Long Shadows is the fifth book in the third Warrior Cats series, Power of Three.
Tropes appearing in this book:
- Alliterative Name: The ancient cats Stone Song and Chasing Clouds.
- Ask a Stupid Question...: Lionblaze asks Jaypaw if he's sure he had a vision of a badger. Jaypaw snaps, "No, I'm just making it up for fun."
- Beware the Nice Ones: Ashfur began life as a sweet, shy young apprentice. After being rejected by his romantic interest, Squirrelflight, he goes insane and tries to kill her three kits - one of which is his own apprentice - and reveals that he also had tried to kill her father at the end of the second series, all just to make Squirrelflight suffer.
- Blood Is Squicker in Water: Ashfur's death, since his body was dumped in a stream after his throat was slashed.
- Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Jayfeather and Half Moon. Jayfeather's grumpy and sarcastic; Half Moon is friendly and cheerful.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Ashfur, who was willing to murder four cats (one of whom was his own apprentice) to hurt Squirrelflight — who had rejected him the year before.
- Crisis of Faith: Sol begins to convince Blackstar that StarClan has abandoned them and that leaving the forest was a bad idea, to the point that Blackstar rejects his leader name and refuses to visit the Moonpool or bring his Clan to Gatherings. Lionblaze, Jaypaw, and Hollyleaf fake a sign from StarClan, which turns into a real one when Runningnose and Raggedstar appear.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Ashfur got dumped by Squirrelflight in favor of Brambleclaw back in Sunset. What does he do? He tries to murder her father, the Clan's leader, and get Brambleclaw blamed for it; when that fails, he waits over a year until he has the chance to try again, this time targeting her kits. All because she picked another cat over him.
- Dream Intro: The first chapter starts with Hollyleaf having a nightmare about Sol and her Clanmates wailing in terror.
- Ensemble Cast: The Power of Three arc features three protagonists: Jaypaw, Hollyleaf, and Lionblaze.
- Fantastic Romance: Jayfeather ends up going back in time - to the ancestors of the forest Clans before they even lived in the forest - and falls in love with Half Moon.
- Find the Cure!: A large portion of this book deals with Jayfeather trying to find catnip to cure a recent epidemic in his Clan after his stock was destroyed.
- Gender Bender:
- Hazeltail is referred to as male:
Hazeltail launched himself onto the apprentice, trying to thrust him away from Birchfall.- Dawnpaw has two brothers, Tigerpaw and Flamepaw. There's a scene, however, where it says "Dawnpaw asked her brother and sister."
- Jayfeather gets called female when Brightspirit interacts with him:
Brightspirit stretched out her neck and rested her muzzle against her ear, warming him with her breath. - I Choose to Stay: Jayfeather goes back in time to the ancient incarnation of himself. He first sees it just as part of his duty, to make sure he sets certain events in motion so that they affect the future, but then he falls in love. He wants to stay in that time period, but isn't allowed to because he's still needed in the present day.
- If I Can't Have You…: Averted with Ashfur. He wants Squirrelflight to suffer, so he plans to kill her kits in front of her and let her live with the horror.
- I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Graystripe's deceased mate Silverstream. When Graystripe's second mate Millie and their daughter Briarkit are deathly sick, Silverstream viciously protested this, saying that Graystripe couldn't bear any more heartbreak.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Greencough rages through the camp; Firestar even loses a life to it.
- I Wished You Were Dead: Lionblaze to Heathertail. She doesn't actually die, but Lionblaze spends the majority of the rest of the book being tortured by nightmares about killing her.
- Love Makes You Crazy: Ashfur. After being dumped by Squirrelflight, he attempts to kill her father, and later her (adopted) children, to make her feel the same pain he did. This is excused in a later book as "his only fault was to love too much".
- Love Makes You Evil: Again, Ashfur. The only reason he attempted murder was because he fell in love and got dumped.
- The Migration: Jaypaw discovers that the Ancients went through this, as they used to live at the lake but moved to the mountains and became the Tribe of Rushing Water.
- Not Good with Rejection: Ashfur. He reacts to rejection by deciding that Squirrelflight needs to feel as much pain as he had. He tries to set up her father's death, framing her current mate as a murderer in the process. When that fails, he decides to try killing her kits in front of her.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Broken Shadow and Stone Song's son Fallen Leaves drowned in the tunnels during his sharpclaw initiation. While Stone Song still grieves too, it has left Broken Shadow utterly shattered.
- Passing the Torch: During the time of the Ancients, Furled Bracken stepped down as leader when the cats voted to leave the lake, so that Stone Song, who wanted to leave, could take the lead.
- The Plague: Greencough, a deadly, contagious pneumonia-like sickness.
- Plague Episode: ThunderClan deals with an outbreak of greencough, and for the first time gets the idea to quarantine sick cats.
- The Promised Land: The oldest known group of cats lived around a lake, but human construction work made prey scarce and life difficult. Jayfeather/Jay's Wing promises them that there is good land for them in the mountains; he knows this because he's traveling back into the past and knows that the Tribe of Rushing Water lives in the mountains later and realizes that these cats would become the Tribe.
- Retroactive Precognition: In Long Shadows, a bunch of characters are shocked when the time-traveling main character tells them where humans will build a barn and that off in the mountains there's a place they can live. Turns out that he's just speaking from his own experiences; he's far in the past.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Once again, Ashfur and his attempts at revenge on Squirrelflight.
- Series Continuity Error:
- In Eclipse, Blossomkit has a tortoiseshell pelt with white patches; in fact, she was named because the white patches looked like fallen petals. However, in the Long Shadows Allegiances, she is listed as pale brown with a dark stripe along her spine. This is corrected in later books.
- In the Eclipse Allegiances list, Sol is described as brown-and-tortoiseshell. In the Long Shadows Allegiances, he is listed as a brown-and-white tabby. This is corrected in other books.
- Sick Episode: While sickness appears in the books plenty of times, Long Shadows is one of the more prominent examples: most of ThunderClan became ill with the deadly disease greencough; we see the healthy cats attempting to keep up with all the patrols and hunting, and cat after cat becomes sick.
- Stable Time Loop: In Starlight, the cats find a perfect (and uninhabited by other cats) spot to live. If there had been other cats, they wouldn't have been able to stay there. Later, in Long Shadows, Jayfeather travels into the past and convinces the cats living there to leave for the mountains, which he could not have done had he not lived there. Then, Rock appears and tells Jayfeather that he remembers that Jay's Wing (the cat everyone mistook Jayfeather for) disappeared after the cats left for the mountains. Because of this, he takes Jayfeather back to his own time, causing his memories of Jay's Wing's disappearance.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Ashfur proudly describes his Evil Plan in front of its intended victims, apparently believing that they're too honorable to try and stop him. Guess who turns up mysteriously dead afterwards?
- Switching P.O.V.: Hollyleaf, Jaypaw, and Lionblaze.
- Talking in Your Dreams: Jayfeather makes use of his ability twice: once to enter Kestrelpaw's dream and learn where WindClan has catmint, and once to speak to Ashfur privately and try to scare him into not revealing Squirrelflight's secret.
- Time-Travel Romance: Jayfeather travels to the past taking the place of Jay's Wing who he is a reincarnation of and meets Half-Moon, who is in love with Jay's Wing, and by the time he leaves he realizes that he has some unspecified feelings for her.
- Title Drop: The series name gets one in the prologue: "The power of three is coming, and the Clans must be ready."
- Trapped in the Past: Jayfeather when he goes back to the time of the Ancients and can only go home after influencing them to go to the mountains.
- Treachery Cover Up: Ashfur's treachery is not revealed to the Clan (and not to the other Clans either) after his death, since the last thing that Jay/Lion/Holly and Squirrelflight want is for the truth about their birth to come out.
- Weirdness Search and Rescue: When Jayfeather is trapped in the past with the Ancients, the mysterious cat Rock shows up to take him back to his time period.
- Wham Line: From Squirrelflight: "If you want to hurt me, you'll have to find a better way than that. They are not my kits."
- Yandere: Ashfur is a male version. After being rejected, he decided to pick off his former love's family members so that she could feel his pain.
