" When a star dies, it can take anywhere from months to thousands of years for its light to stop reaching the earth. " ☆ Curserenewal was always cold. Well..... not always. Not..... always. There was once a time when she wasn't. She was born cold and she ended cold, but there was a time in between. Cursekit had thought of herself as being a frozen wasteland; a tundra, desolate of any life or warmth or happiness. She had thought herself to be unfeeling and incapable of kindness. But that was all until Lionkit came around. He lit things up and he melted the icy cold around her heart. He made her want to be better. So, she was. She became better, and selfless. While her decision to become a medicine cat was all for him, over the years, it came to mean a lot more to her than just helping him. While being able to help him while he was in pain was a wonderful bonus of the job, and she never had to be confused or stuck wondering what was going on and she didn't have to ever go uninformed, she opened herself up to caring for the rest of her clanmates, especially as Leapvigil grew old. Curserenewal had always dreaded the day when her mentor would die. It was inevitable..... they were the last of the highranks left from her kithood, and their light seemed to be fizzling out. She always knew, in the back of her mind, that she would have to live through it, and survive, and pick herself back up, and train a new apprentice. She waited and waited for a kit who seemed worthy, someone to keep her eyes on. But now, she wasn't so sure about any of that. She really wasn't sure of anything. She hadn't been for a long time. Not since the warmth was ripped from her, torn away from her paws, and her heart froze over again. Curserenewal became a shell of herself, or, well, maybe it would be easier to say that she reverted to her old ways. You wouldn't be able to catch her doing much more than staring blankly into the dark, on most days. She was not really generous anymore. She..... couldn't do anything without thinking of Lionwander. Every part of her life was too deeply tied to him, so every time she tried to do /anything,/ all she could do was think of him and then she would cry and cry and cry, and her last moments with "him" would come back to her over and over again. Curserenewal's last moments with the body were something that she thought about more than she should have. She clung to him, and it was her duty as a medicine cat to make sure that everything was in order for his vigil. She spent far too long working on him, making sure he looked put together, but still like himself, and covering him in flowers to mask the sharp scent of blood and death. Curserenewal had never forgiven herself for letting him leave camp that morning. She could have done something, anything, to make him stay, and be safe, and be with her. She could have..... she could have at least said a proper goodbye to him before he left, or she could have told him that she loved him once more before he couldn't hear her and say it back to her. She could have done so much differently. Curserenewal had known that it was a murder. She didn't want to admit it, not out loud, not in her mind, not anywhere, but she knew what each kind of death looked like, and this was deliberate. This was a cat's claws. Not brutal like a fox who would have torn him to shreds, not like eating deathberries or being poisoned or anything else like that. Someone had killed her most beloved. She had shoved that thought deep down into the depths of her mind for a long time, and had barely even considered it, much less considered /who could have done it./ And she certainly hadn't considered that it could have been her sister. Her sister, who loved Lionwander, too, not as much as Curserenewal loved him, but still loved him either way. And she figured, you weren't supposed to kill the cats that you loved, right? Cranehymn was so twisted and messed up. And Curserenewal had been too busy with her grief to notice how suspicious she had been acting, not properly grieving like she was, but just avoiding things and skirting around them with the delicate precision of a killer. Everything all fell into place when she spoke to her for the first time in so many moons, at first with the intent to check up on her and see how she had been taking the death, but she was just acting /so weird...../ And then she confessed. And then they fought. It took everything that Curserenewal had in her to not tear her stupid, vile sister to shreds right then and there. Perhaps it was knowing that Cranehymn could have beaten her if she had tried, but maybe she would have stood a fighting chance if she caught her off guard..... but Cranehymn was a killer, and killers were always seasoned. Seasoned enough to kill again, if anything.
" Sometimes, things like stars just leave, they break, and it takes some people longer to notice than others . . . " So, she had kept the argument on a verbal scale. She wasn't one to let things escalate past their breaking point, anyways, and she would..... she would get her revenge sometime later. She swore it, that she would. She was smart, she could poison her sister, she could scheme and she could /get her back/ for /Lionwander...../ but that wasn't what Lionwander would have wanted from her. Curserenewal was ashamed to say that Lionwander's death turned her into something that he would not have wanted her to be. He wouldn't have wanted her to become mean and uncaring. The reason why she had become who she was in the first place was because that was what he would have wanted. But there's a reason why it's said that she was always cold. Even if she wasn't always before, she always was nowadays, and today was not an exception. When her and Cranehymn fought, she had not cried and she had only raised her voice a /little bit/ but she was..... mostly neutral. She was always mostly neutral because her reason to be a feeling creature was /gone./ Although, once she was alone, that was..... a different story. Once she ran off, farther into the territory, if that was even possible, she let herself start to cry softly, and then sob, and then scream, and scream to the sky how much she hated her sister, and how much she hated StarClan for taking her Lionwander from her, and how much she hated fate and..... well, she hated her life, too. She slammed an angry paw into the ground. Her head pounded and her chest ached. That was not new. Her migraines had been resurfacing on an unbearable level, and her anxiety was so high so frequently that her chest was constantly aching, even though it had faded into a dull ache over the many, many moons. .....but why did it feel like it hurt so much more today? Why did it hurt so much more that Curserenewal could barely stand? She hadn't noticed it when she turned her back on Cranehymn, or when she was trampling angrily through the forest, too focused on her mental turmoil to even notice her physical turmoil. Oh, but it hurt. Her chest ached, like it was being slammed into over and over and over with a dull rock. Not sharp, but more crushing, like something was being dropped on her heart, and was left there to suffocate her, and smother her out. Curserenewal was trying very hard to keep her composure, so she pretended that her falling to the ground was more like..... slowly lowering herself down, of her own accord. Her paws shook and she tucked them in close. They felt numb. She curled herself into a ball, tucking her head in. Why was it so cold out today? It was still summer, why was it so cold? She curled closer as breathing became harder. She was no stranger to shortness of breath, since anxiety attacks often were accompanied by them, but she..... she gasped a little bit for breath. The air didn't feel so cold as it hit the inside of her throat. So why were her paws so cold? More tears dripped down her snout, and they were cold, too, and they were less loud than when she had been sobbing before, but she sniffled quietly. Oh, it hurt so bad. Did Lionwander ever feel like this? Was this what his last moments were like? Was he alone? Was it quick or slow? She was tired of thinking about what his last moments were like. She was..... tired. Oh, she was tired. Maybe a nap wouldn't hurt? Maybe she could sleep off the pain. Maybe it would be warm again when she awoke. She felt drowsy, and she kept drifting in and out of sleep, eyelids fluttering softly. She wondered if she was still beautiful. .....was she still dying? She remembered that dying of old age looked something like this when she saw it, but it couldn't be that..... oh well. She probably wasn't. But, regardless, as she finally drifted off, she still decided that, if she was, she needed some last words..... "Lionwander? Are you listening? If I feel like it, I, I..... just might join you..... will you be there when I arrive....? Maybe I can..... maybe I can be your Cure again....." It was all too easy to slip away, then, with that off of her chest. ☆ " I hope that, if I was a star and I died, that you would notice. "
