A gruff voice resonated throughout the snow-laden swamp, making the she-cat's ears ring.

"The job is done. She's learned that there are some things worse than death... she'll die soon."

"I'm sure she's practically begging for death," responded another ShadowClan warrior.

"I told you she wasn't worth our time anyways. Now you've made me lose my appetite, and this kittypet blood will take forever to wash off my paws." The first.

Sure you did, hissed a voice inside the she-cat's brain. It was unfurling softly, steadily, a cloud of anger that was threatening to burst at any moment.

Burst, the way her blood had when he'd pierced her stomach.

"Hurry up, let's go so Fallowstar doesn't know it's us." The first again. "She's almost dead, we can just leave her here."

Ribbon raised her almost-limp head in a position almost like a snake almost about to shoot poison from its fangs. "Almost, but not quite," she snarled venomously, then relaxed her muscles so her head dropped back down again into a sticky pool of liquid.

"Shut up!" the first cat again —Thistlethorn, was it? Ribbon didn't know and she frankly didn't care.

The second —a blood-lustful, cowardly thing that scraped and groveled at his leader's paws, Runningfoot— growled with a fury that almost matched Ribbon's.

But not quite.

"You should die in your own lukewarm blood!" he shrieked in a lunatic kind of way. Birds screeched in reply and deserted the area, leaving only the dying she-cat and her bloodstained murderers.

Ribbon's eyes were almost dull and glazed, but they retained her hateful glint. "Sorry, it seems my blood is cold." This wasn't exactly true; she could feel her lifeblood still gushing out —she'd expected to be dead by now— and it was still warm, maybe even hot, so much that she couldn't feel the cool marsh mud beneath it.

"I told you to shut up!" Runningfoot crashed his unsheathed, blunted crimson claws on her windpipe. The she-cat subconsciously made a gurgling noise and then coughed up more blood, —would she die of pain, suffocation, or blood loss? she wondered wryly— purposefully aiming the spray into Runningfoot's face.

Or rather, his eyes.

The temporarily blinded victim lurched back with a howl of rage, screaming useless things in a futile attempt to get back at her:

"I'm going to carve through your ribs and pierce every intestine I find! I'll gouge your eyes out and stuff them into your veins! I'll cut off almost all of your head and leave it dangling!"

Ribbon wondered what it would be like to be a nearly-headless, eyeless, organ-ripped ghost haunting his dreams. It sounded rather appealing at the moment.

She didn't have the strength to whip her head around as Thistlethorn brought his paws down on her spine and looked disgustedly at his comrade. Though she longed to hiss and snap at him like a rabid animal, to tear him apart as violently as Runningfoot was describing in his rant, she couldn't.

She hated this feeling of helplessness, as if the stars refused to let her choose her own fate.

The exquisite morning sun started rising with an a majestic exactness, as if it was timed to give her the pictureresque scene of a deathplace. Red-pink blood glittered on frost as the cold shards of ice sparkled in the light.

Thistlethorn muttered a foul curse under his breath, nipped Runningfoot's ear, and sprinted away. The coward.

The still unseeing beast of a cat followed, tumbling and tripping. Against her will, Ribbon tried to laugh and curled up in another flash of agony.

And like that, the two murderers left the dying silver, scarlet-streaked, muck-laden she-cat to drown in a lake of memories as dawn came upon them.

Her housefolk was sad.

The gentle, kind mother that Ribbon the kittypet had known her whole life was grieving, and that was the thought that pushed her on as the green-eyed cat stalked her prey.

The housefolk had come out to feed the flowers —pretty, little wavy orange and yellow things— and sniffled, which was apparently their way of showing sadness. Little holes were dotting the petals, destroying whatever beauty they had possesed beforehand.

Silly, naïve Ribbon; she thought that if she got rid of the culprit, all would be okay.

After a few days of observation, the ten-moon-old had decided that a garden rabbit —brown with black or white hairs here and there, and a very annoying bobby tail, with creepy-huge eyes— was the one who'd ruined the flowers.

So started her plan.

The first day, Ribbon had successfully scared the rabbit away. Triumphantly she returned to the housefolk den, waking up early the morning after and leaping outside with a spring in her step.

And there was the rabbit.

The same steps —run, return, repeat— occured for the next few days. The enraged kittypet could've sworn that starcrossed thing was mocking her.

And plus, her housefolk was still sad. Sniffled every time.

On the sixth day —why she remembered it was the sixth, she didn't know— reality bonked Ribbon on the head. She cursed her stupidity and created a new plan that entwined with her old one, with a few visceral changes and twists—

Chase.

Kill.

The rabbit easily squeezed under the fence that bordered Ribbon and her housefolk's territory. For a swift moment she considered closing the depression with mud and sticks, but reasoned that the rabbit would simply dig through. Her pursuit continued after a brief moment of struggle to slip through beneath the wooden poles.

Her dumb prey was still there, balancing on its hind legs. It stared at her as if silently laughing, then meekly bent down to nibble at a fresh green shoot.

Ribbon fell into a lopsided crouch, bunching up her legs and flying through the air. She landed unceremoniously a few whiskerlengths short of the rabbit.

The hunt continued.

She didn't know when she reached the marshes; one moment she was almost there, unsheathed claws hooked onto her prey's bewitched tail, and then she saw a lilac tabby —twice her size!— in front of her. The rabbit was squirming underneath a slender paw, its fur dirty with mud and muck. It fell still as the tabby bent her regal head to nip its spine.

"And who might you be?"

Her stomach —oh great stars, her belly was in so much agony— felt as if it was ablaze in an inferno of pain.

"Ribbon," she offered with a hint of defiance in her tone. She hated the kit-squeak that still lined the edges of her voice.

"Ribbon," the majestic cat echoed. "And you were chasing this rabbit because?"

Ribbon stubbornly didn't provide a reply. She glared at the she-cat, getting ready to flee. The cat wound around her.

"My name's Fallowstar. I'm leader of ShadowClan. What might you be? You smell like Twolegs, but you have no kittypet collar, and those fat creatures wouldn't be able to chase a rabbit, let alone want to..."

Mind whirling with the foreign words, Ribbon took a step backwards only to find "Fallowstar" blocking her.

"I'll take the silence as an "I don't know" since you failed to reply. But if you really don't know... Join ShadowClan."

This was making no sense at all. Ribbon sound around and made a run for it, but her long-furred tail as quickly pinned down.

"Then, when someone asks you that question, you can respond with "I'm a member of ShadowClan"... sounds promising, yes? I think you'll want to say yes." A faint trail of menace wormed its way into the leader of ShadowClan's tone. That scared the silver she-cat, and she snapped:

"Never!"

"Oh, sorry. You don't have a choice."

Ribbon felt herself being tugged by the tail, and she grappled for something to hold onto. Sloppy, disgusting mud got behind her claws and made her belly sink into the stuff.

"I said I'm not going, you frog-faced blob of dirt! Snake with an ant-sized brain! Dumb piece of dog dung!"

"Marvelous," Fallowstar meowed, though her voice was somewhat muffled by Ribbon's fur. "You have your mo— your Clan's sharp tongue. You'll fit right in." When the cat didn't reply but continued to struggle like an overgrown fish out of water, the leader let go, stepped on her tail again, and called out, "You can come out now, help me take her in."

There was rustling in nearby bushes, and then out slipped two cats: a tortoiseshell she-cat and a dark tabby tom— Thistlethorn.

"You can't, Fallowstar! She's a kittypet, I can smell it on her! Leaf-bare is on the way, and this thing will just be another mouth to feed. What are you thinking?" Ribbon moved her head to see the tortoiseshell and felt a burst of gratefulness.

"I know what I'm doing, Wrensong. Trust me."

Curse that mangy, bird dropping-eating Fallowstar!

The dark tabby seemed to be a cat of little words, but a terrifying aura hung around him like flies to a corpse. He picked up Ribbon by the scruff none too gently.

Before she remembered to make it as hard as possible for them to take her to wherever, they were at what the cats called "ShadowClan's camp".

She wondered when she would die, remembering what Thistlethorn had said earlier, that she'd be begging for death. Ribbon wanted to, so badly, to beg for it to come and take her away, but she wouldn't because she would never do what he or Runningfoot said.

She almost gave in anyway...

But not quite.

After quite a while where Ribbon had tried several times to escape, they performed a stupid ceremony with stupid words talking about their stupid ancestors.

And of course, she had to be apprenticed to the stupidest cat in the whole entire huge world.

A white tom named Runningfoot.

Black dots swiveled around everywhere, she couldn't make a sentence any more, what's swiveling, that's not the word, it's swimming maybe, swimming dark splotches in her vision

Was she going insane now

Their first training session was disastrous, to say the very least. Ribbon, true to her nature, had disobeyed every order she got, contradicted her mentor's every word, and all in all refused to cooperate.

He'd ripped off a good half of her left ear. The velvety piece flew across the training clearing. She was pretty sure a crow came by to eat it, since the next day it was gone and the only evidence was a dry puddle of crimson.

She didn't have the strength to even bite down on her tongue to maybe maybe lessen the pain

A half-moon of torture continued; Ribbon didn't believe that Falowstar was aware of the brutal way Runningfoot attempted to break her. Several times she snapped, almost letting go and giving in.

But only almost.

Not quite.

let me go let me go let me go

So she had no choice. She would never ever dream of submitting to her mentor, but she would never be happy in ShadowClan either.

She needed to go back to her birthplace. Her home. Her housefolk.

if she could have looked into the future feel the pain she was feeling would she not have gone

if she knew she would wind up like this

like this, bloodied and battered, and that she'd failed—

In a gentle swoop, the stars came to claim the she-cat and take her out of her misery, to set her free, in a heaven-land where they hoped she would be happy as she waited for her housefolk to join her one day.

As a kit, she'd always thought that good won over bad no matter what happened. And she'd had that thought in mind the day she'd escaped, too.

Poor, innocent Ribbon.

She'd almost made it back home.

But not quite.