Written by B. Avar while listening to various rock songs.
Disclaimer! I do not own Wings of Fire or any of the characters contained inside it. If I did, there would be constant cliffhangers. I am only publishing one of my fantasies about what could have happened that we do not see in the books. The hero of another story, if you get what I mean.
But yeah, there would definitely be constant cliffhangers.
Prologue.
It was noon at the post office when a small, unsure Sandwing stepped up to the counter and asked to receive a scroll from the dragon there.
"What do you need it for?" asked the Seawing at the desk. "And what's your name?"
"I'm Dust.", said the Sandwing. "I'm being assigned to the northern front. What's your name?"
"Narwhal. But never mind about that. Exactly where on the northern front are you being assigned to? And why do you need that scroll? Speak up boy. My time is short, and you aren't on my list of couriers. The scroll you are asking for, you do realize, is highly classified information." Narwhal said, adjusting his spectacles. Seawings sometimes needed glasses to see above water.
Dust paled at the words 'highly classified', and gulped, but pressed on naìvely. "I'm being assigned to the northern front by Fort Pitt and somebody told me to carry the mail. I didn't realize it was highly classified."
"I didn't realize it was highly classified, sir, that's what you meant." said Narwhal.
"I didn't realize it was highly classified, sir." sputtered Dust, who was by now thoroughly mollified. "I was just told to bring the mail by the marshal's aide. I'm only six and a half."
"They just keep getting younger and younger these days." muttered the clerk. "What a clueless dragon."
"Huh?" asked Dust.
"Never mind. There are a dozen marshals in this base, I'd like you to know. Do you know which one's aide told you to do this?"
"No sir."
"Then we have a problem. You'll have to stay here until I can find someone who will vouch for you, and I won't have you leaving a moment sooner. Understood?"
"Understood sir." said Dust, his eyes now firmly glued to the floor.
"Good. Now wait here. You don't have any identification, and that makes you suspicious."
"But I'm a private. I'm not supposed to have any identification! I'm not suspicious! I'm only six!" cried Dust.
"Which makes you all the more suspicious. Your youth allows you to slip by anything and everything. No one would suspect a young private to be an agent for Blaze or Burn, no. Except for me. You are the perfect recruit for a nefarious enemy like the Skywings." Narwhal nodded to himself knowingly. "Very suspicious." he repeated. "Highly classified information indeed. Just short of top secret it is."
"Cajun, go find someone who can vouch for this most interesting and untrustworthy fellow." said the clerk to a guard, ignoring Dust's cries protesting his unsuspiciousness. "I'll handle him."
The guard left the lobby of the post office and slipped through the swinging door, leaving Dust to sulk on his feet. There were no chairs in the post office, a victim of the recent cost-cutting. There was nothing to do but wait and see if he could convince the clerk to let him go. A cursory look at the Seawing, however, disabused him of this notion, and he fidgeted while he watched the door, waiting for the guard to come back.
Sweat was forming on Dust's face and he was very nearly hyperventilating when Cajun came back in, leading an unfamiliar and distinctly annoyed looking dragon straight towards him.
"Who is this?" he asked Narwhal when he got there, and all Dust's hopes of being recognized and rescued from the embarrassing situation died a premature death. He turned to Dust.
"It certainly would seem that you've become another unfortunate victim of Narwhal's suspicions. I wouldn't worry about him too much." Dust's hopes, once crushed, now rose again. "But he is right about us not letting just any dragon through with classified papers. I'm sorry, but we'll just have to wait until we can obtain the aide in question. There's nothing else we can do, at least that's not against protocol anyway. This might take a little while."
He sent Cajun back out and mobilized a few more dragons in the search.
In the end it took an agonizing two hours to find the dragon who had given Dust the order, and it turned out that he was in a staff meeting in the intelligence division, and could not be bothered to come out and see the matter until it was finished, which took another two hours. By that time Dust's legs felt completely dead, and he was bored beyond all belief. Finally, after another thirty minutes of finagling and chastisement, he was finally authorized to carry the scroll and proceed to the northern front, not forgetting to grab a mail bag at the front door. By the time he got outside it was twilight, and he was hungry.
He visited the market outside and bought some lizards with the last of his pocket money, then retired to an isolated bench to eat them. Just when he finished his meal he remembered the scroll on which he had wasted an entire afternoon.
For a moment he was tempted to drop it on a cactus and forget about the affair, so frustrated was he. After all, what could be so important about a simple piece of parchment? He brought it out in his claw, poised to let go and let it be trampled by errant passerby, but couldn't. Dust sighed and put it back into his mail bag. He licked the crumbs off his scales and took off.
Such was his first introduction to active service.