TWG || Mute

The world he awoke to was a strange one.

His sight wasn't the first sense he regained. Instead, he was slowly made aware of the fact that he was lying on something. He was on his side, and the surface of the thing was flat and cold, like it had felt earlier. Was he in the same place? He must not be in out in the open, since he couldn't feel the warmth of the sun from above. Or the oppressive heat. He could, however, still feel the cool flow of air brush across his muzzle, although he now felt something attached to his face as well. Was the air coming from whatever that was?

His eyes still refused to open, remaining shut as if heavy stones were holding them down, so he tried to use a different sense instead. Sound began creeping towards his ear, soft at first, before it reached it's normal intensity. He half-expected to hear the sounds of the forest around him; the chirping of crickets and birds and the rustle of the leaves in the warm Greenleaf breeze. Yet the sound that caressed his folded ears.. was no sound at all. Almost no sound, anyway. There was a faint sound that would come and go every once in a while, sounding shrill for a second before going away, then coming back again. There was a soft whirr that almost sounded like a breeze, but it was too strange to be one.

Finally, he decided to force his eyes to open, of only a little. With some amount of effort, he managed to crack them ever so slightly, but not enough to see anything clearly. It seemed slightly easier to continue opening them now that the initial part was over, though, but he was only able to make it to a little less than halfway. His normally vibrant green eyes were hollow and glassy-looking, and they blinked a slow as a snail moved. But they were open, and he was able to see again. Well... after they took their time to clear up, anyway.

His initial reaction was that the world seemed too bright, too... white. Everything was white. On top of that, the den he seemed to be in was absolutely massive. It's walls and ceiling with made with sharp-edged shapes and had flat, smooth surfaces. The surface he was laying on, like everything else, was smooth, and it was rather reflective. Directly underneath him, he could feel something softer, like a layer of moss or down or something similar. His eyes slowly traveled to the edge of the surface and found that it had a edge. Maybe it was some strange kind of stone? A big one? He couldn't be sure. Everything was white, everything was smooth. Where in Starclan's name had he ended up? He tried to remember what had happened before, but was instead greeted with a dull ache in his head that he hadn't noticed before. It stretched down his neck and throughout his body, in every joint and every muscle. He recognized this as the pain he would usually get from being out in the sun for too long, and yet it was so much... duller. Like he had taken poppy seeds at some point before, but couldn't remember.

Going back to investigating him surroundings, he looked at the area closest to him, beginning with what was right in front of his nose. Or, more accurately, on his nose. Around his muzzle. This must be the thing he felt earlier, the thing that was giving him air. It was clear, like... solid water. But wasn't that impossible? Unless it was made of ice, something he had once heard about, but he had also heard that it was cold. Well.. he was cold. So maybe that was it.

What was weirder was that there was a strange, bendy sort of stick or vine that was coming out of the back or it. It was clear as well, and laid alongside a few other that were on the stone next to him. He followed their trails down, letting out a soft grunt of pain as he moved his neck, and felt his blood freeze in alarm when he realized that they were.... going inside of him. There were one or two going into his foreleg, some sort of liquid running through the inside of it. Another, thinner than the others and a solid colour rather than clear, went around behind him. He couldn't lift or turn his head enough to look at it, but when he shifted he could feel something stuck to the skin between his shoulder blades.

His heart was beating faster now, and he grew more and more afraid as he followed the lines the other way, seeing them hooked up to some... thing. Several big, square, blocky things that made noises and whirrs that most certainly were not breezes, and the shrill sound was happening more often now but he didn't understand why, and he felt like he was hyperventilating and at that moment he remembered his sister and the white blob and the bigger black blob and the tall creatures that took him and them away and what were they going to do to him and where did they go??

He was wheezing now, despite the aide of the thing he now desperately wanted off his face, and his throat felt raw and his lungs ached from all the coughing and choking he had done before. The shrill sound that he would only label as "beeping" continued and grew in frequency, and all of a sudden there was a huge, tall creature coming into the expansive den he was in, and it was coming for him, oh Starclan, it was going to hurt him. It was going to kill him, and he would be lost after he died because how could Starclan exist in a world like this and he would never get to see his siblings or his mama or his father ever again. He would never get to see his mother.

Tears were spilling out of his eyes and the daunting creature reached him, placing one of it's freakishly large paws on his back while it did something else with it's other. It was making deep noises that he couldn't understand and, out of terror and instinct, he found the strength to swipe one of his paws at the monster's paw. He must have gotten it well enough, because it flinched and removed it's paw, but before he could feel any shred of victory the monster launched into something ten times more terrifying, making loud, angry shouting noises at him. He curled up his body, as best he could, in fright and sobbed squeezing his eyes shut. He felt like he was going to throw up. All he wanted was for this monster and the beeping and the white, smooth world to go away and be replaced by his family and the sounds of the forest and the trees and moss and rocks of his home. All he wanted-

Something stabbed him in the back of his neck, but before he could even cry out, he was gone.


When he came to, he was in the same place as before. He almost began to cry again, certain that he was trapped in some sort of eternal nightmare with smooth white walls and tall, freakish monsters, but found no energy to do so. His body was heavy, so heavy, and his mind was slow. His vision dragged, as it had before the fire, and created duplicates of the same thing. The pain he felt stretched through his entire body was gone, even in his head, replaced with a strange numbness that covered him like a blanket. Although he knew he was mortified, he could do nothing but breathe evenly, as if he were no longer in control of anything but his mind.

Then, a miracle. A bright spot in a dark place. Another monster entered the den, different from the one before, and he felt his insides tighten into a nervous ball. They weren't the miracle, though, rather the thing they were carrying. The cat.

It was his mama.

He stayed frozen, watching as the gangly monster laid her down on another rock that stood nearby, seeming to check her over and do a few other things before leaving once more. Then he tried desperately to call out to his mama, to shriek or yell or cry or do anything to catch her attention, but his current weakness made it difficult. In the end, all he managed to do was let out a few small squeaks before getting winded, but she didn't see him. She didn't even move. No... Starclan no..... was she dead? It seemed that was enough to make him cry again, tears rolling down his cheeks silently as he was too tired to make a sound.

After what felt like moons, the monster returned again, this time carrying Silkpaw. They went through the same motions as before, and he somehow found the strength to try and call for her like he had their mama, but to no avail. So he just lay still, body numb and tear trickling down silent cheeks from eyes that wished they could be seeing anything but here.



When they eventually awoke,
he was the one sleeping.