Warrior Cats Fanfic

Part 1

Violetpaw walked through the swampy terrain. Her gray eyes searched the forest floor as she worked to hunt prey to complete her assessment. She was half a moon away from reaching 12 moons old, the age in which most cats would become a warrior, unless they failed the aforementioned assessment, of course. There were two parts to the assessment, one was hunting, a basic duty that most of the clan usually spent a fraction of the day doing to make sure everybody was fed, and the second part was a test in combat. They were always in dispute with their neighbors. Peace wasn't all that common, and when it did come about, something always kicked them back into violence sooner or later.

As she trudged through the muddy lands, she made note of every tree, bush, and rock around her. Strong, large pine trees loomed over the area, as well as some evergreen trees. Flat and round rocks scattered across the landscape, small, large, medium... All kinds of different sizes. She had been ordered to hunt south of the carrion-place, which was west of the thunderpath. The thunderpath turned north to separate windclan from shadowclan and shadowclan from thunderclan. Riverclan and Windclan were separated by the gorge, and Thunderclan and Riverclan were separated by a large river, and the small hunting area of sunning rocks, which was highly contested by the two. Violetcloud only cared about how she would defend and help her clan thrive, so she didn't think about it too much.

She was part of the greatest clan, Shadowclan. They were unrivaled in stealth. And were by far the hardest working out of all the clans. Riverclan had always been the best groomed and fed, as they hunted the worst prey, slimy icky fish. She gagged at the thought. Windclan had the fastest of cats, though obviously, it was because of how scrawny they were, the skinniest of all the clans. Thunderclan was the worst of them all, so-called the 'best hunters', even though every clan was just as good at hunting, if not better. It's not like they could catch fish like Riverclan, or run fast enough to make a rabbit look like a snail-like Windclan, they were nowhere near as cool as the rest of them. They really could use a lesson on stealth, they always were the most obnoxious of all the clans. All about democracy and friendship. They had no time for that, especially when Leaf-Bare was coming any moment now! The clans couldn't worry about building connections to the other clans when there was hardly anything to eat.

She pulled her head back and above her shoulders. Surrounded by the dark green hues of Shadowclan as well as the light snow patches that indicated the coming of the worst season, she tasted the air for any prey. Her long ears spun at the sounds of rustling bushes or the sounds of rippling water. She could smell a couple of different things, rotting trash, from the carrion-place, mouse, and a lizard. She snuck around as she worked to identify which was closest (the mouse or the lizard, she refused to 'hunt' carrion). As she tried to focus harder on her sense of smell, she realized she could smell some of the other Shadowclan warriors nearby, hidden behind a patch of horsetail and leaves.

Yellowtalon, and Vistaowl, her mentor. She recognized their scents. They were probably watching her right now! Her whiskers twitched nervously. She shook her head, focus! She chose to hunt the lizard, it turned out the mouse was closer, but the lizard would probably feed the clan a lot better, and was only a bit further than the mouse. She was brimming with excitement, as she continued pushing onwards, she spotted the lizard at last, and once she was a fox-length away, she lowered down to the ground, stalking an inch or so closer, at the moment, she was glad she didn't have a long tail like most of her clanmates did, if she did, it would be lashing back and forth as if an annoying was mouse biting the tip of it. Her body did most of the work for her - all 6 moons of training would pay off, muscle memory kicked in, and Violetpaw slipped into perfect form. She watched for a moment until the lizard was distracted - and when it came, she didn't give the green-ish brown critter a moment to react. Springing gracefully like a lynx, she unsheathed a party of sharp claws and dropped down on top of the scaled individual. She stuck it to the ground and opened her jaws to land a killing blow.

Her tufted ears shot back up as she rose her head, eyeing the trees. Do you see that Vistaowl? I'm ready to be a warrior. She snatched up her catch in her jaws and took off back in the direction to the area where they had wanted her to put all of the prey she'd caught. Once she'd gotten back, she stood over a pile of 5 clean and fine catches. A crow, a mouse, two frogs, and to top it off, a lizard. She'd been awfully lucky that she'd got them all, if just one of them got a moment long enough to let out a cry of warning for all the other creatures in the forest, she would've been lucky to become a medicine cat (this is an exaggeration).

"Violetpaw, we've finished assessing your hunting skills, come on, let's head back to camp, and prepare for the next part of the test," Vistaowl said to her once they'd all met up, her words were just as condescending as usual. It didn't necessarily bother her, she'd sworn to herself a long time ago that there was no way, even if Star Clan themselves willed it, that she would ever be like her toad of a mentor.

Vistaowl was an old warrior with gray freckled pelt and black Siamese markings, she was probably just becoming crabbier with age, just as more white hairs began to show. She walked ahead of them back to camp. She wasn't the best apprentice she could be, mostly in the personality department. She barely had any 'distractions' in her training, namely other apprentices that she could mouth off and misbehave with. Though it also meant the people she trained with usually had so much more skill than she did... For the longest time, she'd lost every mock-battle she'd been in, Shadowclan cats weren't the kind to go soft and let you win just so you wouldn't throw a tantrum. Though eventually, she started coming up with her ways of beating them, even if they weren't the traditional way to fight somebody (in shadowclan standards). Usually, little things she'd seen other creatures or clans do, she'd thought about how the rabbits the windclan cats hunted had such powerful legs, and so she tried using her legs to fight her opponents in interesting ways. So.. Kicking like a drowning dog if she was trapped against the ground under a cat- with her soft belly exposed. She'd thought about how she'd seen some riverclan cats hunt fish, and she started using a claw to poke at areas she found out were fragile. The same way a riverclan cat might take a claw and use it to scoop a fish out of the water. She was pretty observant like this all the time, she thought of her mentor's name.

Vistaowl... I'm like an owl, with those huge pairs of big eyes- you would notice so much. Violetpaw noticed a lot. She noticed when people were being discreet or she could tell without even looking at their faces that they were mad, or afraid. She replied to her thoughts, I don't think I'd want eyes that big. She glanced over her shoulder. Vistaowl and Yellowtalon had split off into another direction awhile back, as she reached the clearing where the pine trees became more scattered - and the thorn barrier laid in front of her. She imagined how it must've felt to wrap all those together. Eyck, she had hated having a single thorn in her paw, she couldn't imagine spending nearly all year trying to wind something like that together, she would've given up on the first day. Or at least she'd have complained about it more than she would've worked on it every day until it was no longer her problem. She knew the thorn barrier was important, it kept out the wild from reaching their to-be warriors, or their retired ones, elders. She was never sure how she felt about the elders and the kits. She always complained when she was younger about how annoying, boring, and useless the elders were. They usually were too old to hunt or fight, so they just took up resources. The only reason she didn't bother everybody else all that much about this was because of the Warrior Code. Specifically the rule about putting Elders and Kits first. The warrior code was everything to the clans and meant so much. The only leadership-ish thing she would ever listen to. It was the moral code that stopped the clans from destroying everything. Anyway, back to the elder thing - the one thing they did do was pass down stories, stories of some of the greatest battles, or the most tragic plagues, the one that caught her attention was the story of the original leader of Shadowclan.