#spindlefleck

She heard him arrive more than she saw him. Quiet, muffled pawsteps brushing over the sand. "Why did you follow me?" Spindlefleck asked quietly.

"No reason," Tidechaser replied evenly. "But I know what it's like, to sit here, hoping that the cat you're longing to see will appear for you."

"And did they?" Spindlefleck thought she knew the answer.

"No," he replied, "and neither will Currentheart. Not tonight. Not to you."

His words stung, but she supposed they were true. Pearl and Currentheart had named Dustjump as the bridge between their worlds. They sat in silence for a while before she had the courage to break it again.

"I guess I hoped... that being here would help me make sense of it all. My life isn't turning out at all the way I thought it would."

"No cat's does."

“We’re not far from the Thunderpath,” Spindlefleck murmured, voice low. “Do you think..?” She trailed off into a tense silence, and Splashstone knew she was remembering the kittypet she’d found on the edge of the stinking black stone during her apprentice days.

“Relax, Spindle,” Splashstone did his best to keep his tone light but gentle. Carefree. “The blood-scent isn’t thick enough for that. It’s probably just a loner with a cut.”

Spindlefleck’s fur started to flatten, but Sandtail remained on guard, and Splashstone felt his heart break all over again for the cream colored tom. Even with Currentheart’s assurance that his death had not been Sandtail’s fault, he clearly still held himself at least partially responsible for the tragedy. “We still need to be careful,” Sandtail warned. “We have no idea what could have injured them. We’ll proceed slowly, and I’ll take the lead.”

Splashstone dipped his head to the deputy’s command, setting off after the tom at a creeping pace. They could’ve safely gone faster with Splashstone in the lead–he knew he had the best nose on the patrol–but this wasn’t the time or place to challenge orders, so he slunk along silently after Sandtail.

The patrol finally broke through the forest’s undergrowth to an open stretch of grass and mud in a dip beside the Thunderpath. As Splashstone felt his paws squish into the deep mud, he let out a quiet hiss of annoyance. No wonder he’d never been this way before–no cat in their right mind would ever come this way. So what was a wanderer doing here?

The blood scent led them to a stinking stone opening beneath the Thunderpath. Splashstone could just make out a cream colored ball of fur just inside the entrance of the hole–the source of the blood scent. Sandtail slowed their approach even further, and finally bade them wait with a flick of his tail when they were ten fox lengths away. Splashstone crouched down with an internal groan, his paws sinking deeper into the muddy earth as Sandtail approached the ball of fur alone. 

“Hello?” He called cautiously.

The pile of fur erupted into motion, a skinny cream colored molly leaping to her paws and scrambling a few steps deeper into the tunnel. “Please don’t kill me!” She wailed, “I’m leaving, I really am, I just needed to rest a moment, please give me another chance to go and you’ll never see me again! I-I swear it!”

“What?” Sandtail sputtered. Caution morphed into confusion, then concern in the face of the molly’s abject terror. 

Splashstone and Spindlefleck were making their way to their deputy’s side before he’d even finished signaling to them that it was safe. “We’re not going to hurt you,” Spindlefleck murmured, “we want to help. That injury to your paw looks painful.”

“I-I” The molly gulped in a few deep breaths, her trembling easing just a little. “You mean… you’re not with them, then?”

“We’re not sure what you mean,” Spindlefleck soothed, “we’ve been living here on the beach for a few seasons now, but we’ve never attacked or driven away any cat, and we certainly wouldn’t hurt you. Can you tell us your name? And explain what happened to you?” 

The instructions seemed to be soothing the jumpy molly, her fur was starting to flatten, and her eyes were no longer quite so wide. “My name is Quiver,” she began.

Quiver, Splashstone eyed the way that her three good legs were still shaking just a little. It suits her.

“I lived in a driftwood pile much farther up the beach,” Quiver continued, “I kept to myself, mostly, hunting along the shoreline in the tidepools. Th-then, a little over a quarter moon ago, this group of cats showed up. They were very strange, told me that I needed to leave–that–that I didn’t deserve to set foot on the sand, and that if I didn’t go, they were going to make me leave. They said three sunrises to find somewhere in the forest before they would remove me from the beach themselves. Now, I thought that was just ridiculous, I mean, I’ve never seen them around these parts before, I figured that they were just talking big, the way some cats do, and that so long as I cleared out for a few days they’d lose interest and move on, so I went to stay up in the cliff caves–you know the ones, lots of little nooks and tunnels?”

“We know it,” Sandtail confirmed, his tone just barely impatient. The cliff caves were past TurtleClan’s hunting grounds, but Splashstone had been up that way himself a pawful of times before they’d established boundaries, looking for other survivors. “Please, continue,” Sandtail prompted after the silence had stretched a few more heartbeats.

“Yes! Right! Well, they found me just a day later. Said they’d given me plenty of warning, and that now I needed to be taught a-a lesson, so one of them took my foreleg and–and–” Quiver broke off into a fit of trembling and panting. She didn’t need to continue–the rest of the story was obvious. 

“We’re going to take you back to our camp,” Sandtail said in a low, steady voice. “We have a cat there who can heal–a cat who can help you.” The deputy turned his striking green gaze to Splashstone. “Splash, could you run ahead and tell Dustjump to prepare for an injury? Tell her it looks serious, but that the patient doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger of death,” he dropped his voice to barely a whisper on the last word, but Splashstone still Quiver’s ear twitch nervously. “Spindlefleck and I will help her back.”

Spindlepaw-- no, she was Spindlefleck now-- Spindlefleck's eyes found Foam in the crowd. Her former mentor’s gaze shone with pride as their eyes met. Integrity and strength of spirit… those were the values that Shell had chosen to describe her. Values that she never would have developed without his guidance. She blinked her gratitude at him. Thank you, my teacher.

Shell leapt down from the Tallmast, striding forward to touch noses with Spindlefleck. “Well done, Spindlefleck,” Shell murmured, “and congratulations. We have all been looking forward to this day for many moons.” 

Not as much as I have, Spindlefleck added silently. 

“Now, there’s one final thing,” Shell purred, Guiding her over to where Dustjump was waiting, tail wrapped around her paws. Beside her lay a large, flat stone, caked with layers of old mud in varying shades.

“Have you gathered the earth you want to use?” Dustjump asked. 

“I have,” Spindlefleck meowed. “I gathered it this morning before hunting.” 

Each cat to make their right of passage selected and gathered earth from somewhere on the territory to use in mixing the mud that they would use to leave their pawprint on the passage boulder. From the corner of her eye, Spindlefleck could see Currentheart weaving his way through the crowd with the leaf-wrapped pile of earth she’d collected early that morning. She felt a rush of gratitude for her friend–she wouldn’t have wanted to step away from this for a moment. As Currentheart placed the bundle on the stone and Dustjump began to unwrap the bundle, Shell raised her voice so that all of the gathered cats could hear. “Whence comes your chosen earth?” Shell asked.

“From the tops of the cliffs upshore of camp,” Spindlefleck responded, her meow strong and clear.

“Why did you choose this place?”

Spindlefleck knew that some cats might have given a long, drawn out explanation. Not her. “I love the feeling of the wind in my fur. When I stand against the ocean breeze atop the cliffs, I feel strong and free.”

Shell dipped her head. “Well spoken. We will now mix your chosen earth with water from the sea upon this stone, where each of us mixed our own passage markers. The remnants of mud left here by each of us will mix with the earth you have chosen, binding you as one of us.” At her words. Dustjump squeezed out a sodden moss ball above the pile of earth, mixing it around with a paw until it congealed into a thick paste. 

Silently, Spindlefleck stepped forward, coating her paw in the mud. It was cold and gritty against her paw pad, and she repressed a shiver. It might be unpleasant, but she had to bear with it. This was her right of passage! She wasn't a kit in the nursery, mewling at the slightest discomfort. She was one of the survivors now. A full member of the group. An equal. Finally, finally she was an equal to all of the others. Finally they could stop treating her like she was too young or too inexperienced to be taken seriously. It had been a long time coming.

With her paw tucked up to her chest, she limped across the clearing. The crowd of onlookers parted for her as she went, with a few cats offering quiet words of congratulations or welcome. When she reached the Passage Boulder, Spindlefleck spent a moment scanning the striped face of the rock for where she would make her mark–there. Currentheart’s mark stood alone, towards the entrance of the den the adult cats shared. With a deep breath, Spindlefleck reached out her mud-coated paw, and pressed it slowly, firmly against the surface of the stone, just a little below her denmate’s mark. The mud squelched back between her toes as she pressed down, but she did not tremble: her heart was too full of joy for anything else to register. She had waited for this day for so long. Finally, she had caught up to her friends.

“We are proud to have you join us,” Shell meowed formally, “you may not wash the mud from your paw until sunhigh tomorrow. Bear it proudly a symbol of your new rank among us, and know that from this day forward, wherever your path takes you, your campmates will follow in your pawsteps to support you.”