- Jun 7, 2023
- 266
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The shadow on his back was a burden that needed to be carried by the tom with an insistence that he could not leave the camp alone. Though his journey did not take him far, deliberately slow paw steps dragged it out, a deliberate powerplay against one who could not be so monstrous as to deny someone their chance to mourn. Drawing ever closer and closer, Sootspot was acutely aware of the taste of flower stems within his mouth, the earthy texture of misplaced soil combined with a smell that did not seem as fresh as it could've been had they went to the graveyard some moons earlier.
There was an empty feeling to the disturbed plain as he entered, as if the souls of all those buried had not just ascended to StarClan but disappeared entirely. Hollow was how he would describe the place, a forlorn feeling that he may never see those he'd lost again, that if they'd truly loved him (or their souls had truly existed to begin with), they would not allow something as petty as the ancestors to stop them from talking to him. On a patch where he knew no one was buried, the Queen reclined upon his haunches, a singular eye falling upon Scorchstorm. "Do you hope your mother will get a grave?" He smiled sourly. "I wonder if I would get tempted to dig up my sister's bones if I knew where she was, to make sure was truly dead. But they say it is a cursed thing to disturb one's eternal rest."
He looked away from the Lead Warrior before he got an answer - truthfully, he didn't know if he cared about the philosophical question he'd posed or if he just wanted her to think about her mother dying. They said that pain shared was pain halved, but with few willing to take that burden for the bitter tom, he had few issues picking at random who to place it upon. Regardless, there was a melancholy to him, a lack of poison or bite and the slither of a chance it could be a sincere question. Before where he would place a dead littermate, the one who had died too early to become a failure, he did not have the heart to scheme.
The flowers slipped from his maw, carried by the wind a mere tail-length before scattering to the soil. Sootspot let them stay there. "It should have been someone else..." he murmured his prayer to Shrikethorn, head bowed low.
@SCORCHSTORM