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.