BB!MALICIOUS ENTITY: Ancestor Rats
A cruel fate that can befall a shattered pantheon, and the enemies of Firestar's Quietus
With SkyClan homeless and exiled at the end of the Skyfall Era, StarClan itself was in chaos. 1/5th of their ranks broke from the sky to walk with their descendants into exile, with only some of the most powerful ancestors staying behind.
Skystar himself, Patron of War, was one of them. He scoffed that a Clan that couldn't hold even a sliver of land had failed his teachings, and deserved nothing.
Scores of cats died in exile, starved, exposed, killed by predators. Cloudstar desperately tried to keep his cats together as SkyClan dwindled. Soon, there were barely enough cats to maintain a Clan, let alone such a large pantheon.
When Cloudstar died, his successor Spiderstar found herself facing a new threat. One she couldn't defeat.
Over and over, there were rats who would attack the camp. Horrible, twisted creatures of many colors, with sharp claws like a cat and jaws full of needle teeth. They swirled like a storm around a central point, wound so tightly that it was impossible to see what lay at the eye.
While watching baby spiders fly away from their mother on little silk balloons, Spiderstar devised a Great Plan. SkyClan would live apart but connected, loosely, like a web. The Rats could not kill what they could not find.
As she watched her Clan disperse, some to humans homes, some to live as rogues, the blood roared in her ears. It pounded, throbbed into a rythmn, until the words of a prophecy became overwhelming,
"EEK SHARRARRAM SSARSHAIWO!"
[Rat ancestors disastrous-they-will-kill]
Could this be true? Would their ancestors save them from the rats, someday?
(Below the cut; a guide to Ancestor Rats and how they are dealt with in Firestar's Quietus. CONTENT WARNING: BODY HORROR, GORE.)
Firestar's Quietus; The Secret of the Rats
Exactly as before, when Firestar and the spirit of Brokenstar gathered the SkyClan web together, the rats had one point of attack. They washed over the soon-to-be warriors in a wave, but they were able to fight them off.
Skywatcher laid on his side in the clearing, trembling and wide eyed, covered in horrible bites. At first they could barely get a word out of him, too shaken to speak. When he was finally able to force a word out, he could only mumble;
"I saw Lowbranch. That was my mother..."
And then, someone else came forward, sharing that one rat had the same stripes as their brother. Another recognized their son's tufts on another's ears. The camp buzzed with tension as the stories bubbled forth.
Everyone recognized something in the rats.
Something had happened to their ancestors. Something terrible. It became clear why they had never answered their prayers or sent a hero to save them. Brokenstar tried to reach them, but he could only hear a command echoing in the darkness.
"Neek urrspeekorreen urrsnyarhak, karrl urrsnakochya."
"THAT WHICH CANNOT BE FIXED, MUST BE BROKEN"
It was only later, when they went to confront the rats once and for all, that they realized what those words meant. Stumbling out into the dim light out of the barn, they saw them.
Those weren't just rats!
And the most horrible thing of all was the atrocity behind it all, the creature at the center of the swirling, agonized mass, the eye of the storm...
The Rat Leader; Cloudstar
He promised to keep his Clan together. So he did.
As each life wasted away and his Clan dwindled, smaller and smaller, as their heaven crumbled above them and became too tiny to hold their ancestors, Cloudstar kept them in one piece.
When he died, that mission continued. Trapped as this cursed creature, Cloudstar was mindlessly commanding his cats like a storm around him, dragging in both the dead and the living in a desperate attempt to save the Clan he'd vowed to protect.
SkyClan could not mend until this curse was broken. These fallen angels needed to be released, by force, to rejoin a new heaven of modern making. Slipping into the body of Firestar, Brokenstar was able to lend all of his talents for one final fight. It was just like being back at Carrionplace.
With his purpose as the fallen 5th tree, a guardian spirit, fulfilled and the rats freed from their prisons, Brokenstar's soul grew sleepy with peace. Firestar buried the acorn necklace that he had used to channel him overlooking the gorge, where it quickly sprouted into a new oak.
Rat Ancestors; Tome of Beasts
When an afterlife is destroyed, through mass death or supernatural attack, and the spirits within it cannot peacefully fade away or join a new pantheon, all of its souls can become earth-bound.
There are many types of entities and curses in this world, each one completely unique. Ancestor Rats are the form that this pantheon took.
From a distance, an Ancestor Rat could be mistaken for an odd, escaped domestic rodent. Their faces were an unsettling mix of rat and cat, with teeth laid out like a cat's but endlessly growing like a rat. They had the blade-like claws of a Clan cat, tearing through the skin and laying at various angles.
They had no physical needs, but were unable to handle being separated from their leader. Cloudstar himself, however, did need to rest in some way, returning to the barn where he died every day.
When one was killed, it would flash blue as if briefly turning into a shard of the sky, before leaving a completely standard rat corpse in its place. As long as Cloudstar was alive, the pulsar of each spirit would simply be dragged back into another rat after some time.
There was no escape until he was killed.
After the defeat of the Ancestor Rats, the spirits moved on to SkyClan's special heaven; Skypelt. Even after moving to the lake, Skypelt maintains its independence from Silverpelt, judging its own souls and staying separate (but connected) to StarClan-Prime.
With an abundance of rat bodies on their paws, SkyClan started a morbid tradition for a very special celebration. "The New Day" is celebrated every year with a grand feast, where a traditional rat meat dish called "Roasted Grandpaw" is served.
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