#AND THEN FIRESTAR SAW HIS REFLECTION AS A LION

[neon-vocalist]

why is everyone in the warrior cat books so fucking stupid

[skeptycats]

Vicky Archives #8

LEAFPOOL’S WISH - Secrets and promises

Vicky Holmes, the former editor of the Warriors series, has been doing short extract readings on Facebook since the start of the UK lockdown back in March. There’s some really cool anecdotes hidden within some of these videos, so I decided to begin penning them down for posterity and easy reference.

I won’t be transcribing filler, hedging and false starts but I’m including some amount of preamble just to be comprehensive.

#1 Into the Wild | #2 Forest of Secrets | #3 The Darkest Hour | #4 Code of the Clans | #5 Firestars’ Quest | #6 Twilight | #7 Long Shadows | #8 Leafpool’s Wish

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Do days even exist? It’s still lockdown.

Right, after my very self-indulgent and dramatic reading of the [unintelligible] Ashfur and the three kits, I’ve decided that I will catch up with some of the background to it. Leafpool’s Wish is one of the novellas that I wrote, and inevitably, when I knew that I had the chance to write these stories that filled in the gaps, I wanted to show what happened between Leafpool and Squirrelflight when Leafpool gave birth to the kits and Squirrelflight agreed to raise them as her own. 

They leave the Clan together, ThunderClan, and they go off on this little secret mission. And the kits are born, and obviously Leafpool adores them with all of her heart. She has a visitor, and the visitor is Feathertail’s ghost. Feathertail was a RiverClan cat who was Crowfeather’s first love, and she died in the Tribe of Rushing Water on the journey to find the lake.

“Feathertail!” she gasped. She scrambled to her paws and tried to press herself against the starlitshape, her tail curled over her back in delight. “I never thought I’d see you here! Have you come to see Leafpool’s kits? Aren’t they amazing?” Squirrelflight broke away and leaned down over Leafpool. Very gently, she moved the kits into view one by one. “A black she-cat and two toms, this golden tabby and this gray. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life.” Her voice cracked.

Feathertail’s blue eyes brimmed with love. “They are perfect. Crowfeather would be so proud.”

With a jolt, Leafpool remembered that Feathertail had been Crowfeather’s mate first. Had she come all the way from the Tribe of Endless Hunting to tell Leafpool that Crowfeather deserved to know he had become a father? As if she could tell what Leafpool was thinking, Feathertail shook her head.

“These kits are more precious than you could possibly know,” she mewed softly. “Cats will speak of them for many seasons to come. They must stay in ThunderClan, for all the Clans’ sakes, with a mother and father who can be proud of them, who can share them with their Clanmates to be raised as strong, loyal warriors.”

Leafpool opened her mouth to protest that this was impossible, her Clanmates would never accept Crowfeather as their father, and might reject her too, knowing that their medicine cat had destroyed the code. But Feathertail was looking at Squirrelflight.

“I know how much Leafpool loves these kits,” she murmured. “But you must be their mother and raise them in ThunderClan with your head held high.”

Squirrelflight stared at the starlit she-cat. “How can you do this?” she whispered. “You are asking me to lie to every cat I love.”

Feathertail ran her paw very lightly over the backs of the sleeping kits. “Because I love these kits as much as you do. They are Crowfeather’s: How could I not? I want them to have the best life, not one lived outside the Clans, in shame and exile.”

“Do you wish they were yours?” Squirrelflight whispered.

The silver cat blinked without looking up. “That was never meant to be. The destiny of these kits begins now, and you have the power to change everything, Squirrelflight. Please believe me when I say that Leafpool’s kits must stay in ThunderClan.”

She began to fade until the bark of the hollow tree could be seen behind her. Squirrelflight gazed at Leafpool, and the medicine cat saw water glistening in her sister’s eyes. “Feathertail was right,” Squirrelflight whispered. “I do love these kits, and I want them to have the best life they can— whatever lies ahead for them.” She took a deep breath. “I will raise them as mine and Brambleclaw’s, as true cats of ThunderClan.”

Leafpool closed her eyes. It is the best for my babies, she told herself. “Thank you,” she murmured.

At that moment the golden tabby wriggled and started mewling. Leafpool nudged him toward her belly but he didn’t seem interested in feeding; he just wanted to test his voice. His sister burrowed deeper into Leafpool’s fur with a squeak, while the pale gray tom raised his head, eyes still tightly shut, as if he was trying to figure out where the noise was coming from.

“I need to give them names,” Leafpool purred, marveling at the way these tiny cats already seemed so different, so strong and full of life. She studied the golden tom. His neck was ringed with thick fluff, and his mouth opened wide to reveal thorn-prick white teeth. “He looks like a lion!” she commented. “I think I’ll call him Lionkit.”

Squirrelflight nodded. “The she-cat is as dark as holly bark. Maybe Hollykit for her?”

Leafpool hesitated. My daughter is the image of Crowfeather. Shouldn’t she be named after her father, even if he never knows the truth?

Her sister was watching her closely. “Leafpool,” she mewed, as gently as the snow falling outside. “I am going to raise these kits as my own. Surely I should have a say in their names?”

Leafpool felt a pain inside her belly that was sharper than birth pangs. My precious kits! A few snowflakes drifted down through the hollow tree and settled on Lionkit’s fur. Leafpool battled the urge to cover the kits with her body, protect them from snow, rain, hail, badgers, foxes, anything that might harm one hair on their pelts. Then the scent of Feathertail drifted around her, and she knew their path had already been chosen. Whatever she felt, however many regrets the future held, the only thing that mattered was creating the best life for these three perfect babies.

Squirrelflight pressed her muzzle against Leafpool’s shoulder. “ThunderClan needs you to be their medicine cat,” she mewed. “I will love these kits as if they were my own. I already do! I will never take them from the Clan, you will see them all the time, and they will know you are my kin so they will always be close to you. Remember what Feathertail said: These kits deserve parents who can be proud of them, who can raise them among their Clanmates as fine warriors. Brambleclaw and I can do that. And the secret of their birth will die with me, I promise.”

But I am their mother! Leafpool wailed silently. In her heart, she knew Squirrelflight was right. She could not raise these kits, their mother a medicine cat, their father a WindClan warrior who seemed to have found a new mate already.

“Hollykit is a good name,” she mewed numbly.

UNDERSTANDING A MOTHER’S LOVE

Oh, I do enjoy revisiting those scenes and reading them to you. This one was obviously a critical scene because I had to make it convincing that Leafpool would let Squirrelflight raise her kits. We’d sown the scenes, I think, already for Leafpool’s absolute loyalty to being a medicine cat. After all, she’d been eloping, basically, with Crowfeather a few books ago, and had received word that badgers were coming to attack the Clan. And so she decided to come back, she said to Crowfeather ‘we can’t do this, I am the medicine cat’. And of course she arrived back just as Cinderpelt, the other medicine cat, was being killed by a badger.

So Leafpool had to live with that guilt, she almost deserted her Clan in its time of need. All the way up, during her pregnancy and in Leafpool’s Wish, we see how much the Clan needs her as the medicine cat. She doesn’t have an apprentice, she asks Brightheart to be her apprentice and Brightheart says ‘no, I’m a mother and a warrior’ and ‘I may only have half a face, but I still have a role to play’. And that’s always been a very important part of Brightheart’s identity for me.

Leafpool knows that the entire health of ThunderClan rests on her shoulders and hers alone. She also knows that she’s broken the code - medicine cats are not supposed to have mates, they’re not supposed to have children, precisely because it divides their loyalties like this. And it always leads to trouble, we only have to look as far as Yellowfang and Brokenstar to know how much danger ther is in a medicine cat that has children. Maybe this is a very unfair rule, but I didn’t design the warrior code to be fair, I designed it as far as possible to reflect the “real” life in the Clans. And the fact is that you need a medicine cat to treat all cats equally, and if they have children, inevitably their hearts will lie more with protecting their children over their Clanmates.

I decided to bring Feathertail in to convince Squirrelflight, because I felt that if Leafpool alone had said to Squirrelflight, ‘they’re Crowfeather’s kits, oops! They’re Crowfeather’s, could you raise them?’, I think Squirrelflight would have felt that she was better able to support her sister in raising them. Squirrelflight is a very generous cat, she’s very impulsive, and I’ve always tried to show that she’s not afraid to challenge the warrior code much like her father, Firestar. I made her very much in his image. So I think she would have said ‘pish to the warrior code, pish to the fact that they’ve got a WindClan father’.

Also in Leafpool’s Wish, very critically, I didn’t have time to read this as well, Leafpool and Squirrelflight visit the Moonpool above the lake and they share a dream in which Yellowfang says to Squirrelflight ‘you’re going to have to raise these kits, because you will never have kits of your own’. Now we don’t know the truth of that of course, but Yellowfang just knows that Leafpool can’t raise these kits herself, she knows firsthand the trouble that would cause.

I have sort of painted Squirrelflight into a corner, I’ve maneuvered her into a position where this could be her only chance of being a mother, do this for the Clan, do this for your sister, do this for your kits, they don’t want to live in shame, you have a mate in Brambleclaw, you’ve chosen him over Ashfur... It seems the only option that Squirrelflight raises these kits as her own. That was really important to me, that this was such a huge decision. And also, of course, by the time I wrote Leafpool’s Wish, I had done Power of Three. I knew exactly how massive this was going to be. The fact that these three kits were not Squirrelflight’s biological children. 

This filling in the gaps story, Leafpool’s Wish, had to be absolutely concrete, absolutely convincing. Convincing for me, convincing for you as the readers, and convincing for the cats themselves. These cats are very alive when I wrote their stories. Nothing was done lightly. And this, this I really felt I had to get right. 

I have to say that reading through Leafpool’s Wish... Sometimes when I read to you, and I read things I write on my own, I think ‘ooh, wow, I was on fire’. But I don’t think Leafpool’s Wish is the best I’ve ever written. I was a little bit disappointed in some of it. But I am my own harshest critic. 

I’ll read from another novella next time. I think it’s going to be Ravenpaw’s Farewell. He is me, Ravenpaw. Alright my lovelies, thank you for watching and listening. See you soon!

[skeptycats]

Vicky Archives #3

THE DARKEST HOUR 

Vicky Holmes, the former editor of the Warriors series, has been doing short extract readings on Facebook since the start of the UK lockdown back in March. There’s some really cool anecdotes hidden within some of these videos, so I decided to begin penning them down for posterity and easy reference.

I won’t be transcribing filler, hedging and false starts but I’m including some amount of preamble just to be comprehensive.

I’ve also chosen not to transcribe the ‘creative writing prompts’ section this time due to it being long and not relevant to what I hope to document!

#1 Into the Wild | #2 Forest of Secrets | #3 The Darkest Hour | #4 Code of the Clans | #5 Firestars’ Quest | #6 Twilight | #7 Long Shadows | #8 Leafpool’s Wish

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Good morning! It’s Friday, March the 27th. I thought I’d start with a date check because... all the days are just the same at the moment, aren’t they? Welcome back to my kitchen. Today I’m going to be reading from The Darkest Hour, book six in the first series.

[Vicky points to the front cover illustration]

How awesome is that? That little picture there is an illustration of Firestar drinking from a stream and he has an incredible vision of himself as a lion, and it’s actually a prophecy that he turns out to be the leader of LionClan, a specially-formed Clan when Scourge comes to the forest and unites with Tigerstar to fight against the other Clans. 

It’s a very sad book, Darkest Hour. There’s a lot of bloodshed in it, it’s the climax book of series one, and I always knew that dire things would happen. [unintelligible] very near the end of the book. It’s in the thick of the battle against Scourge and BloodClan, and Firestar has lost his first life. 

Flame washed over his eyes, fading to leave nothing but darkness. A soft, black tide was rising to engulf him; he made one final effort to get up, but his paws would not support him, and he fell back into nothingness.

Firestar opened his eyes. He was lying on the grass of Fourtrees with moonlight washing around him and the rustle of leaves above his head. For a few heartbeats he relaxed, reveling in the warm air of greenleaf.

Then he remembered Fourtrees as he had last seen it, the branches black and stark in the depths of leaf-bare and the clearing thronged with screeching, warring cats.

Abruptly he sat up. He was not alone. The warriors of StarClan lined the clearing, illuminating it with the shimmer of their pelts and the gleam in their eyes. In the front rank Firestar could see the cats who had given him his nine lives: Bluestar, Yellowfang, and Spottedleaf, Lionheart…and a newcomer, Whitestorm, restored to his youthful strength, with starlight glimmering in his thick fur. 

“Welcome, Firestar,” meowed the white warrior.

Firestar scrambled to his paws. “Why…why have you brought me here?” he demanded. “I should be back there, fighting to save my Clan.”

It was Bluestar who replied. “Look, Firestar.”

Firestar saw there was a space beside her. At first he thought it was empty, but suddenly he realized that it was filled by the faintest outline of a flame-colored cat. His green eyes glowed so pale they barely reflected the starlight that filled the hollow, but Firestar recognized him at once.

“You have lost your first life,” Bluestar meowed gently.

A shiver ran through Firestar. So this was what it felt like to die. He stared in mingled curiosity and fear at the pale copy of himself in the middle of the clearing, and as his gaze locked with the ghost cat’s he suddenly saw himself, hunched and bleeding, his fur ragged and the light of desperation burning in his eyes.

Firestar wrenched his head aside to break the contact. There was no time for this. Surely the whole point of having nine lives was so that he could keep going?

“Send me back,” he begged. “If we’re losing the battle, BloodClan will rule the forest!”

Bluestar stepped forward. “Patience, Firestar. Your body needs a moment to recover. You will go back soon enough.”

“But it might not be in time! Bluestar, why are you letting this happen? Will StarClan not help us, even now?”

The former ThunderClan leader did not reply directly. Instead she sat down, her blue eyes glowing with wisdom. “No cat could have done more than you for ThunderClan,” she meowed. “Even though you are not forest-born, you have the heart of a true Clan cat…more than ever Tigerstar or Darkstripe did, for though they taunted you with being a kittypet, they both ended up betraying the Clan of their birth for the sake of their own ambition.”

Firestar’s paws worked impatiently in the grass. What was the use of empty praise? He could not tear his mind away from what was happening in that other clearing, where loyal cats were fighting and dying. “Bluestar—”

The she-cat raised her tail to silence him. “Perhaps your quarrel with Tigerstar gave you the strength you need,” she went on. “All along, you did what you thought was right, even when your Clan mates disagreed with you. You suffered loneliness and uncertainty, and that has made you what you are now…a gifted, intelligent leader with the courage to lead your Clan in its darkest hour.”

“But I’m not leading them!” Firestar hissed. “And I can’t save them—I’m not strong enough. We’re going to lose the battle. Bluestar, this can’t be the will of StarClan! We’ve always believed our warrior ancestors wanted there to be four Clans in the forest. Have we been so wrong?”

There was a ripple of movement from the front rank of the starry warriors. Bluestar rose to her paws as she was joined by the other eight cats who had given Firestar a life at the ceremony beside the Moonstone. All nine of them encircled the young cat who stood defiantly in the center of the clearing.

A voice spoke—not Bluestar this time, but an echo vibrating inside Firestar’s head as if all nine cats were speaking to him at once. “Firestar, you are wrong. There were never four Clans in the forest.”

As Firestar stared, rigid with shock, the voice went on: “There were always five.”

Firestar felt nine pairs of eyes, alight with wisdom, rest on him. “Fight bravely, Firestar. You may return to the battle now, and the spirits of StarClan will go with you.”

BEHIND THE SCENES

I hope you enjoyed that reading from The Darkest Hour. For a long time, The Darkest Hour was my absolute favourite among the Warriors books. As you just heard, Cherith wrote, exquisitely, all the right words in the right order. As an editor one can hope for nothing more, and as the creator of the stories and the characters, she ticked all the boxes.

Darkest Hour was a very interesting book to create, because it was the end of the arc. I’d been building up to this for six books, and as you know I started off not really having any sense of the story arc, but very quickly the characters came to life, and I realised how much of myself I could put in. I realised what awesome co-writers and co-creators I had in Kate and Cherith. We were a dream team.

When I was storylining book six, however, I actually brainstormed with a colleague, an editor called Matt Haslam, who was very young and this was his first editing job, and he brought with him a real energy and a real sort of lateral way of thinking that, although often I’d be very bossy and say “no, no, no, these ideas won’t work”, you know, “I know best”, but actually every so often I’d listen to him, and as so often happens when you listen to someone else’s ideas and really take them in, they’re exactly perfect.

We were discussing the plot of The Darkest Hour, and I said “well, obviously, book six, Firestar has to defeat Tigerstar”. They have been mortal enemies from the first page of book one, and the whole series had to lead up to Firestar defeating his enemy. And Matt said “no. What if someone else killed Tigerstar? What if we had Scourge, the leader of BloodClan, Tigerstar’s supposed ally, kill him?”

And at first I said “no, no, that’s narratively not how it works, love”. I can be awfully patronising, as I’m sure Kate and Cherith and most of my colleagues will tell you. But I let the idea filter down - and that’s the best way to handle me - if you say something that I immediately say no, then give me time and I’ll come round. 

I realised this was a far better, more dramatic, more engaging way to end the series That a greater enemy than Tigerstar appears, an enemy from outside the Clans that threatens everything Firestar holds dear. The warrior code, the four Clans, his whole world that he’s grown to love. And this enemy kills Tigerstar in such a horrific way, that Firestar feels nothing but horror, and dismay, and grief. And how much more powerful is that? 

And it works! The scene - it’s not even the climax of the book - Tigerstar gets killed completely by accident, almost, when we’re least expecting it. He and Scourge come to Firestar to present the united TigerClan, as Tigerstar wants it, and Scourge is like “no, actually, you’re not in control. This is not your ambition. This is mine, and I will kill you if you stand in my way.”

And the cat that Tigerstar thinks is an ally - he thinks he can use Scourge - turns out to be his fatal flaw. And he dies pretty horribly because he has to lose all nine lives at once. But it can be done. And Firestar is just stunned, and all the cats are stunned because they realise that for all his flaws - and Tigerstar was pretty grim - he could’ve saved them, he could’ve helped fight, they needed his strength, they needed his courage if ever they were going to defeat Scourge and BloodClan. 

And so, we as readers have been built up to really loathe Tigerstar by this point, especially after the previous book in which he set the pack of dogs onto Bluestar and the whole of ThunderClan. At this point, everything is reversed, and all we can think is ‘oh my goodness, Tigerstar is dead and that is an awful thing’. 

It was a real object lesson and I still thank Matt very much for having that idea and challenging my little narrative plan. It’s a real object lesson to always listen to other people. People can have really good insights into whatever you’re doing. It just made Darkest Hour even more brilliant, and I know for a lot of you it’s your favourite book as well. And obviously I flicked through it this morning and it's-- Love these books! So lucky!