Spiritkit did not cry, not even on his first night alone.
While the other kits squirmed and mewled in their moss nests, seeking warmth and milk from mothers who still breathed, Spiritkit lay in silence - his tiny chest rising and falling with a ready rhythm, as if he were listening to something beyond the den walls.
He suckled reluctantly from a foster queen, never more than needed to survive, and when he finished, he would crawl back to the mouth of the nursery and stare out at the snow. It was strange, the way he sat there, unmoving, tail curled over his paws like a warrior twice his moons.
“Strange little scrap,” muttered an elder one morning.
“ Doesn’t play, doesn’t cry, doesn’t even flinch when the wind howls.”
“He listens,” said the medicine cat, Frostfern, pausing in her herbs sorting to glance towards him.
“As though the trees are telling him secrets.”
And perhaps they were.
Even as a kit, Spiritkit knew the forest in ways that couldn’t be taught. When the wind shifted, he knew which direction it had come from - and whether it carried prey-scent or predator-stink. When snow fell, he walked with such eerie silence that even the most alert warriors didn’t hear his approach. The apprentices joked that he was half owl, half shadow. The elders said less, but watched him closely.
He watched them, too.
He watched everything.
While the other kits wrestled and tumbled and chirped nonsense in the nursery, Spiritkit observed the way warriors moved through camp - who favored with paw, whose limps returned with the cold, which cats spoke often and which ones chose silence. He notice when Stormfang’s shoulders tensed before an argument. He saw how the leader, Emberstar, stood for too long beneath the Highrock each morning, her golden eyes turned to the trees as if waiting for some sign.
It wasn’t just the cats he read. He studied the clouds, the scratch of frost patterns on the stone, the silence of the prey tunnels. And when he spoke - which wasn’t often - it was always with intent.
One day, a fox came too close to the camp. Warriors readied the battles, racing to reinforce the outer thorn walls, panic bristling through their fur. Spiritkit, only three moons old, stood in the snow beside the nursery and said simply,
“It won’t come closer. It’s wounded and it’s afraid. It’ll circle twice, then go.”
The fox did exactly that.
The warriors said it was luck. Frostfern said otherwise.
Another time, a storm broke suddenly during a patrol, lightning splitting the sky. The returning warriors spoke often a tree that had cracked in two, narrowly missing an apprentice. Spiritkit blinked from the edge of camp and said,
“It was the tall pine near the riverbank. The one with blackened bark.”
Again, he was right.
“You were born in a storm,” Frostfern told him once, her eyes distant.
“But you walk like you’re made of the calm after it.”
Despite the murmurs, the clan could not deny that Spiritkit thrived. He grew slowly, but steadily - his pale mane thickening into a ghostlike ruff around his neck, his stone-grey fur taking on the shimmer of moonlight. His eyes remained silver, sharp and watchful.
At six moons, he sat alone on the edge of camp as dusk fell, the snow whispering around him in fire, crystalline flurries. He sat still for so long that even the elders forgot he hadn’t moved.
When Emberstar finally approached him, her asking gently,
“What are you waiting for, Spiritkit?”
He turned to her and replied,
“The wind says something is coming. Something that will change everything.”
And by the next moonrise, the border patrol would discover the scent of rogues just beyond the river - and the first signs of a long, bitter struggle for the future of the clan.
But Spiritkit…he was already listening.
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