It had been a while since she had been to this part of the territory. At one point, it was her spot, the place where she spent most of her time. For the last few moons, it had felt like little more than a grave yard. All of her intentional planting efforts had since gone to waste; what had once been a unique patch of transversal flora and gaurded fauna was now just dirt. Perhaps she should have expected it; after all, it had been more than a year since she'd last felt okay enough to visit her little garden. Perhaps she didn't even feel okay enough anow; maybe she just needed to say her final goodbyes. Or, maybe she would be revitalized by her contact with what had once been her plants, her little zoo. She found that doubtful; now that NightClan had taken temporary residency, there was no peace in her homeland anymore. It was too much for her. Perhaps after all, after all the time spent debating, out of all of the nights spent on the border, perhaps it was time for Eveninglily to make her departure from SummerClan.

In that way, maybe the dirt pile was a good metaphor. It was a representation of what had once been so lively - her garden, her - that was now dead. For all intents and purposes, she was dead, or at least the living dead, little more than a vessel on a storm-torn sea. "Who would have thought we'd end up like this?" she meowed quietly to the space, her paw gingerly touching one of the last remnants of her dying plants, her voice ragged from unuse. Perhaps that was a silly question: everyone would have thought. Everyone would have thought that the once eccentric she-cat would be crushed by incarceration, by the loss of her freedom, by the fact that every time she had started to recover, trauma reappeared before her eyes, this time new and distinct but still so closely linked to the days of bloodshed and destruction that had taken course nearly a year ago. Still, she couldn't help but repeat herself. "Who would have thought?"