The drowsy hour. The hunts are done. The borders are patrolled. There is nothing that needs doing and every cat knows it. The main chamber is warm — genuinely warm, the particular warmth of a sheltered valley in summer when the sun has been working on it for hours. The dappled light through the tulip poplar canopy is at its most complex and beautiful, green-gold moving across the floor as the leaves shift in whatever air exists above the cove.

Cats are draped across root-surfaces in postures that suggest they have achieved a level of comfort the architecture itself conspired to provide. The apprentices are nominally supposed to be practicing something. They are not practicing anything. Someone is grooming someone else's ear, slowly, in the way that means they've been doing it for a while. Kits fall over for no reason and act like they meant to.

The second fog surge. Crepuscular — this is the hour MistClan is built for, the second rush of activity after the slow midday. The fog comes back as the sun pulls off the cove, rising rather than seeping, filling from the top of the low places down. The light goes amber and then rose and then the specific grey-amber that is dusk in MistClan territory: warm but going.

The herb garden is most fragrant at dusk — the warmth of the day releasing the scents upward as it dissipates. This is the hour Fennelheart tends his patches. This is also the hour the creek sounds slightly wrong, if you're listening. The wrongness is not dramatic. It is subtle enough that only Nettleclaw and — later — Glorypaw notice it.

The cove canopy is genuinely dark at night. Not the comfortable dark of a room with curtains — the dark of a place where light doesn't exist. The tulip poplars close over everything. In Cleartime, on a full moon, there are fragments of silver in the gaps, but they're fragments. In Stillsea the dark is total.

What remains is sound. The creek more prominent than it is in daylight — not louder but more present, because everything else that was competing with it has quieted. The rustle of something small in the undergrowth. The distant call of a great horned owl, which means every kit knows to stay still. A cat's breathing next to you, which you can hear clearly because you can hear everything clearly. The specific creak of a root settling.

Glorypaw, in the middle of the book, lying awake in the deep night of the main chamber, listening to the creek. The sound is wrong. She knows it's wrong. She has known it for three moons. She doesn't say anything. She lies there in the dark that her whole body knows how to be in and listens to the water doing the thing water isn't supposed to do.

The fog is thick but the sun takes it by mid-morning. The smell of the cove in Burnoff is the cove at its most itself — wet soil warming, the first plant growth, the mineral smell of limestone more present after the snowmelt, the green beginning everywhere simultaneously. Deeproot blooms. The herb garden wakes up. Fennelheart is out early every morning checking patches.

Fog only at dawn. The cove in full voice — insects, birds, the creek at its most musical. The light through the tulip poplar canopy is green-gold, dappled, at maximum complexity. Heat collects in the valley floor. Everything slows in the middle of the day.

The canopy releasing. Light that was filtered becomes direct in patches. Amber-grey mornings. The fog staying longer. The smell of fallen leaves accumulating on the Bower floor. Apprentices are on leaf-clearing duty, which they find boring and which is actually one of the most important things they do.

The Deepening is when Amberpool notices things most clearly. The long dataset she carries gets a new entry. This year's version of each observation. Whether it matches the previous year's version. Whether something is running slightly differently than it was.