Do you remember when ShadowClan were terrifying? ThunderClan queens used to tell nursery stories about the dark warriors living beyond the border — warriors so mean, so fierce, so dangerous that even to speak their name would send shivers through a kit’s fur. But do ShadowClan still have the power to scare us?

They once drove WindClan from their home. They raised warriors like Brokenstar and took as their leader the first true Warriors villain, Tigerstar. ShadowClan was the darkness that balanced ThunderClan’s light. Indeed, ThunderClan needed that darkness to shine so brightly, and we piled it on in heaps.

The Warriors series are full of dysfunctional families but, with Raggedstar, Yellowfang and Brokenstar, I think we created the most dysfunctional family of them all. A forbidden relationship between a warrior and a medicine cat, a father who forced a mother to reject her kit, and a kit who grew into a warrior so evil he killed his own father and drove his mother from her Clan. Only ShadowClan would produce warriors capable such violence and cruelty.

You could argue that it is not their nature that makes ShadowClan dark, but their leaders. With vicious warriors like Brokenstar and Tigerstar, and weak leaders like Blackstar and Rowanstar, how could ShadowClan ever shine like ThunderClan? Tigerstar led them into battle beside BloodClan, and Rowanstar failed to appease his warriors’ discontent and reign in his defiant apprentices, which allowed Darktail to infiltrate the Clan and tear it apart. Time and time again, ShadowClan warriors have been thrust into war by their leader’s greed and put in danger by their leader’s weakness.

And yet ShadowClan have survived and, the more we’ve delved into their lives among the pines, the more we’ve seen that their warriors could be as noble as any other Clan’s. We’ve learned to respect cats like Crowfrost and Tawnypelt. We’ve grown to love kind and gentle cats like Puddleshine. And forgive cats who have earned some measure of redemption, like Juniperclaw. We’ve witnessed Needletail sacrifice herself to save Violetshine. We’ve followed Tigerheart’s relationship with Dovewing and seen how he was willing to leave his Clan for the sake of love and return for the sake of duty. We watched him rebuild his Clan and become a strong and powerful leader and, in The Broken Code series, under his leadership, we saw ShadowClan stand alone in opposition to the imposter’s evil demands to punish Codebreakers.

Over the past seven arcs, we’ve come to know ShadowClan in a way we never planned when we were writing the first series. We’ve gone into the ShadowClan camp, we’ve told their story and we’ve seen that they are not really any different from any other Clan. They have the same hopes, the same fears. They, like all warriors, follow the Warrior Code, listen to StarClan and try, above all, to become the best warriors they can be. Along with Dovewing, we have settled into ShadowClan, feeling a little out of place perhaps, but nevertheless coming to view it as home.

But are we right to lose our fear of ShadowClan? Didn’t ShadowClan drive SkyClan from their home under Tigerstar’s leadership, just as they had driven out WindClan all those moons ago under Brokenstar? And what if ShadowClan’s motives in standing up to the imposter had not acted out of a deep and abiding belief in fairness and justice? What if they’d simply opposed ThunderClan out of habit because opposing ThunderClan is what ShadowClan always do?