Endless Sky ~New Beginning~

Chapter Ten

OStar padded over to where the others were waiting for her. Mystic watched the white cat closely with eyes that have probably seen more than OStar would ever see in her entire life.
"Damn, you walk slow," Avaro snickered as she finally sat down next to Spike.
"Shush, it's not like Roxxan wasn't calling you out earlier when we were getting ready to come here," OStar shot back, "Are you going to go pee on a tree now since you 'haven't been to the bathroom yet'?" she added with a grin.
"Avaro, you are not going to pee on a tree again," Spike hissed and OStar looked at her with wide eyes. "Again?!" she laughed.
"Aw, come on now, that was different," Avaro huffed as OStar wheezed and Charlotte chuckled.
Mystic cleared her throat, making them stop to finally acknowledge the one OStar had come here to meet.
The group settled, allowing the prophet to speak. "You must be OStar, correct?" she meowed at the white cat. OStar nodded, guessing that Avaro had already told her a lot.
"Well it's nice to finally meet you this way, much calmer," Mystic continued with a wave of her tail, a third eye on her forehead flickering open slightly.
Third eye...
OStar hadn't even noticed it. In fact, Mystic looked quite different from the rest with her three pure yellow eyes with diamond shaped black pupils, a yellow eight-pointed star on her back and light purple fur. Looking even more carefully, OStar saw lighter purple markings under Mystic's main two eyes and more on her ears and sides. She didn't know why, but the markings felt oddly similar to something she'd once seen, but couldn't figure out where or when.
Lost in her thoughts, OStar completely missed Mystic's question and only noticed when everyone was staring at her.
"What was that?" OStar said with a shiver, not liking everyone staring at her.
"I was wondering if there was anything you wanted to ask me," Mystic replied, looking calm and patient. It made OStar wonder how much of the future Mystic could actually see. One future? Many potential ones? She'd never find out as Charlotte already told her that Mystic was unable to speak of anything she sees.
"Ask you? Uh... How did you meet Avaro?" she said, a part of her wanting to question her silence regarding the future.
"Oh, well it was by sheer chance. I didn't even see it in the future. I was only taking a small walk outside OCTown when I met him and Lucerne," Mystic replied, looking at the blue sky as she dipped into the past. "It wasn't as much of a happy meeting as you might think,"
"It was the morning after I was kicked out of my own home and I refused to let her get my face treated. I wanted it to scar over," Avaro spoke up.
"Why would you want that?" OStar asked.
"To remind myself why I can never go back,"
"Oh..." OStar curled her tails around her paws. "That's a little... Dark..." she thought, yet the dragonkin kept a grin on his face.
"But people can always hide their emotions," she reminded herself and glanced at Charlotte.
"Everyone here has their own story, whether good or bad. But it's not my business to poke into it,"
"Now that I have met OStar, wouldn't it be fair that Fuchsia and Stripe do so as well? Just because they have kits doesn't mean they no longer want to be our friends," Mystic chuckled, cutting into OStar's thoughts.
"I might sit out on this one," Charlotte said, looking a little nervous.
"Why is that?" OStar questioned, tilting her head. "Scared of kits?"
"Err, one of the kits really hates me for some reason, ha-ha, kept hissing at me and hiding under her mom," her friend replied.
"Nonsense," Mystic barged in, getting to her paws. "Rose just needs to get used to you, she might not be accustomed to humans,"
"She's not scared of Lucerne or Avaro and they look human enough for me," Charlotte pointed out but the purple cat was already walking off.
The teen frowned and shrugged it off.
"Come on, Blaze already left shortly before you lot showed up," Avaro said as he followed the Prophet.
OStar huffed and padded on with the others, knowing for sure she would get lost if she didn't.
The village was a lot bigger than she'd anticipated. There were multiple different kinds of homes, some large mud huts, others dug into the ground, or carved into a tree. It was fascinating how these cats were able to make such nice homes with their paws. As she looked around it was clear that this area was more of a residential area. Between the dens she was able to catch glimpses of what seemed to be a trading center. Maybe a place to get food or to locate someone who could repair a hole in the roof of one's den.
"It's like a cat populated OCTown," OStar observed.
Before long the group had reached a leaning tree that seemed to have fallen ages ago onto another tree that supported it. The cats had managed to create a nice home underneath the two with the toppled dead tree keeping the roof in place.
Neatly trimmed vines had grown over the hole of the entrance, creating a natural door with its leaves.
"I'll call them out, there is no way we can all fit in there," Spike meowed as she padded ahead.
"Hm... Where did Rual and Afina go?" Charlotte mumbled, looking around.
OStar's ear twitched. She was right, the two seemed to have vanished right after they had arrived. Well before she'd even met Spike.
"Um,"
"They're probably talking to other elementals again," Charlotte answered her own question, not even speaking to OStar.
OStar decided to pretend not to have heard her friend's mumbling as she sat down to wait for the newcomers.
It didn't take long for Spike to back out of the den with Blaze following and seconds after that two pink balls of fluff appeared. They were about Afina's size with eyeball-melting bright pink fur.
The mother was much worse when she came out, practically glowing pink fur, nothing like Avaro's pink hair or wings. The father was more tolerable, his pink seemed to have had a dash of peach added to it, so it wasn't so burning bright.
OStar was a bit stunned. Of all the cats she'd met, these four were a lot different. She wasn't sure if they were elemental or prophetic. No one said they could foresee the future, but OStar couldn't figure out what element would be pink besides the flower ones and these four didn't have flowers, or even flower markings.
Fuchsia, the mother, was just pink with a few magenta stripes over her eyes and back while her mate, Stripe, was a calmer pink with an orange striped tail.
With the kits rolling around play-fighting, OStar could only say they were just as pink as their mom.
"Too much pink," she thought, feeling like she was going to get a headache.
"Patch! Rose! Stop that with guests sitting here!" Fuchsia snapped and the kits flopped apart.
OStar could only assume Rose was the one who looked like a mini-Fuchsia, while Patch was similar, he had patches of the calmer pink from his father. The two both had their tails tipped with a few orange stripes so at least both took something from Stripe and not all Fuschia.
"Ha-ha! Wow, they've doubled in size!" Avaro exclaimed before it turned into a yelp as Rose jumped at him. She clung to his shirt with needle sharp claws and quickly climbed up.
"Avro! Avro!" she purred.
Avaro grabbed her and pulled her off, chuckling. "You're missing an a. It's av-uh-row. Not av-row,"
Fuchsia seemed already to have given up on trying to keep her kits from going wild and jumping at people, OStar wasn't sure she'd even considered it. That's when she noticed Patch was still sitting where he'd been when he pulled away from his sister, his wide dark blue eyes glued to OStar.
"Uh, hey," she started. Patch didn't reply, nor react.
OStar's ears flattened with unease and looked at Charlotte for help, but her friend was too busy talking to Blaze to notice. Stripe on the other hand, did.
"Hey, sorry to interrupt but there seems to be a new one among you guys," he meowed, making his mate look over and notice OStar for the first time.
Fuchsia narrowed her eyes at OStar, tail slightly twitching as she scanned her.
"Oh right! Fuchsia, Stripe, this is OStar, she joined us recently when Afina found her lost in OCTown. She doesn't have any memory," Avaro said while trying to prevent the kit in his arms from clawing his ear off.
"No memory? She hit her head or something?" Fuchsia looked over at the dragon as she replied.
"Uhh..."
"Nope! She was undamaged when she showed up!" Estella suddenly spoke up from next to OStar, making her yelp.
"When did you get here?!" she asked as Roxxan joined.
"Just now," the princess purred, unaware that she'd startled OStar.
"Undamaged? Then it's magic," the bright pink cat meowed, "Rose stop trying to gnaw off Avaro's ear!"
Rose only meowed back.
"Magic?" OStar blinked, "What do you mean magic?"
Fuchsia didn't reply, most likely she didn't even hear the question as she finally managed to call her kit off Avaro and back onto the ground.
"Honestly, this kit seems to have sucked all the energy from her brother, she's constantly mewing for attention while he is quiet and patient. Great elements, they are really polar opposites," she yammered as Rose attacked her brother.
OStar frowned and ruffled her wings, slightly irritated that her question had been ignored.
"Ahh, but Rose looks so much like you!" Estella exclaimed.
"I was never as noisy as she is now!"
"Yes you were, Zeru said she acts just like you when you were a kit," Patch pointed out and got a hiss with some chuckles from the others.
After a few seconds OStar found herself drifting a bit. Daydreaming maybe. But the world seemed to have gotten silent as she padded away without moving.
She was going to visit someone. A friend who had recently managed to give birth after three painful failures. A sister in law.
She was there when her brother got the call. The birth was too early, everyone thought the baby was going to die, again.
But she didn't.
After a few weeks they were called over to visit and the news of the child being healthy brightened everyone's day.
"Did they name her?" she had asked.
"Yes, but they want to tell us personally once we see her," he'd replied.
OStar grinned, feeling excited. She'd never seen a real infant before, all she knew was that they were small and fragile, and maybe noisy.
"Let's go," her brother had said before walking out the door which was oddly nothing more than a black doorway.
That didn't seem to have bothered her as she quickly bounced after him, her paws landing on cool grass.
Grass.
She blinked. What she'd expected was the front porch, but there was now a forest all around her, the house was gone, and the moon glimmered through the trees.
OStar didn't have much time to really think before a loud piercing scream split through the air.
Charlotte's scream.
"Charlotte?!" OStar meowed, her chest tightening with fear as she quickly ran to the noise. "What's going on? Is she in danger? It sounded like she was hurt," she thought as she got closer to the source.
Just as she was about to jump through the bushes something attacked her from behind, knocking her off her feet.
"Got you!" Rose yowled in triumph, standing on OStar's back as her victim lay on her belly with her forepaws stretched out.
"HEY HOW DID YOU GET OVER THERE?!" Fuchsia yelped sliding over to grab Rose by the scruff and pull her off.
OStar lay there blinking, trying to get her thoughts together and understand what she had just seen and heard. "Brother? Do I have a brother? Why was I in that forest? What happened to Charlotte?"
"Hey, you okay?" Charlotte asked as she tried to help OStar back up. "Rose didn't actually hurt you, did she?"
"N-No no, I'm fine, just caught me off guard," she replied, shaking her head to try and brush off the chills running up her spine.
Charlotte looked uncertain, as if she knew there was something else on OStar's mind. "You sure?"
"Yeah..." she replied, turning her focus back to the others.
Fuchsia was scolding Rose as Patch had finally moved from staring at OStar to crawling into Lucerne's lap.
Charlotte was quiet but didn't question OStar anymore, leaving her alone.
OStar didn't daydream anymore. The last one had left her too confused and ruffled. Already parts of the dream had started to fuzz away like her memory. She couldn't even remember what this "brother" even looked like.
Everything left her with questions, but she knew no one could answer them.
"But maybe Silver can..."