Ternpaw

Ternpaw is currently an apprentice of OrchidClan. A reserved and diffident young tom with a dark past, he spends most of his time poking at plants and insects with little to no company. When he isn't training or going off alone, he can most often be found talking with Aloepaw in the medicine den or trailing along behind his friend Sleepypaw. He's not the greatest conversationalist, but whenever engaged he will do his best to be polite.

## Relationships

### Partner(s)

He has a tiny mini lil itty bitty crush on Sleepypaw rn

### Parents

Lunis (mother, dead) & Snatch (father, irrelevant), also Myrtlepelt (adoptive mom, technically?)

### Siblings

Petrelpaw (brother), Aloepaw (adoptive sister), Auk (bio sister, dead)

## Appearance & Personality

### Appearance

Ternpaw is currently a small and shrimpy little guy. He's short and very skinny, standing at only about 7.4 inches, and most of his bones are still visible through his thin fur no matter how much his Clanmates try to feed him. He's a bit gangly in terms of proportions, with his ears too large for his head, which sits on too short a neck, and his paws are too big for his short legs. He has an oddly long tail that he tends to trip over quite a bit. He keeps the right wing of a painted lady butterfly tucked into the fur around his right ear, a gift from Sleepypaw.

His fur is mostly white, although closer inspection can discern that it's really closer to a very pale creamish off-white color that can only be made out in specific lighting. His ears and the top of his head are a dark shade of near-black, as is the majority of his tail. There are similarly dark spots along his neck, shoulders, and hips. He has bright orange eyes and a wide assortment of scars from both Myrtlepelt and Petrelpaw. The most noticeable are a pair of claw marks on his left cheek, a notch in his left ear, rakings down his right shoulder, cuts along the front of his left forepaw, and a groove across the back of his right knee from Petrelpaw, as well as a set of marks along his left side, a crooked one along his right, two slashes across his chest, and a bite scar near the tip of his tail from Myrtlepelt. There is also a short line on the left side of his neck, a criss-cross on his left hip, and a smaller nick in the side of his right ear, respectively from a weasel, a fox, and an exceptionally angry Steller’s jay.

### Personality

(+): Gentle, polite, thoughtful, intelligent, altruistic

(=): Cautious, resilient, curious, very strong moral compass, focuses on one thing at a time

(-): Jumpy, shuts down easily, gets too stubborn sometimes, low self-esteem, a little overly self-sacrificing

## Biography

### Kithood / Early Life

Tern was born in mid-May to a pair of loners named Lunis and Snatch, the secondborn in a litter of three. His older brother was named Petrel and his younger sister was named Auk, following a seabird theme at their mother Lunis’s suggestion.

1 moon: Vibing. Learning to walk and talk and getting weaned off of milk and such. Tern calls Petrel “Petal” at first because he can’t pronounce the letters yet and Lunis thinks it’s really cute. Tern gets along better with Auk than with Petrel.

2 moons: Shenanigans. Lunis gives Tern an lantana one time and says that it brings out his eyes. He really likes that. It gets squashed by his siblings the next time they’re playing, but hey, it’s the thought that counts. Also, near the end of the moon, Snatch, Lunis, and Auk all get minor colds. Snatch caught it first and ended up passing it to the other two. It’s nothing bad at all, but it does greatly diminish their senses of smell and taste. This becomes important.

3 moons: Snatch brings back a diseased rabbit one day without realizing it was sick. Lunis eats it and so do Auk and Tern while Petrel shares a different catch with Snatch. Tern thinks it tastes weird immediately after taking a bite and spits out his first mouthful without swallowing any, deciding to share Snatch and Petrel’s prey instead. This turns out to be the right decision, because his mom and sister get very sick that night. It worsens over the course of the next morning, and by the next night, Auk in particular is in pretty bad shape. The morning after, she’s dead. Lunis, fearing the same fate for herself, panics and kind of snaps and blames Snatch for it, proclaiming it to be his fault for bringing them an ill rabbit. She tries to attack him, and doesn’t do too well in her weakened state, but it’s enough. Snatch abandons his family and takes off to never be seen again. He was worried that she’d die, too, and he was not about to raise his remaining two kits on his own. Petrel and Tern are devastated and confused, and they have to help their sick mother bury Auk and listen to her tell them that their dad is gone and she’s probably about to die, too. It sucks. Lunis hobbles outside in one last desperate effort to hunt, or to find Snatch, or anything, and she winds up running into Myrtlepelt. Not knowing what else to do, she begs Myrtlepelt to take care of her kids. She doesn’t want them to have to see her die, and she wants to make sure someone will look after them once she does— and this random rogue, as odd as she may look, seems to be the only cat nearby. Myrtlepelt agrees and follows Lunis back to the den, where she is introduced to Tern and Petrel. Lunis says her goodbyes, and the kits unwillingly part ways from her. They’re still grieving and very confused, not entirely following all that has happened in the last few days. It’s a lot for small kits to unpack. Myrtlepelt brings them back to a fox den that she lives in, and they are a little bit flabbergasted to see that she’s keeping the dead fox around to feed from. great. So their new mom is weird and they don’t like her much, plus she’s mean to them. so they sneak out that night, try to find their way back to their old den, get lost and end up spending the rest of the night in a bush that turns out to be poison oak, and continue looking the next morning with a few new rashes. they still dont know where they are, but after getting chased around by a weasel a bit, they realize that they recognize their surroundings. yay. they find their old den! except their mom is already dead in there. oops. they spend the rest of that day just sitting with her corpse and panicking bc they are 3 and they do not know what to do. myrtlepelt finds them and brings them back to the fox den with her. sucks to be them. they both get their first scars from her as punishment for trying to leave: petrel gets a set across his face and tern gets a set on his side. it had been aimed for his face as well, but he’d moved quickly enough to catch it along the side instead. myrtlepelt just laughed at him and commended his agility. ominous.

4 moons: a few days later, Myrtlepelt unexpectedly kicks down the den one night. while tern & petrel were still in it. she was trying to get a feel for their strength, instincts, and survival drive and all that jazz. it goes poorly. they can’t dig themselves out and almost suffocate in the collapse. tern actually passes out bc petrel was climbing on top of him amidst the panic and he couldnt breathe. myrtle pulls them out, yells at them thoroughly, and brings them back to their old den instead. their mom’s body has already been stolen by scavengers, and after myrtlepelt fights a coyote out of it, they move back in. starting the following morning, it gets even weirder as myrtle starts bringing them small animals several times throughout the day and instructing them to kill them in increasingly specific and brutal ways. she refers to it as a type of training, but they just think it’s disturbing. the first time they refuse, Petrel gets a notch in his ear. Tern knows he’s next, and he tries to make a break for it, but myrtle drags him back by the tail and makes him go through with it. petrel gets another notch in his ear a couple of days later after mouthing off one too many times. they both decide that this sucks and they want out, and so one night, they try a second time to escape— but along their way, they come across Aloe with her dead mom and littermates. Tern insists that they take Aloe back to Myrtlepelt so that she doesn’t die. Petrel isn’t keen on this, but he folds and they do so. Myrtle isn’t too happy about it, either, as it turns out, but she does actually go along with it. So that’s good!

5 moons: as soon as aloe is somewhat weaned, myrtle starts focusing her energy on the boys again. now that they’ve honed up their skills a decent amount using small animals, she deems it time for them to move on to larger and more formidable targets: each other. so she has them “practice fight” every day, claws out and everything. Petrel protests this at first and gets a slash across the back of the neck for it. When he has the audacity to try and fight back, Myrtle does not go easy on him and he winds up with some bonus scars on his shoulder and side. It’s not pretty, but it gets the point across. That’s what Myrtle expects to see them do to each other. So they do their best to work around it. They pick points on one another that they will target extensively— Tern’s cheek and shoulder, Petrel’s belly and hips— and try to inflict only minor harm everywhere else. There are exceptions, of course, and they each end up with scars on their paws as well, but the thought was still there. Myrtlepelt doesn’t like them stopping until there’s blood drawn and one of them is exhausted on the ground, so they have to do their best to be subtle. Going easy on each other would warrant negative consequences from their overseer, as Tern learned through a pair of scars across the chest and Petrel learned from a nearly broken leg. Petrel had the advantage in brute strength and endurance, but Tern had the advantage in speed and precision, and they ended up being fairly evenly matched. Myrtle would demonstrate moves and tactics for them to perform on one another, and they did, in fact, learn quite fast. Fear tends to have that effect, as it turns out.

6 moons: After about a moon of that nonsense, Myrtle suddenly stopped bringing back animals for them when she hunted. She didn’t say it out loud, but it was clear that her expectation was for them to get their own. she knew they would not run away, because now when they left the den, they were leaving Aloe with her. Aloe was two moons old now, able to move and speak a bit, and Tern especially found that he was incredibly attached to her. He didn’t want her to have to go through what they were going through, and he put himself through the wringer to defend her whenever he could, forsaking food if it would allow her to have some and other such things. he and petrel would go out and hunt before their practice fights each day, though, and while doing so, they would plan. as soon as Aloe was mobile enough to walk, they decided, they were going to get away. neither of them were very good at hunting— they were essentially just teaching themselves how, after all— but they did their best. Tern would frequently bring back insect wings and pretty leaves to show to Aloe, giving them to Petrel to hide in his thicker fur until Myrtlepelt wasn’t looking. Then he would sneak them into the nest he shared with the other two. They also discovered that bird eggs were a relatively easy treat. Tern was better at climbing trees, so he would roll eggs out of their nests to Petrel, who would do his best to heap up grass and leaves at the base of the tree to catch it. if it didn’t break, they would all have a snack to share (not that Myrtlepelt approved of sharing. they did it behind her back when they were brave enough). He did get divebombed by a couple of angry jays one time, though, nicking his ear, and he fell out of the tree. He ended up landing in the pile of soft stuff that Petrel had put together, though, so it worked out alright. Another time, he and Petrel were accosted by a severely unhappy weasel— likely the same one from several months back— after stumbling upon its winter stash. it gave Tern a scar on his neck, several more to Petrel, and chased them almost back to the den before Myrtlepelt killed it and berated both of them for being wimps. she wouldn’t let them eat any of it, either, and kept it for herself. overall, just not a good time.

7 moons: insanity. Aloe was old enough to be fully functional by this point, but there was a new problem facing their escape plan now: Petrel’s injuries from the weasel had gotten infected. he was having a bad time. He kept up the hunting and training for a couple of weeks, but he kept getting worse and in spite of his protests, it was pretty clear to Tern that he wouldn’t last long if they were to sneak away from Myrtlepelt in his present state. Once it got to the point where Petrel had trouble standing and his wounds started to smell weird, Myrtlepelt decided that he’d fallen off and announced her intention to kill him. Tern, being decidedly Not Keen on That, managed to convince her to hold off for a couple more weeks and give him a chance to find some herbs or something. Not that he had any idea where to start, but what else could he do? And aside from that, Petrel had largely been the one taking the brunt of any physical punishments myrtle dished out; whenever Tern or Aloe would speak or act out and tick her off, Petrel would always intentionally chime in or join them at a much greater scale in order to divert myrtle’s anger to him rather than them. Since he wasn’t exactly in any condition to be doing that now, Tern had to be very careful to watch himself. Also, he had to hunt by himself now. He did his best, occasionally sneaking bits of his catches to Petrel and Aloe, and it was… pretty hard. He came up with nothing more often than not. On one occasion where he almost caught a mouse, he was ambushed by a young fox that, unbeknownst to him, had also been stalking it. It left a few marks on him, but Tern was able to hide from it up in a tree until it took his catch and trotted off. He did have to stay up there until practically nightfall, though, and so his siblings were pretty antsy when he got back. Good job, Tern. But in any case, in order to avoid starving, he wound up resorting to plants. He would test them all first, and after a few frightful encounters with foxglove, nightshade, fly agaric, and sumac, he had a pretty good idea of what was safe to eat and what wasn’t— as well as which plants seemed to have hints of healing properties. he would bring some plants back with him each time he left, he’d explain his findings to aloe, he’d divide up those which were edible (often along with random roots and leaves; he noticed that some of them retained water well, which was very valuable) between the three of them, and then experiment by giving petrel some of the ones that he thought might help with his infection. petrel was not impressed by any of this, but he went along with it, and after a few weeks of trial and error, it actually started to lessen up a bit and he healed. it was marigold and sweet-sedge that did it. woo! oh yeah, and during this time, myrtle was trying really hard to keep up with the training by getting tern and aloe to fight each other, made easier by the fact that petrel couldnt really fight her over it. it still never went over well.

8 moons: petrel continued getting over his infection, and tern started thinking about the best ways for them to leave. unfortunately, he didn’t get much of a chance, bc only about a week into the moon, petrel pulled a stunt of his own. it involved almost getting himself crushed in a tunnel in an attempt to kill myrtlepelt. It didn’t work anyways and nobody was very happy with him about it, but the following day, myrtle decided that it was time for the two of them to fight to the death and get out of her fur anyways. uh. yeah. They didn’t like that idea, either. So they and aloe ganged up and attacked her. All three of them got some neat new scars before Myrtle realized she wasnt gonna get what she wanted and just yelled at them to get out. So they ran for the hills and found OrchidClan. Suncurrent & Lionspark brought them back to the camp and they talked with Leafstar and had their injuries seen to and decided that they probably ought to join, even if just for safety reasons.

### Apprenticeship

Tern, renamed Ternpaw, was apprenticed to a young warrior named Lotusmoon. He was uncertain to begin with, of course, but he did not dislike her.

8 moons (cont)- training shenanigans, bonds some w/ Moonmist while hanging out w Aloe, likes Badger n Mink, kind of accidentally starts to befriend Sleepypaw, HC hike (he n Petrel stayed home)

9 moons- training continues, Moonmist shows him how to make flower crowns, Sleepy gives him the butterfly wing, he wears it, he decides he does like Lotus, things get kinda awkward w Petrel occasionally, rogue war announcement at gathering (they didn’t go)

10 moons- aloe is apprenticed to swallow, tern is massively relieved by this, he also notices that he has a mini crush on sleepy and makes lotus explain what being gay means. good job boy. he also finds a lantana flower and keeps it in his nest. also, he clashes more with petrel. it’s stressful for him :(

## Other

### Trivia

* His voiceclaim is Kaedehara Kazuha from Genshin Impact.
* Ternpaw's favorite color is orange. It brings him back to when he would wait for the sunset every evening, marking when Myrtlepelt would call off their practice fights. His mom also gave him an orange flower once and told him it brought out his eyes.
* His favorite food is... dandelions. Yeah, probably not what you were expecting. Blame Myrtlepelt.
* Ternpaw also quite likes bird eggs, though, and ever since discovering blackberries he’s been hooked on them.
* If he had to pick an actual normal type of prey, he’d go with fish. He’s had a few before and he likes the fins. Yes, the fins. He is not normal
* Ternpaw’s favorite flowers are lantanas. That’s the kind his mom gave him that one time.
* His love language is words of affirmation.
* Ternpaw was Lunis’s favorite kit lol.
* His crush on Sleepypaw is only there bc Sleepy is nice to him and Tern is absolutely amazed by that lol it’ll fade
* Ternpaw is claustrophobic. He’s reasonably traumatized from the incident when he & Petrel were 4 moons old and Myrtlepelt had the den collapse on them. He almost suffocated and he still gets panicky in tight spaces because of it.
* He is very self-conscious about his scars. He’s embarrassed by them and tries to cover them up whenever possible. Whenever he winds up going to a gathering or an event, he’ll do his best to hide them under leaves and feathers borrowed from Sleepypaw’s collections.
* The same goes for his Russian accent, courtesy of Myrtlepelt. Ternpaw developed it worse than Petrel did, and so he has a harder time hiding it. He still tries to, but it’s pretty blatant.
* He is much better at fighting than hunting. He’s gotten better at hunting since he started training in OrchidClan, but it’s still not his strongest suit.
* Ternpaw is also very good at climbing trees. He can’t swim, though. If he ever fell in a river or something, he’d simply just Die.

### Quotes

*"She'll die if we leave her here. She must be cold and hungry."*

***Petrel:*** *"I just don't think it's a good idea..."*

***Tern:*** *"What, d'you think it's a good idea to kill a kit?"*

*"[...] There's no way we're leaving her to die with the rest of her family. She's somehow still alive, and it would be awful to just let her die after finding her."*

*“Shut up about Myrtlepelt, will you?”*

*"Well, would you rather let Myrtlepelt give her a name? [...] How about Shadow? Echo? Mallow? Aloe?"*

*"Aloe? Aw, you're adorable."*

*"You're a good kit. [...] She sort of reminds me of Auk."*

***Petrel (to Aloe):*** *"You'll be living with us now, I guess. Good luck."*

***Tern:*** *"Don't talk like that. We're gonna get out of here with her as soon as we can. You said so yourself, didn't you?"*

**Myrtlepelt:** *“Alright, bring me the brat.”*

**Tern:** *“Her name is Aloe.”*

**Tern:** *"What if - what if... I didn't eat anything? [Petrel] can have everything he catches. I'll go hungry for today, it's fine."*

**Myrtlepelt:** *"That'd be two days in a row without food, little rat. Are you certain you're up for that?"*

**Tern:** *"Yes."*