ᴀ Lαɱҽɳƚαƚισɳ ᴏғ Sɯαɳʂ ~ an announcement

[1]

Once upon a time, the hillside was a garden.

Flowers bloomed in every colour: vibrant blues, garish yellows, purples as dark as sin. The petals were wide and narrow, curled and pointed, forming cups and bells and trumpets. Leaves in every shade of green surrounded them protectively, shaped like shields and spears.

The hillside meadow was a paradise, the closest thing to heaven in this flawed, ugly world. I visited it obsessively, every day and often more than once. My Twoleg's house was a sky-length away from the meadow, in a dingy neighbourhood on the other side of Twolegplace, but I didn't mind the journey. Somehow the effort I spent made those moments of pure happiness on the hillside all the more special.

I was happy, back then, happier than I've ever been since. When the flowers were destroyed, my joy died too.

[2]

Once upon a time, the hillside was a graveyard.

When the Ashfall came - fire descending from the sky, rains of ash and pumice, earthquakes and tremors shaking the Twolegplace to pieces - the flowers were flattened, crushed under a layer of ash thicker than I am tall. We - the survivors - dug through the ash, scrabbling for days on end with weary eyes and mud-stained paws.

When we found nothing, we used the shallow pits to bury our dead.

There were so many dead, it was hard to find space to bury them all. One of the first we found, returning from the sheltered lakeside where we waited out the blast, was my brother, the only one of my littermates I still kept in contact with. Robin. He was lying in what had been the meadow, half-sunk into the ashy crust, his eyes glazed and his mouth still open from when he'd cried for help. I think he'd been trying to escape.

We all lost someone in the Ashfall - only about twenty of us survived in the whole of Twolegplace - but mine was the first, and my grief was the sharpest. We buried Robin where he lay, a shallow, unmarked grave in a featureless expanse of ash, and I searched for flowers to mark his resting place, but everything had been destroyed by the smothering ash.

As we moved further through Twolegplace, splitting into twos and threes to scour the streets for survivors and corpses, my grief numbed inside me and the faces of the dead blurred before my eyes. I only knew my friends were dead because they weren't beside me. But I'll never forget Robin, my brother Robin, laughing and radiant when he was alive, and screaming in terror on that final, awful day.

[3]

Once upon a time, the hillside was a battlefield.

Blood ran down the slope, thick and viscous like the magma I once saw flowing into a nearby valley. The newly-growing grass was trampled into mud again. Ash and blood clung to my formerly white pelt, rendering me a monster, a ghoul. Nobody seemed to care about Robin and the others who'd died in the Ashfall, whose graves we were fighting on top of. What would they think, wherever they were, now we'd brought more death to this cursed place?

Stop, I wanted to say, but I couldn't, because that would've meant admitting defeat. And this battle was too important to back out of, even if it meant dishonouring the memory of my brother.

There'd been a dispute, you see. Our original group of twenty had grown, swelled with wild cats who'd joined us from the surrounding countryside. They were better hunters and fighters than us passive kittypets, used to fending for themselves without the Twolegs' assistance, but they were more violent, less trusting, harder to please. Our little group rapidly grew too large to support itself.

We went to war. It was food that started it, or rather the lack of food - almost all of our prey had been killed in the Ashfall, and what we could scavenge from Twoleg dwellings had rapidly decayed until it was inedible. We were hungry, hungry, hungry, warriors and kits and elders, day and night.

Everyone had their own ideas of how to look for food - raiding neighbouring valleys, learning to survive on plants, even eating the corpses of our own dead (although that idea was quickly shouted down). I can't remember now what I supported personally, but when we began splitting into factions I was quick to take sides with Vasily, leader of the biggest group of cats. There were maybe ten or fifteen of us at first, and we travelled a little way around the lake, and settled there. We formed an alliance with a nearby faction, and set our border at the far side of the meadow.

That was the mistake. The meadow was good hunting land now plants were beginning to grow back, but it was impossibly hard to defend. It took only a moon before the other factions attacked.

We fought, screeching and clawing, all that day and into the night. Vasily was wounded, fatally it turned out, but he shouted at us to carry on, carry on, don't worry about him. And so we did. I spilled others' blood and they spilled my blood and the whole world was a nightmare, as bad as the Ashfall had been. No, it was worse than the Ashfall: now the deaths were caused by cats, my own kind.

We retreated at dawn, leaving our territory entirely, finding a new home at the far end of the lake. Pitifully few of us had survived. So much fighting, so much death, and all for nothing.

We had lost.

[4]

Today, the hillside is a garden again.

I still visit it sometimes, although it's a long journey from the new PineClan camp and I'm growing ever more frail. It's peaceful there - the territory is unclaimed by any cat, in honour of the blood that was spilled there. I like to sit there and remember my old life, before the Ashfall. If I squint a bit, and ignore the aches and pains of my old body, I can almost imagine none of it ever happened.

The flowers no longer bloom in many colours - the old, delicate plants refused to grow back now there were no Twolegs to care for them. A bit like my old scruples and morals. I've done so many things in my long life that I'd never have dreamed of doing when I was a kittypet. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, really.

There are only two kinds of flowers that grow in the meadow nowadays, both wildflowers, strong and hardy and expert survivors. The first are poppies. They dot the hillside with their bright petals and their distinctive saw-toothed leaves. Sometimes I imagine that their blood-red blooms come from the blood of the cats who fought here so many seasons ago. A living memorial to Vasily and all the others who gave their lives here.

The other flower here is much less vibrant than the poppies, muted spears of pink and green that cover the scarred landscape like a snowdrift. Rose-bay willow-herb: one of the first plants to grow where there's been a fire or a lightning strike. Even today young cats in all three Clans are called Rose-bay. The fast-growing plant is supposed to represent survival.

When it comes down to it, I don't know whether the flowers are really significant or if they're just plants colonising a patch of abandoned territory. I don't know if any of us live on after death, or by if visiting the place they died I can be closer to the cats I've lost. I don't know if it's right to keep coming to the meadow, or whether I should be trying to forget the past.

But I do know that I like visiting the meadow, and sitting among the flowers, and remembering.

In PineClan, leaders couldn't be grieved for long before they were replaced.

Reed had outlived three leaders now - all the leaders of PineClan since the Clans had formed after the Ashfall. His parents and Aconite's had survived the great disaster itself, and, perhaps more remarkably, the myriad vicious battles that came after it. The cats he knew who were dead far outnumbered those who were still alive.

So he knew life was transient, that you should seize the moment as it came, that you should take the chance today in case you couldn't take it tomorrow. That there wasn't time in life to throw away living in the past, that the present and what you made of it was the important part.

He still thought it was heartless, though, that the struggle to succeed Aconite should have to take place before the earth had even settled over her grave.

He hadn't slept the night before. In her absense, Aconite had insisted he lead the Clan to the Gathering, and he hadn't had the heart to argue with his old friend. Not when she was that sick. And then the chaos of a Clan at the Gathering without a leader, and his return, humiliated at his failure to keep the peace among his Clanmates, to find that Aconite was sicker than ever, that even Sorrel, PineClan's learned healer, was close to giving up hope… No, Reed hadn't slept. Standing in front of his Clanmates to give his faltering eulogy for the cat who had been his best friend, he thanked the stars for the thick fur that hid the shadows in his eyes.

The eulogy was the easy part. His memories of Aconite came freely: growing up together, learning to hunt and fight and navigate the lake territories, watching the Clans grow from loose groupings of shell-shocked cats still trying to adjust to a world without Twolegs or ash-free skies to three united forces to be reckoned with, watching Aconite grow from a curious, excited kit to the wise, respected leader of one of these forces. He told his Clanmates as much as he could, every moment made desperately precious now there could be no more like it. Maybe, if he could share the Aconite he knew, the face behind the leader's mask she'd shown to her Clan, his friend could live on in some way.

There was only one thing about Aconite he didn't try to tell his Clanmates, even though he would've been within his rights to do so: her parting words. She'd told Reed he could share them, if it would help him. But he couldn't. He needed to think, even though there was no time to think - the Casting that could decide his Clan's future was a matter of hours away.

You must lead the Clan, Reed.

You don't mean that, he said, helplessly. I'm not a leader. I'm too old. We've been through this.

Reed, look after PineClan. And she was gone.

And Reed was left with a choice between two evils, two betrayals: deny Aconite her final wish or deny the part of himself that knew leadership wasn't for him, that he would only lead PineClan into hard times and trouble.

He finished the eulogy with the traditional farewell blessing that couldn't begin to sum up his grief for Aconite, his voice cracking on the last word anyway. Gorse, as was traditional for the oldest cat in the Clan, rose to conduct the second part of the ritual, the placing of Aconite's cooling body into the colder grave. Reed hoped, with all his heart, that he would never be the oldest cat in PineClan.

As Gorse nudged Aconite's still form into the hastily-dug pit, Reed bowed his head, unable to watch.

Ash and mud rained over Aconite's ginger fur like floodwater filling the lake, like grief filling the space in Reed's heart where there had once been joy and implacable trust. Life is transient, he reminded himself. She was lucky to last this long. Fortune, you're lucky to have lasted this long.

Reed had been to countless funerals, witnessed what felt like a thousand deaths. All had been painful. None of them had been this… devastating.

He was too old for this.

---

“I'm not standing.” The stark, graceful ritual of the burial was over, and another, more venal one had taken its place. The funeral was a ritual for the past; this, the preparation for the Casting, was a ritual for the future. Reed was too old, really, to have a future.

He took a deep breath, locking gazes with Jasmine, his fellow senior warrior. “I'm retiring next moon, like I planned.”

She huffed, as petulant as her apprentice daughter, Rose-bay. He sighed. He'd guessed something like this might happen as soon as Dead-nettle and Poplar had started that Ashfall-blighted argument as the burial was drawing to an end. So much for the senior warriors presenting a united front while the Clan was still leaderless.

“I just can't believe how selfish you're being!”

“I don't see how wanting to see PineClan in the hands of a warrior rather than an elder is selfish.”

“Stop writing yourself off!” Reed had been trying to keep his voice even, trying not to alert any of the PineClan cats’ mulling around to the argument, but Jasmine seemed to be throwing all caution to the winds. She didn't lower her voice when she added, “I don't see how it isn't selfish to expect some other cat to deal with everything, just to get a peaceful retirement for yourself. I know Aconite would want you to stand.”

That hurt. It looked like she'd wanted it to, although she didn't take much pleasure in his pain.

“Maybe she would've. But if she did -” he was careful to stress this last part, the lie - “if she did want me, it would've been because she saw me as continuity. We come from the same time, the same mindset. But when Aconite became leader, she was young enough to put her mark on her leadership, to set the Clan going in her direction. I could only continue from her, and in a season or two we'd be holding another one of these contests.”

“You're not dead yet! A season or two is a long time. Let the Clan decide if you have it in you.”

“The Clan don't need to decide. I've decided. You stand, if you're so worried about what might happen.” He meant the offer; he respected Jasmine as a warrior, as a politician, even though she was half his age. Another reason he was too old for this.

“You're a coward, Reed.” She turned and walked away, back to the Clan. He gazed after her, regretful. He'd messed that up.

He considered her final words. Maybe he was a coward. He'd survived this long, after all. Only the brave died young.

But Reed thought that it was more that he knew his place. Life, when you saw enough of it, was its own kind of ritual, an elaborate choreography of births and deaths. It only made sense when you were outside it. Reed's place was outside it, or at least on the edges. He'd had his day, had his chance to become leader in the same Casting Aconite had taken part in, and he had lost. It wouldn't be right to steal a second chance now.

Like the funeral, Reed would finish his part, and hand over to the next cat waiting.