Mossfur

rogue

dark smoke she-cat with pale green eyes

Mossfur is a lean she-cat with tightly built muscles. She is built much for speed, for keen climbing. Ambush hunting is her specialty for it. Her pelt is a smoky blend of blacks and greys, shadow-dappled by nature as it leaves her. She bears wide, intense green eyes, a sharply angled muzzle, and broad ears.

Positive Traits: clever, brave, hardy, determined
Neutral Traits: independent, slow to trust, jaded, protective
Negative Traits: paranoid, ill-tempered, possessive, cruel

While Mossfur holds in herself capacity for great initiative and nuanced thoughtfulness, much of that has been conditioned over time instead to observe and hyperfocus on the worst outcomes and interpretations of situations. She will be brave and withstand much, but only because she doesn't think anything better is coming - this is just how life is, and she isn't afraid to piss in anyone's sugar-coated worldview.

When something is perceived as hers, Mossfur covets it with the vicious clutching of a rabid badger, be it nest or kit or friend - not that she's had many of the latter. Mossfur loathes to share anything whatsoever, ever suspicious that something shared will be taken from her. No one tell her of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Towards her former clanmates, Mossfur was often paranoid, scathing, and dismissive.

Beliefs:

Mossfur believes that StarClan (and most other such fantasies) are made up by cats who want power from such.

Mossfur believes that the world is inherently cruel, eat or be eaten, and that clan cats are only kidding themselves into thinking they're any better than rogues in such regard.

Mossfur believes that most cats only say what they think you want to hear, if they're being kind.

Mosskit: Mosskit was born amid the end of peace on the island, to a litter of three, born to gently-jostling clever ThistleClan parents. For one of few such occasions of life, she was happy.

And then, when on a patrol to investigate the growth of rogue activity, Mossfur's father was struck and killed by a falling tree branch. This freak accident, more than any open violence, left an impact on Mosskit's young mind.

The world is cruel. Fate is unkind. StarClan? If StarClan were real, maybe her father would have visited her and her mourning family. If StarClan were real... well, it doesn't matter. They aren't. Just a tale that medicine cats tell so that they can be lazy and powerful at once.

Mosspaw: Mosspaw saw further encroachment of cruel luck amid the rising tide of rogue activity in ThistleClan territory. One of her smaller siblings, snatched by an owl. Another sibling, hurt in a claws-out spar, with the wound experiencing reoccurring infection over the moons until it weakened them to be taken by a later bout of illness. Her only solace was in a fellow apprentice she befriended, but he grew increasingly distant and competitive as the moons passed. Mosspaw alone of her litter lived to her warrior ceremony, a belated affair amid leafbare, with the youngster left to a lonely task of digging out her own nest beside the empty one of a mother sick in the medicine den of the same illness that had taken her last littermate.

Mossfur: Mossfur's mother survived the illness of that leaf-bare, only to be taken from the she-cat by the struggling affairs of the following year, with the camp meandering from place to place while rogues nested in the ruins of the Clan's home. Mossfur's mood towards her clanmates grew increasingly bitter, something exacerbated by a fling with a tomcat leading to a litter of sickly and soon-lost kits. Mossfur wanted revenge against the world, wanted blood, and grew increasingly hostile and closed-off, clouding her own mind with circles of loathing and justifications. If there were surely calls to cull the rogues once and for all, she was a part of such cries. When Thievingstar perished to the rogues, it felt as something shaped like justice, for the moons of her life felt like proof to her of poor leadership.

And so, the alliance with RedwoodClan in the wake of it felt like a betrayal of the possibility of the Clan surviving on its own. Increasingly had she grown a mindset of letting the other two Clans destroy one another. ThistleClan had its own problems. Not that, increasingly, Mossfur felt particularly attached to ThistleClan anymore. What was the difference between a poorly-led Clan filled with useless eaters and borderline-rogues, versus the other corrupt Clans and actual rogues? Mossfur began to behave more and more isolated in her manner, hunting and patrolling alone, and all the while poisoning her own mind with dark and frustrated thoughts.

Another fling came and went, and with it a new pregnancy, this time as the Clan fled their camp - again! - to the Bear Stones. Her first kit was born wheezing, and for that did she name him Ripplekit - not for the patterns of his fur. Already was she resigned to this litter dying too. The second kit was dismissively named Scratchkit after she hissingly threatened to scratch the attending medicine cat for delivering dead or dying kits.

But Scratchkit was not dead. Nor, as it turned out, dying. As Mossfur became cognizant of this, her mind became a fortress for it. This one, she determined, would not die. The Clan did not matter. The world did not matter. The world and the Clan would not take this last thing from her.

To say she was broody in those early months of motherhood is understatement. If prior she had been ill-tempered and introverted, in wake of giving birth to a living kit she became more snappish and paranoid still - not above accusing anyone who came too close of trying to steal her kit. She carried him everywhere, already planned to mentor him herself, because she didn't trust her clanmates to do it right: without getting him killed.

And then the attack happened. Madness it was, and she tucked her kit away in a hiding place to better fend off an attacker. But amid the shadows of that day, the queen slipped, skidded off a stone into the creek, her ears filled with the sounds of violence, and a kit's cry for help. What felt like hours later - but was far less - she dragged herself ashore. Distantly, maybe as memory's echoes, she could hear cats yowling still. But no kit.

Mossfur could not convince herself that her son was alive. Nor did she want to return to find the body. Or not find it. To go back and forth, forth and back yet more with a Clan barely able to hold onto their camp, let alone their vulnerable clanmates. She turned and went the other way.

What's the difference between a clan cat and a rogue? In Mossfur's eyes, how much they lie to one another and themselves.