Entry 1: The Young Scout
Age 14 - First Assignment to the Perimeter
The waterfall flows upward in my dreams again. And honestly? It’s starting to annoy me more than frighten me.
Old Whisper-Steps says it’s normal for young scouts to have strange dreams when we first start perimeter duty, but I caught him exchanging one of those looks with Elder Silentpaw yesterday. You know the kind - the “we should discuss this later when the kit isn’t listening” look. I may be young, but I’m not blind.
Today I completed my first solo patrol of our beloved Thornhaven Reach, swinging through seven levels of canopy, every branch memorized, every shadow catalogued. The other scout cadets struggle with the silence our forest demands, but it feels natural to me - like the ancient trees themselves are holding their breath, waiting for something terrible to emerge from the corrupted world above.
Here’s what nobody wants to admit: I’m better at this than anyone expected. I can feel the corruption-taint in the air before our best scouts even notice it. I can tell which branches will hold my weight in complete darkness. I can read the patterns in the bioluminescent fungi that tell us when the Umbra winds are changing direction.
Whisper-Steps pulled me aside afterward, and for a moment his usual stern demeanor cracked into something that looked suspiciously like pride. “You move like you were born to it,” he said, and I practically glowed brighter than our Sacred Pyre. “The Reachguard Elders are already talking about advancing your training.”
I should have been thrilled. Instead, all I could think about was the waterfall dream - how the water defied every natural law, flowing upward toward something vast and hungry waiting in the darkness above our underground cavern.
The other scouts think I’m too serious, too focused. They don’t understand that when you can see corruption patterns in your sleep, pranks seem less important than figuring out what the dreams are trying to warn me about.
But I still short-sheeted Bright-Claw’s hammock last night. Some traditions are sacred.
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