Rock-kit padded confidently through the pine forest. His paws made no sound on the needle-strewn ground. One the other paw, his friend and den-mate, Skunk-kit, trotted noisily, his nervousness making him clumsy. Rock-kit smelt the rich, earthy fragrance of the woods; overlain with the fresher scents of a patrol they had just missed. Moments ago, he and Skunk-kit had hidden in a hollow pine trunk, to escape from a sunhigh patrol, consisting of Greyshard, Wolflungs and Mousefoot. Now, they continued through the forest, Rock-kit leading Skunk-kit.

"Are we there, yet?" Skunk-kit panted, running to catch up.

Rock-kit growled bad-temperedly and whipped back to face Skunk-kit, "I told you it was a long way to go!"

Skunk-kit backed away a few mouse-lengths and muttered, "Yes, I know, but-"

"If you're tired, go back to camp, like a good kit!" Rock-kit cut Skunk-kit off. He swished around and ran ahead, ignoring Skunk-kit's mews of protest. He had had enough of Skunk-kit's whining.

"No, I-I want to come!" Skunk-kit meowed anxiously. He bounded after Rock-kit.

"Fine, but be quiet, or we'll be seen. Your blabbering would scare off a deaf badger sleeping in the Twolegplace!" Rock-kit flicked his tail ungenerously, grinning at Skunk-kit.

"Hey!" Skunk-kit stopped in his tracks and stared at Rock-kit.

"I'm kidding! But, no, do be quiet." Rock-kit ordered, used to telling Skunk-kit what to do.

For a few more minutes, the two kits travelled in silence. Rock-kit glanced back every other heartbeat to see if Skunk-kit was still following. Every time, he was. The musky brown tom kit weaved around trees and at one point leaped over a fallen pine. On the other side, Rock-kit peered back, expecting to see the black-and-white pelt of his friend, but he only saw the crumbled trunk. Sighing, Rock-kit leaped onto the top of the tree again. Skunk-kit was struggling to get a paw-hold on the dry branches. Rock-kit grabbed Skunk-kit's scruff and heaved him up the branches. On the uppermost bough, Skunk-kit looked around them and shivered. Rock-kit let go and looked at him sternly.

Through the thick, dark green foliage, Rock-kit could see the fence of the Twoleg farm, long, pale brown jumbles of flat, dusty logs. Next to him, Skunk-kit shuddered again, hazel eyes narrowing. Rock-kit looked at him with questioning, pale orange eyes.

"If any-one spots us so close to the edge of our territory, without supervision, we are so in trouble!" Skunk-kit explained, glancing around them.

"What are you?" Rock-kit asked toughly, "A mouse?"

"No," Skunk-kit hissed back quietly.

Rock-kit jumped onto the dusty ground. Above the tall pine trees, the smouldering, Green-Leaf Sun reached down through the branches. By the time the trees started to thin out and become more widely-spaced, Rock-kit's back was burning. His Leaf-Bare thick fur was useless in weather like this, it felt as if all the heat in the forest was out to get him.

They were coming close to a clearing in the pines. Rock-kit turned around to tell Skunk-kit. Paws barely leaving the ground, Skunk-kit had fallen behind almost a whole tree-length. Head down, he was panting and huffing.

"C'mon, we're almost there!" Rock-kit called to Skunk-kit. Pads sweating, Rock-kit ran back to Skunk-kit and butted him in his hindquarters. Annoyance pricked Rock-kit's fur, as he did so.

"OK..." Skunk-kit muttered, pulling his paws.

Quite soon, the two kits came to the outskirts of the clearing. Rock-kit wove around a small, deep-set stone and pushed aside a low-hanging branch. Skunk-kit gasped.

A dusty clearing spread out in front of them. Cracked earth made up the ground, while the Sun bored down, directly over the middle. In a pool of bright sunlight amidst tall pine shadows, a black tortoiseshell body lay, unnaturally still. A tail-length away, on the opposite side of the clearing, a giant rock, about a fox-length high, stood, its grey surface, splintered by the heat. All around the clearing, there was an almost perfect circle of towering pines. Their usually smooth, deep brown branches with vibrant, dark green needles were now shrunken and oak-coloured with shrivelled, musky green barbs. Rock-kit trotted on confidently, as if he knew every whisker-width of the place. Which, to be honest, he did. He padded up to the black-and-red body and looked down at it. Rock-kit could barley contain the feelings of excitement and anticipation that pulsed out of him.

He turned back to Skunk-kit and mewed loudly, "There we go. A dead body."

Skunk-kit plodded hesitantly towards him. He joined Rock-kit and looked down at it.

Well?!, Rock-kit thought irritably, I risk my apprenticeship bringing you here and you barely look at it! Rock-kit nudged Skunk-kit and gestured to the back of the body. It was laying face down in the dust, its head turned on the other side so that they couldn't see it. The brown tom kit prodded Skunk-kit with a paw. He looked at his black-and-white friend, who was trying not to take the whole of the body into view. Swishing his tail, Rock-kit jumped over the body and landed precisely on the other side. Skunk-kit followed, but when his front paws touched the ground, they slipped.

Rock-kit stifled a laugh. The rest of Skunk-kit's body flipped over his head. His black paws had touched down onto a pool of blood. He leaped up quickly, as his white back was turned to crimson and half-dried blood soaked it. Grimacing, Skunk-kit rolled onto his back to wipe the blood on the ground.

After a short pause, where Rock-kit's eyes gleamed with playful malice, Skunk-kit twitched his ears and mewed, "Wow... What happened to her?"

A young she-cat's face stared blankly up at them. Four long scratches were marked clearly across her face. Glistening orange eyes filled her twisted expression, null and void. The little that showed of her neck was covered in blood and the back of her head was coated in a drying, carmine-coloured sheen. Fur and dry, darkened blood scattered the ground all around her.

Scoffing, Rock-kit answered, flicking his head back to look at Skunk-kit, "How in all of StarClan would I know that?" Rock-kit looked at Skunk-kit, expecting him to do a noncommittal grunt or something of the like, but the small kit answered defiantly.

"Well, it was you who found her." Skunk-kit stared at the lifeless form of the she-cat.

Pretending to be furious, fluffing up his fur, Rock-kit growled, "Are you accusing me of killing her?"

Skunk-kit backed away, he flattened his ears and stammered, "I'm- no... I-"

Smoothening his thick fur, Rock-kit laughed good-naturedly, "I'm joking! I'm joking, mousebrain." Rock-kit veered around the dead body, brushing against Skunk-kit as he went. "C'mon. We should get back before anyone notices we're gone."

Rock-kit trotted up to the line of trees, stopping a couple of rabbit-hops away from the nearest pine. Skunk-kit followed him shortly.

Jokingly, Skunk-kit meowed to Rock-kit, "Yeah. If we miss our apprentice ceremony, Tall-Leaf will kill me." He glanced at Rock-kit and added, "And Owlstar would probably kill you."

Rock-kit shuddered at the tom kit's words but threw a comeback over his shoulder, "She would have to dig me up first, because Blossomkit would have gotten to me before." He let his thoughts wander to camp. Blossomkit's pretty fawn-tinged white pelt would be gathering dust in the medicine cat den at the moment, as usual around midday. His other sister, Treekit, would probably be ordering about the younger warriors or the elders, already 'getting used to' her soon-to-be higher rank. Her brown tabby pelt was only a few shades lighter than their father's, Scarclaw, with very similar stripes. Blossomkit had their mother's pelt, fawn-and-white, while Rock-kit thought that the only way he was similar to his family, was that he was brown. Rock-kit's dust-coloured, thick, pale brown fur was so very different from Scarclaw's or Owlstar's short fur. They sometimes said that he looked exactly like Scarclaw's father, Gorsetail, but Rock-kit never believed them.

Skunk-kit interrupted his thoughts, laughing nervously and muttering "Yeah..."

Rock-kit looked around the clearing and made to stare up at the sky. A flash of fur on the opposite line of trees made him jump slightly. A small but thick patch of ferns grew right underneath a spindly pine tree. Through a gap in the ferns, Rock-kit could make out brown fur, not musky-brown like his, with splotches of ginger. Two, glittering blue eyes met his. They disappeared with no more than a single swish of a fern. The brown tom sniffed the air and froze. Rock-kit fluffed out his musky fur, shaking off the dust. And shaking off a sneaking suspicion.

That scent that cat left... he thought, staring into the patch of ferns, It's just like what I smelt around the dead she-cat, when a found her, three days ago...

Shaking his head, Rock-kit turned around and trotted towards the rock and the low-hanging branches. "Let's go. It's past sunhigh and the ceremony is-" As the two tom kits steered around the rock, they froze on the other side. A pair of familiar pelts was coming closer.

"Oh, no...!" Skunk-kit half whispered; half cried.

Bright yellow eyes fixed on the pair of kits, and a fawn-and-white she-cat bounded to them, glowering from only two kit-steps away. "WHAT is going on here?!" she demanded.

Her companion, a brown tabby tom with a horribly scarred pelt sprang up to them. He stopped on the fawn she-cat's left and turned his head towards hers. Doing so, Rock-kit could see his left eye, which still scared him. It was orange in colour with coppery tinges around the edges. It was everything like a normal eye, except for the fact, that the slit was pulled vertically from the bottom of the eye to the top. An almost perfect line of a scar stretched halfway up his face, going right across his eye.

"Owlstar, sweetie, what's wrong-?" the brown tabby started to ask, in an unusually gentle voice, before noticing the two kits and growling. "Rock-kit! Skunk-kit! What are you doing here?!"

Skunk-kit looked at his paws, while Rock-kit faced his parents bravely. After a heartbeat, he cringed and stared at the ground. "Um... We were-"

Skunk-kit leaned towards Rock-kit and breathed into his ear, "We are so in trouble..."

Word Count: 1862

I cut this chapter up into 3 separate parts. Just so you know why it's suddenly shorter.