StarClan was blinding.

He expected the landscape to be bright, of course. If the stars could shine down on the living to illuminate the Clan territories, then it made perfect sense that StarClan matched their brightness.

He wasn't expecting this though. Everything — the prey rustling in the underbrush, the towering trees, the babbling streams — were all peppered in stars. Everything had an unnatural silvery - white color to it, even as his mind scrambled to fill in these blanks with flashes of memories — shades of green and blue and brown and yellow.

His companion, another StarClan cat, was just as blinding as the rest. Their living colors — dark tabby fur, flecked with something else — only broke through the illuminating shine of stars with the briefest of flashes. The rest of the time, their body was outlined in the same eerie silver - white color as the rest of the territory.

"We're here," his companion announced, coming to an abrupt halt. Even their voice sounded wrong; layered and echoey, as if hundreds of cats were speaking from somewhere far away. Their eyes flickered towards him, revealing the only solid color left to them after death: a deep, dark green. "The Place of No Stars."

The border wasn't physical. Instead of a line of trees or a running body of water that would divide the living Clans, there was only color. Where StarClan was blinding and light and the physical definition of what good was, the Dark Forest was its polar opposite.

It was dark and it was angry.

Blood was the first thing that came to mind. The trees, their scratched trunks and rotting leaves, were outlined in a dark red color. The ground just in front of the border — only a few steps away — was slimy and emitting a strange glow. Fog, just as dark as the rest of the territory, rolled over the ground, smothering it and hiding it from view.

"Sparrowkit?" A voice called from over the border, tinged in hopeful longing. A molly stepped into view only heartbeats later, standing only paw steps from the border.

The molly's pelt looked more real than his own, or any StarClan cat's ever would. Her's was solid and whole where his own flickered between life and death. It held color, too. Dark brown fur, flecked with whites and grays and reds. Colors and patterns and shapes that felt achingly familiar to him.

It couldn't be, though. She looked more alive than he had felt in moons. "Stormflight?"

"My kit!" she purred, instantly stepping closer to the border. The molly — his mother — stopped only whisker - lengths away from the painfully bright light shining from the StarClan side of the border. The light illuminated the one thing he missed earlier, one of the only things to cut through the fog that clouded his thoughts.

A massive, gaping wound.

It leered at him from across his mother's throat, oozing something too dark and too thick to be blood. The same mysterious substance dripped from Stormflight's eyes and ears and nose, leaving behind streaks in her colorful pelt.

The Dark Forest cat's expression dropped the moment he caught sight of the wound. The wound that likely ended her life, separating her from her friends and family and Clanmates. From him.

"I know it's not the prettiest thing," she started, grimacing as even more of the not - blood fell past her jaws and onto the ground. "It takes some getting used to, I'll admit. But it doesn't hurt," Stormflight promised. "It hasn't hurt since I was first attacked."

He wanted to believe her, but how could it not hurt? It was open and it was dripping, grinning so widely that even the living could see it. "I..."

He trailed off though, when the words wouldn't come. What could he say? 'Sorry, that sucks!' is almost mocking. But he wanted to talk to her, to hear the voice that hadn't spoken to him since he was a kit. A carefree, stupid kit.

"I'm Sparrowflicker now," he said instead, before stepping closer to the border.