- Feb 7, 2023
- 25
- 8
- 3
What kept a nation buoyant more than its legends? A cat could be fed with prey and refreshed with a nest. To Burnet, what kept the stars alive and the tides turning were the stories of lives well-lived. Burnetkit had heard so many stories strung upon the nursery, as if mosslike ribbons strewn about from impossibly-high ceilings of dens, shooting stars just out of her reach. She figured that just as the adults could whisk at the sky with their claws, they would grow into the legends they spoke of. She especially drank from her mother's silken word, feeding her and her den-mates with such and warming the belly more than a hearty meal.
Those that had come before the clans were those that walked among her, and yet the colonies seemed like yet another scrawled sentence on the body of her history, a faraway reality confined only to the imaginations of youthful kittens like herself. Those that had forged Windclan from soil to ivory stood among her, though she only the fruits of sweat-slicked efforts, and not the bones and sinew that made up the great beast of her home. She couldn't conceptualize the fact that Windclan hadn't always existed - or, at least, not recently. Like lands of yore and laments of nostalgia, they were but past grievances and glories. The little girl allowed such flighty narratives to inundate her mind with dreams, as though lighting an uncertain path, a fire to follow the footfall. The molten sun could only carry one so far before it beat and brushed abraded tongue against the flesh.
Afternoon sun rested heavily along the canopy of the sky, like a languid stillness befalling a lough, indolence that dragged behind leaf-bare's biting frigidity. The hours lagged lazily, and though she hadn't known it, Windclan was recovering from a tumultuous and ruinous escapade. Sootstar's children had already vacated the nursery in pursuit of some game or some adult to pester, and a golden gaze tracked them from her shadowy roost, looking like mottled dots along an ever-present painting. They did not mar the colors nor jut through the rhythm - they were part of it, just as everyone else of the moors was. Burnetkit found herself underneath the gorse-laden gloom of the comforting nursery, slits of rays revealing flashes of roseyed reds and tigrine streaks. Small enough to fit through the divots and falters of honeyed sunlight, she bounced from darkened patch to darkened patch.
Boredom had overtaken the young she-cat's fiber of being pretty quickly. She poked at her mother's belly with a quick jab of a deft paw, a gosling-down pillow of comfort now a target of playful ire. She practically climbed over the mountainous Swiftshrike, as though the queen were but another obstacle to overthrow, another legend to fell. "Moooom! Tell me a story! Like how it was before the clans! I bet you were, like, one of the first cats in the world!"
@SWIFTSHRIKE
Those that had come before the clans were those that walked among her, and yet the colonies seemed like yet another scrawled sentence on the body of her history, a faraway reality confined only to the imaginations of youthful kittens like herself. Those that had forged Windclan from soil to ivory stood among her, though she only the fruits of sweat-slicked efforts, and not the bones and sinew that made up the great beast of her home. She couldn't conceptualize the fact that Windclan hadn't always existed - or, at least, not recently. Like lands of yore and laments of nostalgia, they were but past grievances and glories. The little girl allowed such flighty narratives to inundate her mind with dreams, as though lighting an uncertain path, a fire to follow the footfall. The molten sun could only carry one so far before it beat and brushed abraded tongue against the flesh.
Afternoon sun rested heavily along the canopy of the sky, like a languid stillness befalling a lough, indolence that dragged behind leaf-bare's biting frigidity. The hours lagged lazily, and though she hadn't known it, Windclan was recovering from a tumultuous and ruinous escapade. Sootstar's children had already vacated the nursery in pursuit of some game or some adult to pester, and a golden gaze tracked them from her shadowy roost, looking like mottled dots along an ever-present painting. They did not mar the colors nor jut through the rhythm - they were part of it, just as everyone else of the moors was. Burnetkit found herself underneath the gorse-laden gloom of the comforting nursery, slits of rays revealing flashes of roseyed reds and tigrine streaks. Small enough to fit through the divots and falters of honeyed sunlight, she bounced from darkened patch to darkened patch.
Boredom had overtaken the young she-cat's fiber of being pretty quickly. She poked at her mother's belly with a quick jab of a deft paw, a gosling-down pillow of comfort now a target of playful ire. She practically climbed over the mountainous Swiftshrike, as though the queen were but another obstacle to overthrow, another legend to fell. "Moooom! Tell me a story! Like how it was before the clans! I bet you were, like, one of the first cats in the world!"
@SWIFTSHRIKE