☄. *. ⋆ ❝once upon a shooting star❞ ☀ sr

⠀⠀「 act 1 」
☄. *. ⋆「 a trip down memory lane 」

Could you hear it? The call of the soft wind through the desert dunes, the song that the desert itself sung? Could you see it? The stars, ever so bright, illuminating the barren, hard desert? 

She was padding through those seemingly endless dunes, awaiting nothing and everything this night. The stars shone brightly tonight, clearly, with nothing in their way blocking them from the viewer, Dawnlightpaw. Each pawstep was calm, was blissful, and the soft desert wind caressed  recognized this feeling, this feeling that pushed them forward. It felt almost like there was some sort of leash, something that tugged on their very heart, urging them to go on, to pad on, and to continue underneath the starry sky. She couldn't explain why or what she was feeling– but something pushed her to just do so, to just move forward and not question the plan Fate had laid out.

Oh, and, as she moved, she felt the pain in her left foreleg and back hind leg where Zion had attacked. Had that been part of Fate's plan too? Either way, she would be eternally grateful to Sicariushug for patching her up.

Eyes still shining with excitement and anticipation from her apprentice ceremony, unwittingly and almost without thought, for the very first time, she crouched down through that tunnel that exited WindClan camp. This was her first time crawling out of the camp, the first time the surface underneath her paws wasn't stone, for once. They tried to quell their beating heart, pounding with anticipation, and their senses felt so alive as fresh air barreled into her nose.

She was up, out of the tunnel, and in the heart of the desert as the wind sung to her and the dunes shifted beneath her. Yet it wasn't the sand they noticed first, no, not by a long shot; it was the stars, the stars that burned their eyes with their dazzle and allure, the stars that sung out to her, that cried out in joy that she had finally found them, and finally was home underneath their majestic light. They hadn't been able to breath as they took in their wondrous light, hadn't been able to stop the tears that streamed down their face in recognition.

She hadn't cried since that fateful night when her siblings and her had been found, but somehow, this rediscovery of the stars above seemed to rival in importance to the events of that night, and they lost that facade of coolness, of uncaring cold, and tears had danced their way down her face. 

She continued, her paws rippling the sand beneath them. Tonight, the wind brought some other scent, not the usual humidity of the other territories that they yearned for, but a scent that would be alien to many cats– but not to Dawnlightpaw. They knew each and every hallmark of that scent, that foreign feeling of it that would have been obvious to others as familiar to them as the scent of WindClan itself. The place was embodied quite fully by a name, a name that Storybrook had taught her after she'd been removed from it, but still, it echoed in every part of her blood, calling her, claiming her as one of their own.

The twolegplace.

The name wasn't pretty, not at all– it was a mishmash of things that meant different things, but it tugged on them, and they didn't resist. They knew what was happening now as they walked forward, feeling the scent (the scent was a jumble of steel, rubber, and manufactured wood among other twoleg scents) become even more pungent. 

And she felt it, felt the twolegplace become one with her as she entered it, stepping onto a – she searched for the word in her mind – thunderpath.