The Skies That Seize Us

"This is a Warriors one-shot, originally posted for Sundance and Eagleclaw's fanfiction contest. It follows two 'sisters' as they experience life, death, snakes, knives, skies, and betrayal. Any questions can be asked below or on chat. The style is Third Person Present Tense, new for me. I hope you enjoy."~ Winterpaw

“Moondust in your lungs, Starlight in your eyes. You’re a child of the cosmos, A ruler of the skies.” ~  Anonymous

•~•~• The world is ours, and we deface it.

Skies do not just surround us, they also protect us. They nurture life. They hold the power. Skies are vital and vivacious — they are life, and death to be.

And they fascinate Anastasie. Entrance — imprison. She climbs trees to the top, gazes out across the horizon, and dips into an undetermined siesta. She dreams beneath stars. Lives among the birds and the squirrels and the wind. Skies make her feel safe when nothing else does.

Anastasie has no home. Chantel does. They are sisters, ‘and nothing more,’ says Chantel. Anastasie thinks: her “sister” purrs at humans and eats friable pellets, lives too comfortably. She has direction and hardened motivation. Chantel does not deny any claim.

Anastasie floats, fearlessly. She fantasies craters and supernovas, flames and empty space. The danger. Self-handled hurricanes.

Chantel strides along at the peak of evening, each day. She calls it a routine. Anastasie does not speak often, but communicates with body language, with music. She growls along with birds, almost beautiful. They are her kin.

When she does talk, it is senseless, picturesque sayings. Questions to questions. Philosophy. A foreign language,  la código de la reina.

“Sister, please come home with me.” Chantel pleads, every night as the moon falls and Anastasie slides down from her tree. Saber the Spruce, Chantel named it once, when Anastasia was sobbing on the ground with soundless chokes. This happened often. It started when Severen left, but the earth does not speak of Severen often, and neither does Chantel. Neither do the birds.

Anastasie will mumble phrases about “oceans” and “escapes,” “betrayals,” and then will slowly drop, wither. She will cry, but it is not crying; she melts. Wreaks havoc upon the soil beneath her as she flails and scrapes, bloodying up her tree.

She does not leave Saber. She eats untrustworthy berries and rotting roadkill dragged off to the side by relentless foxes. Chantel winds around the tree to inspect — secure — the territory, each visit. And then, at midnight, no later, no earlier, she vacates.

“Goodbye, sister. Until tomorrow.” She will say. And Anastasie will turn, bleary, and whisper “the stars are trailing you tonight, star-kin.”

Then Anastasie is alone, and time does not exist, nor pain. Only the sky, the world, and her heart.

•~•~•

Chantel, at home, with her humans and crumbling pellets, is truly and actually a monster. The sofas and webbed cloths are torn, shredded, singed. Chantel hisses until she has no voice; her owners have bite-marks and blood-oceans for legs.

Chantel eats consistently, creatively; is robust and sleek. She is the desired weight of covetous house-cats.

Anastasie is skinny, rib-rimmed. She looks hungry, and isn’t.

Chantel drinks from granular puddles, not bowls. Cars streak down roads, and their gases, their oils, seep into the water. Chantel stares into her holographic reflection, then drinks, because if she looks that flawless in the water, why not capture it inside of her?

The stench of the city fills her nostrils as she wanders. This is daytime, when she is free, when Anastasie is a memory at the back of her mind. When Anastasie is nothing but a speck.

Each morning, Chantel transcends past her designated yard, and creeps over to an unwieldy sepulchre. A grave — a reminder. This is where Severen lays. Dead, but not forgotten. Chantel can still hear his raspy voice, at the back of her mind, wedged between the Anastasie-memories. And then, she is overcome with anger.

He left her, did he not? He betrayed her. He was just as duplicitous as Anastasie’s berries.

Then she can feel her claws curling once again, the reminder of when she let go, when she stopped bordering the anger.

That day, when she set free the anger. That day, when Severen died, and she so hopelessly desired it to be more than a coincidence.

•~•~•

Anastasie sometimes converses with snakes. They slither by her tree, circling around her, guardians of nature and borders. Admirable, no?

She would drop from her deep-evergreen branches and sit, softly, beside them. Shade protected them, because shade was allied with the sun. Chantel told Anastasie so. Anastasie always knew, though. Naturally.

The snakes — patterned and fork-tongued — stare up with beady, slanted eyes. Devilish eyes. They shake their ticking tails, but Anastasie sees only innocence.

“Hello, dear snakes.” She starts, and they draw closer, slowly leaving Saber. “Have you seen the firmament today? It has hints of green — I’m sure of it. Jade, maybe. A grassland-resemblance?”

The snakes slither nearer. She can hold their stare. She can touch their whorls and wisps, feel as open and mobile as they do.

“So, shall we talk about the sun?” Anastasie leans in closer.

And then she eats a swirling berry, feels the venom in her veins, and the snakes dart away as fast as they had darted  onto  her. Chantel arrives, holding her peace, and cleans the wound. Soon, it is midnight. Chantel leaves.

The birds sing, the sky shimmers, and Saber slowly dies.

•~•~•

Chantel, at home, howls until her humans lose sleep. When they finally turn their lamp on, waking with vexation, she curls into a ball beneath the tortured sofa, hidden under shadows. They stumble around the house in search, blindly, for hours.

She smiles and laughs in her sleep.

•~•~•

Anastasie slumbers on a branch lower, this night. She cried herself down; the branch above broke. She set paw on it after midnight, and felt the creak, felt the tremor, then leapt away as it plummeted.

Now, she has dry eyes as she snores. The foxes cackle away.

The branch murmurs, but she does not move. Why is Saber unhealthy? Anastasie forgot his age years ago, but she knows gray is the correct color of bark.

The moon glows. The stars glisten. The sky quietly falls, along with the spruce needles.

•~•~•

Chantel has blood dangling from her pure, snowy fur. A gash meanders across her leg. She is silent and hurt.

This morning, she felt the desire of a lustrous puddle. She wiggled out from beneath the couch and there, still awake from the previous night and red-eyed, her owners were. They looked like liquid, soppy and unconfined, fatigued. They stared at her wearily, then saw her crooked smirk, and vengeance dawned in their eyes.

The female, the raven-haired beauty, swiftly handed over a metallic object to the male. He had deep creases on his face, melancholy memories.

The female blocked the flap inside the door with a dusty box and stood like a tower behind the lined man’s shoulder.

He hoisted the shiny weapon into the air, and brought it down in a vindictive arc. The knife slashed Chantel, who screamed, but it came out as a bellow. She shook the house. She roared.

Chantel became all claws and carelessness as she struck out aimlessly, and eventually flung herself over to the door. She ripped away the box covering the flap, cursing it. Halfway out the flap, she turned back, and stared up at her owners with tearful eyes.

She spat, then fumbled out of the house.

•~•~•

Anastasie has been weeping for the past hour. A bird nest lay on the ground before her, shattered and shunned. Fox-scent floods the tree. The birds have flown away and stayed away. They will not return, she snivels. Nothing will.

To rid herself of these calamities and commotions, Anastasie lazily climbs her tree. He feels softer, prone to death, but why? Anastasie holds in her whimpers by searching for her squirrels. Her brothers.

She cannot hear their chitter. The branches are bare and cold. Anastasie sees the body of a squirrel baby mangled beneath the tree, surpassed by needles and stones. A improper, unintentional burial.

It was murder, but the foxes were nowhere to be found, and neither was Severen.

They were all gone, but some of them had reasons.

•~•~•

Anastasie’s snakes do not arrive that evening. Their minuscule eyes do not appear. Their noisy tails are shaking in another land.

When Anastasie looks up, cradled in her croaky branch, facing the sky, she sees clouds. Gray and bedevilling. There is not a single star to be seen. The moon is but a rusty glow.

There is nothing left to nurture her. She, and the world, are empty.

At this, Anastasie falls. She drops, unafraid of the consequences. She sacrifices.

But when she slams upon the ground, her bones do not splinter. Her blood does not leak. She is cast under shadows, belittled by leaves, and still alive. Bruised but not broken.

Anastasie screams, climbs the rotting tree again; she leaps, this time. Bounds.

She hits the ground and feels two paws snap backwards. But this is still not enough.

She drags herself to Saber once again, and heaves herself onto him. She cannot get higher than the third branch.

Anastasie begins to panic, hyperventilate. She does not want to die slowly, excruciatingly. She wants a bang, and then  The End. She wants to be gone with everyone else.

Up in her tree, she teeters on the edge of the branch, and a silvery shine bathes her before her final step. She holds her breath.

Anastasie lays back, stares up, and sees the sliver of moon. Tiny, useless, but there.

The sky goddess is fighting back! She is winning! My friends can come back now.

And slowly, stars begin to peek out from behind the swirling shades of blue-gray. Anastasie is breathless, wide-eyed, honoured, and too ensnared to hear the thunder or feel the pecks of rain.

•~•~•

Chantel is stumbling across grass, lugging her dribbling leg along with her. It is past evening — Anastasie would be ruined. On the ground. Shaking.

Chantel releases short, desperate breaths. She grinds her fangs. She, too, looks up at the sky. But she can see the lightning. Hear the tumbling thunder. Feel the sorrowful rain.

She can sense the end.

•~•~•

Anastasie barely notices her sister (‘but nothing more’) stagger upon the clearing. She glances down, nods, and then returns to the raging sky. Chantel gapes, shivers.

The heavens above rumble and snap.

“Did you hear that?!” Chantel yelps. “That’s thunder. Thunder, Anastasie, we have to get out of here!” She pleads from a broken heart.

Anastasie blinks her sea-foam eyes. “Our skies are just sad, Chantel. All the birds and the squirrels are gone. And the foxes and Severen are guilty.” Her tone sharpens on the last words.

“No, Anastasie. Just — no.”

Rain pelts harder. The first strike of lightning hits — barely feet away from Saber. Purple and milky-white flashes overtake the sky.

Chantel backs away from the tree, transfixed, petrified. “Anastasie — please, get out of that  stupid  tree! It, and you, will catch on fire!”

Anastasie awakens, maddened. “How dare you, night-sister! Saber is invincible, he will protect us! Just as the sky will, so you have nothing to worry over. And if it does light up…let it. I am ready.”

Chantel’s leg pulses; she starts to slump. “I…I can’t believe you’re like this. How did Severen ever do this to you?”

Anastasie stands tall, outstretching her limbs. The harsh moonlight illuminates the rain and branches behind her. She glitters, angelic, standing upon a tree, beneath a storm.

“You know what he did. He took advantage of me — us — and then left. He just left.”

Chantel is speechless. Anastasie had never spoken so clearly and intentionally. She can be saved, can thrive. Anastasia could live, if only she chose to.

“Then…then…come, sister. Please. Come home…”

Chantel falls, collapses into the soggy ground. She dies, her blood pools around her, and lightning strikes her body.

Anastasie stares, unshaken. Half of her mind has been killed, along with her “sister.”

She spreads her legs, she closes her eyes and raises her head up to her saviour skies. “Alright, sister. I am coming.”

Anastasie whispers her twinkly bird-song, and falls from and with the sky. “If you are up there, Severen, this is because of you!”

Lightning ravages the tree and sets it aflame; the branches explode; Saber is demolished. Gory-gray bark is strewn everywhere, endlessly.

One charred body lays upon the ground. Chantel and Anastasie died together, because they are one. A cat, devastated by the betrayal of her friend. A cat, whose different personalities plagued her actions. A cat, who was once something pure and sane. But that time had ended inside the betrayal all those years ago.

A cat, but nothing more.

The sky continues to boom and break, but still, it protects us. If it gives life, it can take it away. It took Severen away when he died of infection under city cement, but Chantel would always dream that she was the one who ended him. The day she unleashed her anger, it was on herself, and no other. Then, he died at noon. And she bore scars.

Now, extra snakes and squirrels do not return to the grave of Saber and the cat. They hide, they flee.

If one animal can affect another so greatly, ultimately ending in death and destruction, then skies must not be that beautiful after all.

The End.