrugged, her face pensive. "You're about to get your nine lives. Maybe it's an early gift from Starclan."
-
"Resilience," Skystar touched his nose to Cloudstorm's head, lightening white fur painful to view, even with bright and shining stars all around him. "Leaders live far longer than a cat should."
Time is the space between seconds, minutes, hours, days. Time is distance and memories are stepping stones back. But Cloudstorm saw a future where there was a great river of ignorance separating past and present- and no stones to cross.
And across that river-
Across that river-
He heard the faint notes of a song.
-
When Darkstar jumped upon the Great Rock, the other leaders nudged each other and bared their teeth. There was an odor akin to twoleg garbage radiating from him.
"Leader’s word is law." Darkstar wheezed. A fly landed on his nose. When he blinked, his eyes opened slowly with liquid stuck to the lids. "Thunderclan will have part of our land."
The leaders all nodded sagely and praised his addition to the code, the taste of power on their tongues sweet as honey. But they laughed to their deputies later about how far the mighty Skyclan had fallen.
Darkstar didn't even make it back to camp. The second he stepped back into Skyclan land, a vapor seeped out of his body. A pile of skin and bones lay where Darkstar had collapsed, and soon that was gone too. There was nothing to bury, like he never existed at all.
The disgraced Ravencloud would be the next leader, and Skyclan territory was smaller than ever before.
—
Once upon a time, the forest had stretched to the tallest tips of highstones. Their trunks were big enough to serve as dens, and their branches strong enough to hold the whole clan in its arms. Once upon a time, the Skyclan medicine cat could put their ear to the bark of the oldest tree in the forest and listen .
A chill ran through Cloudpaw the first time he'd seen one of those trees uprooted. The roots, that had stretched for the length of a stream, stretched out like broken bird talons. Dirt and bugs and water seeped from the dead wood like blood. The rumpled soil underneath it was loose and moist. Cloudpaw's foot sunk into mud and he dug his claws into the wood to drag himself up. He winced as the tree groaned in protest.
Cloudpaw climbed all the way up to the side of the tree and walked carefully down the bark. It barely made a sound as he sat in the middle of the old giant and closed his eyes. There was such emptiness in this place. The hollow inside the wood would grow until all that remained was food for the roaches and termites. No- they wouldn't even be allowed that dignity. This wood would remain in a half dead state, sheltering the very beings that ripped it from the earth.
Time stretched out in a dizzying line, bursting away from Cloudpaw's consciousness like a monster on the Thunderpath. He watched the acorn of this grand oak fall from its comfortable branch and roll down a slope of grass into this hollow. Time rushed forward as the acorn slept under a layer of detritus and dirt, as it blinked its slumber off with a reach towards the sun. Its brothers and sisters all grew together, their roots connected by tendrils of the guardians of rot and rebirth. Tiny white strings of web connected the canopy quietly. Cloudpaw trembled with the tree as its cousins cried out from a great fire, and breathed out in sweet, life giving relief as rain came again. He writhed like the worms exposed to the dry air as the tree was ripped from the ground, and its heartwood butchered out of its long body. A Stranger lay beneath its wood, suckling the teat of his mother. The dwelling and the Stranger would rub against each other's presence, until that ginger Stranger would go into the forest, and one day, Cloudpaw would talk to this Stranger face to face.
But not today.
Cloudpaw tried to find Skyclan in this cursed vision, but the Expanse of where they weren't and where they were bursted his brain at the seams. Where? Nowhere, Everywhere. In the blood of great warriors, spilled on the ground on Sunning Rocks, the fifth point of the Star. In Kittypets whose blood stirred at the Vastness of the life they could be living.
Cloudpaw passed out on the tree and slipped into the churned up sea of mud beneath. He woke to Birdpaw shaking him, pain splitting his head like a serpent slammed into a rock.
White lined his eyes now, as if seeing catastrophe could stop it.
-
When monsters destroy the camp, clanmates watch in horror as Cloudstar's face went bone white. The dirt and splintered wood was incredibly visible on the paleness. His sky blue eyes, always so clear and calm, were lighter too. Now a Greenleaf ice color, like they'd melt off his face at any moment.
"We need to ask for help."
"You mean we go beg ." Silverleap sneered, her voice cracking with fear under the revulsion.
"Yes, we go to beg ." Cloudstar lashed his tail. "I will grovel, I will kneel, I will bare my belly until they claw it open if it means that any of you would be safe."
"But," Buzzardtail said, his face tight with pain. "What will we do if they say no? They have before."
Cloudstar shook his head. The enormity of dread beyond that future was too much to bear. They couldn't be forsaken that far. Not now. Not when they had been faithful even as the sky fell down around them and elders died from starvation and kits never made it past their first moon.
"Don't leave." The ruptured wood creaked as Cloudstar and his clan passed them by. "You belong nowhere but here. "
"I know." Even destroyed, Cloudstorm could find the paths the forest cleared just for Skyclan. The earth was free of splinters and rocks, and the stripped trees stretched to provide as much cover as they could. "I love you, we love you. But you are dying."
"You would die with us if you could."
"Yes." Cloudstar saw Four Trees in the distance. A tingle went through the paws that had climbed the tallest trees in the forest. White fur, like blood, drenched his toes. "I'm sorry."
-
"Where are we going?" Buzzardtail whispered. It tickled his newly white ears. "Cloudstar, you're scaring the clan."
Cloudstar stopped.
"We'll rest here for the night." He said without turning. "Tomorrow, we keep going."
"Where?"
"Stop asking me." Cloudstar's voice broke as he closed his eyes and hunched in on himself. " Please. "
His deputy's mouth went dry before he relayed the message to the clan and left Cloudstar alone.
It wasn't fair to be like this. Birdflight wasn't dead . Thunderclan territory was rich and splendid, her pelt would return to its former glory, their children would-
Their children .
Poison curdled inside Cloudstar then, as it did inside Birdflight miles away. She lay alone in the nursery, tears wantonly running down her face, wondering which part of Thunderclan territory was actually Skyclan's . If Thunderclan even fucking knew how much they stole already from her newborn children.
There were never two cats united in spirit like Cloudstorm and Birdflight.
The fur on her stomach went white, and while she was not as sky touched as her mate, the powers at be watched her anyway. Birdflight suckled bitterness deep in the heart of her children. Like a seed, it germinated for generations under the flesh and blood of their descendants.
One day, all of that rage baptized a single kit, the life of his sisters sucked into himself like a sinkhole. Tigerkit was born hungry, elongated fangs and unnatural claws a gift for a promising acolyte.
(Tigerstar ran with the dogs behind him, united in the Hunt. Watching all of Thunderclan leave their camp, become refugees inside their territory- neither Thunderclan nor Shadowclan cats sing but his throat trembled with joyous song.)
But Cloudstar that first night in exile was too damaged already to hope for an answered prayer. If you split his insides open, the raw meat of them would be white, white, white.
-
Nothing waited for Cloudstar when he died. Nobody came up to lick his cheek or purr a welcome. All the clanmates he'd lost on the way to the gorge were stuck in some purgatory heaven, swallowed by the endless journey of tiny creatures in an expanding universe.
What greeted him was eye searing blue and white, forever and ever. After a long time, a voice whispered in his ears, muffled like an echo of a scream. "Do you understand now?"
Skystar's outlines could barely find him, Cloudstar focused in on his eyes. Though it was hard to move, hard to reign his thoughts into coherency. He was- He-
"You are your clan." Skystar said. "But your clan now doesn't exist in memory or time. Do you understand?"
Below them, Spiderstar admitted defeat. At his last and final words as clan leader, the clan fractured like glass, and Cloudstar fractured with them. Skystar disappeared. What was the use of an origin story for a people that didn’t exist.
-
Most cats in the clans would survive far better than they’d expect as loners and rogues- but they would die anyway.
What kept the clans alive was meaning. Rogues, loners, and kittypets were just cats, alone in a universe where they were an afterthought at best, and they knew it. But within the clans, there was barely a world outside of the code. To be a warrior was to have a purpose, and to have a purpose was a powerful thing. Any cat alone who met a clan cat knew how deluded they truly were, to think that the universe centered on them. But if the universe lived off fear, it lived off belief too. Clan cats had belief in spades.
What gave each clan purpose, each clan uniqueness, were the other clans. In order to be special, you needed others to be special from.
Skyclan was always a little distanct from the rest of the clans, their founder was a lonely cat who needed others in order to be above them. But they still were connected through their pride and belief in the code.
But Skyclan alone.
A clan alone?
That was nothing at all.
Suddenly their only purpose was survival, waiting until death to see what they'd left behind. Once those truly from Skyclan died and found that there was nothing to go to, that they now existed to be eaten up by the Vastness of their separation?
It would’ve been better if they died in the forest.
Here is what is so insidious about loneliness, about exile, about splitting into a diaspora. You’re alive, but for what reason? You’re alive, your descendants are alive, but Lost. Once Lost in the claws of forgotten memories and time, it is almost impossible to be Found.
To have a “once upon a time” that time has to be over.
Generations of cats were born in kittypet homes and loner dens, pieces of themselves missing and lying dusty in the gorge. Those who stayed within the rock were digested slowly, for that canyon lived off misery. Great splits of the earth are places of patience, and time always wins.
-
After the Stranger who was now not a Stranger came, and the shattered shards of himself came back together, Cloudstar hummed. Birdflight sang back and no matter how white his pelt, how pale his eyes, it was like they were apprentices in the mist again, voices rising to find each other. The smoke that surrounded both of them for years dissipated.
“Something’s coming.” Birdflight referenced the line of yellow monsters surrounding the little, petty world of the clans. Spiders wrapped the trees in a tizzy, webs stuck to Birdflight’s paws.
“I know.” Cloudstar purred. It was so hard to stay in one piece, but the more he spoke, the more he proved his existence. “We’ll watch them together.”
Snow would blanket the clans, trees would come screaming down upon them, and Skyclan would watch from above as they always had. For the endless crying sky was their domain, journeys to nowhere, fading memories of a home long-lost, belonging to an idealized past.
That was what the universe made Skyclan into, and so Skyclan would play its part gladly.