Ashleap's Fall

Memory

My head pounding painfully, I get up slowly, stepping carefully over a bright red tom with a disfigured back leg who snarls in his sleep as I pass him into the clearing. It's cold, especially for what I can only assume is either greenleaf or newleaf, judging by the huge stock of prey on the pile and the short cut coats of the cats around me.

Where have I landed? Am I in DragonClan at all anymore?

New and curious faces stare at me from every angle, yet they somehow smell so much like home. I recognize very subtle things about their faces immediately: the slant of a nose, the curl of a smile, the distinct scent, all of it screams DragonClan.

Perhaps it's not a where at all.

Perhaps... it's a when.

My fur is much longer than it was before, my shoulders slimmer, my tail longer and my entire body larger, perhaps with age. The cats nods to me respectfully as I make my way through their ranks. They seem understanding when I stare at them, confused.

"Can you see them again?" asks a dark gray she-cat. "You look terrified."

However these cats know me, they know me as someone to be respected but looked on from a distance. Even the kits seem to shy away, excepting one, who bounds up to me with glittering eyes. "Are you seeing the spirits again, Ashleap? What do I look like?"

Ashleap.

The piercing alarm at the back of my mind grows still. There's a recess, a void that I didn't know could exist and I feel like I've been dropped into a bottomless lake.

For the first time in my life, I'm completely alone in my own mind.
"Probably an ugly toad!" spits her littermate from a distance.

"I'm fine." I tell them both.

Ashleap, Ashleap, what did I remember about her...?

She was a medicine cat in DragonClan a long time ago.

Perhaps it was before we moved camps. That would explain the Highfall's disappearance, the lessening of deciduous trees. DragonClan used to live closer to the mountains before one of the more recent leaders moved us away following a great catastrophe.

Alright. I can do this.

My mind still burns with the sudden emptiness. There are no voices, no whispers, but also an unexplainable emptiness that has no words or meaning to it.

Another red cat, similar to the one in my den in coloring but vastly different in build and bulk, nods to me as he passes by, off for a patrol, no doubt.

A gray she cat approaches me, her gaze penetrating and slightly terrifying. She must be the leader. "Well, Ashleap, what did you plan on doing today?"
I look about the camp and quickly decide, "I'll be gathering herbs."

"Will you be bringing your apprentice? He looks awfully lonely in the medicine den." The gray she-cat says, nodding towards my den.

I look after her gaze, but all I can see is the red tom with the disfigured leg, now fully alert. I had thought he was a patient. Thank StarClan he was asleep when I first stepped over him.

I want to shake my head, but it might be easier to get information out of him then the group of cats I'll inevitably have to face if I ask the right questions. "I will." I say. "It'll be good exercise for him."

"He needs it. Angry furball does nothing but sit in camp and complain when he's not around you."

I purr. "Better air him out, then." Concealing my inner confusion, I stalk over to my 'apprentice', who is lazily sprawled across the entrance with seemingly not a care in the world.