A wildfire had started at the edge of the territory in the summer heat, spitting up embers and coughing gritty smoke over the pine forest. Kier had taken a special interest in it, going out to stare at it from a distance and sometimes from dangerously close up, with that way he got when he was thinking up ideas. No one knew why. There where whispers that he'd been spending more times at the standing stones, that cats who broke away from patrols to sneak a look at the eerie site in the middle of that clearing found half-eaten hearts scattered about, and it wasn't a rumour that he'd been coming home shaking ash from his black fur, looking equal parts angry and disconcertingly bright-eyed. Everyone said it had something to do with Snowblister. Breaking some vow before the deputy could. It all depended on who got there first, though what the 'there' was, no one knew. If there was one thing Kier guarded more than his bastard mistress, it was his secrets. 

But Sneakysnap didn't care about any of that. The fire wouldn't get far into the territory with the dampness of the pines, but it was the perfect playground for the adrenaline junkies of NightClan's sick youth. While Kier had sacrificed his youth to ambition and looked into the fire with nothing more than a search for desperate, hateful, ravenous possibility, becoming more like his mother with every night, for Sneakysnap it was a thing of daredevilry and escapade. She'd already led a late-night expedition to the flames, apprentices and young warriors taking turns leaping through the fire and heckling everyone else as the sparks spitting into the coal-black sky sent them into a drunken, dizzy frenzy; kits had hung back, snuck away from their governesses to watch with wide-eyed, envious awe, and the rest were all happy to show off for an audience. Kier's showmanship was infectious. They were all wild, all high on epinephrines and bound to die young. 

Now, Sneakysnap was heading out again on one such expedition, this time a one-woman show. She was addicted; she needed more of the fire before it blew itself out. The others had grown tired of it, or grown afraid; it grew harder and harder to explain their singed fur and burned pads, though Kier would have surely done nothing but throw his head back and laugh raucously at their antics. Discipline didn't exist for the youth. Tail snapping impatiently, Sneakysnap headed for the camp entrance, hungry for more stupidity. There was also just something so vast, so endless, so sickeningly beautiful about the black-burned landscape, the trees turned to wilted sticks of ash, the red sky, the soot on the breeze that stung her eyes. Her pupils dilated at the mere thought, her mouth opening slightly.