Desiccation

Mistystar sat down, curling her caliby tail around her little white paws. The terrain beneath her paws was rough and cracked, a result of the drought. She watched in despair as her Clan scattered, crying and wailing softly to themselves. Smokefern, a blue-cream tortoiseshell as well as Mistystar's deputy, ran up to the calico-tabby leader. "Mistystar, what should we do?" Smokefern cried. "There's no water to drink, everyone's slowly dying, what shall we do?" the deputy's voice cracked and squeaked like young mice.

Mistystar snarled, "If we complain about it, water will never come back to us." her voice was hoarse from the rough texture in her throat. The river that once ran through FrostClan's camp had completely dried up, and the rain had stopped falling from the once-thick clouds.

The drought was ripping apart the Clan, piece by piece.

Mistystar stalked off, her legs wobbly. She stumbled over to the medicine cat den, her rough and sore pads carefully slotting into old, dried up pawprints. She retched almost immediately at the smell of decomposing bodies - the elders were either all dead or too sick to bury the bodies, and the same went with warriors, apprentices, queens...

Mistystar shook her head to clear the thoughts from her brain, yet at the same time she knew that they would never leave from the back of her mind. The caliby she-cat stared at the medicine cat, Copperflight, for a few moments.

"Yes?" the irritiable tom asked. Mistystar swallowed an apology and stared in dismay at the red tom. Her glazed blue eyes flitted over to Lizardbee, who was breathing rapidly. The skinny Burmese-patterned tom writhed around, parched with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. After a few short, jagged breaths, Lizardbee was eerily still. Copperflight glanced at the tom and sighed.

-tba-