Skullclan does not have a meaningless name. Their members were once part of an old clan. One that managed to survive the first Crimson Death outbreak, running away through the use of twoleg inventions, riding on wood and water to get to an isolated island, where only lived wildcats, which they thought would be safe of the disease. This idea, however, proved itself to be foolish. The plague followed them like fleas, infected surrounding their camp in the middle of the night and turning a peaceful sundown into a bloodbath. Wherever your paws could take you, you'd find blood. The stench was everywhere, the ground was soaked in it, the soil drinking it as if pleased by the curse above it.
It was a long day. From 27 kits, queens and warriors, few survived to see the sunshine again. The leader and deputy were, unfortunately, no exception. It was a brave warrior, Longfur, who first tried her luck to find her clanmates and flee once again.
While exploring the ruined camp, hiding in the shadows, the warrior found out what the infected wanted with her clanmates. The Dead seemed to enjoy toying with their remains. Ripping fur and flesh with their claws and teeth, picking their bones apart, licking their blood and feasting on their bodies like rats. She found out that, if she weaved through them using a skull already licked clean, the distracted infected didn't seem to pay her no mind. That's how she reunited with the few survivors and managed to run away.
Wearing the skulls of their dead clanmates and hiding their fear and tears as well as they could, Longfur, Silverthistle, Copsenut, Curlmask and Rowanstalk fled the cemetery their camp had become. They spent numeral sunrises walking, hiding between trees and caves until they found somewhere to rest, somewhere to hide until they could strike back. Twolegs were always enemies for wildcats, but in their absence, and in the presence of such a larger threat, what they left behind served as an ironical secure space for their tired and desolate paws.
It was in the ruins of an ancient twolegplace that Longfur and her companions vowed to honor the cats that kept them safe until that moment, even when they weren't even there anymore. They gave the skulls of their old clanmates a "proper" ceremony, before starting to setup a new camp. The ruins seemed to be home for a weird kind of twolegs a long time ago. They dug into the side of a mountain, with tunnels that reached onto the ground like they wished to imitate caverns or even reach the end of stone and dirt itself. Whatever they once were, the clan now found a great hiding place in the rubble of the smooth stones made by these ancient twolegs to support the weight of the tunnels and small crevices that lead to larger chambers, which they dedicated to dens. And it was exploring one of these tunnels that Longfur found a shard of the stars.
The warrior found herself in a secure, small cave that was located at the end of a long sequence of tunnels. It was round and had, in it's center, the stars itself reflected in a pond and in it's cold, stone ceiling. The warrior couldn't understand how that could have happened, but this had to be a gift of her ancestors. Starclan hadn't abandoned them, and this is how she was sure of it. In the heat of the moment she slipped and fell into the stars. Opening her eyes, she saw herself walking between her old clanmantes, their bodies torn and deformed as they were in their last moments of life, the shine of the stars robbed of them by something Longfur couldn't understand, or, at the very least, didn't want to. After walking in dead, dark stars, for far too long for her comfort, she found the five original cats of which she and her clanmates wore their faces to escape. Their heads were forever gone, faces and names lost to the Crimson Death and buried by Skullclan. They gathered around the startled warrior, mumbling words of encouragement and cries of help, tasks and necessities, memories and grievances, each one gifting yet cursing the she-cat with what remained of their lives.
Once she awoke, trembling and drenched in the cool water of the pond, glittering from head to toe, pulled back to the cold stones of the cave by her medicine cat, Copsenut, she knew she'd never be the same.
"Are you alright, Longfur? What happened here? What-"
"That's the wrong name."
"What... What do you mean?"
"They named me Longstar."
