THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED — DREAM

[RAVENSONG]

He is alone tonight, but he is used to it. Unlike the other medicine cats cast about the Clans, he has no mate nor apprentice to curl up close to. All he can hear is his own blood rushing and the labored breaths that his patients take. He lies awake but with his eyes closed. He thinks of the precious few bundles of lungwort stashed in a hollow only a paw step away from his nest. There is no time for him to mourn over not having the foresight to over-collect a herb he had never known the purpose of, but he still cannot shake the feeling that he has failed.

Closer and closer he comes to war with the stars. He wonders how many cats might have gotten sick at the Gathering. He thinks of Racconstripes irreverence toward the ways of a medicine cat—what would they know? He thought bitterly. They do not understand. Every night his stomach turns with every imagined possibility that would come of this sickness if it were not contained. And his mind is already made up. He will not attend the next moon's medicine cat gathering—there yellowcough would breed at its sacred stone and StarClan would only watch. And perhaps, though it is not definite, he can convince Cicadastar to forgo, or limit the cats for the next Gathering all together.

There is a choice to be made—face heavenly wrath or claim the suffering of innocent believers and Ravensong would prefer to taste eternal darkness if it meant he could chose the former over the later. His trust above flickers dangerously like a dying flame and as he finally closes his eyes to sleep, he feels no hope nor despair and wonders if StarClan would really continue to let them die.

☾₊ ⊹ темная ночь — dark is the night

•  
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  RAVENSONG of RIVERCLAN
  — LH BLACK POLYDACTYL MALE (CARRYING CINNAMON, DILUTE) a tall, slender creature with pitch-black feathery fur, large ears, and a sharply angled skull held up in an aloof manner. smells of dried herb, speaks with a low and rumbly accent and walks with an elegant slinking gait.
  
  — born in twolegplace and orphaned at a young age, he joined riverclan at its inception and began training as a drypaw warrior known for a bitter temperment until beesong made him his medicine cat apprentice. after his mentor's untimely death, he had been named ravensong at the moonstone, young heart revitalized with anger and guilt. he is a somber and thorough medicine cat that guards every word spoken in the confines of his den.
  
  — secretly loves "the stars but not so much what inhabits them"
  — openly suffers from chronic migraines
  — single, but "it's complicated"

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[STARCLAN]

You wake to a den that is perfectly your own, yet something in the back of your mind tickles– this is not quite right. Your paws do not seem to touch the ground as you stretch, though if you were to look you would see your pads spread across the surface beneath them. Each step is awfully quiet, and that is when it hits you: your den is empty. The patients that had crowded you just one night ago are missing. But more than that, the sounds of camp don't reach you. The typical bustle of morning patrols, or warriors whining about thorns in their paws, or the soreness of their throats. You hear none of it. Fear strikes you. They're gone.

Your paws carry you swiftly from that revelation. Whether you mean to or not, you approach the moss that shields your delicate from the rest of the clan, and when you push through...

There is nothing. Not only does your camp lack your clanmates, it is not your camp at all. Before you spans a new world of towering, snowcapped mountains. Their tips scratch the sky, and the stars that begin to show themselves above in the quiet deep blue of the far sky. They glow dimmer than you are accustomed to, but as the sun creeps lower and lower towards the horizon, they pulse with life, with intensity– it almost seems like a heartbeat. The orange bleeds to pink and then to purple, and finally to the calm, night blue. The intensity of the stars grows to a blinding light. It swallows you. Without pain, with love and desperation, it takes you in. Those mountains are blazed into your eyelids, desperately closed.

When you wake again, it will be to your own nest and that same decision blazing before you: what will you risk, for the safety of your clan?​