The five Warrior Clans are going extinct. Gatherings and Moonpool visits are inacessable, with leaders falling left and right. The lake territories are being wiped out to the brink of extinction by new, large predators that have migrated into their...
They look scared of me. The two she-cats had begun to whisper quietly, never taking their nervous eyes off of Crescentsky.
"Go look at your reflection in the water. If that even is you. I don't believe that it is." Tinyflame's meow came out in a frightened jitter. The corners of her jaw stretched down and into a deep, appalling frown.
"Of course it is," Cheetah murmured back. For once she was serious, but there was also admiration in her tone.
"It has the same colored eyes as her. Oh wow, I never thought Starclan was capable of things like this. This is awesome!" For all of the confidence in Cheetah's tone, the spotted she-cat still had a ridge of fur lifted along her spine.
It? Fear trickled like snowmelt down her spine.
"Yeah, sure, awesome." Tinyflame's retort was dry, and she rolled her eyes. Then she glanced at Crescentsky and her eyes widened again.
"I don't believe this. It's too dangerous. It can't be real...!" The smaller she-cat's words were tremulous.
Crescentsky was scared to speak again, in case her voice came out in that deep, guttural tone like it had before.
If that was her voice.
But it had to be. She had meant to say it.
She padded over to the stream's edge where the water was calmest. Towards its middle the channel swirled in eddys around partly-submerged rocks.
Tinyflame's odd words had frightened her. She almost didn't want to look.
But she dropped her head lower anyways in order to study her reflection. Because it was still dark, it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Crescentsky didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't anything as profound as this.
The eyes staring back at her were pinpointed and small. They had perfectly round, dilated pupils in order to absorb the moons minimal light. And the irises were her's; one blue-flecked and another yellow. But the fur that stretched across her face was not hers. Nor was the pelt that covered her shoulders, her forelegs, and her flanks.
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What she could see of herself was vast and dark, shaggy and dense. Stockier than a cat. As she turned her face to the side, her muzzle seemed to elongate to twice as long as that of a cat's. When she moved, her reflection wavered along with the surface of the water, but did not change.
She was huge. Crescentsky looked down at her compact paws, which were leaving deep gauges in the earth.
And she did have claws; but they were in-retractable and blunt. They couldn't tear through an animal's hide like a cat's could.
