#bb!frostdawn

I have ONE controversial opinion and you must allow me this;

Curlfeather not apologizing to Frostdawn kinda rocks as an idea.

Obviously it reads as insulting because of how they gave Berryheart a Tom the Wifebeater ass Redemption Death in this book, and the general way that they've not approached her with the nuance she deserves is frustrating. I agree.

But hold my hand and walk with me. Imagine Curlfeather, mauled and bloody before the daughter she died saving. Frostpaw's gone through so much fixing the damage she caused, furious at the state her mother's in, the mess she made of RiverClan, all the suffering everyone's gone through... and Curlfeather says,

"I don't regret anything."

"Really? REALLY? I go through all of that, I come ALL this way, and you won't even give me a rotten little sorry?"

She doesn't give her mother a chance to respond, lashing her tail towards the grimmace that hangs off the side of her shredded cheek, "You're not sorry for how you lead to yourself looking like THAT?"

Frostpaw shoves her scarred throat foward, "You're not sorry for THIS?"

She claws dig into the sodden black earth of the Dark Forest, "You're not sorry you're HERE?"

Curlfeather is quiet, her remaining eye stoic like a stone. Frostpaw begs furiously, "NOTHING?"

"I will vow on our blood that I will not lie to you anymore," the demon's tone is soft and honest, "and I hope that means more than the insincere apology I could offer you otherwise."

Just when it feels like Frostpaw has so much anger that her body can't handle it, pain stuffs itself inside her in equal measure. Her stomach is sick with love, throat choked with affection. It takes her a minute to form the word,

"Why?"

"When my father, Reedwhisker, was taken by the Kin, I saw how they broke him. His uncle, Stonefur, did not buckle under Tigerstar. My grandmother Mistyfoot quietly rescued the Clan from his accomplice, Leopardstar, while Mistystar willingly worked alongside a vicious impostor."

Now that Frostpaw is the one who's waiting quietly, Curlfeather's voice flutters hopefully, "I was willing to do anything to restore my Clan to greatness," the specter pads foward, touching her nose to her daughter's trembling forehead, "except sacrifice you."

She didn't expect to feel the harsh sting of her daughter's paw smacking her across the nose. She reels back.

"You don't get it! It's not about YOU! It's about everyone you hurt! Dont try to pretend it was all worth it, you didn't make anything great, you just broke it!"

"I had to break it so it could be set back stronger. I gave you the chance for the power, and now you are making it better than it was."

"That was in spite of you! You told me to trust no cat and I had to unlearn that!"

"I saved you when I could have escaped with my life."

"From a situation you caused in the first place!"

"It was a warrior's death!"

There is a silence that settles over them. Curlfeather is snarling in offense. Frostpaw looks, again, at her mother's fatal wounds, the defensive stance. She's reminded of how the cats of other cultures don't always see scars as rewards for a fight survived-- just reminders of pain you've gone through.

"...it was a warrior's death," she agrees, gently, watching tattered hackles smoothen out, "...and now you're dead, while I'm still alive."

The emotion in Curlfeather's face is solemn, but otherwise incomprehensible to her daughter. The expression on Frostpaw's is equally unreadable to her mother. This is the only thing they will ever understand about each other-- that there is an irreconcilable difference between them, steeper than the divide between sky and earth.

The last words the demon speaks to her daughter are, "I love you."

Oh yeah entirely, no question. My ideal arc for BB!Owlnose is that, as Icestar, Frostdawn, and her little DND Party come together to start to consider where RiverClan goes from here, Owlnose does something... steady in the background. Like a sign that things are going to be okay.

There's always going to be some people who blame him for the direction RiverClan went in. They project fantasies of how he could have "saved" the Clan they knew if he stepped up, or blame him in some way for how it fell apart... but his wisdom is that it was exactly that sort of power worship that broke the old RiverClan.

"This is silly," he purrs, paw brushing the brand new, tanned leather surface of his owlface drum, "but I think a Clan's like a song."

He gives a little pause to let Frostdawn chuckle. She deserves it, after everything.

Owlnose continues while batting the drum in soft tempo to his words, "one-two, three-four, ul-arra. It's only a beat until it is complete, then it's a rhythm."

Frostdawn's smile is lopsided, loving but tired. "Uncle, only you could play an owlface like a lullaby and make philosophy as heavy as stones."

"You know it!" He hummed, changing his tune to a proper lullaby. An old one he'd been playing for her since Jayclaw left for StarClan. Her tongue got sharper every day and every minute she sounded more like her mother, but this wasn't the time for that.

It was a field procedure, and she was immediately released afterwards to Whistlepaw who was hanging back and watching. The biggest dilemma on their end would be if they're going to record it for the scientific record or not.

The team is there to observe-- they learned long ago that the Clan cats fear humans, and that's good for their research. They don't want to influence the culture any more than the Destruction of the White Hart Woods did, they are here simply to document.

The tools they keep in their truck are for taking samples, biopsies, recording weight, tranquilizing. The Clans are wild animals, to them.

So... what do you do, when a wild animal is dragging itself towards you, making a distress call? Not just a distress call-- the same exact meow that you have, on video, from individuals when they're asking each other for help.

It's language. Your test subjects are making contact with you.

But then dreadful reality sets back in. If you help her, you're interfering. This will alter your results from here on out. You know there's some kind of power struggle going on in the western group, and there is a chance that this is going to have ripple effects on that.

...that's not going to stop you, though. The vets on the team are already moving her onto a sterile tarp. She asked for help directly, what are you even doing this for if you let her die?

You're reminded of a lot of things. The cheetah who left her cubs with a camera crew. The seal who jumped up onto a research vessel to escape an orca. The elephant who approached a vet to treat a bullet wound.

Man, citing those incidents would be an ACE opener for your thesis paper. But it would be admitting that you possibly overstepped a boundary. Then again, it would totally get the sanctuary more interest, and maybe you'd get more funding...

I hadn't even considered that, but it makes it work even better. The fairytales don't even just have the wolf get their belly cut open-- they also get filled with stones and tossed in the river.

There's a clear image in my mind that when Frostpaw is put under the human tranquilizer, her mind falls backward and plunges her into liquid void. A dream takes hold, bubbles forming in the dark, her body cradled by clear water as far as she can perceive.

The unspoken knowledge of her dream tells her that she's in a raindrop, the river, the lake, and Riverstar Himself. The embodiment of water. And He is endless.

Her problems are washed away by the sheer vastness of his being, and she's just beginning to wrap her head around the marvel of it all when she opens her eyes in a den. Warm, comfortable, surrounded by hay.

The vision sloshes in her mind like dancing waves. She has a boiling desire to understand what it meant-- and the only thing that comes to mind is the Tribe of Rushing Water's philosophy that all things are connected by the river. That living by the Lake, fed by the southern delta, which rushes down from the mountain's waterfall, makes their cultures kin.

Thank you with all my heart, I cannot be normal about it either. Something drives me absolutely crazy about the idea that two, intersecting themes of BB!ASC are "echoes of the past" and "love was there, it was not enough, but it was still there."

Small recap for others; In BB!DOTC, the Park Cats are now a cultural group with a king. King Arc leads a massive group of refugees up from the south and establishes a kingdom by the river. The First Battle is caused when Clear Sky takes his prince, River's Ripple, as a hostage to hurt Thunder Storm, not respecting the political value of his son's friend. King Arc dies in this battle, and Riverstar continues the River Kingdom until his death, kicking off Riverstar's Heir.

I'm unsure if it came across, but something I intend with the Arc/Frost meeting during Frostpaw's Sabbatical is that King Arc is seeing his son Riverstar in her. The way that the ambition and responsibility that he put on him as his prince, is reflected in the stress and confusion that Frostpaw herself is now going through.

He, too, died saving his child, much like Curlfeather did. It's still a terrible burden to put that on someone you love so much.

I still need to tweak her siblings (thinking in my next draft for Mistpool, I'm gonna use blue merle dog markings and give her the same shape as Graysky), but this absolutely validates Frostdawn's design in my eyes lmao <3

There's a scene in my head during the first book of BB!ASC where Frostpaw is shoved up the tree by Curlfeather. Curl looks up at her and everything is moving in slow motion, her eyes full of love and sacrifice. She tells her daughter to trust no cat as the teeth of the dogs sink into her, softly, gentle as a kiss.

...And the camera cuts quickly to Frostpaw, up in the tree, the "wool" pulled off her eyes for the first time, the screeching, violent agony of her mother's bloody death reflected in them. Her grip falters as her body trembles with nausea, but she catches herself. Tears her face away from the horrible sight, and pulls herself up further out of harm's way.

It's odd that Canon!Curlfeather is portrayed on the screen as a scheming character who was fully willing to manipulate her daughter into a position of power, and smart enough to know that she needed lackeys to carry out her dirtywork... and yet, seemingly had no plans for her other two kids.

On one hand, I can understand her wanting to "use" her family as little as possible. You could say she's willing to make a sacrifice with Frostkit's comfort, but wants to spare her other children from it.

On the other hand... I just don't feel like that works. I want to portray BB!Curlfeather as someone who truly believes every choice she made was good for her children. She might reconsider some of her beliefs based on her closeness to Morningstar while in the Dark Forest, but in life, she is absolutely the sort of person who would have a use in mind for her kittens.

I'm not super proud of these quick designs I made for Mistpaw and Graypaw, but here's a first draft;

You probably notice that they're all dog-like, and that's because they are direct descendants of Bluestar in BB! WOLF MOTIF BABEY

In fact, this is going to be a massive contributor towards their characterizations. I may be shuffling my tree in some other ways to make for better faction drama in RiverClan, but BB!Curlfeather priding her lineage, especially as it connects to Crookedstar and Stonefur, is very important to how it shapes her identity.

DESIGN AND DRABBLE BENEATH THE CUT;

On the wolf motif as a whole;