Silverpaw;; Medicine cat apprentice

[swift]

_Pale as the Moon

Name |

Silverpaw

Gender |

She-cat

Age |

15 moons

Rank |

Medicine cat apprentice

Clan |

Pine

Beliefs|

Her beliefs are rather ambiguous: she needs Starclan to blame for her blindness and the constant feeling of shame that such a disability brings upon her, yet she refuses to acknowledge Starclan's existence. But, she considers it the fault of Starclan, not of fate, that led to her affliction. See what I mean? Contradiction, contradiction.

Well, according to her, if there was a group of celestial cats frolicking in the heavens, watching over the cats stuck on planet Earth, laughing over their trifling wars and sneaking into their dreams, what had she to do with it? And why had not they kept her safe if they were all so mighty and powerful? From her miserable existence springs a deep hatred for any and all matronly figures.

But despite her decrepit spiritual soul, her physical self is in good shape. Her motto is "Just do it." She believes firmly that one can do anything, no matter how impossible it seems, if one sets his mind to it. It's the only thing that wakes her up in the morning and keeps her going through the day. Being blind, she has suffered unjust criticisms and biased scrutiny. Who was she to bother hunting, training--honing her skills? She was blind; her eyes were hollow, empty voids. She survived simply because of a stroke of freakish luck. She didn't deserve to live--to drain the already tight food reserves when the clan would be so much better off without piggybacking a blind cat.

Parents |

Duskpelt[NP] and Whitetail[NP]

Siblings |

None

Other Kin |

None

Mate |

Not yet

Crush |

Not yet

Kits |

Not yet

Apprentice/Mentor |

TBA

Appearance |

She is absolutely adorable--cherubic. With her small frame, moist little black button nose, and soft, dove-grey down fur, she ultimately resembles a kitten. Her legs, long and willowy, sport jet black bands that thicken at the thighs and taper around the ankles. They are a bite too long for her petite frame, but add a touch of spritely air to her otherwise miniature profile. Her blossom ears end in short tufts of dark fur, giving her a slightly feral look to compliment the bold tabby print on her face; down her back, the fur is a black, marbled pattern. Her eyes are a misty grey-blue, like rain clouds gathering before a strong storm, and they are rather expressive, although she has lost use of them.

Beneath her pelt, etched into her skin by the claws of a bear, are intricate patterns consisting of elaborate whorls and crisscrossing lines--like a crude drawing of a vine branching out and curling. The scars snake along the length of her body. Barely a spot on her body is left untouched. The medicine cat has been able to coax back her fur, and the scars are usually well-concealed, but a disfavoring shift in the wind's direction can cause her fur to part, and for a split-second, reveal a notched spiral here, or what resembles a drifting leaf, but is actually the preserved imprint of one of the bear's long claws, there.

The fact that she is able to breathe is a miracle.

Personality |

When she is presented with the opportunity, she utilizes her angelic countenance to her utmost advantage. She is not afraid to get down and dirty either (simply because after face-planting in the mud a hundred times, some things aren't as repellent as they used to be). But what she wants most, and would never admit for the life of her, is to please. She knows that she can never be accepted into ordinary clan life, no matter how much she pines for it. Oh, how much her heart hurts! when she sees her peers excel into adulthood without her, and then she is left to her own devices: to wallow in a pool of her own tears of self-pity.

In an attempt to mask her secret agony, she acts unruly. She runs wild about the forest, leaping nimbly from tree to tree [that rise about 80 feet above the ground] without any regard for her own safety, raiding fox dens for food, knocking down known-to-be hostile beehives for a honeycomb, et cetera. After all, who would want to be friends with a melancholy creature? Spontaneity. Vivacity. That's the key to a locked heart.

But despite her best efforts, Silverpaw is particularly prone to periods of depression. She finds herself mourning more and more frequently for the loss of her sight. She keeps to the shelter of the shadows to grieve in solitude. She ignores her strong pull for society until she can bear to don on her mask again.

A note: she is scared to death of bears for a rather justifiable reason.

Skills |

Due to her blindness, all her other senses were strained to make up for her loss of sight. These senses--such as taste, touch, and smell--are well-tuned and heightened above average perception. She can hunt with remarkable ease and accuracy on the familiar forest paths by following her nose. She also has no problem employing her claws. She makes a wonderful sparring partner, if again, she is familiar with her mock opponent. Her eyes may be slow but her mind is quick. She can predict the movements of her opponent on presumptions from previous mock fights. Other than that, she is terribly awkward when facing new situations, and extremely clumsy and uncertain in alien territory: she would be able to fend for herself well in her beloved forest, but in, say, a meadow, she would slip and slide halfway down before taking two steps across the grass.

History |

Life in the Nursery |

The first sound she made was a feeble plea for milk. The first thing she felt was the warmth radiating from her mother's breast. That was also the first thing she saw when she finally managed to peel open her eyes.

"She's such a darling, Whitetail! Oh, look at her! She has your eyes! My nose!" exclaimed a high-pitched voice, pronouncing each word in rapid-fire succession until they were a train wreck of disoriented vowels and jumbled consonants.

"And your pretty little face," said a deep bass voice that sounded as deep as the ocean.

Silverkit wondered how the voice could decipher the butchered sentences. They had been rendered nonsensical. She had no clue what to make of the ups and the downs, the overall unevenness of the first voice's pronunciation. What a massacre. She didn't know that words could be twisted and turned in such a manner.

Silverkit looked up at her mother with wide-open eyes, astonishment writ across her face.

"Honey, you're scaring her. Watch how she looks up at us with those eyes of yours as large as the full moon," said the word-murderer.

How nonchalant her mother looked. Her eyes only smiled. The quirk of her lips only suggested amusement. How could she not realize that she was massacring herself? Her mode of expression? This was madness, sheer madness!

And as these thoughts led to other thoughts, all the thoughts eventually led to a conclusion. Horror dawned on her face. What if she had inherited such a defect? What would become of her then? She knew that she would not be able to face the embarrassment of a crippled mouth. She turned to her father and stared up at him, begging with what her mother called his eyes.

Whitetail, noticing how her eyes had latched on to him with an impassioned fervor, felt a chuckle rising in his throat. He coughed a few times to clear it, wishing not to ruin his mate's moment with the last remnant of her last litter. He knew that she was too old to bear him more children, and he was too old to raise them. Early this morning, he had woken up to stretch as usual, only to find that his bones were too stiff to relax. Age was taking a toll on both of them, and despite his normal thickness, even he had realized that this little kit--their last daughter--was very special to her. So he kept his mouth shut. Until, that is, Silverkit stumbled up to him, her rump sticking up in the air as she tried to maneuver her awkward legs, and mewled,

"Daddy, why did you marry a word-murderer?"

Duskpelt's face darkened immediately. Her mouth pursed as it did whenever she found something displeasing.

Whitetail, taking in his daughter's smart little remark and his mate's instant reaction to it, burst out laughing. His laughter boomed throughout the nursery, and for Silverkit, who was right by his paws, it seemed as if the very earth was shaking--laughing with him.

"You woke up my whole litter, Whitetail!" grumbled a nearby queen nursing six newborn kittens. "If you weren't so darn humongous, I'd give you a smart box on your ears," she added goodnatured-like.

"Aw, don't harass the poor guy," piped up a baby-faced calico tom at the other end of the den. "He gets knocked around enough for chasing away all the mice and voles."

And so life went on in the nursery. Days were hot, nights were cold. Silverkit sought warmth by her mother's side, ran to safety under her father's belly. And eventually, she grew up to be a fine-boned apprentice and was promoted from the nursery to the designated apprentices' den. Her parents left shortly to retire into the elders' den, and swamped with training, Silverpaw found that she had little time to visit them. Eventually, she forgot about them altogether, only to have an awkward reunion at the fresh-kill pile when both she and Duskpelt reached for the same hare at the same time. (Hares are their favorite meal.)

That Night |

Unfortunately, she wasn't as close to her parents as she wished to be. She regrets it now, of course. Whenever she happens to walk too close to the Nursery, she can't help but hear snatches of the queens' gentle purring, the kits' hungry, searching squeals, the fathers' tenderly whispered I love you's; and then she's off, ripping across the terrain, kicking up her heels, sending blades of grass and clods of dirt flying as she makes for the forest.

Hidden amongst the foliage, and enveloped by the comforting smells of pine with her tear-streaked face thrown in shadow, she allows herself to give in.

The sobs take over.

Then the screaming starts.

She throws her ears back against her head, her jaws parted in a long drawn out shriek of anguish; her body trembles with the effort to give sufficient voice to her grief. Over time, her wails only increase in intensity. Her voice grows hoarse. Tears slide down her cheeks. It starts feeling as if her vocal chords are being torn apart by the stress of her miserable keening, and yet, she does not--absolutely refuses--to stop. She stumbles up to her feet and half walks, half crawls to the edge of the clearing where the woods begin. She starts racing her claws back and forth against the scarred skin of the surrounding trees, and finds her claws tracing along familiar tracks and grooves that she herself had gouged out of the bark and left there to heal, slash, and heal over again. And it only serves to fuel her frustration. Sap oozes forth from reopened wounds and gashes like blood and stick her paws to the tree. It runs down from her paws to her legs, trickles onto her shoulders and slides along her spine. Eventually, she pulls away and slumps down onto her haunches. Overcome with fatigue and panting heavily, she can only spare enough energy to bury her head into the grass and brush her tears across the dirt. It isn't her parents she mourns then; they have far faded into mist. She grieves for her secret weakness--the dirty little secret that she cradles so carefully between her paws, holds her breath because she is so afraid that the slightest stir of wind would spirit it away.

Feeling her heart collapse within the confines of her chest, she lets her mind drift in hopes to distract from the pain--back to the accident that stole her sight from her. She floats in and out between consciousness and unconsciousness and remembrance, feeling its claws rip through her flesh like sharpened steel, burning and scalding as they sweep across her corroding skin so neatly, so slowly that the motion is like a mere caress. Each stroke brings her closer to death, brings with it a fresh blaze of agony; and she even begs for it--for death--her gouged eyes squeezing bloodied tears, her mouth open in a silent scream. Heavy paws travel upward from her haunches to her neck, sending high voltage jolts of electricity pulsing across the bloody trails left behind each digit.

Then, her world explodes. A thousand sparkling, shimmering dots of every color and shade perform a dizzying, confusing dance before her eyes as the bear seizes her head by its teeth. The dull ache is renewed by fresh waves of terror and agony as it bites into her skull.

Pain. Just drowning in pain. She is beyond begging and lies limp in the bear's fierce jaws, where her blood soaks into the soft brown fur around its terrible mouth. It chews quietly on her neck, its angry screams at last silenced by her silence, its teeth tearing through the old scabs and reopening healing wounds. By now, her inflamed face is a bloody pulp, covered with deep lacerations that run from cheek to cheek. Her brow is sliced open, with discolored brain matter sticking to the gaping, open flaps. Her eyes are crusted over with blood. All the fur on her cheeks had been ripped off, leaving a constellation of red pinpricks on the exposed skin, beading blood, and both forelegs are bent at unnatural angles. Facing boredom with an unresponsive corpse, the bear tosses her aside like a rag doll, as if she were a toy once so treasured and beloved, now worn and defaced.

She was disfigured, ugly, and now resting on the ground. Sweet, sweet ground. Tears she did not know she had left dropped from her eyes to the earth.

And so, day gave way to night, and the sun was replaced by a full moon. How beautiful she was that night. Yes, she glowed especially vibrant that night. She reached out with her spindly silver fingers, gathered her broken body into her awaiting arms oh so gently. As a matter of fact, everything glowed that night, and she soon found that she could breathe again, nestled in the moon's glowing arms. It still hurt, but she was breathing. Each gasp was a renewed triumph because, with the immediate danger of the bear now far gone, she realized that she wanted to live. She wanted to live so badly. When dear moon set her down back onto the dew-sprinkled grass, her heart fluttering like a trapped bird in her chest, but nevertheless pumping life through her battered limbs, she was seized by an overwhelming sense of relief and oddly, of satisfaction. She was sure that with her useless legs thrown haphazardly across her chest and back, she was quite a sad sight, but nothing could compare to or distract from the fact that she had survived.

And she laid there on the forest floor, the ground sucking up her warmth, the pine needles soaking in her blood, until the dawn patrol happened upon her crippled form. She had been staring up at the bright blue sky, following the flight pattern of the crows and buzzards that had come to pick at her decaying flesh, unable to close her eyes to block out the horrible image of their oily black wings, hard cruel beaks: her eyelids had been ripped off. A few strings of flesh dangled from the top of her eyes. Others were stuck to her eyelashes, hanging from the fine hairs like tinsel. On the lower half of her face, she was bald, and her mouth was caked with a mixture of dirt, mud, and her own blood. She couldn't speak. She couldn't see. No one offered to stop her pain.

But at last, her tears had been stemmed.

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[Whiskers]

Hey swift. Good to see your joined. :) I'm Whiskers, an admin, obviously. xD

There are several things about Silverpaw that cannot be fixed immediately, because they have to be discussed among the admins. For instance, Pineclan is the one clan in our site that does not believe in Starclan. If you want your cat to believe, that counts as a character plot and it will have to be approved by staff. Also, since blind cats are rare, you also have to discuss that with admins, though I can tell you right now Crow has final say. We already have one blind she-cat in Meadowclan, so I don't know if we'll accept another.

Now, on to the things you can work on right away. :)

Beliefs: You definitely will need more information regarding beliefs. Whether she ends up believing in Starclan, or if you decide to make her atheist, you'll need to explain why she feels this way, what led her to her current stand on the issue. Beliefs are a massive part of FoF, since Pineclan does not worship Starclan, so you can always talk about how she feels toward the other clans who do. I like how you included other beliefs that were not necessarily Starclan-related, so you could also expand on those.

Appearance: Her silver eyes. I don't know of any cat who has silver eyes, and since I am not the genetic expert on our team of admins (in other words, ask Crow xD), I can't say for sure that this is wrong. Buttt I'm going to point it out anyway. It seems weird to me, and maybe you made her have these because she is blind...? If she's blind her eyes will simply be cloudy, they won't be a metallic color. The rest of her is pretty good, and you've hit all the major points in a pretty concise way. I'm fine with her appearance. :p

Personality: Here you will most definitely have to elaborate. Why does she want to please, above anything else? And if she wants to please, then why is she 'unruly' at times? How is she around other cats? Does she make friends easily? You've presented several good ideas that I like, but you've only scratched the surface. So dive deeper and tell me more about Silverpaw and why she ticks the way she ticks. :P

Skills: you might need to change these if the staff does not accept her blindness. As they are right now, however, they are acceptable, though I'd like you put just a few of her weaknesses in there too.

History: Unfortunately, I'm going to have to ask you to completely rework this, as it needs to match up with our main site plot. Sorry, I know, it's a pain. Go here to find out more about the plot.

She is dissatisfied with life. She believed that she was too old to be kept in the Apprentice's Den, so she sleeps outside. When it rains, she sleeps under a tree. When it is windy, she tucks herself into the branches of a nearby tree.-- This all seems like personality, not history. They are also intriguing little bits of information. :) I'd like to see you put more of her 'habits' in her personality, since I see you can come up with good ones.