- Aug 1, 2023
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CICADAFLIGHT
HE/HIM 𖥔 RIVERCLAN WARRIOR
When he was very small, Cicadaflight remembers a foggy day. He piled his skinny limbs in the entrance to the willow den and watched it creep, slow and unending, over the camp. Thick drifts of dull oearly greay that cloaked the world, turning every cat and den into looming and vague shapes. It had made him shiver, trickling down his spine, that blank world, devoid of color or motion. A maze of mist-cloaked shapes, a steely gray sky.
His life feels like that, right about now. Each day is like paddling through a river deadlocked with ice, limbs kicking, kicking, kicking, until they go cold and weak and dead. The world flows slow and blank around him, and he lets it carry him passively along, limp and uncomplaining as it bashes him continually against the rocks at its banks. Dreamlike, he wanders through his own life like an impassive passerby, watching through rheumy eyes as minutes blur into hours blur into days.
* Like a dream. His life before now feels like that, or like a faded childhood memory, well-loved and worn soft around the edges. Someone else's life, someone more fortunate. An incomprehensible reality, but so is his current one—a world he can't believe, a world he can't believe in. A world he's not wholly sure he wants to be in.
A world where Willowroot and Poppysplash no longer linger soothingly around the edges of his vision. Where Lichenstar no longer combs the tangles from his fur and calls him little echo, as if he's a kit again. Where there's no Moonbeam to tend his wounds and offer quiet assurances. No Ferngill to offer gentle guidance. No Iciclefang—Iciclefang, the betrayer; Iciclefang, for all her faults—to steer him when his paws eternally seek the bladed path. It's unthinkable. It's like a feverish daze, a sickness-choked dream from which he'll surely awaken, someday. Somehow.
The sky is a glossy pool of black today, marked by stars, like a foxed mirror. Cicadaflight watches it without seeing it, dull off-hued eyes settled blankly on the horizon. His chin is tucked to his chest, his crooked tail wrapped around his paws; he curls into himself, like a skeleton tucked into a catacomb, knees to chest under its shroud. The wind runs its temperate fingers through the fur of his cheek, succeeding only in dragging the tangled mess of curls to and fro, too matted to tease out with the breeze alone. He hardly notices it.
Indifferent to the river foaming by his paws, or to the slow, collective breathing of a sleeping camp, his eyes sit flatly still on the distant horizon. Maybe if he stares at it long enough, the sun will turn back, pulling the nights with it, until he's settled back into a world still populated by the cats he trusts, the cats his fathers trusted. Exhaustion pulls at his mind, tired itself, like an aging shepherd trying to bring a defiant lamb to heel. He ignores it, pointedly, as well as the raw, miserable scraping of his stomach. His paws tremble when he shuffles them in the sand, but he ignores that, too. He ignores everything.
That is, until a Clanmate arrives. It takes him a long moment to register their presence, blank eyes shifting slowly to the other night-draped shape. His stare is dull, as if he's simply staring straight through their head into the faraway sky.
ooc:
Anyone can be the cat he's staring at :)
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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.
cicadastarxsmokestar/ brother to beefang & loveburn / kin to many
mentored by iciclefang / mentoring n/a
21 moons old as of 3/10/2025penned by dejavu
