The nights had grown still again - too still.
The Forest, which once pulsed with the breath of prey and wind, now whispered only fragments. Spiritmane felt it in the way the air trembled at dusk, in the dreams that clawed their way into his sleep like cold paws dragging him backwards.
He had always been a quiet listener. But now the quiet was listening back.
It began with the dreams.
At first, he thought they were memories: flashes of old battles, long-gone voices calling his name. But they lingered too long. Too clear. And they spoke of things he had never seen.
Fire devouring hollow trees. A white-furred kit screaming from the depths of a dark pool. A figure - tall, cloaked in stars - standing at the river’s edge, whispering:
“Stone forgets nothing. Neither should you.”
He awoke each time in silence, heart steady, fur bristling, the scent of frost in his nose despite the warmth of his nest.
He told no one.
Until one morning, as dawn light spilled over camp, Frostfern - the medicine cat who had once spoken of him walking “like the calm after the storm” - approached him with solemn eyes.
“You’ve been seeing them too,” she said.
He didn’t ask how she knew. She always knew.
Frostfern led him to the edge of camp, to the stone hollow where she kept her most sacred herbs. She nudged aside a bundle of old thyme and revealed something Spiritmane had not seen in seasons:
A stone - smooth, round, veined with silver, warm to the touch even in cold wind. A stone of ancestral memory.
“It’s from before the clans split,” she said. “Passed from paw to paw, hidden when times grow dark. They say it stores what the stars can no longer hold.”
Spiritmane pressed his nose to it. And in an instant - he fell.
Into the memory of a cat not his own.
He stood in a battlefield soaked in rain, surrounded by cries and ash and fear. A warrior - not himself, yet somehow part of him - bled from the shoulder, teeth bared, eyes filled with fire and grief.
“This is the pride,” the memory whispered. “To know too much. To carry not just your clan’s scars, but the echos of every one that came before.”
The vision vanished.
He stumbled back, breath ragged.
Frostfern steadied him with a paw. “You were never meant to lead, Spiritmane. You were meant to remember. But even memory has weight. And now something ancient is stirring - something even StarClan won’t speak of.”
He stared at the stone. The silver veins shimmered faintly, like starlight frozen in rock.
“What do you need me to do?” He asked though he already knew.
Frostfern looked at him for a long time. Then said: “Go where the memory leafs. Even if it takes you to the edge of the living. Something is waking beneath the roots of StoneClan - something long buried. And only you can hear it.
12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVmvOR4pHnu
That night, Spiritmane left without a word.
Not in exile. Not on patrol. Not for war.
But in search of the truth beneath memory - the hidden threats that even the stars feared to tug. For he was more than warrior. More than shadow.
He was the one who walks between what is remembered…and what is forgotten.
ns216.73.217.1da2
然後按「加至主畫面」