Diagnosed with a developmental disorder at a young age, Duskelle Waterlee has always been special - but not necessarily in a good way. Even at the age of fourteen, she is still unable to truly grasp human ways of life.
Her only relief is River, a st...
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Duskelle awoke with a start. Her eyes jumped open abruptly, her vision cutting jaggedly through her vague dreams.
The red-gold light of sunset filtered in through the gaps in the den walls, creating a dappled pattern of light that flickered over the nests lying here and there on the ground. Some time had passed since she'd last been awake.
Since she'd last been awake.
Suddenly, Duskelle remembered what had happened.
It all seemed to flash through her mind in the form of frozen images. Finding the fox den, rescuing Hawkkit, and then Stormpaw — thinking Stormpaw was dead. Taking both of them towards camp, Graysplash finding them, the sickness, and then waking up and seeing Mosspaw. Mosspaw telling her — Mosspaw. She loved that tom right now more than she'd ever loved River.
And then there was something else, something that pulled at the edge of her memory but skittered away when she reached for it, leaving only flashes of green eyes and a sense of overwhelming importance beyond anything that had ever mattered to her. There had also been a voice...no. More than one voice. More voices than she could ever count.
She took off the odd feeling from the half-memory that hung over her like clinging fog and returned to Mosspaw's words. "That makes you somebody I care about," he'd said. "Someone who deserves to stand next to me as an equal."
An equal, he'd said.
An equal.
Nobody ever seemed to realize how much it mattered. To be viewed on the same level as somebody else.
Duskelle had never had the privilege of being equal. Her parents — the creatures — they'd seemed to hate her. Sometimes, it had seemed to Duskelle that they hated not just her, but her entire existence, the idea of her existence. That a child could exist that was excluded completely from the world of its parents. She wasn't even a child, in their eyes. She was below that. Always below.
River had cared for her. But River had always been older, maybe not in terms of years but in experience, and River had always subtly looked down on Duskelle, indirectly let her know that she wasn't as good as her, and Duskelle had never allowed herself to realize anything bad about River before, but in the wake of her abandonment, she had started coming to her senses about the kind of cat River truly was.
