Poor Cell Reception [P]

[Willowfern]

Dogbark was tired.
Tired of what, exactly? Well, that was a hard concept to nail down, considering it couldn’t be nailed down, as the concept, along with the plane of existence of which Dogbark currently was aligned with, was not something that could be grasped in one’s paws and nailed down in the first place.
The world was so vast, so strange, so beautiful, and Dogbark had missed his chance of getting to truly experience it with wonder-filled eyes. He had never simply stopped to admire a sunset or sunrise in his youth, and in his adulthood he hadn’t done so, either. And after the “incident”… well, Dogbark never did stop after that.
He supposed that the reason that he never stopped moving was a simple one, he didn’t want the nightmares from that night to finally catch up with him.
Though… why?
What would the nightmares have done? Give him a spook and be done with it? Make him cry a bit? Hah, such things had never really occurred to him before his death. How naïve he’d been. Even when he had been old enough to know better, Dogbark still managed to go through life like a young Warrior. With reckless abandon and no mind for the consequences of his actions.
What a fool he’d been, wasting his life on memories.
His own mother hadn’t spoken to him in a long expanse of moons, yet Dogbark had spent half his life pining for her.
Fate was cruel and twisted.
Finally reunited with his mother, only to find she’d barely missed him.
Dogbark huffed. Figures.
Dogbark blinked open his eyes. He’d been sitting in the everlasting sun, thinking back on his life. Pondering. Now that his thinking had gained a dark momentum, Dogbark decided to stop it where it was at for now, as he had eternity to ponder what the meaning of his life had been, and what his life might had amounted to if he had somehow managed to not die… or did he get killed?
Frustrating enough, Dogbark had no memory of his death.
He supposed he must have hit his head during whatever caused his death.
Dogbark stood and stared across the wide, endless expanse that was StarClan’s hunting grounds with mounting disgust. All of this… all of this was fake. He wondered why StarClan even bothered to exist in the first place. Dogbark would have been much more contented with disappearing into a mindless void after his death than to be left to ponder the complexities of existence as he grew more and more bored, but, it seemed whatever larger Being of the Universe that had initially created StarClan had had a specific use for the hunting grounds in mind. Too bad Dogbark couldn’t unearth it.
Stretching and shaking off any encroaching tendrils of sleep (Dogbark loathed sleeping when he shouldn’t be. It was a habit of his he couldn’t shake. He felt gross and lazy whenever he accidentally slept away part of an endless afternoon.), Dogbark made his way back to that pool he’d crawled out of on his first day in eternity and peered in. Empty, as usual. Though the reflecting light on the pond’s surface faintly mirrored what Dogbark could only imagine would be a busy camp, though perhaps Dogbark’s mind was becoming soft after so little use.
The former Deputy of ThunderClan hadn’t spoken to anyone in a dream in what must have been moons, but he didn’t want to anyway. He had decided that after a few moons of being dead, one must swear off excess dream walking, as the veil between the living and the dead must remain between. After all, if one gets to see a friend every night after said friend has been dead for twenty moons, then what is the point of mourning? And that is where the dream walking becomes problematic.
Yes, mourning is important, therefore Dogbark couldn’t make his former clanmates thing dreamwalking would be a common occurrence.
On the subject of mourning, Dogbark doubted he was being thought of in a sad way anymore. ThunderClan had moved on, that he knew. The world kept spinning, therefore the clan would keep going on.
Dogbark wasn’t conceited enough to think there had been much crying when his body/absence was discovered by the clan, he knew he had fallen out of popularity among his clan during his final days. As much as he hated to think it, he knew he’d only been truly mourned by a mere pawful of cats.
Well, better a pawful then nothing.
Silently, Dogbark paced the pond, his starry paws barely making prints in the soft silt that lined the edge, his tail lightly buffeting the grass that crept up to the edge of the pond.
What, Dogbark wondered, might he have accomplished if he hadn’t died and fallen out of favor with ThunderClan? Of what significance was he in the first place, to be chosen as Deputy when he was? What had StarClan foreseen for him? Was his story truly over? Was there another chapter? Probably not, but…
These questions, among countless others, haunted Dogbark like the ghost he now was.
Whatever the answers were, Dogbark hadn’t the slightest clue.