The Moonlapse [ABANDONED]

XV

Dusk was slowly rising to rule in the sun's place. The solar light was slowly falling away to sleep beneath its delicate blanket, gently laying its carpet of dreams upon the woods. Glimmering waves of golden beamed over the horizon, slowly sinking away from the vast, cerulean heavens. Stars were beginning to awaken for their nocturnal stay, freckled among the orange twilight.

A soft evening breeze gently whispered as it crept between the branches, rattling red leaves from their trees and luring them down to an emerald grave on the ground. Alderheart and Jayfeather wandered under the dreamy carpet that dusk always brought, shaded beneath the treetops of the gloaming forest. Scarlet leaves were carried along the winds that spoke to the rising moon.

"I don't know what must be happening with them. Bristlefrost was wounded so fatally I don't even know how she's still alive. Rootpaw lost an eye, and all four of them are injured," Alderheart spoke as they made their way along the trails. Melancholy shadows were beginning to finally kiss the sun goodnight, and the moon arose to peek over the horizon.

"Do you think they'll even make it out alive?" Jayfeather meowed, his subdued tone matching with the dimming light. "At least one of them might die on this quest."

Alderheart's soul was doused under a cloud of dread. He inhaled a deep breath, releasing a fluttering sigh into the nightfall's atmosphere. "I hope not. And that's hope, not an expectation."

The sky had fallen into a deep navy by the time they reached the moor. The moon gave them a striking view, its silver light softly embracing the vast hillside. Tonight, the constellations were sealed away, veiled in clouds of dull sapphire. All the stars' dreams had sunken beneath a sea of shadows.

"Okay. Alderheart, you run off and find some sticks and herbs and shit," Jayfeather meowed. The red-furred tom slowly set forward into the nightfall chill. Winds tousled with his ginger pelt, and the wavering grass that clung to his fur was cold in the dampening dew. 

He kept running until, suddenly, the hills were flooded in a serene silence. He froze in place. The trees at the edge of the moors were rattled, they were swaying in the wind, but the breezes made no sound. The leaves drifting through the shade were carried agonizingly slowly, the grass refused to embrace them and so did the heavens. All was consumed in an entrancing buzz. It was like the silent crackling of a flame.

Alderheart slowly bent over, allured to the grass. It embraced him as he sunk down onto his side. His mind was trapped in a shimmering limbo, it was lost deep among the trenches in an ocean of dreams. Slowly his eyes cracked open again, but the moor he'd just been walking through was dead. This hillside before him, it appeared the same. Something wasn't right though, as if all the colours had been painted in scarlet and his eyes were blind to the effects.

The tom blinked. Paws were suddenly standing before him, but they weren't Jayfeather's. Alderheart's eyes fluttered. He raised his head. 

Amber eyes stared down at him, emotionless and stoic. All the feeling in those eyes was flooded within blazing pits of magma, burned away and reduced to ashes that would never shine again. But behind the silhouette was what told him this was not the hillside he'd just stood in.

It was an eclipse. The moon was veiled in a curtain of pitch black, and yet the blaze of the sun still encircled it in a ring of fire. Its light was reaching out, the dark sphere blocked it away and yet it still shone in all of its fierceness. And just as soon as the vision captured him, it was gone. Alderheart's senses were granted back to him.

"Alderheart! We didn't need catmint, and you weren't supposed to use it for non-medical purposes!" Jayfeather hissed. Alderheart simply laid in pure, paralyzing disorientation. The moor had been restored to its previous state, and the moon was no longer reduced to a shadow that eclipsed light. It simply stood, a silver angel that rested within the sky. It didn't do anything else.

Don't listen to him. Just pay attention to me, a deep voice spoke within the caverns in his mind. Jayfeather's mouth was moving. He was saying something, and yet it was drowned away under the words of the unnamed speaker. It was as though they were trying to drag him back into that vision.

Alderheart's thoughts were growing hazy. They were falling away under a flood of dreams, drowning deep into the ocean of madness. A million voices now accompanied him, they encircled him. And they told him to relax.

Fall asleep.

It was a strange feeling. Like his mind was swimming within a vortex of others' thoughts. His feelings, his identity, his self--they were being crushed away and suffocated in a black hole. But it didn't matter. There was no traces of emotion left in his mind to feel despair about the loss of his soul.

Alderheart let himself fall away into this cocoon of warmth, until finally, his soul was dead under the possession of another's.