"Hey, Eis, are you feeling alright?" Cotinga asked Eis that night, when it was time to go to sleep. Muskrat was already sleeping, his chest heaving rhythmically as he mumbled a few words in his sleep.
"Yes, I'm fine," Eis replied as she waved a talon dismissively.
"Are you sure?" Cotinga said skeptically. "Like, really sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure," Eis said.
Cotinga gave Eis a reluctant look, but then she lowered her head and went to sleep. Or at least, Eis hoped that she was asleep.
Eis stared down at the sketch of a wolf, illuminated by a single candle in the otherwise dark cave. Below the picture was all kinds of fascinating information about wolves. She had just gotten a scroll about canines from the library. Dovekie gladly gave Eis the scroll about canines.
Truthfully, Eis found canines to be one of the most appealing creatures in Pyrrhia. They came in so many shapes and sizes and Eis couldn't help but feel interested and intrigued by them. Not to mention how absolutely adorable they are, which was unfortunate, considering that Eis didn't see them very often in the Ice Kingdom.
But not even the sketch of one of the cutest, most majestic creatures to ever walk the lands of Pyrrhia could subside her frustration.
It felt as if it's been years since they found something that was new and useful. And yet she felt as if she was the only one who was actually trying to do anything about it! And that was absolutely infuriating considering the fact that actual lives were at stake here!
But Eis did have to admit to herself (and only to herself) that there was another reason why she wanted to do this.
She knew that this could actually be a good chance to prove her worth. If she could stop a murder from happening at the school, then that had to be worthy of some praise, right? After all, it did require a certain amount of hard work and intelligence to be able to do something like this.
However, she wasn't sure if her parents would exactly be pleased or impressed in the slightest if she ended up saving a dragon from another tribe, specifically Corona. She knew that they didn't care much for dragons from the other tribes.
Was it wrong for her to hope that the possible victim would be another IceWing?
Okay, yes, Eis answered herself. It really did sound quite wrong now that she thought about it to herself, but if she managed to save another dragon of her own tribe, then maybe it gave her a higher chance of impressing her parents. Even if it was North (who was one of the most annoying dragons in Eis' opinion, so she was glad she managed to get rid of him from her side), Eis would still save him if he was in danger.
But then again, even if Eis did end up saving someone, her parents will most definitely be disappointed in her for allowing herself to be allied with dragons from other tribes. But surely they would have to understand, right? Her parents loved her, and she was almost certain that they would listen to her.
Well, not that they had showed her much affection in the past couple of years, but she knew that they still loved her, and she loved them.
She remembered the first year and a half of her life. She was younger and more naive and optimistic then. Her mother and father showered her with affection and gave her anything she wanted, and they complimented everything she did. Back then was when Eis decided that her parents loved her so much.
But then, after the first year and the half, they stopped showing her so much affection. They started putting so much work on her shoulders and they started to be much harsher and stricter with their teachings. They put a much stronger emphasis on discipline and how important it was for her to succeed.
The change had been so sudden that Eis was hardly able to keep up with all of the work and pressure that was suddenly being thrown at her. She figured that hopefully her parents would figure out that she needed time to adjust to the change and take things one step at a time, and then she would go back to being the spoiled, loved dragonet of theirs, even if she was just a little less spoiled.
But of course that didn't happen.
While she was too slow to handle everything they were throwing at her, they assaulted her with stony, disappointed faces. She remembered the first time she received that look from them. It was horrible. It made her feel a wide pit in her chest that didn't felt so, so wrong. Was this how Aurora felt every second? Surely not, because then surely Aurora would've done something to stop her parents from looking at her that way.
Eis quickly decided that she better shape herself up to the standards of her mother and father or else she would've ended up exactly like Aurora. She was nothing like her sister! Aurora was so disobedient, so uncaring. Eis didn't want her parents to look at her that way.
So she forced herself to push herself past her limits and reach the goals her parents set for her.
And then once again, her parents were back to loving her.
What was she talking about? Her parents just went back to spoiling her. They had always loved her. She just needed to please them, and they would show just how much they truly loved her. Aurora never pleased them or made them happy, which was why they didn't love her and didn't show any love for her.
Her father told her that she was lucky.
Of course, sometimes Sleet and Snowdust would suddenly stop showing her affection and giving her presents. Sometimes they would tell Eis exactly what she did wrong and sometimes they wouldn't. Either way, it was up to Eis to fix herself where she went wrong.
But sometimes they didn't want her to fix herself. When Eis was two years old, she always wanted to be a singer. She wanted to be on a stage, singing to her heart's content. She practiced her singing day and night, and whenever she asked for an opinion from the servant's, they always told her that her voice was beautiful.
Queen Snowdust told Eis that her voice sounded like a walrus being strangled to death and that she should just give up her dream on being a singer. Sleet had agreed, adding in that being a singer was a waste of time for Eis anyway.
So Eis was two years old when she lost her dream.
Not that it mattered much anyway. Even if Eis still sometimes practiced her singing and still felt some desire to sing, her parents were right. Singing wasn't particularly impressive or useful, and she needed to put all of her energy into sharpening her mind and improving other skills such as hunting and fighting.
So she did. As she grew older, her skills grew, but every year it seemed as if her parents' standards grew as well.
By the time Eis had her fourth birthday, her parents were never pleased with what she did. They always had some kind of criticism about her, like "You need to lift your chin higher than that" or "You need to be more swift and more graceful" or "Next time, try to do it faster."
Every criticism like that made Eis feel terrible and vulnerable, and it always made her wonder even more if she was even worth as much as she always liked to say she was. But even if they pointed out the smallest flaw in what she did, Eis would always work to improve herself.
It was like they didn't love or care about her anymore. But they did, didn't they? They always loved her. It couldn't be that they were just pointing out everything wrong about her just to hurt her. They couldn't be doing that just to make her feel weak and worthless. Because she wasn't. She wasn't. Was she? She didn't want to be.
How else could she explain all the days when they showed her that they held so much affection for her? How else could she explain all of the gifts and kind words they had given her on those days?
It wasn't because they thought she was worthless! It wasn't because they thought that everything was wrong with her! They just see a few things wrong and they point them out. They just wanted her to succeed. They just didn't want her to end up as a weakling.
So why weren't they happy with her anymore?
Eis knew at once that it was all her fault.
She needed her parents. She needed them to tell her what she was failing at and she'll do it. She owed them too much. She needed to please them in return for all of the affection that she just knew they had for her.
Her parents loved her too much to be purposefully destroying her like this.
Eis had no one but herself to blame for her thousands and thousands of shortcomings and failures. She had no one but herself to blame when her parents exposed her weaknesses to her and punished her for them.
Everything was her fault. Her parents weren't being unfair.
And perhaps it was because of Eis' many failures that her mother gave her a small mirror when she was four years old. "Look at it every day, whenever you have the chance to," her mother had told her when she gave it to Eis. "Use it to analyze yourself and reflect about everything wrong with you."
Eis took her advice and started to look in the mirror every day just to study her reflection.
A year later, when she turned five years old, she decided that she hated her reflection.
It didn't have too much to do with the way she looked. She knew that she was beautiful. A little bit on the shorter side, but still beautiful. Her white, blue-tinted scales were all perfectly clean and sparkly, and her claws were as sharp as ever.
It was just the look in her eyes that bothered her.
There was just something in those dark blue depths that didn't look right to her. It never matched the way she moved with pride and dominance. There was something in those eyes that looked weak. They didn't look like huge oceans of passion more than small, quiet lakes.
What was wrong with her? That wasn't who she was. She was Princess Eis, heiress to the throne! Well, just as long as her older sister, Aurora, didn't get it first. But then again, she didn't feel as if she had much to fear from Aurora. Her parents always told her that Aurora was weak and worthless and that was why they neglected Aurora, and Eis believed them.
She caught the nasty looks Aurora often sent her way, and Eis usually returned them. She made sure that her look said, "If you're so mad about me getting more attention than you, then why don't you do anything about it? You should've listened to Mother and Father more and did what they asked."
Eis always did what her parents wanted her to do. Eis do this, Eis do that. And she always obeyed without question. True, sometimes she did stray from what they wanted, but most of the time it was on accident. She made sure that they weren't displeased with her for as long as possible before she inevitably made another mistake in the next few weeks or so.
She owed them. She knew that they loved her, and she wanted to let them know that she loved them back.
And the look in her eyes didn't help with that. She hated, hated, hated the look in her eyes whenever she looked at her reflection. Eis wished that she could tear them out herself and replace them with new ones. She was afraid that if anyone looked at her eyes for too long, then they will see every single one of her weaknesses in them.
She wished that she had her mirror now. She wished that she had a way to know if her eyes had changed.
Eis was finally snapped out of her thoughts as she realized that her talons were clutching the paper too hard. She had already made tears in it. Dovekie won't be pleased, Eis thought to herself. Oh well. She could apologize to her when she went to go return the scroll in a matter of a few days.
Right now, she needed to focus.
Eis ignored how tired she was and pushed the sketch of the canine away from her, this time pulling out another scroll and unrolling it. There must be something in here.
Her eyelids began to droop, but Eis quickly blinked them awake. Don't fall asleep now, she thought. She still had enough energy to pull through and get through the rest of the scrolls she picked out from the library to find any sign of useful information.
When was the last time she slept? A few days ago? Eis didn't want to think about it now. It wasn't going to help her very much right now, no matter how exhausted and sleepy she felt in class.
Eis grimaced as she remembered that she had almost fallen asleep during Professor Clam's class. Of course, she had quickly caught herself and forced herself to stay away and absorb everything that Professor Clam was teaching them. She knew the kind of lecture she would receive from her parents if she fell asleep in class.
She certainly wasn't going to fall asleep now.
After finding absolutely nothing in the scrolls that she had read last night, Eis was feeling more than a little frustrated. She was currently in Professor Singe's class, writing down notes to the best of her ability, forcing herself to listen to every single word of the teacher's lesson.
She was working hard.
Yet the moment she gave a sideways glance to see what Robin was doing, she saw him messing around instead of doing his work.
Eis narrowed her eyes at Robin as he showed Dolphin a ridiculous doodle that he had quickly drawn on his paper, and Dolphin snickered and showed Robin what he drew during class even though he was supposed to be taking notes.
Then, of course, later that same day she had to help Muskrat with his reading skills. He had asked her yesterday and Eis, being the kind dragon that she was, agreed to help. Had Eis been in a better mood today, she would've been more pleasant in Muskrat's company while trying to help him, but of course she wasn't, and that ended up with her giving a grumpy, sub-par apology to an upset MudWing.
During lunch she went to go check if her friends were doing what they were supposed to be doing (which meant putting more effort into investigating the mystery), and surprise surprise, they weren't!
Eis was almost sure that if any of these dragons had her parents, then they would constantly be disappointing them.
Well, Yerba, Dolphin, and Robin would, at least. Eis acknowledged the fact that Stormseeker seemed far more responsible than those three dragons combined. She managed to find Stormseeker reading through scrolls in the library earlier today and he told her that he was just reading through some scrolls to see if he could find anything useful, just like what she expected him to do.
She had found the other three just walking down the mountain corridor as they laughed and exchanged bad jokes with one another. They were acting as if there wasn't anything bad or possibly catastrophic that might happen, which only pushed her irritation.
Needless to say, this was the last straw for her.
"What do you think you're doing?" Eis demanded as she approached them. The three dragons stopped talking at once and turned around to look at her. Eis noticed Robin deflate as he saw her. Good.
"Um...we're talking?" Robin said. "We're talking about a lot of things! So maybe we're not talking about everything and by that I mean we're not talking about every subject in the world, but we're still talking about….stuff! Good stuff! Ehe….yeah, we're just talking."
"Oh, yeah, you're talking alright," Eis snorted. "About things that aren't important! Have you guys been trying to find out who's the murderer, when they're going to attack, and who's going to be killed if we don't do anything about it right now?"
Robin's shoulders somewhat slumped, but he still kept his eyes on her. Eis wanted him to keep them down. She wanted to know if he felt ashamed of slacking off, which he probably wasn't right now.
"Look, Eis, we've been trying our best," Yerba replied. "But we haven't found much yet. We decided that we should, y'know, slow down. We've been working to find out as much as we could about this."
"And just how hard have you been working?" Eis asked sternly.
"Very hard!" Robin promised. His tail started to shake. "We're putting so much effort into this investigation but you know, with school and the fun dragons and the stress that comes with working into this, it just kind of gets hard to keep putting in that much amount of effort! I mean, not that I want to get lazy of course! I was actually planning to—"
"I don't want to hear your excuses!" Eis snapped. "You three have been fooling around for far longer than you needed to!"
"Jeez, Eis," Dolphin mumbled. "You know, Robin is kind of right. We can't focus on this one case for too long or else we'll just get way too stressed out. Besides, I really think that we should let Robin finish what he was going to say because—"
"Because what? Because he was going to suggest to go out and talk this out over a few chickens?" Eis interrupted. "Because that certainly sounds like it'll be a load of help."
"I know, Eis," said Robin dejectedly. "But really, I was going to—"
"Stop," Eis said quickly. "I don't care what you have to say. I don't want to hear it. If you're going to do something useful, then you're going to do it now or I'll make you!"
"Eis, calm down!" Yerba exclaimed. "None of us have done anything wrong yet, and especially not Robin."
"Really?" she demanded. "He didn't do anything wrong?"
"Don't you remember that I first found out about this?" Robin asked. He shifted his talons a little bit. "That has to count for something, right? Well, sure, it was by pure accident, but I still found out about it first, right? And wasn't I the one who also found out that our professors were in it, too?"
"That doesn't matter now!" Eis retorted. She knew that it really was true, but it really didn't matter now, did it? "You may have done it before, but you aren't doing it now! You've only do a little bit for us and then slack off for the rest of it!"
"Whoa, Eis, where is all of this coming from?" Dolphin asked.
Eis knew that she was just in a bad mood today. She hadn't slept in quite a while and with all her frustration in not making much further progress, she knew that she was frustrated. But at the same time, she surely had a point here, right? Here she was, working hard, while these three were only wasting time.
And she knew that this was not the kind of company that her parents would want her to keep. If she was going to be in a group with dragons from other tribes, then they would've wanted her to make sure that her multicolored allies were respectable and responsible. Yerba, Dolphin, and Robin were certainly not the kind of dragons they wanted her to be involved with.
But now what could she do? She was stuck with this group and if her mother and father ever found out about them, then they would never show her any love again. Not like the way they did when she was younger.
It was already hard enough to earn their approval, and she didn't need anything to make that even more impossible than it is now. If her parents found out now, then they would lose any love or respect that they had for her and they'll see her as just as worthless as Aurora.
There was no thought that terrified Eis more. Her parents were the most important figures in her life and she wanted them to love her. Please don't hate me, she thought as an image of her mother and father popped into her mind. I'm sorry if I'm disappointing you by doing this, and I know that I hardly do anything right but I'm trying. Surely you must understand.
Are you watching me somehow? Are you disappointed or proud that I'm working so hard to solve this? Or do you think that I've failed all over again?
What would make you happy?
"Why does it matter to you?" Eis asked in a hostile voice.
"Please, we're your friends," Robin replied. He looked down, not meeting her eyes. "We're trying to help each other and if there's anything wrong that's causing you to say this, then we can fix it."
"The only thing wrong here is you!" Eis snapped at him. "You're treating this just like a joke, aren't you?"
"Of course I'm not!" Robin cried. He lifted his head to look at her in the eyes again. "But, you know, I just get caught up in other things, like hanging out with friends and—"
"Friends?" Eis said. How can Robin think about friends at a time like this? At a time where he needs to be doing something productive? And how dare these dragons encourage him, too. "Surely these aren't real friends! These are only dragons who pity you!"
"Pity me?" Robin asked, disconcerted. "Pity me for what?"
"For everything!" Eis answered loudly. "I bet that they must know something about you, huh? Something that makes them pity you. Clearly they know that you're a foolish, less-than-mediocre dragon who won't ever go anywhere in life because he's lazy and immature! You are only an emotional charity case and a burden to everyone you come across and that's all you'll ever be!"
Eis took a moment to breathe, and then she glared at him. "Why did your parents keep you?"
Robin flinched, and Yerba immediately went to stand in front of Eis, glaring down at her. Eis didn't back away. She tried to ignore how much larger and stockier Yerba was than her.
"Back off," Yerba growled at her. "I don't know what's got you all riled up like this, but this isn't okay!"
"I'm just telling him how it is," Eis spat.
This time, Yerba grabbed her by the arm and she began dragging her towards somewhere. Eis was startled by the sudden movement and she knew that Yerba wouldn't let her go. She knew that she probably couldn't escape from her grasp, either.
Almost at once, the worst case scenarios began to fill up Eis' mind. What was Yerba planning to do? Surely a SandWing like her is planning something awful. Maybe she was planning to stab her with her tail barb for what she said to Robin.
Oh, if her parents ever found out that she was killed by a measly SandWing then they might as well just throw her body into the ocean instead of giving her a proper funeral. Maybe—
Yerba dragged her into a cave, and Eis looked up. It looked like many of the other caves that the winglet dragonets had to sleep in, and then she realized
It became clear to Eis what Yerba's intentions really were.
"Alright, so now that we're here," Yerba said sternly, "let's talk."
A/N: I hope you enjoyed this bonus scene! Part two will come later, I promise. I also promise that eventually there are going to be bonus scenes in the POV from the rest of the Falling Five. Writing from Eis' POV was a bit of a challenge for me since I wanted to put some complexity into her thoughts, and I also didn't want to make her too unlikable. What do you think? Reviews are highly appreciated!
