The first snow had not yet settled when the kit first cried out beneath the bare, broken limbs of the fallen alder. Frost laced the clearing like delicate webbing, white breath blooming in the chill air of dawn. The queen, Tristledrift, lay curled in the hollow where roots held the earth, her flanks heaving with the effort of birth.
Three kits were born the morning - tiny mewling things, slick with life and shivering against the cold. The first, a pale grey tom with a cry like splintering ice. The second, a mottled she-kit whose purr rumbled deep even before her eyes had opened. The third, and last, was Alderidge.
Even then, she did not cry.
Her pelt, the color of aged bark, clung in thick, coarse patches as she pressed her body against her mother’s warmth. Her breathing was hallow, slow - but steady. Tristledrift watched her third-born with weary wonder. “You’ll hold,” she murmured, voice brittle. “Like stone.”
She named her Alderkit.
By dusk, the queen’s breath had grown thin.
The snow came swiftly after. A late storm rolled from the mountains, binding and bitter, blanketing the camp in white silence. Tristledrift, who had not moved from the hollow, gave her last warmth to her kits, curling her tail tightly around their tiny bodies as her own strength slipped away.
When the dawn came again, she did not rise.
The Clan found her that morning, still as the alder tree she’d birthed them beneath. Her body was stiff, fur frozen at the tips, but the kits beneath her were alive. Hungry, trembling - but alive.
“She held on for them,” murmured Barkclaw, the elder who had once loved Tristledrift as a sister. He stared down at the kits and added, quieter, “Only stone could have endured that cold.”
From that moment on, the Clan saw Alderkit differently.
Her brother, Sleetkit, mewed often and loudly, always seeking a queen’s side. Her sister, Bramblekit, took to others quickly, wrestling and tumbling with any kit who would join her.
But Alderkit watched.
She watched the way the wind moved through brittle branches. She watched the way warriors stepped with caution on iced paths. She watched grief pass over faces like passing storms.
And she did not cry.
When another queen, Tansyfern, tried to nuzzle her close, Alderkit did not resist, but neither did she lean in. She slept pressed against her siblings, but always on the outer edge, as though guarding them from the dark.
There were nights she would wake, silent and wide-eyed, and look out through the nursery den’s bramble wall at the stump of the alder tree. The snow had melted there first, revealing the earth where her mother had laid. She did not know why it mattered, only that it did.
“Strange kit,” some warriors whispered.
“Strong,” said others, watching her steady step and quiet focus.
As leaf-bare deepened and prey vanished like ghosts into the cold, sickness spread through the camp. Two elders and a young apprentice fell before the moon changed. Hunger gnawed at every belly. Yet Alderkit, thin though she grew, never once mewled for more.
When Sleetkit wept in the night, missing the warmth of their mother, Alderkit pressed her flank to his without a sound. When Bramblekit grew angry and lashed out in grief, Alderkit took the blow and did not return it. She simply watched, eyes sharp - not cruel, not cold - but knowing.
As if some part of her already understood:
Loss is a shadow that walks besides you. It cannot be fought. Only endured.
And she would endure.
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