Being a hollow-guard requires incredible skill and strength. One must trust their instincts, even on the smallest of hunches. They must also be fierce and unyielding, willing to lay their life down for the Tribe of Soaring Oaks.
As of late, many ha...
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Poolteller returned too late. When she entered the heart of her den, Drift was already lying beside the pool with his eyes fixed on nothing at all. As she tried to sit at his side, he didn't look her way. He only put a tail-length between them and said, "You didn't even try."
He could feel the hurt pouring off of her in waves, clouding the cool air between them. Any colder, and Poolteller's namesake might have been awash in frost.
"Drift," Poolteller began. This time, she did not try to close the distance, and he was as grateful as he was betrayed. "There was nothing to try. Our father is dead."
"He is now," Drift snarled.
"He has been. For seasons." Without looking at her, Drift knew her eyes were pleading. Tired. She had just been in the forest burying yet another of her Tribe, and nothing in the world could make her want to dig up the dead. Especially their father.
But it wasn't a matter of digging him up. It was in truth another burial, one that hadn't needed to happen. Drift rose to circle the pool's edge. "I'm not mad."
"You're grieving. It makes the best of us mad."
"I'm not mad," he repeated. "I am telling the truth. I have been, but you refuse to listen. To your brother. Why?"
By now, he found himself directly across the pool from his sister, and she stared into its depths until she spoke, only the faint rise and fall of her chest proving that she had not turned to stone, even if her heart had. "Dead cats do not suddenly return," she finally said. "We bury them, and they join the Tribe of Endless Hunting. They leave this world for good, and nothing we do or dream will make them return to us. The stars are their hunting grounds now."
"But Sun never died," Drift countered. "Do you remember a body? No, because there wasn't one. There was blood, there was fur, but there wasn't a body."
"Because he was eaten. By a wolf that left tracks right through his blood."
"He left those tracks!" By the time Poolteller had returned from Shrew's funeral, Drift had settled into a comfortable numbness, which was beginning to boil away. Heat gathered beneath his pelt, angry heat, and across the pool, he watched his sister fight to keep her own hackles from rising.
"Cats cannot become wolves," she gritted out.
"He did."
"He died!" Always so careful, so controlled, Poolteller snapped for the second time that day. She kicked a stone into the pool with all her might, then slashed her paw through the ripples as they rolled to shore. "Sun is dead," she growled, forcing each word out between her teeth, "and I have grieved enough for nine lives over without you digging him up to haunt us.
"You are not the only one grieving, but you are the only one dragging ghosts from their graves, and it will make you mad. It will kill you, even if it kills you slowly." She took a heavy, shuddering breath. "I don't want to have to mourn you, too."
