Erin Hunter - Midnight

Stormfur and Feathertail, too, were true friends, and even Crowpaw had become an ally he would want beside him in any battle.

“You were right,” he meowed thoughtfully to Midnight.

“We have become one.”

The badger nodded gravely. “In days to come, you need each other.” She pronounced the words with all the force of a prophecy from StarClan. “Your journey not end here, small warrior. It only just begin.”

The long grass beside the Thunderpath parted and Firestar prowled into the open, the weakening leaf-fall sun shining on his flame-colored pelt. Beside him Graystripe sniffed suspiciously at the air.

“Great StarClan, it smells foul today!” he exclaimed.

Cloudtail and Sandstorm padded up to join them, and Leafpaw, the last member of the patrol, turned away from the clump of marigold she was examining. Cloudtail let out a snort of disgust. “Every time I come up here, it takes me all day to get the reek out of my fur,” he complained.

Sandstorm rolled her eyes but said nothing.

“You know, there’s something strange about today,” Firestar meowed, glancing up and down the Thunderpath.

“There aren’t any monsters in sight, but the smell’s worse than ever.”

“And I can hear something,” Leafpaw added, her ears pricked.

The wind carried a deep-toned roaring sound toward the group of cats, faint with distance but growing gradually louder.

Cloudtail turned to his Clan leader with a puzzled look in his blue eyes. “What’s that? I’ve never heard…” His voice trailed off and he stood gaping.

Over a rise in the Thunderpath came the biggest monster any of the cats had seen in their lives. Sunlight dazzled off its gleaming body, and its shape rippled in the heat rising from the surface of the Thunderpath. Its throaty roaring grew and grew until it seemed to fill the whole forest.

It came slowly, followed by another and yet another.

Twolegs swarmed over them like ticks, yowling at each other, their words all but drowned by the roar of the monsters.

Then as the leading monster drew abreast of the five watching cats, the unthinkable happened. Instead of going past it swerved, crunched over the narrow strip of grass that edged the Thunderpath, and headed straight for them.

“What’s going on?” Graystripe gasped as Firestar howled, “Scatter!”

He dived for cover into a clump of bracken while his deputy fled deeper into the forest and turned to stare out from underneath a thornbush. Cloudtail shot up the nearest tree and crouched in the fork between two branches, gazing down. Sandstorm headed into a narrow gully with a trickle of water at the bottom, pausing to look back only when she reached the other side, her fur bristling in mingled shock and anger. Leafpaw followed her, and flattened herself in the long grass.

The monster barreled forward on huge black paws that crushed everything in its path. As all five cats watched, frozen with horror, it rammed its shoulder up against an ash tree; the tree shook under the impact, and then, with a shriek like all the prey in the forest dying at once, its roots tore out of the earth.

The tree crashed to the ground. The monster rolled on.

The destruction of the forest had begun.