Mind the gap.
The camp was alight with activity as soon as one of the queens had awoken to find Flickerheart’s mother’s bed of moss empty. The fiery she-cat went straight for the leader’s den after all the other queens had awoken. Nursing mothers huffed at her insolence, but the clan was determined to find her. After all, what if a bordering clan had kidnapped her!
Their leader was nowhere to be found, with the Deputy scheduling searching patrols. To form circles around the surrounding areas. Riversoul’s absence was hardly noticed by anyone- after all, he was hardly useful on patrol. Flickerheart noticed. It was their mother, after all. She had sought him out first thing, only to find his bed cool and unslept in.
Without waiting for the deputy’s sign off, Flickerheart dashed out of camp, following her father’s scent. She was well behind the three of them, but knew with a bit of fast action, she would make it in time to help defend her against any neighboring clan cat!
Her feet took her down a familiar path, and before long, she realized she could follow it in her sleep. It was the path to her father’s favorite training area. It had been difficult, but with his early training, before Riversoul, Flickerheart had learned so much. It was a place she always enjoyed being, and so she ran on with an invigorated sprint, dashing on as a breakneck pace. Her jaw clenched with determination as she broke away from the undergrowth and saw her father’s shady orange pelt sitting at the edge of the ridge. She made a point to slow down, and strode up next to him.
What filled her senses would make Flickerheart blanch for the years to come. The sickly metallic scent assaulted her nose. Her eyes fell upon her mother, lying motionless on the turf, and her father standing close enough to the ridge to fall over. Blood spattered his own pelt, and foam flecked at the corners of his maw. “F-father, what happened to mom!? Where’s Riversoul?”
Her father turned his eyes onto her. They were wild for a few short moments, as if he didn’t recognize her, and then he melted. “Riversoul is dead to us. He killed your mother and was feeding the neighboring clans with information on us. He needs to be brought in to face judgement.” Flickerheart’s eyes swelled with tears she wouldn’t dare shed in front of her father, and looked down to her mother’s cooling body while her father’s eyes rested on her. “Flickerheart, you need to go find him. Catch him and bring him back. Or kill him, I don’t care. I just want him to pay.”
Flickerheart’s limbs went rigid. “I-I can’t do that...”
Her father’s face twisted into that of a snarl. “You can and you will. If you can’t come home with him, don’t come home at all.” And with that, he stood and took her mother by the scruff of the neck. He was to take her back home so her clan could mourn for her. There would be no mourning for Riversoul.... did he deserve it? As she watched her father stride away, the tears blurred her vision and threatened to spill over.
Flickerheart felt so small all of the sudden. She felt quite insignificant, and that scared her. Instead of letting it take over her, Flickerheart took that feeling inside and crumpled it into a sight little ball of anger. Her brows set and she frowned sharply. She would not let Riversoul get away with this. Taking away two out of the only three family members she had in her life... no. He took away her mother, and now, he took away her brother. No, Not today he wouldn’t.
~~~~~~
Picking up on Riversoul’s scent was absolutely too easy.
He wasn’t even trying to hide- or even stop the blood flow, wherever that was coming from? He was quite a ways ahead of her, but if she went on through morning, she could be upon him by first sun. And her plan very well would have worked if the clouds that had been threatening to drop rain upon them didn’t finally let loose some time after midnight. She broke out into a run as the trail twisted into the highlands of mountain territory. The rain was quickly washing away the blood and scent from the stones, and she found herself growing with disparity.
When the trail was indistinguishable from the muddy waters, she decided to break for the night. She did her best to find a rocky overhang and crawl into the hole for her most uncomfortable sleep in her life. The ground was hard, the rock was cold and all her heat was quickly sapped out of her body. It was all she could do to sleep at all that night, and so when the rain stopped, and first light broke through the shoddy clouds, she was ready to leave that wretched place. This time, however, she had no direction, so she simply walked. She walked until her paws ached, and then some more when she surprisingly found a spat of blood. It seemed her brother hadn’t had a well rest either.
She would use this for her advantage as she started off once again, lopping along carefully. One slip could mean a long, long fall. One she was not sure she could survive. It didn’t take long for his scent to follow, and when she saw him once again, she almost snarled after him. It was almost as if he could hear her thoughts, and so twisted sharply to look back at her.
She was shocked to see the side of his face smeared with blood streaked by the rain. It was almost impossible to tell where the cut was, had it not been for his swollen eye that had closed. She wanted to run to him, to help him, but she also wanted to push him off the edge of his bridge. “Riversoul!” She snarled, and that seemed to seal it for Riversoul, and he turned back around to cross the rest of the crumbling rocky bridge.
She made to follow him across the narrow, natural stone bridge, but she had to hesitate. The view down to the bottom made her a little dizzy, but it was all the time Riversoul needed.
He began slamming his weight against the land bridge. A few tries and it began crumbling, as though it had prepared for this moment. Flickerheart was stunned and for a long, long time the two stood there and stared at each other. They stared until Flickerheart couldn’t stand it anymore. The hot tears came back, and she swallowed them to feed her anger. “Riversoul- how could you!? How dare you!? You didn’t have a monopoly on her! She was my mother too! And you took her!” With each word, Flickerheart’s voice rose an octave until she was shouting at him, threatening to loose her own voice and sending echoes to sing across the mountains.
Riversoul stood still, still staring at her with his one good eye. “Flickerheart, you don’t understand...” he finally said, his words drawn and careful. “I did what I could...”
“Shut up!” She yowled at him. “Just stop, okay!? I’m so tired of you playing the victim all the time. I’m sick of you being so selfish!” Her words were thrown right at him. She wanted to hurt him with her words, because her claws were currently etching grooves into the stone below her. That’s when she made the snap decision. With numb paws she leapt out into the open air. It felt as though her anger were propelling her across, but all too soon even that ran out. She hit Riversoul’s side with a bone rattling impact. She scrabbled against the side, hoping to get a foothold on the wet stone and failing, slipping away into the crevice that had yawned between them.