[mal du pays]

Thread for eltonn!

[eltonn]

how did the kit get here? 789 words

The small storkatten sitting across from the Cavebound shifted uncomfortably as the Cavebound kneaded a few dark berries into a pulpy mush. The Cavebound couldn’t help but grin. The kit was probably confused. This wasn’t natural behavior for storkatten, after all.

Paws press into the bare wall, leaving purple footprints stained into the stone. It’s repeated, thrice, and soon a trail of prints meanders up the wall to the ceiling. The Cavebound has to stretch high to reach the final destination, and he smears his paw in a long line at the end. Now that the timeline is complete, he looks down at the kit again. “Alright, little one. What do you remember? Start with the earliest, if you could…”

The kit took a deep breath, glancing down the walls before speaking. Prints made trails up and down the walls to the left of them. While this new trail stopped at the top of the cavern, the others curled back around, looping up and down the wall multiple times to encompass all the meaning they held. The kit’s eyes were caught by the cat-like shapes around those prints. When it opens its mouth to speak, it does not answer the Cavebound’s question. “What’s that?” Its ears are pricked towards the only trail that is shorter than theirs. Instead of starting with normal pawprints, like all the others, it started with a maelstrom of overlapping marks. None of them are legible as a full print. It looks more like a mess than anything meaningful.

The Cavebound chuckles a warm, rolling laugh. “That story is not for you to know. We are here to mark down your own, not to indulge in the mysteries of others. Now, if you please, tell me the first thing you can remember.” There’s an insistent glow in his odd colored eyes as he urges the kit to speak.

The kit thinks for a second. “Warmth.” The noise of something scraping signifies that the Cavebound dipped their paw in a puddle of dark red berries and then smeared it near the start of the kit’s trail. “Warmth and my mother,” the kit says, a bit more clearly this time. The cavedweller licks the remaining dye off his paw, then adds a brown cat-shaped smear near the red mark.

“My mother wasn’t brown,” the kit begins to protest, but the Cavebound shushes it softly and places his tailtip over it’s mouth. The kit wrinkles its nose, then sneezes.

“The color does not matter. Please, continue.”

This tedious method of recording continues on for roughly an hour. The kit was still rather young - old enough to live on its own, but most major life events had not yet occurred, and as such there was not much of interest to record. The marking of the first rabbit they killed was followed with some pride in their voice, but otherwise, the kit’s story was melancholy.

It had never known its father, and was the only kit in its litter. While the time it had spent with its mother had been loving, it did not last long. It wasn’t sure what had killed her, only that it had awoken one morning to find her dead in their den, saliva and snot caked around her muzzle. She had seemed fine the evening prior.

It had tried to make a living in that old den after burying its mother, but found the life lonely. It missed conversations. It missed cleaning a friend. It missed the warmth of someone else’s fur. But most of all, it missed being able to ask questions, and to have them be answered. There’s no one to talk to when you live alone.

So the kit took to wandering, to find a companion, someone they could talk to. As much as they wished it so, the trees never did answer their pleas for an ally.

The kit had first attempted to befriend a squirrel, only for the creature to die of fright when it tried to carry it into the den to nap. Second came a fox, which the kit had barely escaped from with its life. The poorly healed scars hidden within the fur on its hind leg were proof enough of that. The third attempt was with a mole, who had burrowed away rather quickly when it heard the kit’s mew.

Dejected, it had fallen asleep underneath an oak tree. It doesn’t know how long it wandered after that, only that the moon had grown and shrank several times since then. “It must be fate,” the kit said quietly, “that I have found you all now.”

Cavebound’s deep, encompassing mew filled the room as he put the final marking at the top of the kit’s painted trail. “Fate indeed.”