enjoy the essay, i hope i get a high distinction on it xx


Kier came to meet her alone. He’d steeled himself before leaving camp — his camp — and now his head was jutted forward, his stalking steps direct and hasty and foul-tempered; he wanted to get there and he wanted to leave. He walked in a beeline, straight as the eagle flies, and he hardly saw anything as he went; he smelled the familiar scents of NightClan, the scents that had come to mean home so deeply, the scents of rotting bark and moss and stagnant water, and he felt a jealous, murderously insecure aching in his chest, a little like grief — because this was his. She had left, and this was his. He hardly felt the ferns whipping his face as he went, eyes closing instinctively against the fronds, and yet he did — he felt them, and each time it sent that ache through his heart. That ache that felt like an absent parent holding up a treasured doll and threatening to take it away. He knew this territory just as deeply as Aspenstar did, maybe more deeply — because he had eaten hearts among the standing stones upon it; because he had nosed his way into the darkest soul of it; because he had come to it when he needed a fable, not been born into it. And he loved it.

When he’d gotten the message from his predecessor, passed on through a trembling, bloodied Inferior who happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was hunting under supervision, not even ten feet away from the others but just too close to a patch of undergrowth that a message could be whispered through, Kier had been an anxious mess. He’d been a buzz of frightful activity around his den — up the slope, down the slope, around his nest, along the water, back up to the nest, and all the while babbling to Eris. Truly, he’d worked himself into a panic attack. What does she want? he’d rambled, his voice so tight and constricted and desperately young as he tried to keep it quiet enough not to travel into the main cavern but hysteria wrestled it louder, shriller. Why is she here? She left — she was gone. I really did think she was dead — for seven blissful moons she’s been dead, and now she’s not. What have I done to deserve this? Truly, Eris, what have I done? Why must these cats continue to haunt me? Sagebristle and her accursed gigolo, my MOTHER when she turns up out of the blue — now, he’d lowered his voice to frantic, wide-eyed hiss, Aspenstar? Dust, he’d reminded himself, turning away. He knew every leader’s warrior name — knew everything about everyone. Dust, dust — not STAR. Not star. I’m the leader, not her. If she tries to take it back, I’ll kill her. Yes, I’ll kill her. Before she even makes it to camp. And with that he’d slowly sunken into his and Eris’ nest, still whispering to himself as the panic subsided and shivering confidence took over again, and let her soothe him.

But he’d also cursed Aspenstar’s — the harlot’s — indiscretion, truly cursed it. He’d had the Inferior executed immediately without trial, for one, which had sent up panicked whispers and utterly undone everything he’d been trying to do since the Ceremonies — calm them, soothe them, nurture them, convince them everything was alright. Now they were all frightened again and be had to give some nonsense about plotting treason. When the truth was he just couldn’t let Aspenstar’s survival, her closeness to NightClan, get out: he had usurped her in an illegal coup; she was meant to be dead — for heaven’s sake, he’d let them believe HE’D killed her; she couldn’t be here, within shouting distance of camp. It would unravel everything — it would unravel him. Any old idiot living under tyranny might jump at the chance to exchange one dictator for another — the grass might look infinitely greener on Aspenstar’s side, and when one jumped, many did. They were thoughtless, instinctive mice — and mice panicked. It was hard enough trying to keep them from bolting as it was; cat hunts and executions and terror seemed to have done it, to suffocate the will to escape so tightly that it became paralysed, immobilised, outweighed, by pure fear (all any empire really needed was to be more frightening than the belief they might win; terror had to be more convincing than the possibility of success, of uprising). But how long would that last if Aspenstar offered them a glimmer of hope? So no, he couldn’t let it get out. They couldn’t know about her. And so, he had come alone. Without a bodyguard, as he did on his night escapades to the standing stones. And it was a good thing, almost, that he’d had so long to stew before he met her, that he’d had time to let his feelings twist — because now, there was one thing stronger than his overwhelming anxiety: he was just in a really terrible mood. The fear melded with sick, raw anger, every emotion heightened to the point of over-sensitive, overstimulated nausea. He resented being summoned like a lapdog. He hated her; he’d admired her, once, had thought they could work together even if he was serving his own purposes behind her back, undermining and scheming — now he wanted her dead, wanted her dead with a fervour that tinged almost on erotic, as violent passion so often did with Kier.

When he drew closer through the black, dripping ferns, he smelled her before he saw her, before he heard her, even. Kier slowed. He wondered, resentfully, if she’d chosen the river specifically to spite him; with ears as sensitive as his, the roar of it hurt them just as the glare of the sun hurt his dilated pupil. He tended to avoid it, avoid the falls. As he slunk out of the shadows, his ears were slightly pressed back against his skull, just as much from discomfort as from withdrawn hostility. All his stroking charm, all his honey, were abandoned; there was a glare to his eyes, a glare venomous and possessive and distrustful, and the fur on his shoulders had twitched up. He slunk around the edge of the clearing, and then he sat; it made him look afraid, to sit so far away from her, but he didn’t care to overwhelm his senses with the stench of her. When she greeted him, Kier didn’t give her the dignity of greeting her back, just sat there and glared and let her talk in frosty impoliteness. She had come to his kingdom; he didn’t have to talk. He’d let her make a fool of herself. That was the thing about the two of them — each thought they’d manipulated, outsmarted, and bested the other. Aspenstar thought she’d convinced Kier to kill for her; Kier thought his father’s life had been a remarkably small price to pay for a crown and she’d been a dolt of a she-cat to make the price so low. Both preened and congratulated themselves and snickered at the others gullibility, unaware they were doing the same.

I’d say I apologize for barging in, but I don’t remember you being very apologetic the first day we met. Kier didn’t reply. Didn’t reply to anything. Not to her invitation to tread down memory lane; not to her insincere apology or to her greeting. He just stood there in icy silence, his own mismatched gaze holding hers but mouth uncharacteristically shut. If Aspenstar had a nostalgic fondness for him, he had none for her; his narcissism didn’t lend itself well to reminders of an earlier time when he wasn’t king — not his siblings, not his mother, not Aspenstar. Sagebristle and Moonblight were different, he’d only met them when he was already deputy; but this she-cat had known him when he was a trainee in the League. A pitiful circumstance. And though he’d modelled for himself a legend of rags to riches, of having been born in a barn and now feasting as a king, any ACTUAL reminder, any LIVING vestige of those days, was still an unbecoming look for him. He felt nothing but a bitter, quiet resentment — one laced by jealousy, by possessiveness of NightClan, by insecurity and uncertainty and fear, all hideously, deeply jealous and childish and quiet. He didn’t know why she was here, but he wouldn’t be handing back his crown. And so, he stood there standoffishly, looking far less regal than he did nervous and obstinate. His shoulders were up too high; he couldn’t quite make his neck stand up straight to look at her head-on. He’d resorted to the look of a scavenger caught with the goods and fearing being chased off. She hadn’t LEFT him anything, and he resented the smug look in her eye that said otherwise. Everything he’d done, he hadn’t spared a thought to her — he’d waged war on the League for HIMSELF, for Eris; he’d instated a tyranny for HIMSELF; he’d done all this FOR HIMSELF. BY himself. She’d left a little fear; he’d blossomed it into terror. But the way she was staring at him suddenly made Kier feel hideously unsure, like he was being gaslit — and he hated how she could do that. How she could push him back to a pathetic state of being. Maybe everything he had WAS hers. Maybe she HAD laid the foundations up like dominoes— but she HADN’T; it had all been him. HE had worked his paws tirelessly to the bone; HE had the blood and the sleepless nights and the headaches to prove it; all of THIS was thanks to him and him alone. He forced his paws not to knead the ground anxiously through sheer force of will — his will had always been destructively powerful. He wanted to slice out her other eye to make her stop staring with that hideous smile. He hated her feminine tricks that confused and fogged and blurred his head, his own sense of self.

Finally, after lengths of silence in which the only sounds were the breeze through the pines and the rush of the river, Kier spoke, ignoring all her nattering. “Well, she’s dead anyway.” It was blunt; he meant the messenger. “Which was very inconvenient, by the way — there’s a due process for these things, you know, executions, and as tremendous a method of terror as it is, it’s also mightily disruptive when it comes unannounced. So thank you, for making my job that much harder for me.” He shouldn’t have let on that she’d gotten to him, should have been smarter than that, but Kier was all emotion and he was horribly vexed. Another silence fell, a silence in which he eyed her with cold distrust. At last, he broke it again. “Why are you here?” His voice was quiet, icy, all tyranny and authority, and he hoped it disguised the tremor in his chest. He felt his paws shaking; he shifted them to hide it. He wasn’t interested in any stories of her miraculous survival, of her adventures, of her memory loss — ordinarily he’d hoard them and all knowledge, file it away for future use, but not now. The less he heard about her being alive this whole time he’d been leading NightClan, the more this slimy, jealous knot of threatened anxiety might loosen and fade. For the first time since taking his crown, he truly was: he was threatened. Only Aspenstar could do that to him. The pup had grown up and fashioned a crown for himself — but she was still master of hounds. And yet that wasn’t quite true. Both of them wanted to be on top — psychologically, physically. He wasn’t going to let her take back control of NightClan, and now he could let her see who he truly was — who he’d always been, and who he’d grown into. They were equals now, when once he’d been the fawning flatterer. He was a king. There was something indescribably erotic about it, about the truth laid bare. And that was where the conflict came from: now, they were equal. So violently equal. He stared her down; he held his ground; the fawning flatterer didn’t submit. There would always be a battle of wills between them. Always be a desperate, unrelenting tug of war until the days they died. “NightClan is mine — it will always be mine. If you’ve come to ask me to hand it back, my dear,” his voice was sneering; he’d never called Aspenstar that before, “I’m terribly afraid you’ll be leaving disappointed.”

And what really made him mad, what really drove him up the wall, what made him insane, was— THIS? THIS was better to Moonblight than him? This violent, narcissistic, selfish tyrant? How was she ANY different to him? He felt sick with anger over the incomprehensible hypocrisy, the stupidity, of it. What, because she didn’t have bat ears that lent themselves so easily to childish insults? She wasn’t much of a looker! Not even really pretty — all she had was a kind of haughty charisma that seemed to drive toms wild. Kier had just always been immune because, really, they were that little bit too similar — FAR too similar. Both used their own specific charisma to get what they wanted, and both seldom lost. But guess what? She’d lost to him. He had one up on her. He’d always have one up. He was winning. She’d bowed out and submitted. In the game of their lives, his name had one extra notch beside it. The pup had grown up, and the pup had grown dominant — and she wasn’t going to bow to her now. Nor would she to him. And so he knew, even standing there then, that this night wouldn’t be easy. They’d both go down fighting — psychologically.

He certainly didn’t find her attractive — in fact, as he stood there, he pettily picked out every flaw on her face, her body; there was no better way he knew to discredit a woman’s power than to minimise and diminish and critique her looks, even if he kept it to himself. Oh, he felt better already. She really was nothing. And he didn’t have to pretend anymore.