#antlerstar

As the years following the war with the Fallen dragged on and StormClan learned more about their outcast neighbors, guilt festered deep in the hearts of many cats. As descendants of the cats who loved and lost in those halcyon days between peaceful factions lived, grew, and built families of their own, the Fallen's absence became a more personal tragedy. Where once, speaking of StormClan's former allies would have been a risk, a radical act, as time went on sympathy for the exiled kindred became commonplace. Most had some measure of connection to the Fallen, be it through family ties or growing respect for Tallrock's original stewards, and StormClan's remorse for the extreme cruelty enacted under Rimestar took center stage before long in discussions of that conflict. Glory, wartime leader of the Fallen during the war, became a mythical figure of sorts in his own right in StormClan, a beacon of justice against oppression who, when the chips were down, put the safety of his kin over the honor of victory.

It was in the throes of this political shift in StormClan that a boar found its way into the Tallrock territories. The records were hazy, but StormClan had encountered these animals before - this one, though, was different. A massive, senior brute which had fought and survived for a long time and which bore the scars to prove it. Something was wrong with the creature, though; it was starving, disoriented, unpredictable. Before long, it had wandered up to Tallrock...and then it found StormClan's camp.

The encounter was nothing short of a massacre. Warrior after warrior rose up to challenge the one-eyed animal, and one by one they fell under hoof and tusk. None had seen a boar in their lifetime, nor their parents in theirs, and StormClan was utterly unprepared to fight back against one, cornered within the hollow they called home as it picked them off in a panicked frenzy. The cats who survived, their deputy Antlershade among them, managed to flee to the moorland below, where they sheltered as well as they could under heather and gorse.

The boar was a threat that could not be ignored. Antlershade, inventive and eccentric, proposed a counter-strategy; claws and teeth would not kill a boar, but they had all heard the stories about how the Fallen had once hunted them. They needed to skewer it somehow, pierce its heart with some manner of pike.

StormClan rallied up and, doubtful of his idea but with nothing else to try, moved to the woodlands to the west, where they labored together to prepare the trap. With their weapon in place - a fallen pine tree, stripped of as many branches as they could get - Antlerstar led the last of StormClan's warriors out to seek the boar and lure it into a chase. The plan worked so well that it had made it all look easy; the boar impaled itself on the concealed tree, tore forward after the cats who had so artfully enraged it until, blocked by the tree's remaining branches, the boar's struggles finally ceased.

As the dust settled and StormClan returned to their ruined camp, an idea quickly took hold: this boar, Red-tusk, as some had started to call it, was missing its left eye. It had struck when StormClan's remorse for the Fallen's expulsion was at its deepest, it had found them in their homes and forced them off the mountain. Cats started to say it had been no ordinary boar, and few were inclined to dispute it. A curse, born from StormClan's own guilt, a self-inflicted punishment. As morale plummeted and faith in the Clan and what had made it began to fracture, Antlerstar devised another plan: they would leave Tallrock for good, leaving Red-tusk's curse behind and rebuilding the Clan from the ground up. Wipe the slate clean.

His idea was not unanimously celebrated, however. It took time for them to organize, but a small band of StormClan cats, mostly elders, objected. One of the heroes of the battle, Mothpelt, was among them; they had given too much for the Tallrock territory to turn their backs on it now, they could not put their faith in mere rumors of a curse when StarClan had not spoken. Mothpelt and his allies would not try to stop Antlerstar and his from leaving, but these loyalists would remain in StormClan's old camp to rebuild. The Clan split, and with time, contact between the two separate halves dithered away. The loyalists seemed to disappear entirely from the mountainside, only further solidifying beliefs that the mountain was cursed.

Antlerstar accomplished many things in his lifetime; slaying Red-tusk had only been the beginning. Under his calm and intelligent leadership, StormClan found a new home in the southern meadows and more than enough peace in which to settle into it. Squabbles within the Clan were fewer than they had been in generations, with many of the problems of making a new home solved quickly and efficiently. Antlerstar's Clan took the entire change in graceful strides, and the legacy he left behind was one of sharp wits and clever thinking, of organizing warriors against problems in ways that minimized harm on all sides. He'd made good on his promise, leading StormClan into a new era where, hopefully, tragedies like those of the Tallrock war would never repeat.