private all it is, is a memory ࿐࿔ cicadaflight

[lichenstar]

✦˚.✧˚✧˚✦˚ ✧ ˚✧˚✦˚✦.˚✧

CLAIM THE BURIAL I SEEK IN DREAMS FLOWING RIVER CEMETARY ✧

• Urchin spines and sharp shell-edges stick out from their flare-ribbed core, a grouching, loping pile of jagged arcs of night and piercing quills of light. He is moping... and it serves him no real purpose but to fester and rot within his own cage. The reed-striped phantom creeps upon him in the gloaming hours just before night's fall, reaching a tattered limb to sharply prod into his side, a willful attempt to unfurl the tightly wound ball of loathing that seats itself at the edges of society.
  
  "Lay down," is barked in gravel-toned grating, watching him snap a houndish gaze in her direction with teeth bared against his willingness (or maybe it is intentional... it hardly matters). He is too tall for her to reach the tangled spots in his mane, the matts forming behind his ears, so the demand is one of practicality so she is not made to climb him like a tree, it lacks dignity they both ought to cling to.
  
  "I'm not asking."
  
  He is not the half-soft ghost that he had been as a child, a little specter staring at its reflection in the ripples and wondering who it had once been. Still... still he looms like a statuette of his father, an offering forgotten and abandoned to grow overrun with bitter roots. "Come on... let me... clean you up..." whispered softer, an unpracticed motherly sympathy that remembers him for the tiny boy he'd been. All too-long limbs and wide, bugish eyes.
• about
  
  speech hex code ✧ #6368A5
  
  ooc notes ✦
  tagging ✶ @CICADAFLIGHT
  penned by tieirlys
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[CICADAFLIGHT]

CICADAFLIGHT

HE/HIM ☆ RIVERCLAN WARRIOR

Lavender evening sits pollen-scratchy under his skin, the bruised sky circling him like a fox with a bared moon for a jaw. Among the many reasons he dislikes the gloaming hours, the looming behemoth of sleep stands foremost. Cicadaflight hasn't slept solidly since he was a milk-plump scrap curled at Smokestar's flank; his adult sleep is thick with dreams. His waking hours are dry and spare and as bloodless—as heartless—as reeds drying in the greenleaf sun. His sleeping ones are clotted with lurid colors, overspilling with strange figures whose legs warp like funhouse mirrors. Cats wearing each others' faces, and when he palms his own, it's vacant. Trees thick with cicadas until their rattling husks fill his mouth. These and many more.

Why he has such strange dreams, he isn't sure. Over the wobbly heartbeat of his life, they've grown from simple nightmares to terrors made all the more frightful for their overwhelming confusion. The dreaming world is a garbled, incomprehensible thing. It's without solace, without relief from the constant brand of outcast.

Regardless, it makes him hesitant to sleep, fearful of what slumbers under the stale moss of his nest. He lingers on the edges of camp, run too ragged to bother sorting through the gnarled mats of his pelt, even as he feels fresh knots of black curls clustering behind his ears. So he just sits and sulks, sucking cold air through the hideous carving of his cheek as he watches his Clanmates chatter and share tongues. Left lurking on the fringes, as always.

" Gah! " he yelps as an intruding paw jabs him between the ribs. Lichenstar. She's his superior, she's been very much there since his infancy, and yet his lips creep back without his beckon. At the interruption, maybe; he seems to have very little awareness of why he does what he does, or indeed control of it at all. His bruise-dark eyes are sulky without entirely meaning to be, all the luster gone from dual jewel tones.

She barks an order at him. It's always awkward, the two of them; two cats made of odd edges, bumping hard and metallic against one another. Even when he was a kit, toddling out of his first nightmares, greeted by the strange warrior with the crooked tail (just like his) and the muttered words. Still, he remembers it; remembers the fierce burn of envy in his chest as he watched her cluck over Shellpool or Pebbletail.

" …Okay, " he exhales after a thorny silence, lurching onto his stomach with a thump. elbows stinging in protest when he doesn't bother to cushion his fall. She's his leader. It's technically a command. Looking at it like that, through the warped lens of the world he seems intent on missing out on, it's his obligation to permit her ministrations. It assuredly has nothing to do with the miserable mess of his pelt, or the twinge in his chest.

ooc:

—

accordion

Cicadaflight is a hulking black-and-white tom with tangled, curly fur and heterochromatic amber and salt-blue eyes. There is a jagged scar torn into the right side of his face, and he wears three pairs of luna moth wings behind both ears.

cicadastar x smokestar / brother to beefang & loveburn / kin to many
mentored by iciclefang / mentoring n/a
19 moons old as of 2/5/2025

penned by dejavu