Cyan's Drabble Drawer

Flint could see the world before him, with the dead grass crushing underneath his paws painting them a dusty red color – leftover from the pools that served as a red carpet across the battlefield to curl up the dead in their cold, congealed embrace. It had flown like a sluggish river from the body of the cats Flint had killed back when the war was still going. Their sightless eyes were an abstract memory, as if they were there, but also slipping through his claws like the ash-like dirt beneath his pads. It was a shambling, dark, and quiet thing.

With a scowl and a hiss of rage through his teeth, he raised yellow and green eyes to glare at the sky above, ears trembling at the noise that thudded through the clouds and his chest. Life had abandoned this place, and he kicked over a skull just to apathetically watch a rat scurry away from the predator looming over it. Yes, life had been gone for what felt like an impossible amount of time. So much so that the faces of the corpses around him had rotted away, leaving eye-less holes and agonized open mouths around him, tongues taken by the scavengers and left to be reclaimed by the earth. He turned away from the corpses, eyes on the new horizon in front of him as he moved forward. Each step he took felt heavy, sluggish as if he was running through a thick sap.

He persisted though, feeling his face grow hotter with each step he took, ears flattening to his skull as he smelled the stench of death grow heavier. His new target should have been simple to get to – it was only a rock sitting in the middle of the field. The cat sitting on top of it drew his eye immediately, especially when others leaped up to join him on that rock, sitting down beside the tom with their backs towards Flint. The sun was just setting down behind them, turning the portion of sky hanging over their heads a deep, fire orange. It matched the look in their eyes as they turned to look back at him, and Flint froze at the incriminating glances cast upon him.

Familiar, haunting faces; Faces of those dead and the faces of those not yet gone from his world, and it left him feeling cold in the place of where the heat of his life-force used to be. It seemed like the blood from his body was drained from him, only to rush over the rock and around his paws like a flood, carrying corpses along on it with their talons grasping for his legs and his face. That wasn't possible. They were still... Metal and Sparrow were here – but he'd never met the grown-up Sparrow, and Metal wouldn't ever look at him like that.

Like he was a disappointment.

He sputtered around the blood filling his mouth, feeling rooted to the spot even as all of the rest of him was going in the opposite direction. “How? Eagle, Mouse, Wolf, Pep... You guys aren't dead. I just saw you, you were alive!”

He cried out in desperation, feeling like he couldn't get enough air to his lungs. His footing was finally lost, and he swirled around in the red river that had swallowed him in its entirety, his bleary eyes only capable of seeing red as his lungs filled with the viscous fluid, drowning out his thoughts and leaving him drifting into the endless depths of his mind. The only thing left behind was the vicious denial that his friends were still alive, and surely not dead.

Yet.

The haunting voice in his ears woke him up with cold, feverish chills. The night sky above him laughed at his agony as he stumbled away from the sleeping pile he'd formed with his closest companions. Flint was left to wretch clear fluid out in the dark as he trembled with the troubling feeling that his future had been laid in stone by some force he didn't even know existed.