Prompts

The day she met Louie was a dry one. She remembered it clearly as being such because the dry dirt made for a good excuse to make her way to the barren rock just outside of the cavern that she'd claimed as a home for the future clan she'd determined she'd have one day. Mirestar laid sprawled on the stone, her ears twitching at the soft remnants of birdsong drifting up the walls of the valley's sheer drop that protected them on three sides from easy intrusion. What she didn't anticipate when choosing this location was the very inconvenient thought of someone plummeting from above.

Yes, plummeting- for such a fall wouldn't be easily navigated on paw. But the snap of a dry branch and odd yelping sound of a creature she'd never met before sent her reeling to her feet with a yowl of hatred and protest as this massive scruffy fall of mess fell right beside the place she'd been sleeping after having rolled down the incline in a fuss. She could barely believe her eyes as she let out soft hisses of warning to the beast in front of her, lifting her paw testingly as she dared it to move. To fight. To attack. But it didn't. It just laid there. Dead? She wondered. She wasn't sure. She looked up to study the fall, weighing in her mind the likelihood of this beast rising again.

Her question was answered for her when it let out a wheezing cough, and a pitiful little whine. She crept over, her back still arched as she studied it. Those pitiful eyes- despite being the eyes of some creature that most certainly was not a cat- they were smart enough she could see some reason in them. She didn't bother to try to speak, she knew well enough from her youthful escapades that trying to talk to non-cats was a waste of her time. Talking to a gator had certainly been. But she slowly relaxed as she walked around, staring back at it. It was scrawny, starving it looked like. The thing looked like it hadn't eaten in days. She looked away, fighting with herself quite a bit. Was it dangerous? It didn't seem like it...It just seemed lost. Lost and abandoned, like she felt. Since her mother had died, and her siblings had fallen victim to the swamp she'd mastered, she'd tried to find company in anything and everything she could. Chasing some fantasy of creating a clan when she had never even met another cat that wasn't related to her- and now dead. Sure, starclan believed in her, they'd given her her lives after all...but for all the heart and determination she had, she had no one.. and she had no idea of where to go from here.

She sat in front of this beast and tilted her head, regarding it again. Perhaps... just maybe.. those pitiful eyes could be a friend.

And right now, a friend was the thing she needed most in the world.