private IS THIS THE RIGHT THING? // nightbird

[TWILIGHTKIT ⋆]

He wakes with a startled hiss.

Twilightkit cannot remember his nightmare. From the moment sunflower eyes bloom open in terror, the images disappear. The fear thrums in his chest but whatever has placed it there is gone. All that he can fathom is all that is tangible before him. His mother's nightborn pelt, her flank rising and falling with ease. His siblings beside him, each breathing (or snoring,) in their own rhythmic patterns. Other kits in the nursery, other queens - all alive. The distinction is important, even whilst he cannot recall his own troubles.

For a moment he eases against his siblings once more, whiskers twitching as he closes his eyes to sleep. But it does not come - phantoms etch into his eyelids and fling them open once more. Firedark eyes, bloodied teeth and claws. Shredded skin, images tucked away from kitten eyes, yet the games they played never shied hard from the severity of their lives. Twilightkit doesn't fear living, he knows that. He doesn't necessarily fear death - for as he understands it, it's unavoidable, crawling like the sun across the sky.

He fears loss. He fears forgetting another, or being forgotten.

( He cannot remember what color Howlingstar's eyes are. )

He slips from the pile of siblings he had been nestled in. His uneven gait has grown more graceful in his elder kittish months, and though he is sluggish and groggy, he easily picks around the nests to draw closer to the moonlight, too look out into the night sky. He lets out a shaky breath, and it seems to be that that wakes his mother only a tail length away. His ear twitches as she stirs, and gilded eyes turn to find her. He's had a request on his tongue for the better part of a moon, now, but has always fashioned it into a too dull blade to present. Perhaps now... whilst they're both vulnerable, both unsure of the future... perhaps now he can ask.

"Nightbird...?" he softly speaks, black paws pushed against the ground to stand. "We're to be apprentices soon." A fact. He knows she revels in the day, to watch her children progress and grow stronger, to be free herself from the shackles of the nursery. He blinks away the glimmer of uncertainty and fear in his tired yellow eyes as he pads closer to her once more.

"Will you be my mentor?"
​

 

[nightbird]

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆ twilightkit is not usually the one led astray. his siblings each have their moments of rebellion, the silver pelted boy seemed rather uninterested in it all. nightbird trusted that, wasn't well versed at hiding it. she may not deliberately pick favorites, but it was only natural to align with one so similarly steadfast, to recognize when something was wrong.

maybe that is why a tired sigh has her eyes peeling open, maybe it's because she hasn't truly slept well since before the journey to the mountains. either way, the queen joins twilightkit. nightbird no longer has to crouch down to meet his level- a testament to just how soon they'd be joining the apprentices den.

if they were born just a handful of moons earlier, they'd already be there. they were older now than when duskbird began training. nightbird thinks of his too short legs, struggling to keep up with her expert pace through the undergrowth. she thinks of the awe filled look in their eyes at the foot of the great sycamore, how easily it was snuffed in the jaws of a beast. she feels the weight of his limp body across her back and sits as if even the ghost of it were too much to bear.

her brow knits imperceptibly at the question. nightbird didn't know it was one she dreaded until now. there was potential in twilightkit, well forged he could easily be one of thunderclan's greatest. but the lead warrior's formerly pristine track record now had a body count. she knew cats died and such was the way of life. she also knew there was a common factor in both lightstrike and duskbird's lives, their training, that they were now both buried. her own child stood here now asking for the same fate. she should take it as a compliment.

"it's not up to me." she settles on that. because it was the truth. because the blunt denial she wanted to give would lead nowhere but to an admission of her failures. flamestar would decide as howlingstar did before her. "we have plenty of capable warriors. i'm confident you'll do well with whoever flamestar choses." with any luck, he wouldn't pry into the sudden distance, to the way she sat so stiff and alert despite the circumstances. if they were truly as alike as she felt they were, it was already too late to try and hide such subtlties.

BURNING SWORD // ───‎ ⋆ GUIDE MY HAND‎ ‎‎ ‎‎☽

• ooc ↛
  

• 

• 
  NIGHTBIRD ✩ she/her, lead warrior of thunderclan, 37 ☾'s
  ⭃ a small black smoke molly with a white paw and pale silver eyes. currently a queen residing in the nursery.
  ⭃ mate to raccoonstripe / / currently mentoring none.
  ⭃ peaceful and healing powerplay permitted / / underline and tag when attacking ↛ see battle info here
  ⭃ penned by vayle ↛ @vayl3 on discord, feel free to dm for plots.
  

​

 

[TWILIGHTKIT ⋆]

He can only claim to know tales of Duskbird. A tom who risked and lost his life to save Howlingstar, family to him (and perhaps may as well have been family to his mother, too.) Lightstrike is a more recent figure, but even past his death Twilightkit struggles to recall his features, his mannerisms - his importance beyond, somehow, family. He looks on to Nightbird expectantly, and does not see how specters of her failures haunt this very moment.

Instead he sees her narrow nose bridge, now marred and healed. He sees her narrow, angled eyes, the way her fur is sleek like his (or... how his is like hers, rather.) If cats see Raccoonstripe in Tigerkit, in Bayingkit - if they see Howlingstar in him... do they see Nightbird in Twilightkit? They do not share coloration, but their features are enough alike. If his mother is to pass, would they look to him in remembrance of her? Or would they, too, struggle to see past the individual?

He notices suddenly how she's stiffened. Her muscles are taut and her tongue sharp as she speaks. She doesn't outright deny his request but instead plainly explains that it isn't in her power to decide. Twilightkit's golden gaze does not waver nor falter in his fatigue or short burst of curiosity. He holds his mother's well, should she not look away.

"Then I will speak with her myself," he says, certainty driven with every word. "When the sun rises, I will find her den, and I will ask her directly. But -" he raises his nose slightly, as if to angle his face better, to see her better. Is that grief in your eyes? "Would you like to mentor me?" He rephrases the question in a way he thinks she cannot avoid. And then, plainly, he adds, "If you do not think you can, say so. I do not like playing games like this." Rarely is the striped tom so cold, and in truth he is not - but calculated are the words leaving his tongue, careful to ensure he gets the answer he needs, even if it is not one he wants.​

 

[nightbird]

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆ nightbird's tongue traces her teeth at twilightkit's thick insistence. in this moment, she wishes she could snap it. make it into something as malleable as tigerkit's willingness to please or lightningkit's loose imagination. neither of them would be so bold as to march upon her, let alone a clan leader with demands waiting firmly in their throats.

"mind yourself," she mutters a correction to the things that might as well have come from her own mouth. but the right to such shamelessness had to be earned. powerful kin or not, twilightkit had yet to earn anything besides the first pick of prey the warrior code granted to him. arrogance was no hallmark of a good apprentice.

persistence was, she thinks. and what had her son been if not that? his focus was undeniable, nightbird had trusted his obedience to her word more than once. the queens ears twitch as her own capabilities are brought to question, the pride she tried to swallow battering at the backs of her teeth in response. if twilightkit wanted honesty, she'd give it. "two of my apprentices are dead." she thinks of lightstrike once again, who made it to the mountains and back out of stubborn will only to die in battle. if the thought didn't have her feeling so bitter she would have laughed.

"i don't know where i went wrong, if i can even be to blame. forgive me if i am wary of sending my own child to the same fate." despite a sarcastic edge to her words, fear wrinkles the scar over her nose for a moment. raccoonstripe's burning gaze after news little wolf's death is at the forefront of her mind. if he blamed her then, he'd blame her for this. that was a ledge nightbird doubted she'd even try to talk him off. even then, there was a small part of her that wanted this- to build something of her own blood from the ground up. "of course i want to, twilightkit. and if this is what flamestar decides best, i won't argue. you'll be great one day and i'd be proud to help you there."

BURNING SWORD // ───‎ ⋆ GUIDE MY HAND‎ ‎‎ ‎‎☽

• ooc ↛
  

• 

• 
  NIGHTBIRD ✩ she/her, lead warrior of thunderclan, 37 ☾'s
  ⭃ a small black smoke molly with a white paw and pale silver eyes. currently a queen residing in the nursery.
  ⭃ mate to raccoonstripe / / currently mentoring none.
  ⭃ peaceful and healing powerplay permitted / / underline and tag when attacking ↛ see battle info here
  ⭃ penned by vayle ↛ @vayl3 on discord, feel free to dm for plots.
  

​

 

[TWILIGHTKIT ⋆]

"Mind yourself," her mother crones and in an instant, the child sits straighter, as if a whip is cracked near mouselengths from her very ears. Obedience is all she has to hold - her submissive nature only bends to the laws that bind her and the parents that mold her. Soon, too, a mentor will enter the fold (and she wonders, briefly, if such is an added reason to request such of Nightbird. That if she can ensnare one of the few that she allows with power over her, then she does not need to allow another into her circle of trust and vulnerability.

She says nothing more. The conversation is as good as finished with those two words, her mother all but admitting to her that she must be foolish in one way or another. Do kittens make requests for their mentors often? Do they trek the long way to the leader's den and plead, in hopes that Flamestar (or Howlingstar before her) will be ambivalent and kind? Motherhood is born into their leader, but does that mean she is softened by it, or sharpened instead?

Her paws shift, and she almost ambles back to her space alongside her siblings. But Nightbird bites out into the night air - something she knew as true but not something she had dredged up with her own paws to understand. Golden eyes flick between Nightbird's moonlit ones, searching for... something. Pain? Grief? She's seen annoyance and frustration in her mother's eyes more than enough, the ache to move and be of use certainly apparent in the middling moons of Twilightkit's life. But before her, her mother shares near nothing in her gaze. She withholds her emotions from perhaps her most emotionless child. Twilightkit reflects it.

After a long, drawn out moment, her mother settles with a middle ground. If their leader wills it, then she will accept. Mind yourself replays with the same cold chill of the night, and the child does not reinforce her want to pester the fire-pelted leader. She leashes herself with confidence that Flamestar will see success in the pairing without having to be guided towards it. Twilightkit heaves herself to her hind legs, her black-capped forepaw lifting to press against Nightbird's forearm.

"Such a fate will not welcome me so soon," she promises. With the fierceness of her mother and the confidence of her father, she damns death and all of his horsemen to the bowels of the earth. May they claw their way up from its molten middle and find her long before they can claim her forever. May the stars get used to seeing her from beneath the foliage of the trees and undergrowth because she will not be amongst then until old age takes her final breath. She will be sure of it.

"You will teach me well," she reinforces with a firmer press of her lonely paw. "I know you will," Twilightkit then says, not a single worry or fear littering her gilded eyes.​