Sinister Spooks
Username: pyrrh
Cat's Name: Dandeliontail [MountainClan warrior]
The Haunted Tale: Dandy had been such a happy, earnest kit, delighted with the world, with her clan, with herself, with her littermates and parents. An absolutely happy go lucky girl kit, her favorite thing in the world was to frolic around in grassy fields and bask in the sunlight - especially during the time of year that her namesake was plentiful and she could come away with an extra dusting of yellow across her pelt if she rolled in the sunny, bright flower blooms. However, she didn't take things as seriously as some of the adults would have liked, a natural byproduct of her base nature combined with her uneventful kithood. The clan had been in a time of plenty, and none of them really wanted for anything - not safety, or food, or even leisure time. All the warriors, and the more capable apprentices, were having no trouble finding enough game for every clan member to eat, and Dandy wasn't really sure why everyone was so *serious* all of the time about how scary things were during times of hardship. They weren't hard *right now*, wasn't it fine to relax for as long as everything was stable and secure?
As she got older, and the kit was old enough to become an apprentice, her parents and the clan agreed that the thing she needed most was to understand that times of plenty, like the one she was growing up in, were rare and usually short lived. If nothing else, winter season came around without fail, and that alone was a kind of scarcity. So she entered her apprenticeship, but the style of teaching of her mentor didn't mesh well with her way of learning and understanding, and the two clashed from the start. Immediately the mentor tried to teach her with an abrupt absence of resources, a false scarcity to show what it felt like and force her to learn how she would adapt when it happened for real, but for Dandy she bristled and boiled under the surface, her soft happy heart slowly poisoned bit by bit with every time that she had to watch her friends or family or anyone else in the clan continue to have plenty, while she had her share of things taken away on purpose for her to "learn" some sort of "lesson". All it made her do was plan a revenge for when she was free to do what she wanted as a Warrior in her clan. The aging apprentice only learned to hide her true feelings, burying her fury and resentment deep inside of herself, learning to parrot the behaviors and words and attitudes expected by others.
Finally she earned her warrior name, moving from Dandelionpaw to Dandeliontail, and it was not long after that she started to enact the revenge she had long been plotting. She skulked around the Clan territory in the depths of night, sneaking past patrols and guards and anyone else who might be awake, purposely destroying the resources that belonged to the clan at large, but especially targeting those in power and those who she decided had harmed her. The clan leader, her mentor, her parents, any warriors who had participated in her restrictions from which she learned nothing but how to sneakily get revenge. She succeeds at remaining sneaky with her sporadic destruction and theft for a few moons, but after more obvious increases in patrols and watching resource piles, unbeknownst to her a couple of very trusted cats are set onto the special mission to find who is hurting the Clan. So one night she gets caught, in her surprise slashing out with her claws and drawing blood on the Warrior who caught her, but it doesn't take long before she is subdued by the more experienced cat and fatally wounded due to her refusal to do anything but fight with the intent to kill. As she faded from consciousness the Warrior who killed her declares that her death has no honor, and she will be doomed to walk the Dark Forest alone forever. Though she grinned defiantly up at those final words with the very last of her fading energy, they began to haunt her as soon as she woke in the Forest, wrapped around her like a ghost she couldn't shake...
Notes from Beyond the Grave: If I reincarnate her, Dandy will have this ongoing and inexplicable drive to Atone by simply doing good in the world, even if it costs her everything she holds dear. Self sacrificial way beyond any reason, her biggest character flaw. But for a while she will have to prowl the Dark Forest and realize that she wasn't in the right, actually, and learn that through talking things out with others who appear in the forest.
