My entry. I know I won't stand a chance against whatever JediMasterQuill enters, and Lightning's entry was amazingly matchless, but I'm hoping that I can maybe squish myself into third. :3 Hope you like, Scarheart and Scarheart's judges!

Word count (including this AN): 22, 827 [WARNING: This means that this is 36 pages on Word. Yes, I got extremely carried away with this ickle fella's story - make sure you have time to read all of this when you start it! x'D It was written to be read in one sitting~ Hopefully you're a fast reader...]

~note: I didn't realize until I was perhaps a third of the way through this, but this fanfic goes very well with one of my favorite songs: Shattered by Trading Yesterday. I recommend you listen to it (the long version) before, after, or while reading this. ...After is probably your best bet, lol.~

.:: AND THE W O R L D LISTENED ::. {3}

The night is pitch-black, and the wind blowing off the dunes is sharp and cold as shards of shattered ice. It howls through the sand, shrieking around the gentle curves it created only last warmbreeze, summoning towers of cloud that hover over the restless sea like gigantic eagles of black and silver, waiting to strike. Only last night calmed by the timid glow of a waning crescent moon, the ocean and its surrounding territories now seem tense, gathered, alertly fearful. The jagged silhouettes of snow-white cliffs, now only shades paler than the death-dark sky, are like the teeth of a gigantic beast, lips curled back, mouth open, ready to rip apart the stars and end the known world.

There is a sudden flash of light, followed swiftly by an earsplitting crack, and the teeth of the great beast blaze like frost afire for barely a heartbeat of a heartbeat. More flashes follow, and then comes the steady pound of rain upon sand, and the chiming splash of rain upon rock, and the dribbly slap of rain upon a belabored sea.

Later - it could be heartbeats, it could be seasons, it could be anything in between - the pounding, the splashing, and the slapping begin to become drawn-out, fewer and farther between. The great eagle clouds slowly retreat. The rosy light of a tired dawn tinges the edges of the beast's teeth with quiet fire, and the teeth become white cliffs once more.

And then there is a silence. It is a great silence, an all-encompassing silence, a strange and heavy silence, a silence unbroken by the lonely cries of gulls or the whistling wind or even the waves on the shore.

The elders' legends say that when such a silence is present, the world is watching.

They say that when such a silence is present, the world is listening.

Flightkit makes her first appearance outside of the nursery when she's five moons old. It's much later than most kits reach this marker in their lives (most are poking their noses into everything by two moons), but Grayheart either doesn't notice or doesn't care.

"Look at her," the deputy purrs rather giddily to his apprentice, Firepaw. "Isn't she perfect?"

Firepaw just wants to get on with his training - he's only an assessment away from becoming a warrior - but to humor his mentor, he looks anyways, quelling the disparaging comments that want to rise up in him. And then, once he's looked, he finds that for some reason he can't quite look away.

The little golden tabby she-kit is blissfully oblivious to any watching Clanmates as she spins and twirls, chasing an elusive silver butterfly. Her pelt gleams softly in the early mildbreeze sun as she darts first left, then right, tail lashing excitedly, not showing a shred of the shyness that most kits do on their first venture outside the small, shady, sandy place that up until then has been their whole world. Every once in a while Flightkit's paws will barely brush the wings of the small thing, and she'll let out a squeal of pure joy and redouble her efforts to capture it.

There's a strange sort of spark in her every action that holds Firepaw's attention tightly and won't let go. He's never seen a cat with such spirit, he reflects vaguely to himself, following Flightkit's gleefully erratic pounces with his eyes. Nor has he seen a cat so oddly...free.

"Flightkit!" Grayheart calls, interrupting his daughter's hunting and Firepaw's reflections. "Flightkit, have you forgotten your dear old dad already?" The storm-gray tom smooths his cream chest fur, chuckling softly. "We're the only two out besides Firepaw, and I haven't even gotten a glance from you, let alone a good morning."

Flightkit immediately gives up butterfly-chasing, dropping down onto all four paws with a soft thud. "Good morning, Dad!" she calls cheerfully, waving her tail wildly. "What are you doing up so early? It's only just dawn!"

"I could ask you the same question," Grayheart points out good-naturedly, his whiskers twitching.

The little tabby wrinkles her nose. "Yeah, but it's different for me, 'cause I've never been out of the nursery before. So I'm supposed to come out whenever I want."

"And I'm the deputy," her father reminds her, voice tinged with a rumbling purr. "I need to be up before the sun so I can organize the dawn patrol."

"Oh yeah..." Flightkit looks crestfallen.

Grayheart's silver ears prick up suddenly, and he turns his head towards Firepaw. "Also," he tells his daughter, "I've an apprentice ready to become a warrior. If he passes his assessment, that is." The blueish-gray tom gives Firepaw a mock glare, playfully narrowing his bright-blue eyes.

"Really?" Grayheart's daughter exclaims, curiosity piqued. She scampers towards them, skidding to a halt about a gull-length from Firepaw, her pale cream whiskers bristling. "I thought he was only just ten moons old."

"He is, but he's been training hard," purrs Grayheart, flicking Firepaw affectionately with his tail. "You see here before you SandClan's greatest overachiever. Say hello, Flightkit, be polite," he adds as an afterthought.

"Really?" Flightkit mews in response to Grayheart's second-to-last statement. Then, without drawing a breath - much less giving them time to answer - she says, "Hi, Firepaw!"

"Er...hi," Firepaw says slowly, not sure why it feels quite like the right thing to say to her.

There is an awkward silence that stretches on for an unrealistically long time, and Firepaw begins to feel a prickling in his fur as though somebody is standing behind him, breathing down his neck. Flightkit is shifting from paw to paw, her gaze darting back and forth. Firepaw's never given much thought to the elders' saying about the world listening, but now he gives it quite a lot of thought, as he stands there awkwardly, fur prickling, standing stock-still without so much as a tail twitch. He certainly has the time for it, as this silence doesn't seem to be ending any time soon.

"Um," Flightkit finally says experimentally, flattening her ears slightly as though fearing retribution from an unseen force. When none comes, she quickly says to her father, "I'mgonnagoplaynowbye!" and rushes away.

Grayheart laughs and turns to his apprentice. "I've set up the patrols for the rest of the morning," he tells Firepaw. "Now let's go on that warrior assessment, shall we?"

Firepaw still can't shake the feeling of being listened to or watched by something not easily named, but he nods solemnly. "Yes, please."

As the mentor and apprentice pad out of camp, Firepaw pauses and gazes back over his shoulder at Flightkit, dancing like a feather in the breeze, joyful and free and nobody's but her own, and he thinks that she's the most beautiful and most confusing thing he's ever seen in his life, and he wonders why he simply can't look away, and why there's this strange silence resounding around him when he looks at her.

The deputy calls, and Firepaw tears himself away from the sight and bounds out of camp, paws thudding against the sand, sending up little dusty clouds, but even while his legs and muscles and lungs move involuntarily over the familiar sandy trails to the training dunes, Firepaw's mind wanders, ever lingering on Flightkit.

He's never - what do the young warriors call it? - fallen for somebody before, so he doesn't quite know what it ought to feel like, but he's pretty sure he's falling for a certain sun-bright she-kit right now, and though this new feeling is confusing, it feels so right.

Flightpaw was a holy terror throughout the last two moons of her kithood. In hindsight, Firegaze knows he should have expected her to drag something back with her from her first-ever solo hunt. Of course, even had he expected the dragging, he would never have thought of what she would be dragging. Honestly, what apprentice comes back from a hunt dragging a besodden, starving, bloody tomkit the same size as herself?

Apparently Flightpaw of SandClan does.

After she tugs him into camp and releases his scruff, the entire camp - the last patrol has just come into camp, and the next one hasn't yet left - simply stares for a long few moments that are only broken by surprised whispers and a few giggles. Firegaze is as transfixed as the rest of them - it's obvious that Flightpaw has just brought back a cat, but how? Why? Wherefore? He can't wrap his mind around the concept for whatever reason, even though it's Flightpaw and thus all of her odd behavior should be taken in stride.

Finally Flightpaw ends the murmuring. "Come on, somebody help me!" she squeaks, prodding the young tom with one forepaw. He lets out a muffled groan, and this for some reason causes the Clan to spring into action. Firegaze finds himself hurrying to find Foamfeather, their camp's resident medicine cat, along with about five others, while Grayheart and his brother Ripplewhisker bound to Flightpaw's side and begin sniffing at the apprentice.

By the time Firegaze has located Foamfeather, Flightpaw and the others have managed to somewhat revive the dusty-brown kit, who's now attempting to sit up.

"Don't be stupid," Flightpaw is telling him while she holds him down firmly with a small creamy paw. "You're far too weak to walk."

The strange kit can't reply with anything but a hacking cough, and Firegaze silently pities him - it's hard enough to argue with Flightpaw when you can speak perfectly well.

Foamfeather hurries forward, plumed silvery tail waving. "Out of the way, everyone!" she orders sternly, and the Clan step aside one by one, all except for Flightpaw, who remains firmly planted by the youngster's side. She seems to have started up a whisper-conversation with him. Narrowing her bright blue eyes, Foamfeather mews warningly, "Flightpaw..."

"But he's so interesting!" Flightpaw complains, even as Grayheart steps forward, lifts her by the scruff, and calmly steps away. "His name is Dusty, and he can't remember where he's from, or why he was in the water, or me rescuing him, or..." She pauses dramatically, which would have been humorous even had she not been dangling by her scruff from somebody's mouth as she spoke. "...Or why he was covered in buhlood!"

"Be that as it may," Foamfeather mews coolly, "I was appointed to this camp to heal cats, and healing cats is what I intend to do. You can continue speaking with your interesting new friend as soon as I have attended to him."

"Aw, whatever," the lithe golden tabby mumbles disappointedly as Grayheart sets her softly on the ground.

Firegaze's whiskers twitch before he can stop them, and he immediately hopes that she didn't see that. Of course, she did.

"Firegaze," complains Flightpaw petulantly, seagreen eyes narrowing in frustration, "don't laugh at me!"

The chestnut-pelted tom is lost for words. It's that silence again, the silence that seems to be imposed upon him every time Flightpaw speaks, the heavy silence that says, Something bigger than you is listening to this, and watching this, and comprehending this. Something. Perhaps the world.

"Well? You going to say something?" Flightpaw asks, thumping her forepaw against the sand, Dusty the new kit almost completely forgotten in her quest to pull a response from the young warrior.

"I - I'm sorry," the tabby replies, blinking slowly. He can't think of anything else to say.

Flightpaw's left ear flicks. "Okay!" she chirps, and waltzes back over to stand by her father's side, interestedly watching Foamfeather attempt to persuade Dusty that the healing herbs aren't poisonous.

Several days before Flightpaw's warrior assessment is scheduled to occur (Dustypaw's too, Firegaze remembers idly), Clawstar comes by the camp for the first time in moons. That makes sense, as he only usually visits the camp when there are warrior ceremonies to be performed, but what doesn't make sense is his extremely early timing. Grayheart makes sure to remark on it as soon as Clawstar is properly settled, and Firegaze, who's been given the high honor of permission to sit and talk with them, listens carefully.

"So what brings you here so early?" Grayheart asks with a yawn, in his casual, easygoing way.

Clawstar's pale amber eyes narrow, causing the tiny, intricate black stripes and whorls on his smoky gray pelt to twist and twirl and rearrange themselves into a thousand different shapes. "Rogues."

The big blue-and-cream tom raises a furry eyebrow. "Hmm?"

"Rogues," Clawstar repeats, already sounding impatient. "I suppose you haven't yet had trouble with them, or I'd've heard from you, but they've been giving the other two camps quite a bit of trouble. Reeddapple was severely wounded just days ago in an attack on her camp by some. They daren't attack my camp directly, of course, as it's the largest, but they've been stealing fresh-kill and picking off cats who wander off alone."

Grayheart tuts in disapproval but doesn't pursue the issue further. Firegaze feels compelled to mew, "But what are you doing about it? ...with all due respect," he adds onto the end hurriedly.

"Mmm." Clawstar doesn't answer the question right away, first tilting his head to one side and pinning Firegaze with strange pale eyes like dying suns. "You're Firegaze? Grayheart's former apprentice?"

"Yes," Firegaze replies with a twitch of his tail. The dark tom's gaze is unnerving him, but Firegaze isn't about to show it.

The leader nods slowly. "He told me you were sharp. I see what he meant." Clawstar blinks, and the black whorls around his blazing eyes twist and contort and rearrange again. "I have appointed a guard at each of the other two camps, and at the moment I'm gathering a group of cats to pursue and destroy these rogues. We'll have them yet. My last step of the plan before attacking was to alert Grayheart's sector and to gather volunteers from it. And, of course, to perform the warrior ceremonies." The dark tabby tilts his head slightly to one side. "Does that answer your question, Firegaze?"

The mahogany tom nods. "Yes, thank you, it does," he responds, marveling at himself. He's carrying on a conversation with the leader of all of SandClan - the most powerful cat in existence - as though he were just talking to another warrior!

"Good." Clawstar pauses for a heartbeat, his bright pale eyes lingering on Firegaze, then turns to Grayheart. "Come with me, Grayheart. I hear you have two apprentices ready to receive their warrior names...?"

To Firegaze's dismay and apparently Clawstar's chagrin, Grayheart's brow wrinkles in confusion, then smooths as he shakes his head. "No, they haven't taken their final assessment yet. They'll be ready in several days - "

"I won't be here in several days, Grayheart, I will be hunting down rogues on the cliffs," snaps Clawstar, tail lashing irritably. "Are they ready to receive their warrior names?"

As Grayheart pauses again, Firegaze begins to feel annoyed at the deputy's hesitance to answer, but he quells the feelings with a pang of remorse. When the cream-streaked tom speaks, though, he still doesn't have the answer Clawstar wants. "I really don't know. As I said, the apprentices in question haven't ta - "

"Enough," Clawstar growls, raising his tail, and Grayheart falls silent. "Firegaze, are the two apprentices Grayheart told me about ready to receive their full warrior names? For StarClan's sake give me a quick answer."

"Yes," Firegaze replies simply, certain that he speaks the truth.

Clawstar nods. "Good. Flightpaw and Dustypaw are their names, is that correct?" This time he turns to Grayheart for the answer.

The blue-and-cream tom's ears are twitching nervously, reminding Firegaze of Flightpaw's left ear's tendency to flick when she's stating a strong opinion that she firmly believes to be true. "Flightpaw and Dustypaw, yes," Grayheart murmurs, apparently deciding not to bring up warrior assessments or the lack thereof again.

"Alright. We may as well get it over with - I assume that's them over there?" Clawstar points across the sandy clearing with his tail, to where two not-quite-fullgrown cats are whispering and chuckling over a meal of gull, their golden tabby and dappled sandy brown pelts touching, fur fluffed up against the cool mid-chillbreeze air. Not waiting for an answer, the leader adds under his breath, "The tom isn't Clanborn, is he?"

"No," Grayheart replies, his tone still vaguely apologetic. "No, my daughter found him in early warmbreeze and brought him back to camp. You know how she is, I've told you. But Dustypaw really is quite an addition to the Clan, he's a very decent - "

"Yes, yes, I know. We've been through this already, Grayheart." The dark tabby sounds bored. "Just as long as you don't take any more of them in, and he doesn't breed into our Clan. Our blood is pure and ought to be kept that way." His pale eyes narrow slightly. "Now let's stop dillydallying - we need to get this over with."

As Grayheart and Clawstar finally pad away towards the Greatstone, where all of the announcements are made from, Firegaze hears - or rather feels - a familiar silence descending upon him, the sensation of a thousand ears, of one great ear, he doesn't know, listening to him, to what he says, to what he thinks, to what he feels in his very heart. Strangely though, this time, this bringer of silence is speaking to him with the echo of Clawstar's words; Firegaze doesn't know why these are the phrases spinning through his head as his gaze drifts across the clearing and comes to rest on Flightpaw, laughing and free, nudging Dustypaw with one sure forepaw and mussing his headfur with the other.

Just as long as... murmurs the forbidding voice, even as it strains to listen to the confusion pounding in his head and heart. Just as long as he doesn't breed into our Clan...

Firegaze doesn't quite understand why a feeling of foreboding is creeping into his chest, but he's sure that even as this odd silent entity hears him, he hears it as well, a faint shout of bitter laughter as its presence fades and his gaze slides past Flightpaw and Dustypaw, on through the camp.

How could everything have changed so quickly? Firegaze wonders, shivering with exhaustion and cold as he stands alone on the highest dune he can find, wet fur and tail rippling behind him, once amber-brown fur now a neutral grayish color due to the mud and sand that has been kicked onto it in the past few hours. A trickle of blood runs down his cheek, faintly tickling his fur, but the young tom doesn't bother wiping it off as his dark golden gaze frantically probes the rolling, sandy terrain - as much of it as he can see through this damp, thick fog, at any rate.

"I don't see anything; do you see anything?" whispers a voice to his left and slightly behind him.

Another voice, faint and sounding vaguely disembodied as it carries through the silvery fog, mews, "No. Have any tracks been reported?"

Yet again a new voice speaks from seemingly out of nowhere, somewhere to Firegaze's right, "No. Not yet. We're still searching."

"Just imagine!" The first cat who spoke is speaking again, in a hushed whisper, and Firegaze decides that it belongs to his campmate Greengrass, a middle-aged tom. "Not only raiders and thieves, but slavers!"

"No." At first, Firegaze doesn't realize that he himself has spoken, but once he does, he carries on speaking in a hoarse, tired voice that he barely recognizes as his own. "No, not slavers. The apprentices and kits weren't touched."

"What are they, then?" the she-cat who had inquired about tracks having been discovered chimes in. Firegaze still can't place her voice with a face, as it's too quiet to hear properly.

There's a silence, though it's not that heavy one that Firegaze is by now quite used to. That one only seems to occur when Flightpaw - Flightheart, Firegaze corrects himself - is around.

At long last, Firegaze can finally bring himself to answer the inquisitive warrior. "Kidnappers. Hostage takers," he says quietly.

"Didn't quite catch that..." a new voice calls from even further away.

Greengrass yowls to the new cat from Firegaze's left, causing the younger tom to flinch briefly. "Hostage takers, rock ears!"

And it hurts, for Flightheart is gone, captured by the rogues who struck in the dead of night, and Firegaze, always so well prepared for everything - well, barring Flightheart's swift jibes, of course - doesn't know what to do.

The deep silence begins to gather strength as it descends on Firegaze like a dark cloud, like a more sinister version of the fog that covers everything, and now, in this moment of despair, he feels it as it listens to him, to his sure words and his confused mind and his grieving heart, and he is strangely glad that something knows what he feels, even if that something is only a silence, only a world listening to his insignificant little life, focusing in on his troubles and doubts when it wishes, like Firegaze focuses in on the mews of a gull when he wishes.

Clawstar put Firegaze in charge of the cats in pursuit of these rogues, who apparently are only an offshoot of the main group. Firegaze, still shell-shocked, isn't sure why. Any other time, he'd have relished the chance to take the initiative, to command, to shine, to show how he was born to lead...but now it feels so very, very empty, and all for the lack of a little sun-pelted she-cat.

For Firegaze, the past few days have flown by like smoke on the wind, swift and hardly within grasp. The season of chillbreeze has reached that point where every dawn is the same pale grey, every day's new sky the same, every cutting breeze the same temperature. Each sunrise brings yet another day of fruitless searching through the mornings, pausing to eat whatever they can catch when it feels like sunhigh, then resuming the quest until the dull gray sky darkens and the others curl up to sleep.

Firegaze doesn't sleep. He'd keep searching through the night if he was alone.

When the nights are darkest and the winds blow coldest and cruelest, the dark ginger tom huddles in the middle of his traveling companions, gazing up at the clouded sky, praying for a sign to show them where to go, but all he ever sees is darkness, and all he ever hears is the lonely sound of the wind among the cliffs.

Once in a while the warrior will doze off, but usually he'll swiftly awaken and snap back into reality even he begins to sink into a more comfortable crouch. On those rare occasions that he doesn't, his dreams will be of Flightheart, but her golden pelt will be faint and blurred and far away, almost invisible, and when Firegaze tries to run towards her, she only draws further away until she's barely a spot on the flickering horizon of his dream-world, and if he keeps on going, she will vanish. When Firegaze stands still she is closest - still distant, true, but closer. He'll stand there with his gaze fixed on her, drinking in the light she seems to emit with his eyes, feeling it touch every particle of his being, and he won't even notice the throbbing silence that surrounds him, ever listening.

"What are you doing here?" Flightheart exclaims the moment she sees his face, even as she leaps to her feet. It hurts that she sounds less than pleased. "Do you honestly still think we need rescuing?" Her left ear is twitching like mad, as it tends to do when she's excited or upset. Twitchtwitchtwitch. It doesn't do anything to help calm down the already tense situation.

Firegaze isn't in the most tolerant of moods at the moment, even if it is Flightheart. "It looks as if you do," he mews, gesturing around the small cave that the two of them are standing in. "In any case, if I were taken hostage by a band of rogues - "

"They didn't take us hostage." Dustystreak speaks up, and Firegaze's head whips around to pin the sandy-colored tom with a hawk-like gaze. He hadn't noticed the other SandClan warrior there when he came in, and he mentally berates himself for it as the younger cat keeps speaking. "They're our allies."

"Really?" Firegaze's eyes narrow as he glances from Dustystreak's wide, sincere eyes to Flightheart's glaring but no less sincere ones. "Explain yourselves, and make it fast." He realizes that he sounds like Clawstar, or some other cat who actually has authority over these two, but he realizes it a few heartbeats too late.

"You're not my father," Flightheart retorts, but the resentful tone of her voice has slightly diminished, to be replaced by a mixture of curiosity and wariness. She's already taking control of the situation, steering it calmly where she wants it to go, no matter what Firegaze or Dustystreak might want. "What's been going on at camp? How's Grayheart? Is he okay?" Her voice softens even more as she asks about her father, and Dustystreak sends her a quick, sympathetic glance over Firegaze's head - a glance that doesn't escape the dark ginger tabby's notice. Flightheart meets Dustystreak's eyes for a few heartbeats, and she seems to relax, the fur on her shoulders slowly lowering to its natural smooth state.

Firegaze tries to ignore the shared glance as he answers. "Grayheart was doing fairly well the last time I saw him, which was about a moon ago. I've been leading a patrol after the two of you on Clawstar's orders - he's going after the main group of rogues, which - "

"Main group?" the golden she-cat interrupts. Her whiskers are twitching slightly. "And how much does Clawstar know about these rogues?" She glances over Firegaze and she and Dustystreak share another gaze, this time one of humor. Firegaze feels as if his fur is being rubbed the wrong way - it's not pleasant.

"Probably more than either of you do," he says coolly, eyes narrowing even more, his fur starting to prickle along his spine.

Flightheart blinks, looking affronted. Her wide blue-green eyes seem to shoot sparks as she answers hotly, "Excuse me, but we've had nothing but rogues for company for the past moon! Now, if you can truthfully tell me that Clawstar's been through that, I'll believe you." The she-cat's ears flatten slightly. "Until then, I won't."

"Calm down, Flightheart," Dustystreak mews mildly, draping his tail over her back. "Firegaze doesn't know the whole story. Don't go off at him like that."

The young warrior glances at him, looking half-ashamed, half-rebellious, then drops her sea-colored gaze to stare at the sandy cavern floor for a moment before she raises her head to look Firegaze in the eyes. "Sorry about that," she finally mumbles as the twitching of her left ear slows to a steady flick, flick, flick. "I can have some problems with my temper."

"I do seem to remember that," Firegaze remarks, allowing himself to relax somewhat as a hint of a purr creeps into his voice without warning. "Now why don't you two tell me what exactly happened to you, and why exactly you think that those cats out there - " he gestures towards the cave entrance with his tail " - are on our side?"

Dustystreak and Flightheart's eyes meet over his head again. There's a moment's pause, and then they both start to purr.

"That's a long story," Dustystreak finally chuckles. "I'm not quite sure where to start..."

His words echo in the silence that's beginning to move in on them, reminding Firegaze of the presence - or non-presence - that is ever listening. It's eagerly alert at the moment, and Firegaze thinks for a moment that it may be taunting him - what are you going to do now, Firegaze? What are you going to do now?

The dark ginger tom tries to shake it away, but he doesn't succeed. He didn't really think that he would. At least he can still dimly hear Dustystreak and Flightheart - they're bickering good-naturedly about why exactly Albatross, apparently this rogue faction's leader, hates to be called Alba.

Strange that their mingling voices deepen the seemingly depthless silence.

They're trekking away from the cliffs, a group of cats eight strong, if you don't count the rogue. Which Firegaze isn't doing, obviously. To be honest, he's trying to forget the prisoner that they happen to have in tow, for multiple reasons - the least of these certainly not being Flightheart's reaction when Firegaze informed her that rogues were rogues, and whether or not this particular rogue had killed or kidnapped or stolen prey, he was still a rogue, and Clawstar wanted the rogues driven out, captured, or killed.

"Well, we all know what Clawstar's going to do when he gets ahold of Alba," snaps Flightheart moodily from where she's stalking beside aforementioned rogue.

"Albatross," aforementioned rogue corrects her, raising a dark-brown forepaw in good-natured chagrin.

"Shut up, Alba, I'm trying to save your life," Flightheart says, not batting an eyelash as she jumps back into pseudo-conversation with Firegaze, who has decided that it's in his best interest to give up speaking until they reach camp. "Why do you want him dead? He never did anything to you."

"He helped take you hostage," Greengrass volunteers helpfully from his position in the back of the group.

Flightheart's eyes dart to the side for a moment. "That's a matter of...perspective," she mutters, sounding less than completely certain. Her voice regains some strength as she plunges on through the rest of her statement, though. "Anyways, that's something he did to me, not to Firegaze."

Greengrass coughs loudly but doesn't make any comment to the contrary, for which Firegaze isn't sure if he should be grateful or not. If Flightheart found said cough suspicious, she certainly doesn't act as if she did as she turns haughtily to Dustystreak.

"Dustystreak, don't you think Firegaze should let Alba go?" she mews to the cat on the other side of the rogue, raising her furry eyebrows significantly.

Dustystreak glances from side to side, looking less than pleased to be caught up in this debate. "Well, he did come with the raiding party that captured us - " the sandy-pelted tom begins, only to be cut off by a low hiss from Flightheart. Pool-blue eyes taking on a rather panicked look, Dustystreak hurriedly adds, "I'm not done yet, don't get angry until I finish, okay?" When Flightheart doesn't respond, though Dustystreak looks nervous, he apparently decides to take that as an answer in the affirmative, and keeps speaking. "But he did help us escape, even if he had - erm - motives other than, well..."

"Than the pure goodness of his heart?" Firegaze suggests bitingly from behind Dustystreak. "Oh, I'm sure he did." It's absolutely impossible to stay silent for long in this charged atmosphere, and Firegaze has given up on trying that course of action.

"Well...yes," mumbles Dustystreak, staring at his paws. This doesn't seem to help him walk, and it takes an almost-fall over a piece of driftwood for the young tom to look up and keep talking. "But Albatross helped us in the end. He even helped you," he adds, turning to stare rather accusingly at Firegaze and tripping over another piece of conveniently-placed driftwood. "Even after you came down and ambushed him and captured him, he still told his band to fight on your side against Tern - "

"Actually, as I recall," interrupts Firegaze again, "while I was discussing past events with the two of you, he cut off our exit routes and then proceeded to force all of the SandClan cats to fight - "

"Don't be an idiot, Firegaze, it'll end up being good for us - or you, if that's what you're concerned about," Flightheart cuts him off, and though he can't see her face, he can feel her glare. "Stars, when did you get to be such an uptight little crabheart?"

Firegaze glares furiously at the back of her high-held head, trying to ward off the quick jab of pain that he feels at her words. She's being unreasonable about this, he reminds himself as the nine cats pad through the sand in silence. It's for her own good that he's arguing with her.

"Flightheart!" Dustystreak exclaims, ears flattening in alarm. "Calm down!"

"Right." The golden-furred she-cat takes a few deep breaths, letting each one out with a loud, furious whoosh. "Sorry, Dusty; sorry, Firegaze. Still trying to get you out of here, Alba. You'd better appreciate my efforts."

"That's Albatross," the smoky-pale brown tom admonishes lightly, "and I can assure you that I do. Very much."

"Good." Flightheart's tail twitches. "Okay, Firegaze, so it seems as if the reasons that cause you to wish to take Alba back to the Clan to his almost certain death are that firstly, he kidnapped Dustystreak and me - well, only me, really, Dustystreak just chased after us - " she nods playfully at Dustystreak, and he scuffles his paws in the sand embarrassedly " - he's stupid, but he's brave. And the second reason is that Alba is a rogue. Which he can't help."

"Debatable," Firegaze mutters under his breath.

Flightheart's fur rises along her back. "Let's put it this way. Do you see yourself becoming a rogue in the near future, Firegaze?"

"If I let this cat go free, then proceed to return to Clawstar and tell him that I lost two warriors and let my one prisoner go? Yes, actually." Firegaze wonders for a moment why he feels so driven to respond this way, and tells himself that it's all for Flightheart's own good.

"You know what I mean!" she snaps, tail lashing in annoyance, then shakes her head in confusion. "Where was I?"

"I won't remind her if you won't," Albatross pipes up, and smirks, whiskers twitching, when Flightheart shoulders him hard.

"I've had enough of deals with rogues in the past few days, thanks," growls Firegaze, glaring at nobody in particular. As he prepares to respond to Flightheart, he reminds himself who he's talking to, and instantly feels a surge of guilt wash over him. He has been being a crabheart. "You were telling me why I wanted to keep Albatross captive," the ginger warrior reminds Flightheart meekly, letting the sharp tone fall from his voice.

"Riiight." Flightheart darts a suspicious glance back towards Firegaze out of the corners of her eyes. "So. He stole me from the Clan - which I don't really think counts, as it's partially because of him that I'm heading back home right now - and he's a rogue - which isn't a decent thing to judge him on. It's like judging you for being a SandClan cat."

"We do do that, you know," the rogue leader points out.

"Thank you," Firegaze tells him.

"Do you have a death wish or what, you idiot?" spits Flightheart, slapping Albatross' side with her tail. "Just shut up, okay?"

"I was simply pointing out a flaw in your logic." The tom's long, feathery cream whiskers quiver with what might be suppressed purrs.

"I could do without you doing that right now, then. If you want to die, I can be quiet right now, you know." Her fur is quivering furiously along her spine, and her left ear is starting to twitch.

The rogue's ears flatten slightly in alarm. "Point taken; please do continue to speak. Your words are honey to my ears, they illuminate - "

"Okay, point taken." Flightheart takes a slow breath, then lets it out just as slowly before she abruptly sits down in the sand. Firegaze hurriedly stops walking, as do the two cats behind him, but the others, who were in front of or next to the golden tabby take several paces before realizing that they've lost half of their group. The SandClan cats and Albatross come padding back to the halted half of their group.

"What are we doing?" asks Dustystreak, brow wrinkling in confusion as he glances from Flightheart to Albatross to Firegaze.

Flightheart's eyes flash with a mixture of annoyance and humor. "We're persuading a certain overcontrolling tom to let Alba go."

"Albatross," he corrects her almost wearily. "Please."

"Right, whatever." The she-cat waves him away dismissively with one golden paw as she turns towards Firegaze, staring almost nervously at his paws as she speaks. "I know I'm being annoying, and what I'm saying might get sidetracked, or - or not make much sense, or just sound totally stupid to you, but...would you please just listen to me?"

The curt no, sorry is hurrying up through Firegaze's throat when Flightheart flashes a brief glance upward and their eyes meet - fire-gold and ocean-blue, sunlight and sea, a dynamic symphony of multicolored lights, and the ever-aware silence is morbidly deep and its listening void can't be filled by the negative.

As Flightheart blinks and looks away, Firegaze takes a deep breath, swallowing the words that don't really want to come out anymore. "Okay," he says quietly. "I'm listening."

She's furious again, stalking back and forth, left ear twitching madly, sunny pelt not muted by the sand it blazes against, once more arguing - but this time she does it with a muted rage, a somehow quiet anger tempered by true happiness and contentment. Flightheart always was a journeyer, but no cat ever hated returning home - if only for a little while.

"You're leaving?" she demands hotly, stopping her pacing to jab Dustystreak in the chest with a partially-extended claw. "Leaving? And you expect me to stay here? I completely understand part of that, but the other part, well, I can assure you that I do not understand or agree with that at all!"

"Flightheart - " Dustystreak begins helplessly, but she cuts him off as she continues her tirade.

"It's not as if you can even take care of yourself out there. Who kept us alive for an entire moon? Who hunted? Who found us a den to stay in? Who befriended Alba?"

"I actually think that that was me, at least at first." The dusty-brown tom mews it quietly, with barely a hint of sarcasm or triumph tinting his words. He almost sounds a little bit ashamed. "But Flightheart, I don't want - "

"That answer's debatable," she interrupts again, obviously not getting ready to stop this rant any time soon. "And I can take care of myself, you know. You don't need to worry about me slowing you down." Flightheart's voice takes on a note of concern. "I want to help you. I want to be with you."

Dustystreak doesn't seem to have an answer for this. He glances doubtfully to his right, then to his left, as he searches for the perfect statement.

Before the young warrior can find such a thing to say, Grayheart speaks. Until now he's been standing off to the side with his former apprentice, silently watching and listening to the battle of words and wit, but he has apparently decided to make his fatherly opinion known. "I for one agree with Dustystreak," he tells his daughter, scratching his cheek slowly, then getting to his paws and padding over to her side. "Nobody's saying that you can't take care of yourself, but we don't want you to get hurt. In any case, Dustystreak has a path to follow in life, and you have a different path to follow, it would seem..." As Flightheart turns to stare at him with accusing blue-green eyes, the blue-and-cream tom trails off for a moment, then adds hopefully, "I'm sure Firegaze would agree, don't you, Firegaze?"

Firegaze hasn't really been giving the debate much thought, but he knows his answer to this question. "I think Flightheart should be allowed to do what she wants to do," he mews, meeting his deputy's clear blue eyes and holding his gaze steadily, if guiltily. "She knows where her path leads better than anyone else, I would think."

"You do have a point," Grayheart concedes uneasily, as Flightheart's eyes brighten and she nods quickly at Firegaze in a thank you! gesture. Firegaze looks away.

Pale-blue eyes narrowing, Dustystreak protests, "But Flightheart deserves better than...than who knows how many moons chasing after me wherever I go. She..." The sandy-furred tom shuts his eyes quickly, then opens them again, casting Flightheart a gaze filled with such unfathomable affection and caring that it sends a reverbrating pang of loss echoing through some place deep inside Firegaze. "She deserves better than me."

The implication is such a wildly beautiful, unescapably tempting, ever impossible one that Firegaze is almost glad when Flightheart leaps furiously back into the conversation.

"Excuse me, don't talk about me as if I'm not here, and don't say such ridiculous things!" Her eyes are blazing with sea-blue fire, smoldering and flaring as her gaze darts from one tom to the next. "Nobody's better than you, Dustystreak - well," she quickly reconsiders, "well, Grayheart is up there on the list, and Alba...he's Alba, how could I not think of him - but overall, you know, it's you. Sorry, Dad," she adds ruefully, nudging the big fluffy tom quickly. "And don't even think of implying that I would get together with somebody else even if you did abandon me like a heartless wretch, Dusty. Who would you think I'd start padding after, anyways?" Her eyes sparkle humorously, moving from Grayheart to Dustystreak to Firegaze as she continues to speak. "It's not as if anyone wants to be, you know, mates with featherheaded little Flightheart, even if she is the deputy's daugh - Oh."

For a moment silence settles over the four cats, but it isn't a heart-moving, air-thickening silence like the ones Firegaze is so used to - it's just an awkward one.

Finally Flightheart breaks through it quizzically, head tilted to one side, eyes glimmering with a sort of cautious curiosity, one of those looks unique to her face that Firegaze loves best. "Um..." Her whiskers quiver slightly with the intensity of her attempting to put her thoughts into words. "You aren't interested, are you, Firegaze...?" But the sad, almost disappointed, very nearly bitter little trailing away of her question shows that she thinks that she already knows the answer.

"I always thought that we'd..." he begins to reply before he thinks it through, eyes fixed on his paws, studying their ginger hue resolutely, determined not to look up. He stops speaking abruptly, rearranges the words in his mind, and mews, "If you listened to the Clan gossips more, you'd know that we've been an item since you were apprenticed. Deputy's apprentice, deputy's daughter...but that's just their arrangement, nothing official..." Firegaze is scrambling for words to escape the threat of the listening silence that's suddenly sprung up - is it laughing at me? he wonders with a dreadful suspicion, and hurries to finish what he's saying, forcing his way out of the soundless void. "It wasn't really anything." To them. Or to you. "Just Clan talk. Nothing to worry about. What's...what's important is your happiness." And too late he realizes that the last sentence spoken, the barely discernible emotional quiver in his voice that he tried to keep away, has betrayed him, as Flightheart and Dustystreak both gaze at him with new meaning in their eyes.

Flightheart takes a half-step forward, towards him, and her breath catches slightly in her throat as she speaks. "I didn't know," she says quietly.

"That's okay," he replies, eyes still focused firmly on his paws, because he knows if he looks up and sees her face again, the importance of what she needs will be swept away by the flood of his longing. He can't do that to her. "I want you to be with him. If that's what you want. And - " he raises his eyes to meet Dustystreak's sky-blue ones, grateful for an excuse to look up without seeing Flightheart " - and you should take her with you. If that's what she wants."

The depth and awareness and utter aloneness of the silence that engulfs Firegaze with its coldly removed observance is greater than ever before, it seems.

Clawstar's ears are flattened slightly against his head, and his pale eyes flicker with controlled emotion, but his voice is neutral, almost conversational. He is first and foremost a Clan leader, and he obviously doesn't think that ranting will help the situation. Which it wouldn't. Firegaze is bone-tired, physically and mentally and emotionally, and every tone of voice sounds the same to him by now. It doesn't really matter anyways, and he chose to let the cats under his command go into battle. He chose to let Albatross go. He chose to tell Dustystreak and Flightheart to go where they needed to go.

The tabby leader stares flatly at Firegaze, and almost seeming to read his thoughts, mews, "I'm very disappointed in you, Firegaze."

No anger. No sarcasm. No kinder tone. No semblance of I'm just saying this because I'm expected to say it. None of that lingers in Clawstar's voice as he speaks.

"I know," says Firegaze numbly.

"Hmm." Clawstar regards the dark ginger tom calmly for a moment, then asks unexpectedly, "How would you like to be deputy of the Shell Camp?"

Only moments ago, Firegaze thought that nothing could knock him out of the newfound dazedly sad monotone of his life. Now he isn't so sure. "What?" he exclaims, eyes widening.

"You heard me." The dark tabby is motionless but for the tip of his tail, which twitches restlessly against the sandy floor of his den.

Firegaze is still staring at the SandClan leader, his mind absolutely blank, the question the only thing echoing through it - that and the awareness of the listening silence, which hasn't departed ever since Flightheart did. How would you like to be deputy of the Shell Camp? It's Firegaze's second-wildest dream. Deputy. "Why are you asking me to...to be deputy?" the russet-furred tom manages to croak.

"You're a smart, strong, loyal cat, not to mention the quickest learner I've ever come across in all my seasons of being leader." Clawstar blinks thoughtfully, pale eyes flickering with unreadable emotions. "You rather remind me of myself, and I didn't turn out so badly, now did I?"

The young warrior finally stops his owlish staring and allows his gaze to dart around Clawstar's den while he still tries to comprehend the enormity of this completely unexpected offer. His eyes flicker over the smooth, rounded, slightly damp sand walls, only a few telltale indentations and ripples telling the truth about how the underground den was made - sand built up around and under a low-hanging projection of a looming, standalone rock. Legend has it that SandClan leaders have dwelt there for a thousand seasons. Once, Firegaze dreamed of dwelling there himself. Sometimes he still does.

"So? What do you think?" Clawstar's voice is more impatient now. "Part of the reason I decided to ask you this was because you didn't dawdle and stumble over your answers like my deputies always have. Give me a straight answer."

He wants to say yes, he really does, but Firegaze finds himself asking another question before he can stop his mouth from forming the words, and once the words have been released into the air, they can't be taken back. "But why, after what I did?"

The smoky tabby's tail stops twitching, and his glinting amber eyes narrow into slits of ashen fire, piercing and chilling, the dark streaks and whorls tugging together at the creases in his brow. "I wonder that, too," he says softly, allowing his eyes to slowly rake over Firegaze until eyes of cold pale fire meet eyes of sunlight gold. For a moment there is complete silence, and the listening world presses hard against the painfully aware Firegaze until Clawstar speaks. "It's an all-or-nothing choice, what I'm offering you, Firegaze. You see," he goes on, obviously seeing the confusion in the other tom's eyes, "I need a loyal deputy for the camp without one. And after the - well, frankly, the absolute mess you made of that mission - I also need proof of your loyalty, which I have begun to severely doubt."

"Then why are you asking me to be deputy?" Firegaze shoots back at him without thinking, stung by the truths in Clawstar's statement.

"I just told you that," the leader says, with infuriatingly cold calm. "There are multiple reasons why no disloyal cat would take the position of a SandClan deputy, not to mention a SandClan deputy at the Shell Camp, which is closest to my own camp. If you truly have joined the rogues - which I doubt, as up until now you've been one of SandClan's best warriors and totally loyal - you'd rather join their growing forces than place yourself in such a dangerous situation." His tail resumes that steady twitch, eyes still boring into Firegaze without blinking. "So. You're accepting, of course."

The ginger tabby tom begins to nod numbly, but then a faint memory springs into his head, a memory of a time when he was a young apprentice, going to the Shell Camp with Grayheart. The fuzzy image of a silver she-cat dappled with black makes its way into his mind as he remembers, and he exclaims, "Wait - what about Reeddapple?"

Clawstar's eyes narrow the slightest bit, and it's a moment before he replies, "She was injured in the rogues' raid on the Shell Camp. She won't be up on her feet for a while."

"But..." Firegaze's brow wrinkles in confusion. "I don't want to question your decision - " Clawstar blinks slowly, an approving gesture " - but cats aren't supposed to transfer camps except in times of emergency, are they, and I don't feel quite right taking another cat's place. Shouldn't you just appoint a substitute deputy from her own camp to take over until she recovers?"

"Mmm." The dark gray-and-black tabby closes his eyes thoughtfully, and an uneasy quiet descends on the den for a few heartbeats before he mews, "What if she doesn't recover? What if she dies? What then?"

The young warrior tilts his head to the side, unable to stop his questions, for some reason feeling as if he and Clawstar are edging around each other with questions as cats preparing for a fight do with their feet, cautious movements, agile but controlled. "Why would Reeddapple die? Where is she injured?"

"She has a bad stomach wound." Clawstar's eyes are still closed, but their pale silvery lids quiver slightly, almost imperceptibly. "It probably isn't fatal, but perfectly healthy cats drop dead every day. You never know." His eyes spring open suddenly, once more pinning Firegaze. "You haven't answered me; what would you think of taking the deputy position if Reeddapple left this world?"

For some reason, as they speak of this near-stranger dying, an uneasy feeling has been building in the pit of Firegaze's stomach and in the back of his mind, whispering warningly, reminding him of all of the rumors he's heard about Clawstar, the ones he doesn't listen to, the ones he never believed, and before he thinks better of it he asks boldly, "If I said I would be willing to become deputy if Reeddapple died, would you kill her?" When Clawstar doesn't reply, Firegaze presses on intrepidly, wondering abstractly if some part of Flightheart has somehow rubbed off on him. "Has she been speaking against you? Is she not as loyal as you want her to be?" His questions are only faintly tinged with animosity, more curious than accusing right now.

A cold flame flickers in the depths of the SandClan leader's eyes, but it isn't an angry flame. It's an intensely intrigued one. "As I already said, Firegaze, you remind me of myself," he says quietly, and his tail stops twitching again as he peers at the younger tom. "Perhaps I would, and perhaps she has been, and perhaps she is not. More likely than not, those statements are all true. You're clever."

And now Firegaze is certain that somehow, insane as it seems, a bit of Flightheart did attach itself to him somehow, because he feels furious, furious and sick. The feelings are muted by his intensely cautious, underemotion exterior, but they are there, and he can't ignore them, so without thinking, the dark ginger tom mews, "Sorry, I can't take the Shell Camp position in that case, Clawstar. With all due respect - " he dips his head slightly " - please find somebody else to do that. I wasn't raised or trained to...to cause death." His well-loved mentor's face flickers briefly before his eyes, as do the fainter, harder to grasp images of his parents.

Then he remembers what Clawstar's very specific ultimatum was, and he's suddenly aware that he may have spoken far too quickly, but once more it's too late to pull his words back, and Clawstar's eyes are once more slits of frozen fire. They still don't show much emotion, but the leader's anger and frustration has somehow already filled the room with a feeling like a heavy, dark cloud. For a moment there's a deadly, loaded silence, and Firegaze becomes very well acquainted with the sound of his own nervous heartbeat, his deceivingly slow breaths, and then Clawstar speaks, his voice full of cold disinterest. "As you wish." He pauses, then mews the word that - for a little while, at least - seals Firegaze's fate. "Go."

The young warrior knows it's futile to argue, pointless to disagree. And now, even as he slowly dips his head once more and backs out of Clawstar's den on shaky legs, he feels utterly hopeless.

As soon as Firegaze's paws touch sand, he turns and walks slowly away, setting his face towards where the sunset would be, were the persistent shadowy clouds not obscuring it. A cold, heavy rain has started to fall while he and Clawstar were talking, and it steadily precipitates faster and harder and colder, but after who knows how long walking, Firegaze starts to not be able to feel it any more, and he welcomes the eerie silence and the once-frightening awareness of the sickeningly eager listening of the world, because he can still feel that, even though his paws are numb and he's soaked to the bone with freezing rain and the icy hail has slashed through pelt and often as not skin, leaving bloody streaks in its wake so often that he doesn't feel the impact of the frozen shards anymore. This listening world is all that he has for company now.

Flightheart stole away his heart. Now it feels as though everything else he ever lived for is gone as well.

Firegaze hasn't been keeping track of how long he's been stumbling through this storm with only a listening silence to accompany and guide him, but he eventually notices that the hail has departed and the rain is letting up, though a strange smoky haze slightly obscures his vision, only partially departing when he blinks hard. His dark auburn paws aren't doing what he wants them to do, and his tail feels leaden. His throat is parched, oddly enough, and it hurts to swallow.

The warrior - he still thinks of himself as that despite his exile, will always think of himself as that - is fairly certain that he's coming down with a fever in the middle of this lightening storm, and since there's absolutely nothing he can do about it besides keep walking, that's what he does, with a harsh, hoarse chuckle accompanying this action. Firegaze aimlessly sets his course for somewhere on the cliffs that line the sand. Perhaps he'll find shelter there, a place to wait out the storm and his illness - assuming it doesn't kill him, of course.

As Firegaze and his listening world make their slow, painful way through the rain in commiseral silence, Firegaze begins to think that he smells something. As the great white stone cliffs loom into view, towering over Firegaze, their presence almost making a rupture in the aware silence that surrounds him, Firegaze is certain that he smells something, and moreover he thinks that the scent he's detected is that of other cats. By the time Firegaze has fuzzily decided to follow the scent, he knows it's catscent, and he's also sure that it's rogue scent. At the moment Firegaze couldn't care less, and he stumbles through the sand, his fumbling paws often as not dragging and catching on absolutely nothing at all, towards the scent, towards the ever-growing cliffs, holding to them like a lifeline as the world listens to his desperately pathetic struggle.

Darkness is all he knows for days on end, days that sometimes feel like mere moments, days that sometimes feel like countless lifetimes. Sometimes there is pain, throbbing in his head and his cold paws, stabbing and tearing at his throat whenever he swallows, even pricking his eyes with a thousand tiny claws when he blinks. Always he is thirsty, throat drier than the pure white, impossibly fine sand that scuds along the beach with the warm wind on the hottest days of sunbreeze, and always he is either too cold or too hot, one moment seeming to drown in water like ice, the next moment being burned alive by an unquenchable fire.

At times the fever subsides for a while, and Firegaze is able to regain his mind, to creep out of the tiny dark corner, the little hole that he's been curled up in, and to find something to eat and something - thank StarClan - something to drink. He's very rarely in any condition to hunt, but that's not a problem, not here. Here, in this dark unplottable maze of underground tunnels and caverns and warrens, this place that he's heard called the Hive by countless cats - here, everyone steals, taking what they can, giving nothing back, and though the warrior hates himself for doing it, he finds himselves living by the rogues' code in order to survive.

Though the brief heartbeats of clarity are welcome because they allow him to obtain what he needs to survive, he often wishes that they would cease to occur, no matter if he died in his endless fever. For when his mind is clear, then he can hear the world listening, and now it seems to have begun to speak to him as well, whispering echoes of Flightheart's words into his mind, branding her sunlit pelt in blazing detail onto the backs of his eyelids, and Firegaze has begun to think that he is going insane, and when he has found his prey and his water and has stumbled back to his crevice, he clutches his head in his paws and trembles in the darkness until the fever seizes him again.

One day, countless days later - it might have been countless moons, or even seasons, though Firegaze's now hardly discernible voice of logic says a moon - his fever begins to diminish. Its departure first manifests itself in the lack of headaches, and the absence of extreme cold, and Firegaze finds that, though he burns with unnatural heat, he can get to his paws and stumble about and even sit up peering out of the crevice for unbelievably long amounts of time before he feels like he needs to curl up again. He knows he should be joyful at the signs that his illness is leaving, but no matter how long he searches, he can't find a shred of joy within himself.

As the day goes by and rogues pass by Firegaze's niche without a second glance and life as usual goes on in the Hive - theft, quarreling, perhaps fighting, most likely several murders - the dark ginger tom slowly regains his strength and his sanity and his senses, and by the time that he thinks ought to be late in the day, near sunset, although he is far from perfect health, Firegaze feels well enough to get up and walk as far as he needs to go.

The one problem is that he doesn't know where that place is.

When the cat thinks it over, he realizes slowly that it would probably have been better if he'd died in his fever, because now he's lost, more lost than he has ever been, and he doesn't know where to go, and the world listens in its heavy silence, and Firegaze knows that it must be laughing at him, even as he tells himself that he's insane, and even as he wishes for a guardian, a hopeless wish that will never come true -

And then there's an explosive yowl down one of the passages outside his den, and it's followed by more yowling, and there are snarls and growls and hisses and screeches, and the sound of a fight in the tunnels, and then all of a sudden there's a pattering of feet in the long, winding pass directly adjoining his den, and the running sounds stop right outside his little dark crevice, and then there's cat scent and fur and a weight presses down hard on him and somebody hisses in surprise and then gasps, a little gasp but a telling one, and even as the sounds of battle cries draw closer, Firegaze is suddenly very, very aware of the silence.

For a moment he stands facing the cat who has just catapulted herself into his den, and she faces him, neither one able to see the other in the crushing darkness, but both of them perfectly aware of where the other is...and of who the other is.

Finally the she-cat speaks, her voice shot through with surprise, but laden with pity. "Firegaze," Flightheart says quietly, almost incredulously. "What's happened to you?"

"Wow. I wonder," Firegaze rasps back cynically, as the yowling gets even closer, but he can't lie to himself - where moments ago he could find no joy, now his heart is overflowing with it, a painful joy, but a pure joy. Flightheart!

"Oh, for the love of StarClan." He senses the she-cat's tail lashing. "Polite as ever, I can see." Something in her tone, though, betrays the fact that she is at least relieved - if not as overjoyed as he is - to find him here. "Why aren't you with your buddy Clawstar?"

The dark ginger tabby coughs before mewing, "He's not quite my buddy. I happen to be here because I was exiled from the Clan."

"Harsh." Flightheart doesn't sound too sympathetic, but she doesn't sound angry either. "So was I, and so was Dustystreak. It's starting to become a trend for the Dune Camp, apparently." Firegaze is fairly certain that her whiskers are twitching slightly. "But what're you doing lying around here?"

"Just recovered from a fever," Firegaze informs her.

"You seem okay to me now. Why haven't you left this place? If you didn't want to come looking for us, you should've at least gotten out of the Hive. It's a horrid, crime-ridden area, and certainly doesn't seem like the sort of thing you'd quite like, in any case."

His eyes narrow shrewdly. "Can't be that bad, can it, since you're here," he points out.

"I'm with Alba. Or - was," the she-cat corrects herself, and just as she speaks there's a mewl of pain very near the entrance to the tiny cave they're in, and Firegaze winces in sympathy with whoever was just bitten. "We're recruiting."

"Recruiting...what, exactly?" Firegaze's brow wrinkles. "I wasn't aware that rogues were that organized."

"That's because you're horribly close-minded," she tells him, still fairly amiably. "We're building up an army to battle Clawstar, who happens to be one of Alba's arch-rivals, and Shark, who is another of Alba's arch-rivals and who has, at least for the time being, allied himself with SandClan. We've gotten Tern - yet again one of Alba's arch-rivals - "

"I'm noticing a recurring theme here," Firegaze interrupts drily.

"Shut up and let me finish, then you can snark," Flightheart says brusquely. "As I was saying, Tern, another of Alba's arch-rivals, has allied with us against a few common enemies - namely Clawstar and Shark, neither of whom are really very kind to the rogues at large - and we came over here to find freelancers who don't have a gang at the moment and sympathize with our cause. We, ah, ran into a bit of trouble, as you've probably guessed."

"A protest against Albatross showing his unseemly visage in public?" mutters Firegaze.

"Ha ha. No, actually, some of Shark's sympathizers happened to be wandering nearby, and they attacked us, obviously."

"Obviously," agrees the tom, raising his furry eyebrows slightly.

"What turned you so bitter?" demands Flightheart suddenly. "You used to be a bossy furball, but not like...not like this."

Firegaze scowls darkly. "Multiple occurrences. Stupid decisions. Wanderings of the heart."

There's a long silence, and the listening world is tangible, but Firegaze's angry sorrow and Flightheart's quiet regret are just as near as the ever-intrigued universe, almost blocking it out for a moment.

"Fine," Flightheart says finally, and her voice sounds almost like a pathetically sad whimper the first time it comes out, but she apparently gets control of it, and her next words are forceful. "Fine. You know what? I could let you sit around here and feel sorry for yourself, but for a reason that I myself am not even sure of, I'm going to drag you out of here, because nobody should have to just lie around mope their life away no matter how much they may think that they want to, and I want you with us, and - ohStarClanRUN!" This last bit comes out in a screeching rush as two furiously battling cats come rolling into the already slightly cramped cavern, and Flightheart leaps out over them, and Firegaze doesn't know why he squeezes out past them, but he does, and then he and Flightheart are suddenly fighting for their lives.

They're separated by a few snarling cats who are either fighting each other or trying to flee and the rest of the tunnel is occupied by more snarling cats also fighting or fleeing, and although it's by no means pure daylight, Firegaze is grateful for the increased visibility outside of his crevice. He can even distinguish pelt colors and markings in the dim light if he focuses carefully, which is hard for him to do in the ever-changing environment of furious, battling rogues, but he tries to keep his eyes on Flightheart as she wades through the sea of fighting cats, steadily heading towards one of the myriad passages that go shooting off away from this tunnel. He follows her as best he can, trying not to get too involved in a fight, making his precarious way out of the battle and into the quiet, musty little passageway that nobody seems to have started quarreling in yet.

Flightheart's waiting for him a few tail-lengths in, and he's terribly glad, firstly because, of course, it's her, and secondly because he has no idea where he is, really.

"All right. Come on," she mews resolutely. "We're going to be meeting up with Alba very soon, and I hope you'll at least be half-decent to each other, but knowing him and knowing you, I doubt it. Would you at least try not to rip his fur off, for my sake if not for his?" The she-cat sounds hassled and careworn, and for a moment Firegaze considers asking what has happened to her, but trusts his better judgment and doesn't.

The golden she-cat and the ginger tom wind their way through the little dark tunnel, up and down and around corners and curves until the tiny passage suddenly widens into a larger cavern, and the scents of cats - some familiar, some not - hit Firegaze's nose. Albatross he recognizes almost immediately, and Dustystreak too. "Gang's all here, hm?" he observes, his voice taking on a superior tone despite a part of him telling him to stop this nonsense, that he's no better than they are anymore.

"Yep." Flightheart sounds more relaxed, and doesn't bat an eyelash at the cats whose heads are turning in their direction. "Dusty, Alba, you'll never guess who I found!"

"Albatross," the rogue protests, and his brow wrinkles as he recognizes Firegaze. "Lovely." As usual with the strange brown rogue, Firegaze can't tell if he's being sarcastic or sincere.

"Firegaze?" Dustystreak exclaims, bounding towards them. He stops a few tail-lengths away, his nervousness making Firegaze feel uneasy himself. "Um...hi," the sandy-pelted warrior meows, shifting from paw to paw.

"Don't be so shy, Dustystreak," Flightheart chides, reaching him in one bound and nudging him gently. Her nose rests on his cheek for a few heartbeats longer than is usual for such a touch, and Firegaze feels a sharp, all-too-familiar twinge somewhere in the region of his chest. "Firegaze doesn't bite."

There's another silence that seems to last longer for Firegaze than it does for anyone else, and he knows that the world is listening, and he's certain that it's laughing.

He can't take it anymore.

Firegaze tried to live with the rogues, with Dustystreak, with Flightheart. He wanted to be able to do exactly what Flightheart wanted him to do, for once, and so he attempted to stop quarreling with Albatross, to stop snapping at Dustystreak, to stop bickering with Flightheart herself, but he couldn't.

Some things just aren't meant to be, he reflects bitterly to himself, glaring furiously at Albatross and Dustystreak, who are also shooting nasty looks at him and each other.

"I still think we should go after Shark," Dustystreak asserts, ears flattened against his head, normally wide and kind eyes narrowed. "Have I ever asked you for anything big like this before, Alba? No, and I won't ask you ever again. I just want to catch them before they get...too far..." His voice trails away miserably.

"Sorry, kit, no can do," Albatross mews, his own ears flicking, strange dark honey-colored eyes unblinking. "It's rather important to me that we launch our attack on SandClan first, and I can't let you take a group of cats out after Shark; we need our full strength in this battle, y'know. Tell you what, I'll make a deal with you - "

"Yes, well, we all know how that's going to end up, don't we?" interjects Firegaze spitefully, seizing his opportunity to voice his opinion again. "You're both idiots. Dustystreak, you know nothing about warfare, and neither do you, Alba. You aren't strong enough to attack anybody yet, and once you are, I certainly don't agree with your current plan. SandClan as a whole has done nothing wrong to you."

Flightheart's been pacing around them, muttering under her breath, and now she raises her voice to mew, "Do you toms really have to fight like this? I think - "

"Yes," the three all reply, voices mingling as one, and return to glaring silently, each daring the other to cave to someone else's wants, but nobody does.

"Well," the golden she-cat huffs, "if you're determined to fight, then - " she pauses and lets her gaze wander over the three scowling faces " - don't go fighting over there." She gestures with a paw to the huge, cavernous rock tunnel that shoots off into depths of darkness not able to be probed by sight, one of the many mysteries of this new cave that they're staying in, one that Alba has warned them all about several times. "Normally I'd assume that you knew about its dangers for yourselves, but this ridiculous quarrel has revealed to me your true levels of idiocy. Despite your stupidity, I do somewhat care for all of you, even though Dustystreak is a stick-in-the-mud and Alba's unbearable and Firegaze is a crab, and I don't want any of you going and breaking through the stupid floor and falling to your deaths because of this." Her sea-green gaze darts around the echoing cave for a moment, and then she mews, "And don't go chasing each other outside on the cliffs either, and don't go getting your tails lost in the lower tunnels, and don't get yourselves back to the Hive on accident, though StarClan knows how you'd do that. Honestly - " Flightheart's eyes narrow slightly, but in concern " - honestly, I'd rather you didn't fight at all, but since when are toms sensible about things like that?" She pauses before giving the parting shot. "For the record, I don't agree with any of you."

Her words have mostly flown over Firegaze's head, and he's fairly certain that this is true for the other two toms as well, as their angry gazes have stayed locked on his or each others' during all of her tirade, still scowling stubbornly, the occasional growl rising from someone's throat, the occasional soft rasping sound of claws being unsheathed and sunk into the floor, then eventually retracted back into their pads.

At long last, Dustystreak shakes himself off, and with a half-apologetic glance at Flightheart, mews, "Well, I'm off. I - "

And then Albatross is in front of him before he can take a step, aggressively blocking the young grayish-brown tom, long creamy brown fur dusted with red rising slowly along his spine. "I said no to that, Dusty," he reminds the warrior pleasantly, but his dark amber eyes have narrowed an infinitesmal bit more, and they're taking on a keen shimmer that belies the rogue's happy-go-lucky exterior. "You're staying right here, not going off on what could quite easily turn out to be a fool's errand."

"That's what you want to do," snaps Firegaze irately, getting to his own paws and stalking over to the others, tail lashing. StarClan, living with rogues must have blunted Dustystreak's brain - and he says those words suddenly without thinking over possible consequences. "StarClan, living with rogues has blunted your brain," he mutters.

Dustystreak and Albatross both appear to take offense at that, ears flattening as they turn to narrow their eyes at him and baring their teeth just the slightest bit, but then there's a flicker of movement, and before Firegaze can even process what happened, Albatross has pinned Dustystreak to the floor. "Not going," the large tom says kindly, but his eyes glint warningly at the same time.

The young brown-pelted warrior growls, low and deep in his throat, and with a sudden twist, jerk, and kick, he flings Albatross off of him and rolls back to his feet, crouching defensively as he backs towards the closest exit tunnel. "I'm not taking any of your warriors," he hisses. "I'm just going after Shark myself. Can't I even control my own destiny?"

"Not when you're under my command," Albatross tells him, but his strange dark eyes are darting from left to right, shining as he thinks rapidly, and then the rogue leader speaks again, his new words right on the heels of his last sentence. "Actually, yes. All right. Go on, by yourself, track down Shark, don't get lost, keep yourself alive, defeat his horde of angry followers, heal yourself, and so on, and so forth. What's it to me?" The tom turns away, mewing breezily, "I'm going to go get together Tern's and my cats, in any case; we've got a Clan to - "

"I don't think so." Firegaze steps in front of Albatross now, bristling slightly. "That idea's no better than his. First off, you're going to destroy my Clan, and secondly you'll probably get yourselves massacred."

"The first one's actually the objective, in case you hadn't noticed," points out the rogue leader blithely, "and in regards to the second, well, I like to think positively. You ought to try it sometime. Does wonders for the mind and body."

"Thanks, I'll remember that," growls Firegaze, shooting a glare at Albatross. "And I thought the objective was to end Clawstar's rule - not that I'm completely in agreement with that either."

"Well..." Alba blinks thoughtfully. "Well, yes, I think that was the objective that I told you, and one of the ones that I told lovely young Flightheart right here, but you see," he says happily, "I have multiple objectives, which I reveal when the occasion suits them. Or not at all, if I don't feel like it."

For a few heartbeats Firegaze stares at the rogue leader, and Albatross stares coolly back, and then Firegaze can't take it anymore. He launches himself forward, bowling Alba over and rolling across the expansive, sandy cave floor, trying to find something besides long reddish-tinted fur to sink his teeth into.

Suddenly Firegaze sees the tell-tale white streaks of claws slice right past his cheek. Judging from Albatross' barely audible hiss that directly follows the slash, the claws aren't the rogue's, and Firegaze knows they aren't his own. The two cats separate, panting and growling, and turn to see Dustystreak, back arched and tail lashing. For a moment there is near silence, and then Firegaze's eyes meet Dustystreak's, and in the held gaze that barely lasts a heartbeat an alliance - albeit a potentially brief one - is formed. The two former SandClan warriors advance on Albatross together, and the rogue leader backs up slowly, eyes still glimmering shrewdly as he slowly steps across the damp sand, taking a curving backwards path through the great shadowy main cave.

Flightheart is outraged, her golden fur bristling as she stalks back and forth, saying something very loudly and very forcefully, and her left ear is twitching like mad. Firegaze would listen if the other two were, but as they're not, he sees no reason to stop focusing on the imminent battle. As he and Dustystreak slowly pursue Albatross around the cavern, Flightheart passes out of the ginger tom's peripheral vision and his attention becomes entirely centered on the retreating figure of Albatross and that of the pale-brown cat stalking a few cat-lengths to Firegaze's right.

They finally corner Albatross in a drastically curving portion of the cavern, a place where the roof suddenly slopes down to connect with the damp, cold, dark gray cave wall only several cat-lengths above the ground. A narrow ledge snakes along the side of the cave there, but it's too impossibly tiny to warrant Firegaze's attention, or so he thinks at first.

Just moments later he's reminded that he's dealing with Albatross, whose sanity is extremely questionable. His reminder comes as the reddish-furred tom pounces up onto the ledge and makes his way swiftly and surely up it, ducking under the precariously-placed cave roof as he does so. When Alba comes to the end of the ledge he pauses, crouches, lashes his tail, and then springs lightfootedly onto another ledge, apparently unconcerned about how he intends to get down.

Dustystreak blinks, taken aback for a moment, and glances at Firegaze quickly as if he expects him to do something. Firegaze himself is lost for a solution to the situation, and he stares uncertainly back at the younger warrior for several heartbeats until the faint sound of Albatross' chuckle rolls down from the projecting rock he's currently perched on, and by StarClan, Firegaze is going to take that rogue down a few pegs if it's the only thing he accomplishes in his stay with the outcasts, and before he knows what he's doing, the ginger tom is climbing up the ledges, leaping from tiny rock to tiny rock, more carefully but not much more slowly than Albatross did. Firegaze notes with a fierce flash of satisfaction that the expression on Alba's face has changed - not much, but the reddish-pelted cat looks quite a bit more worried as he turns and leaps onto another jutting stone.

Once, Firegaze casts a glance behind himself, and feels oddly gratified to see Dustystreak hard on his heels, stormy light blue eyes fixed on Albatross. Firegaze has never really liked the sandy-gray cat, and now that Dustystreak and Flightheart are together it's hard to even summon a feeling of amiability when he thinks of Dustystreak, but any ally in this place is appreciated. The dark ginger tabby has a sneaking feeling that the others, especially his former Clanmates, have the same attitude, but it's not as if he's going to halt the multiple arcs of intrigue and plotting and ambition to ask them that. He doesn't need more cats turning on him.

Albatross has halted in his ascent, not being able to find any other ledges to pounce onto, and Dustystreak and Firegaze leap towards him with renewed resolve. When Firegaze half-pauses to think about it, he wonders what exactly they're going to do to the rogue when they catch him, but the thought flies from his head before he truly grasps it, and he races onward up the winding network of stones along the ever-heightening cavern walls, desperate to reach Alba before the tom finds a way to get out of his current undesirable situation, which he somehow always manages to do. It's extremely infuriating; Firegaze wants to ask Alba how exactly he does it someday when they're on half-polite speaking terms.

And then with a leap and a bound Firegaze has arrived on the same flat ledge that Albatross is standing on, paw-pads scraping against the ground as he unsheathes his long white claws and clutches the stone for extra traction. Dustystreak comes skidding to a halt behind Firegaze, panting softly, and Albatross begins to look a bit more nervous. The reddish-brown tom takes a step back, amber eyes darting between the two other cats, dark ears pressed flat against his head, fur ruffling along his spine, but somehow he's still able to chat with his usual vivacity.

"Now really, what has possessed the two of you?" the rogue leader asks conversationally, taking another very small step backwards and to the side. "Attacking me? Really? That's not like you at all, Dustystreak, I know you - and as for Firegaze, well, honestly, this is rather like him - but more like the old him, and you know how much I dislike the old you, Fire, he really wasn't nearly as nice as you tend to be nowadays. So I ask both of you again: Why are you attacking me?"

"I need to go after Shark," Dustystreak says simply, tilting his head to the side slightly. "I need your support, though. I'll get it by force if necessary."

"If you have an ally, you mean," Alba corrects him airily. "And you, Fire?"

"That's Firegaze," Firegaze informs the rogue, "and I'm attacking you because you're an insufferable, arrogant, currently genocidal wretch of a rogue whose existence probably ruined my life." He snarls out the ending of his statement, and it feels good to finally have something out in the open.

"Oh dear." This in one of Albatross' cheeriest tones. "Now that can't be good."

"No, unsurprisingly, it isn't," growls the ginger tabby tom, ears pinned against his head threateningly as he lashes his tail once for emphasis.

As the two Clan cats start to advance on Albatross, slowly crowding him towards the edge of the piece of stone that he stands on, he casts a nervous glance at the nearest ledge, which is a good few cat-lengths below their current perch. "No need to be hasty, now," he wheedles.

"Just give me a patrol," says Dustystreak, almost pleadingly.

Firegaze hisses.

"Really, Fire...gaze..." Albatross tacks on the suffix quickly as he stands on the very edge of the precipice, "you need to rethink your priorities." At Firegaze's flat but half-curious look, he continues a bit more comfortably. "You see, you're blaming me for all of this, but honestly, the cat with the most blame for everything you've lost is standing right here, and it's not me. And it's not you," he hurriedly adds, almost before Firegaze has reached this possible conclusion. "If you think about it logically, it's just as much Dusty's fault as mine that you had to come chasing after us all those moons ago, and then he wasn't exactly cooperative when you did find him, was he? And then of course, you know, with Flightheart and all. I don't see why you're coming after me when he's - "

"He's not trying to destroy my Clan," Firegaze interrupts, and shoulders Albatross off of the ledge. The tom bounces off a small projecting rock as he tumbles down onto the second-closest ledge, which is just about a tail-length below the closest ledge, and his squeak is music to Firegaze's ears. For a moment, Firegaze stands there, breathing hard, staring down at Alba, and keenly aware of Dustystreak's presence almost right behind him. Then suddenly he straightens and looks directly at Dustystreak, whose blue eyes widen almost imperceptibly in the apprehension that always shows when Firegaze talks to him, but there's still something relaxed in the short-furred tom's posture. Firegaze's lip curls slightly as he speaks. "I'm sorry, Dustystreak, but he has a point."

The other tom barely has time to get into a defensive stance before Firegaze attacks, but he does have time to do it, and that makes quite a bit of difference. As Firegaze pounces, Dustystreak ducks, pushing Firegaze along with his hind legs as Dustystreak himself rolls to the side, barely keeping himself from falling off the ledge. Firegaze is no stranger to climbing and jumping on rocks, though, thanks to his recent excursions into the rogues' world, and so it isn't too hard for him to recalculate his jump and land neatly on a slim shelf of rock just a few cat-lengths to the side of the bigger ledge where Dustystreak is getting to his feet. Turning almost before his feet have gotten accustomed to the feel of the rock, Firegaze pounces right back at Dustystreak, who's ready and waiting for him. The two cats roll about on the ledge for a moment, writhing in each other's grasp, trying to sink their claws or teeth into a vulnerable place or else to push their opponent off of the ledge. Of course, the jutting piece of stone being the size it is, both toms end up rolling off of it, and this momentarily breaks up their fight as they twist in midair and land on new ledges of rock.

This sensation jars Firegaze, sending tremors up his legs at the impact with the cold hard stone, but he doesn't stop for long to register the feeling, bounding towards Dustystreak, who is a few stone projections to his left. Meanwhile, it seems that Albatross is slowly stalking down towards them. For the moment, he's too far away to bother Firegaze with his presence, so the ginger tom continues to leap towards Dustystreak.

The two cats make contact on a ledge midway between their respective former ledges, and they don't waste time on formalities, getting right back to the furious battle. Dustystreak's claws flash through Firegaze's vision again, and he doesn't duck soon enough; the tabby feels a quick, sharp pain in his cheek and retaliates immediately, plunging forward and sinking his teeth deep into the other tom's dust-colored pelt. Dustystreak yowls and slashes at Firegaze, some of his blows landing, some entirely missing as far as Firegaze can tell.

And then Alba's there in the thick of the battle, and he seems to be taking his own side, as usual - sticking out a paw to trip Firegaze here, prodding Dustystreak hard in the ribs there, and Firegaze adjusts his fight strategy to include the rogue leader. Dustystreak seems to have done so as well, as the number of blows or lunging bites he's aiming at Firegaze starts to decrease and the number of the same in regards to Albatross seem to increase rather drastically. Firegaze takes advantage of this, stops attacking Albatross, and pounces on Dustystreak. The force of his leap carries both of them off the ledge again, and this time the ginger cat's landing is decidedly messier - his shoulder strikes a projecting stone, then the side of his head, and then even as he lands his hind claws get caught and wrench his back leg badly.

For a moment the former SandClan warrior stands on the tiny bit of stone that he's managed to catch himself on, panting and gasping for air, awkwardly resting his injured leg against the rock. Then there's a flash of grayish-brown and he dodges instinctively, barely escaping Dustystreak's well-aimed pounce towards him. This turns out to be a good thing in more ways than one, as Dustystreak's landing recalculation appears to be fairly clumsy, and the sandy-furred tom skids and spins to a very awkward halt, almost falling off the ledge that he lands on. Firegaze is on top of him, clawing and biting, before the younger cat can totally recover from his landing. But Dustystreak manages to wriggle away, and he shoves Firegaze hard as he does so, forcing the ginger tom off of the ledge.

Firegaze twists in midair, positioning his legs in readiness for the harsh landing, and so is surprised when his paws hit a layer of damp sand instead of hard rock. A jolt of pain still shudders up through his paws into his body, and his hind leg is particularly achy, but the landing was surprisingly easy - and then Firegaze realizes that he's landed on the floor of the great soaring cavern. Immediately his head jerks up and he gazes up the sloping, curving cave walls towards the ceiling, squinting in the half-light to figure out faster whether or not somebody is coming towards him with intent to kill or severely injure.

Nobody seems to be doing such a thing; Dustystreak and Albatross are chasing each other around the tiny labyrinthine formations of stone, every once in a while meeting and battling, then separating, one pursuing and one fleeing, or often as not both fleeing. Firegaze casts his eyes through the great echoing gloom around him, and sees with a flicker of surprise that Flightheart seems to have gotten into a disagreement with two rogues he doesn't recognize. She seems to be handling it well, though, and would probably snap at him if he went over to help her, so he ignores this as he pads towards the closest ledge of rock. Barely heeding his aching joints, the tom sets a ginger-furred paw on the stone and tenses his muscles to take another step...

...and then he doesn't, instead just standing there, frozen in place for no particular reason, of course aware of the listening world's eager silence, flinching from what he feels is its laughter, but in the end he's not trying to pay attention to that; he's just tired of all of this. Of running around with the carelessly carefree rogues, of quarreling with Alba and Dustystreak and Flightheart, of being separated from his Clan, of life - no. No, he reminds himself slowly, he isn't yet tired of life. True that Flightheart is lost to him forever, and true that his Clan has cast him aside, but there are still tiny shreds and bits and pieces of things to find a strange half-happiness in, with whatever shreds and bits and pieces of his broken heart he can manage to pick up. There's Grayheart, his well-loved and well-respected former mentor. There's Greengrass, the ever-dependable companion. There's the harsh but honest Clawstar, whose approval he can perhaps win back. And there's the sea, the wild sound of the waves flinging themselves against the sand and the great white cliffs in abandon, hurrying towards the shore like great blue-furred beasts, vying with each other to see which one can fling its great foam-capped self into sparkling drops first, a race of futility; this is accompanied always by the lonely mewing and crying of the gulls, a sound almost all shore-dwelling cats swear nearly breaks your heart.

These things Firegaze has, these things he can live for, and yet none are in here, in this lonely great cavern. In the end, there's really only himself here, himself and the world around him, the world that listens to his life and - he knows it - chuckles in spite of itself.

So the dark ginger tabby lifts his forepaw again, removes it from the cold hard rock, and slowly pads out of the soaring cave, towards the mouth of the small tunnel that will wind and twist through this strange place until it intersects with a hidden passage into the Hive, which will lead him home.

His eyes catch on Flightheart's sun-golden pelt, and for a moment, just a moment, he wants so much to stay here, because to be near her, to be with her, though she's lost to him forever - that's what he really needs, the one thing that may perhaps be strong enough to drive away his sorrow, and the one thing that will certainly be strong enough to keep him forever sorrowful, in a strange and wonderful and terrible ever-whirling cycle...the silence resounds...

And Firegaze tears his eyes away from her and flees, pelt vanishing into the deep blackness of the tunnel.

"I've come back."

"So I see." The amber eyes are cold as ever, but they lack hostility. "And what makes you think that I won't drive you from my presence? Kill you, even?"

"I can help you win this war," says Firegaze - because what is the slaughter of rogues when compared to the slaughter of SandClan? Nothing. "You want me on your side," he adds, certain that he speaks the truth.

Clawstar's eyes narrow, but in less of an angry way, and more of a challenging one. "Perhaps you can. And," he muses, the volume of his voice dropping a bit, "perhaps I do. Perhaps I do." His night-black tabby markings twist and crease and dance as he blinks. "We shall see."

As Firegaze departs the den, he tries to keep his mind off of the cats he's left, but it's impossible to wipe Flightheart from his thoughts; she hovers forever on the edges of his consciousness like an indecisive bird, holding its own against the wind, wondering whether to land or to fly onward, and Firegaze himself doesn't know what he wants his memories of Flightheart to do, either. The silence caused by the intrigued world listening in on his troubled thoughts is, as always, deafening. Apparently the universe finds tragedy amusing. Firegaze sometimes almost thinks that he might as well, and then he'll wonder if he's going insane, a wondering which haunts his thoughts almost daily now, and the deep quiet is still there, pressing against the edges of his consciousness with the hovering memories of a she-cat with eyes like the sea that Firegaze loves, and a pelt as radiant as the sun.

"Greengrass." Firegaze greets his almost-friend, his former Clanmate and campmate, the moment he sees him. Even a homely, gaunt, thinly-striped tabby face is a friendly one in what has come to be called the Shark Camp - an unofficial camp of rogues who follow Shark and Clawstar, and Firegaze welcomes the prospect of a long conversation about changes in the Clan.

But Greengrass, after staring at Firegaze for a heartbeat with pale yellow eyes full of recognition, scowls and turns away, slinking into the multitudes of rogues, cloaking himself with the pelts and scents and presences of other cats, just as Firegaze learned to do in the Hive, and Firegaze is alone, and he doesn't know where Grayheart is, and he's not permitted to go to the Dune Camp, and Shark is the deputy of the Shell Camp, and Reeddapple is dead anyways. What was the point of turning down Clawstar's offer, in the end? Firegaze asks himself bitterly as he stands there, not bothering to even look for Greengrass.

And then there's a sound of paws on the sand next to him, and an unfamiliar cat is speaking to him. "You're Fire...gaze, right?" The warrior name rolls awkwardly off of his tongue, and Firegaze knows that the small brown-and-white tom is a rogue.

"Yes," the ginger tom responds. "Do you have a message for me?"

"C-Clawstar says that you're supposed to go with Shark's patrol, that's leaving tomorrow before dawn to raid the rebels." The little cat ducks his head and flees, vanishing effortlessly into the milling crowd.

"Right," says Firegaze dully as he sinks into a crouch. There's no point in going anywhere, is there? And so he stays like that, crouched on the top of a barely discernible tiny hillock of sand, watching the rogues pass him by as the sun rises and reaches its zenith and then falls slowly, reddening into a ball of flame that tinges Firegaze's beloved sea with fire, transforming it into a river of molten blood.

Then all is dark, and Firegaze tries to sleep, but Flightheart and the irrepressible listening world return together to pad through his thoughts, to haunt his dreams, and the ginger tom gives up his feeble attempts at resting and sits back on his haunches, staring up at the sky, pretending to ponder great questions of life and the universe, when all he's truly worrying about is a pointless, hopeless, stupid, beautiful love.

The sound of the sea accompanies the awareness of the listening world, and for once Firegaze finds that awareness terribly lovely as well, but what isn't wonderful when the sea sings alongside it?

Once more, Firegaze is making his way towards the Hive, and once more he's traveling in a heavy storm, the rain slapping his face and sides and legs, running in rivulets down his striped pelt and dripping into his eyes, drumming steadily on the ground - but this time he isn't alone. Behind him prowls a veritable army of rogues - it isn't anywhere near Shark's full force, obviously, but twenty-odd cats seems like an enormous number for a raiding patrol.

Raiding patrol. For a moment guilt resonates somewhere inside Firegaze, but he shakes it off. Albatross was going to annihilate SandClan, he reminds himself. Clawstar doesn't even plan to kill all of the rogues, and he's going to let Dustystreak and Flightheart live if they'll surrender. And then, of course, the ginger warrior scoffs at himself, mocking his own thoughts. Yes, that's what he told you.

"We know the way to the Hive, you know." Greengrass' voice, rising from somewhere in the middle of the group behind Firegaze, is cutting, and for a moment Firegaze wants to cringe and crouch and ask what he did wrong, and then he remembers that, of course, he sold out his Clan for the rogues.

"I know," is all he says, and he says it quietly, emotionlessly, because he doesn't even know who's on his side anymore. Not that he knows what side he's on, either. Nobody seems to want to take him, not now.

Then, surprisingly enough, Shark comes into the conversation with what is very nearly a defense of Firegaze. "Shut it, fishbrain," he growls in the general direction of Greengrass, deep voice tinged with a strange accent due to the deep scars etched into his cheek and throat, disfiguring and twisting his jaw. Of course, he then turns to Firegaze and snarls, "Go faster."

"Okay." Firegaze tries not to flinch away from the massive dark gray tom. "I'll do that." He picks up his pace considerably, lifting one paw as soon as he puts the other one down, barely caring about the wet sand that coats his feet and legs and spatters his coat, now only determined to get this over with as soon as he can, making a beeline for the entrance to the Hive, and for a moment he thinks he sees a cat standing a little ways ahead of him in the rain - its pelt suddenly flashes gold, his head lifts, his ears swivel - and then the mirage is gone, leaving in its wake the silence of a keenly listening world.

The Hive was almost completely deserted when they set paw in it; by now almost every rogue has declared their allegiance or else departed the area, fleeing from the war that threatened them. Now, as Firegaze navigates through the ever-tightening, ever-darkening tunnels, praying that he remembered the way, only faint scents and the occasional mark of claws slashed across a stone wall tell that cats have set paw here within any span of time in living memory.

"This goes nowhere," rasps Shark, as the army of cats descend into deeper blackness. "You're leading us into a dead end."

Firegaze's eyes narrow, but he doesn't make a comment; he just presses onward, choosing to ignore the rogue leader's words rather than shoot back something sarcastic that he'll most likely regret later. His paw pads scuff against the stone every once in a while, and a faint whispering noise arises and fades into nothingness, like a quick and fleeting breath. The dark ginger tom begins to lose track of time, but his eyes continue to probe the now stiflingly dark and tight tunnel, ever searching, ever aware - and then there it is, just as he remembers it from his journey through here with Albatross and Dustystreak and Flightheart - Flightheart - and he quickly pushes those treacherous thoughts away and halts next to the stone that juts out from the otherwise smooth wall of the passage.

"What's this?" sneers somebody from near the back of the group - probably Greengrass, though Firegaze isn't certain. "It's not even movable. Are you trying to tell us that the rogues are behind that? What do you think - "

A low hiss from Shark brings an abrupt silence to the tunnel; Firegaze thinks that the other cats may have even stopped breathing, the quiet is so absolute. Shark is a formidable cat, somebody to be respected and, more importantly, feared.

"It's not behind that," Firegaze mews simply, as he slithers up onto the stone projection, awkwardly positioned between rock and cavern roof. He extends a forepaw, reaching upward, and sighs inwardly with relief when his paw brushes moss, and then a stony ledge. Hooking his paw around the ledge and unsheathing his claws, Firegaze slides off of the rock and pulls himself up through an all-but-invisible hole in the tunnel roof, blinking as he tugs his head through horizontally laid curtains of moss into a much more spacious, comparatively brighter passageway. He tugs his hind legs and tail through the hole as well, then turns around and pushes his head back through the moss, wanting to chuckle at the various astonished looks stamped on every cat's face - even Shark wears an expression akin to surprise. "Come on, then," says the ginger tom, trying not to sound too superior. "This way."

As rogues begin to flood up through the moss, striped heads and spotted heads and patched heads appearing one by one, Firegaze notices idly that though there are gray cats and white cats, black and brown ones, ginger and tortoiseshell-furred felines, there isn't a golden tabby among them, and Flightheart is instantly blazing in his mind like the sun, and as the world listens, Firegaze can't force himself to banish her image.

She's beautiful; every golden fur is highlighted, every darker tabby swirl and streak is a flash of dark fire, and her eyes shine like the illuminated sea in this observing silence.

Firegaze has dropped to the back of the group, alone with the universe and his thoughts of Flightheart, so he's caught completely off guard by the sudden screech from the front of the patrol, which is followed by a snarl and then yowling as what sounds like a major battle begins.

The cats surrounding him surge forward as far as they can go in the still fairly small passage, pushing others out of their way, even trampling their allies in an attempt to get into the fight, to see what's going on. Firegaze follows them, nipping and shoving his way through the crowd just as the others are doing, and then suddenly somebody's claws have connected with his face, and the searing pain makes him leap backwards, but he slams into one of Shark's rogues midleap and crashes onto the floor.

Somebody leaps over him, and then somebody else steps on him, their claws digging painfully into his side. Firegaze flinches away and kicks the cat off of him, shaking his head to rid it of the blood that's trickling down into his eyes and obscuring his vision. This isn't very effective - more blood is soon dripping down his face, wet and dark, and the wound that slashes across his forehead, nose, and cheek is throbbing painfully. Firegaze, still on the ground, dodges another set of paws and pushes himself to his feet, noticing that the yowls seem to have quieted and that Shark's patrol doesn't look as if it's been defeated.

As he pads curiously towards where the first screech had originated, Firegaze's whiskers tremble in annoyance as the ticklish blood dribbles down his cheek. He lifts a paw to swipe it away, but just before he touches his face, a yowl makes him freeze, moving not a hair, because he can't believe what he just heard - and then it comes again, a furious cry, accompanied by frantic murmuring amongst the patrol.

A cat is calling his name.

"FIREGAZE!" It's not a pleading mew, not accompanied by even the tiniest bit of pain or fear, but instead an accusingly furious scream - and he recognizes the voice for certain this time, and a cold feeling, what he thinks is dread, mingles bitterly with the familiar joy in his throat and stomach and heart, because it's Flightheart, and there's that silence again, that fuzzing over of any sound that doesn't emit from her throat, that darkening of everything besides her fire-bright fur, as the world listens to the incomplete story of them.

He's only taken one step towards the sound of her voice when she shoves in between two rogues and her gaze meets his. Contrary to what he was expecting, Firegaze doesn't see much cold fury in her eyes. Instead he sees an equal mixture of sorrow, pain, and anger - something strangely similar to disappointment, though it isn't that.

"Bring her back here," growls Shark irritably, and several rogues begin to crowd around Flightheart, pushing her towards a small group of rogues - strangers who Firegaze doesn't recognize, who must be with her.

"How could you do this?" she chokes out, despairing words laced with anger and sorrow, as she disappears into the midst of the cats. "How could you join him, after what he did?"

Firegaze's eyes widen as he wonders what in the name of StarClan Flightheart is talking about - and then she says it, a last defiant cry before she's completely lost to his sight and hearing, and it's as if he's been plunged into the sea in the heart of icebreeze, as if he's been frozen to the bone, as if his heart has temporarily but suddenly decided to vacate his body.

"Grayheart!" she spits, her words becoming venomous and more hushed as she's pulled further away from him. "They killed him - and you joined them anyways. I persuaded Alba to let you stay with us - I showed you this place - I thought you cared - " Her pelt is completely lost to view now among the milling, uncertain crowd, but one last sentence drifts back to Firegaze's numb ears with perfect clarity.

"I was wrong about you."

It's very, very quiet.

Night has fallen, cloaking the caverns and tunnels and doubtless the entire outside world in a deep blackness, a great stillness, a feeling that has risen and set with the moon for untold ages, a silence unique to itself, nothing like the silence of the listening world. It's always a broken silence that flies with night, a harmonization of crickets and owls and insomniac gulls, muted by the quiet, deep breathing of one's denmates, or by one's own breathing, or by the speaking of one's dreams. Firegaze cannot find solace in this silence, as he once was able to do. He cannot think, cannot rationalize, can hardly breathe, can hardly live, as the mantra is pounded into his mind in an involuntary cycle, over and over and over again.

Grayheart, well-loved and well-respected former mentor.

Greengrass, ever-dependable companion.

The harsh but honest Clawstar.

The sea, the wild sound of the waves.

Grayheart, well-loved and well-respected former mentor.

Firegaze never "loses it", never lets his emotions run rampant, never flees to a lonely place and looks up at the sky and lets it all out in a single cry. Such things are not done by him, not by this cat, thank you, and he's always prided himself on this fact. Now, in the dark, in the stillness, surrounded by twenty denmates whose names he does not know, alone in a crowd and feeling the loss of Flightheart more keenly than ever now that she's barely more than a few pawsteps away - now he wishes more than ever that he could force himself to do such a thing.

He's lost Greengrass' friendship. He's lost his faith in Clawstar. He's lost the sound of the sea - he can't even call up the song of the waves into his mind anymore, so long he's wandered in these tunnels. He's lost his mentor, the one cat he came to depend upon after the deaths of his parents.

Everything he had left to perhaps live a little bit for, even after Flightheart forever stole away his heart - it's all gone. Everything's gone.

His life is as good as over.

I was wrong about you.

And Firegaze's legs are suddenly moving, pushing him up from where he's curled tightly on the cold stone floor, stepping carefully but swiftly around and over Shark's rogues, carrying him out into the great main cavern, its floor erratically dappled by scapegoat streaks of moonlight that have broken through some ventilation hole or other. All is silent - the scent of Albatross and his great tribe of followers and allies is old but not gone, lingering on the stones, on the sandy floor, even in the air. They've all been absent for days, all but Flightheart and her small following, as far as any cat can tell.

Firegaze swiftly skirts around the edge of the cave, eyes shifting back and forth, darting around the great space, alert and aware. He knows that the only cats not sleeping are the six or seven who stand guard at the entrance from the Hive - the only outlet from this isolated series of caves and tunnels, as far as they know.

In truth, it's the only outlet he told them about.

As he makes his way into the smaller tunnel that leads into the little cave where their prisoners are being kept, Firegaze catches the scent of Shark's rogues, and almost the moment he identifies their scent, they've come bounding around a bend in the tunnel and are standing shoulder to shoulder, bristling, effectively blocking his way. "What're you doing here?" one of them snarls, his green eyes flashing warningly.

"I'm here to take your place," he lies coolly. "You're to join the guards at the entrance from the Hive."

They don't argue with him, slipping past him swiftly, padding silently back towards the main cavern, pelts veiled and dulled by shadow - in truth, the rogues have always seemed to fear if not respect the few Clan cats that travel with them. In just a few heartbeats, the sound of their pawsteps has faded away.

An uneasy silence settles as Firegaze waits, forces himself to stand still, not even shifting from paw to paw. Give them time to get far away, he tells himself sternly.

Finally he feels that he's waited long enough, and, tail twitching uncertainly, he pads around the bend in the tunnel and keeps walking. The shadows grow deeper and darker and the scent of cats grows stronger, and still he walks on, until suddenly something in the pressure and temperature of the air changes, and though he can hardly see, he's certain that he's standing in the prisoners' cavern.

The next thing he hears confirms his suspicions - a brief whispering sound flickers around him, and there's a rustling, as of cats shifting nervously. Then, quite unexpectedly, somebody speaks right next to his ear; sure enough, it's her.

"What do you want?" hisses Flightheart. The traitor endingisn't spoken, but her tone strongly implies it.

He doesn't feel any joy anymore, even at the sound of her voice, even at the faint, ever-so-barely discernible gleam of her eyes in the deep darkness. But he answers her, nonetheless. "You weren't wrong about me."

She steps back, and he thinks that her ears twitch or her fur rises slightly before she replies, her muted voice now shaded with curiosity, but also tinted with scorn. "And why would you expect me to believe that?"

"This way," he says simply, and steps aside, into the little cave, leaving the passageway open and unguarded.

Flightheart is silent for such a long time that he begins to wonder if she's perhaps already slipped away, but then she speaks, slowly and disbelievingly, all anger purged from her voice, and she only says one word. "Why?"

Firegaze closes his eyes briefly. It tears at his heart to even think the answer, and he knows he can never say it, for it will only bring more pain to them both, though they both know the truth already. "Because," he answers softly, not sure how he keeps his voice from trembling. I love you, he finishes to himself, and marvels at how much it hurts.

The insensitive world is listening still - the silence makes that very clear.

As the group of cats - six rogues, plus Flightheart and Firegaze - pad swiftly across the great cavern's floor, cutting through the middle carelessly, Flightheart speaks for the first time since they've left the prisoners' dark cavern, and what she says is not what Firegaze expects to hear. Nor is it something he wants to hear.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "For saying that to you. I had no right - "

"Don't be sorry," he interrupts angrily, flattening his ears. "You had every right. It's true, after all."

"Why are you like this?" Flightheart demands in a savage undertone. "I don't want to see you like this. I liked you better when you were a bossy crabheart. Why can't it be like it used to be?" Her voice is pleading now, and Firegaze somehow knows that now she isn't just talking about him, but about the state of their little listening world, which hovers on the edge of disaster and doom.

"I don't know," says the ginger tom quietly, his memory flitting back unbidden to the golden days of sunbreeze in Flightheart's early apprenticeship, the whisper of the wind in the dune grass, the now-unreachable song of the waves, when anything was possible, when he and she together was more than a laughable idea.

They've crossed the great cave by now, and they stand in front of the yawning mouth of a great dark tunnel, the tunnel which Albatross always warned them that they were never to set paw in. There were tales whispered about it - unconfirmed tales, true, but who wished to confirm such things? - tales that told of cavern floors made of rock as fragile and thin as ice, where one false move sent you plummeting to your doom into untold, unexplorable depths. One cat whose face Firegaze can't recall swore that cats had fallen down there before, ages ago, in times past living memory, when a now-nameless Clan inhabited this place.

It's dangerous, but there's a way out of it.

Two ways out of it, Firegaze reminds himself, finding a morbid humor in the thought. Two ways out of it, and he'll be taking one, and they'll all take the other.

"Hurry!" Flightheart exclaims, and then adds as an afterthought to the six rogues, "Stay close to the walls. Alba said that the floor wasn't too thin here, but he's never cared to test it."

Even as they set out, paws and pelts rustling against the smooth cool stone, there's a faint sound - almost like a murmur - somewhere far behind them. Heartbeats later the sound repeats itself, only now it's more clear, and the alarmed tone of the cry is discernible. Flightheart's ears flatten and her pace quickens as she leads the way towards where a shaft of pure moonlight spills onto the deceptively unassuming tunnel floor.

When she reaches the pool of moonlight and steps into it, towards the opening in the cavern wall that leads to freedom, her fur blazes and shimmers like silver flame, and Firegaze's breath catches in his throat at her beauty - and then she's gone, tail whisking as she bounds out of the cavern. Her little band of rogues follow her, scrambling up into the light one by one, and then Firegaze pulls himself through the hole. Something catches on his pelt as he does so, and he smells the pungent tang of rosemary as he just crouches there blinking, dazzled momentarily by the bright white rays of the moon. Then his eyes adjust to the light, and his claws immediately sink into the sand as he stares down the steep rocky slope that the eight cats are now perched on.

They're sitting in perhaps the only safe place to settle this high up on the cliff that envelops their tunnels and caves - a ledge of packed sand and rock that couldn't have been formed here accidentally. It's not a very wide perch - perhaps a tail-length across. It doesn't stretch on for a great length, either; Firegaze can easily spy the place where another hole in the cliff leads right back into the very cavern they just exited.

"What now?" Flightheart mews nervously, her gaze drifting down the impossibly steep cliffside to the distant sandy shore below them. The rogues with her echo her question, muttering darkly as more alarmed yowls rise from the dark opening - it won't be long before Shark and his cats discover where they've gone.

"There are ledges," Firegaze tells her. "You can climb down on those." Even as he points with his tail to the bit of solid rock a ways down the rocky precipice, one of the rogues shifts into a smooth crouch and pounces, landing perfectly on the ridge. The cat's eyes glint as it turns back towards them, and it raises its paw in a signal Firegaze doesn't recognize. Then it gathers itself again and springs down the cliffside, nimbly landing on the next jutting stone.

"He'll wait for us down below," Flightheart interprets the raised paw surely, and mews to the other rogues, "Follow him down. Firegaze and I will come last."

As the cats begin to leap from ledge to ledge, departing one by one, Flightheart picks her way across the narrow path fearlessly, coming to stand by Firegaze. Her sweetly wild scent is overwhelming from her close proximity, and Firegaze wants to tell her to go, but he can't. And then she speaks to him, ever so quietly, her words falling into his ears like a gentle rain, or like the song of birds on a bright warmbreeze dawn, after the last winds of icebreeze have taken flight.

"Thank you," she says softly, and then adds half-sadly and half-regretfully, "I know why you're doing this, you know."

"Shut up about that," Firegaze growls, digging his claws into the sand and staring determinedly at his paws so he doesn't have to meet her eyes. "I don't want you thinking about it. Go on and live your life."

"I care about you," presses the she-cat, her voice catching. There are more yowls, clearer now, from the darkness, and out of his peripheral vision Firegaze sees her head turn briefly towards the entrance into the cave before she continues. "Not in that way, but I...I don't..." Flightheart takes a breath. "If I could do something about it - "

"You can't, so stop dwelling on it," Firegaze tells her, but his words aren't sure enough - he can't keep his voice from quivering just a bit, and then he looks up, and she's looking at him, and her eyes - her eyes. They're shining like they've never shone before, he thinks, like his once-beloved ocean under the moon, a thousand different shades of green, a hundred different hues of blue, and suddenly her scent is all around him, and her cheek is pressed against his muzzle, and her muzzle is against his cheek, and for a moment they just stand there like that, and Firegaze doesn't even feel the world listening, for Flightheart drowns out everything else.

Then she steps back. "You go first," she says chokingly, gesturing down the cliffside.

"No. You go," he mews firmly. "I'll follow as soon as you're away from here."

There's a flicker of distrust in her eyes, and he prays that she'll overcome it, as now there are definite sounds of pursuit from the caverns below and behind them, and those sounds are drawing closer by the moment.

Evidently she's decided that he's telling the truth, as she slowly slides into a crouch, narrows her eyes, and with one last glance at him - he seals it into his memory indelibly - she leaps down onto the ledge, at least six catlengths below, and steps away from it, waiting for him.

He doesn't follow her; instead he stands there, staring down at her, for a few fleeting heartbeats, and then it dawns on her face, the knowledge that he's not coming, and betrayal is stamped into her eyes. But there is no heartbreak there, just as he knew there would not be, just as there isn't supposed to be, and she turns and flees down to the next stone, and he can tell by the way she pauses that she's turning and looking towards him again, but he still doesn't move, and after a while her sun-bright head drops and she bounds down onto the next ledge.

And now it's time for Firegaze to play his final part in this story, this feeble, petty amusement for the listening world.

The dark ginger tabby tom turns to the stunted rosemary plant that grows by the entrance, partly covering it. He tugs a few stems from it and carefully wipes them over the sandy path until the scents have all but completely vanished. The yowls of the pursuers are now so close that he's certain they've tracked the escapees almost to the great tunnel, and so he leaps back through the opening, hoping that he's not too late to stop them from discovering the exit.

He isn't too late, nor is he too early - his timing is perfect.

There's a yowl from the direction of the great main cavern - "There's one of them! In here!" - and for a heartbeat he sees the silhouettes of Shark's rogues looming against the tunnel's entrance, and then he's off, fleeing through the tunnel with wild abandon, tossing his cares to the winds, not heeding the foreboding creaking of the floor.

Firegaze glances back a few times to make sure that the rogues are pursuing him, and they always are - seven of them are the closest, the forerunners - and once he feels a jabbing pain in his hind leg and glances back to see that one of them has reached out and slashed at him, and he lengthens his pace.

Then suddenly, without warning, there's a great jagged darkness spreading out ahead of him - Firegaze remembers the legends - he stops suddenly mid-stride, spins to face the rogues, and one is pouncing towards him, claws unsheathed, and the other six are skidding into a semicircle around him, and he doesn't dodge the blow, but lets the cat knock him backwards, trusting the cavern to do its work for him -

and then there's a mighty CRACK as he's tackled onto the floor, and the rogues screech in dismay and terror as the stone under their very paws divides and

falls away

and then their cries as they fall, they're very strangely muted

by that ever-present silence

that accompanies the

listening

world

and Firegaze realizes calmly, with a strange certainty,

that it wasn't ever laughing at him

it was crying for him

and the world spreads out the future before his eyes

as

he

falls -

its last gift to him, perhaps? -

he sees

kits

three of them, sandy-pelted tabbies

they romp and play in a

peaceful

world;

one looks towards him quite suddenly and its eyes are

sea blue

and then the kits are gone

only darkness meets his eyes as he

tumbles

ever

farther

and a golden-furred she-cat laughs in his memory

chasing a butterfly

chasing her dreams

flying forever free

he

says

her

name -

"Flightheart."

And

it

is

silent

totally

silent

and

the

world

holds

its

breath

and

listens

and

listens

and

lis

The world listens in its heavy silence, but does not hear what it is searching for, and so it slowly and sadly moves on, searching for something else to hear, and being the world, it finds that something. A few silver-feathered gulls, blown from their nesting grounds by the sudden storm that sprang up like an angry beast in the night, are now beginning to make their way home.

One of them, an impetuous youngster, only several seasons old, is overjoyed to feel the fresh clear wind under his wings, to smell the last remnants of early warmbreeze rain in the air. Drunk on fun, he hurtles through the air, throwing his body through nigh impossible feats of agility and speed, flirting with the dangeruos sharp white cliffs, daring them to touch him, to end his wild game in death. He dives to the ground, climbs to the sun - life and hope spring eternal, in his eyes. Why should anyone sorrow? Why should anyone be miserable?

As the gull wings his way home, dodging through dunes and rocks and the like, he spies one of the land dwellers not far ahead of him. With a warning cry to the general area, he shifts his wings and pulls around it in a tight circle, wondering why it shows so little interest in him. It's remarkably pretty for one of its kind, its feathers tinted with bright sunlight, its eyes glinting like the beautiful sea, and he wonders why something so pretty would be so unhappy. Perhaps because it wants to eat something, he reminds himself cautiously, spiraling lazily above it.

Then he spies another of the land dwellers, far away, almost further away than his vision reaches, and the ever-curious youngster flits away to see what it's doing.

It doesn't look as melancholy as the other one, but it's marching through the sand rather purposefully, which the gull can't find it in his wild heart to approve of. Purpose to him is a constraint, something to be shunned at all costs. He finds it odd that this beast, with feathers all drab and dull - the color of common sand - would have more life in it than the beautiful one. He also notes carelessly that if this land dweller continues on its path, it'll most certainly come upon the other dweller, sitting in the shadow of a dune with its head dropped despairingly upon its chest.

Perhaps the other dweller will be happy; perhaps it knows this sand-pelted one. Or perhaps they will fight. The gull considers waiting to see what will occur upon the meeting of the two, but decides not to - he isn't the waiting type, and there are air currents to be ridden, and fish to be caught, and danger to be flirted with.

So he flits away merrily, letting the land creatures fall from his memory as he spreads its feathers and sails through the clear pale dawn sky, his heart light. He notices a bright new star on the horizon and dips his wings to it gaily as he races on towards the sea and home.

And the world listens.