Content Warnings for death, decay, and injury

I decided to make my first warriors OCs a few months ago for kicks and giggles and now I’m INVESTED

I’ve been working on this one for a while now! I made the rough version of this video a few months ago, and decided I wanted to try and polish it up a bit. Then, polishing it up turned into... this, I guess! If you notice points where the style of the lineart or designs of the characters shift a bit... those are the points where I picked the project back up again, haha!

Characters are as follows:
Hawkpaw (white w/ black spots)
Puddlepaw (fluffy with dark face/paws/tail)
Whitepaw (white streak on nose)
Mudpaw (“Johnny” aka the one with the black stripes)
Unnamed mentor (half n’ half w/ white)

So the basic storyline here starts with a group of apprentices: Hawkpaw, Puddlepaw, and Whitepaw. Once, when out hunting (i.e. playing), they happen upon a tree that smells of rot. When they decide to dig up whatever has died there, they happen upon a... stash of mutilated birds? They are appropriately confused.

At the same time, we see flashes of the recent past. Mudpaw’s mentor is kiiind of a (massive) jerk, and takes out a lot of aggression on him. As a result, Mudpaw ends up feeling powerless in his situation, and takes out his aggression out on the prey he catches. When that aggression gets to be too much, and the kill is not enough, he mutilates his catches, and then buried the evidence. His clan doesn’t realize just how much hate and resentment he’s bottling up, and this bottled aggression and resentment drives a rift between himself and his clanmates.






EDIT: as they are no longer indicative of the story's direction, I removed the following sentences from the story summary!


[ If left unchecked, he might move on to bigger prey...





Anyway what I’m saying here is that there’s a growing potential serial killer in their clan and no one realizes it. ]