PERFUME OF INIQUITY 𓆩♡𓆪 DREAM

[DAWNGLARE]

Too good to be true. He’d known it the moment he’d heard it. It was all too simple to quell a plague – persistent as it was peculiar and new – with an herb he knew little about, but happened to be sitting in his den soaked in water all their same. Heads turned – more, a naive soul had clamored for, and Dawnglare would bite that there is a reason, such a solution had not breached a mind like his – because he has not caught so much of an inkling of the cursed thing for many, many moons.

His stock was dwindling to a bitter trickle, and soon they would be ripe with plague again. If a cough from the newly - cured could still pass disease, it would continue to spread until all it could do is blow past the ashes of them all.

No, his sleep was not so peaceful with the future weighing so heavily upon his shoulders. His days are stressful with delirium and fog - eyed patients and his nights uncomfortable, with the lack of a smile beside him. Splendorous visions and wishes of grandeur have not come to him in the days since this – Yellowcough has reared its ugly head. Divinity forgotten, for once he wishes not to dream, rather than for it, so that he would not have to meet the face of suffering beyond closed lids.​

 

[MORNINGPAW ☆]

She has not been here in many moons, but the den where Dawnglare slumbers is where she’d taken her final mortal breath. It’s strange to place her paws where the living do, where her father, brother, and sister walk daily still. Morningpaw’s heartbeat quickens as she slips through the ferns. Starlight glitters in the pawprints she leaves behind her, and every trembling whisker shimmers as though bathed in silver rain. She has not come here today to reminisce over the short life she was forced to leave behind. The Clans need her.

Dawnglare’s slumber is troubled. The tiny tortoiseshell point walks on cautious paws to stand beside his nest. Her eyes search for her littermate, tucked away inside his own circlet of bracken and moss, and seeing him—his ribs rise and fall, his onyx tail twitching—strengthens her resolve. She touches her nose to Dawnglare’s reddish ear, just enough to cause him to stir. He is not truly waking, when he does, but once the sleep leaves his eyes, he will focus on her just enough to see the first patient he’d ever loss, as well as one of the first he’d ever brought into this world.

“Dawnglare,” she murmurs, her voice filled with pain, longing, grief. “I am sorry for what you are going through, but StarClan has sent me with a warning.” The tiny Ragdoll mix will wait for him to straighten in his nest, to stare at her, and then she will sigh and bow her head.

“If the five are to survive, borders must be crossed.” She lifts blue eyes back to his, once guileless and now filled with the wisdom no living four moon old kit could possess. “Do not give up hope, Dawnglare. We are still with you… always.”

She trembles as she reaches up, up, to brush her nose against his. Her chest aches, and the tears pricking the corners of her eyes threaten to spill, to overwhelm her. She misses him, and she hurts for him—this cat who dared to love outside the bounds of the law, who earned her father’s ire and who has isolated himself within his own Clan, but she loves him. And she hopes he knows her father still does, too.

“Goodbye, Dawnglare.” She draws away from the tom who’d seen her born and the one who’d watched her die, her namesake. She fades until she is a shadow, a specter, and then until she is nothing at all.
​

[ PENNED BY MARQUETTE ]​