A/N: Well, I didn't get this up before Sunday (I did say maybe last chapter), but this chapter is extra insanely long in consolation. (10,000 words!? I don't even know what to think about that.) Now, before I say anything more, I'm going to say this: This is a long chapter, but a good portion of its insane length actually comes from the [I actually lost track and I'm too lazy to go word count this; I think it's ~3000] word Author's Note at the end. So I'm not going to say anything more up here. Nothing. If you want to read an Author's Note, wait until the end of the chapter.
There was a Rainwing, Clay knew, on that dragonbark. The Rainwing's camouflage actually wasn't that good, but Clay figured that that was the point; that dragon was probably the one Jambu had ordered to be spottable. The other Rainwings had been ordered to make themselves harder to find, such as the Rainwing Clay was pretty sure was only about two dragon's lengths away from him. That dragon was literally just standing in front of him, not on a tree or behind a shrub, just on the ground. Clay had missed the Rainwing at first, however; the camouflage displayed by the dragon was exceedingly impressive and almost flawless. The Mudwing had only caught sight of the Rainwing when he saw that giveaway of wavering light in a vague, dragon-like shape. And Clay was also pretty sure there was another Rainwing closer to the top of the canopy. There was just a slight inaccuracy with the way a certain spot's leaves looked, which gave the dragon away. According to Jambu, there should be one more…
There. The dragon had placed itself in between the leaves and the bark of the same tree, half suspended in the air, making the display of camouflage impressive with its intricacy. There were flaws, though: Some of the leaves were textured oddly, and the camouflage didn't match up perfectly with its surroundings, especially near the edge of the dragon. Clay nudged Jambu, who was quietly standing beside him, and then pointed, one by one, to where he believed each hidden Rainwing was.
Jambu nodded after each point, until he said, after the fourth, "Perfect. That's about three and a half minutes—not bad at all. I say you should do a couple more rounds of this, though. It's exceedingly important for you to be able to detect hidden Rainwings. You can wait over there while we set up a new test."
At this, all four Rainwings Clay had found flashed back into view and half-jumped, half-flew back down towards Jambu (except the one already on the ground, who just stepped forward). Clay moved away while all the Rainwings huddled together so that the group could talk about more ways to test Clay's newly-developed Rainwing detection skills. It wasn't necessarily a new concept; Clay had heard about Rainwing detection tactics before coming to the rainforest. The Nightwings, likely under Fierceteeth, now that Clay was thinking about it, had given out large amounts of information about Rainwings after Mangrove and other Rainwing Talons started to become threats towards Burn's forces; therefore, Clay had heard of the standard strategies of "look for inaccuracies in the scenery" and "look for wavering light." He had never put these tactics into practice, though, and now that he was trying to, he was finding that seeing past Rainwing camouflage was a lot harder than the scrolls—and Deathbringer and Beetle, during their confrontation with the Tears of the Rain—made it out to be.
Jambu had attempted to encourage Clay by assuring him that detection wasn't easy, and that dragons often had to practice for weeks before becoming proficient at the skill. But that encouragement didn't really comfort Clay, considering that he had to learn the skill by tonight, in order to be ready for the night's battle. If it took Clay minutes to find a hidden Rainwing when he was just standing still and focusing on the task, then how in Pyrrhia was he supposed to find a hidden Rainwing in the middle of a frantic battle with the Tears of the Rain? How was he supposed to avoid another disabling venom strike from a Rainwing if he couldn't see them? The answer, simply, was that he couldn't, so Clay knew that he had to listen to Jambu and keep practicing.
At least, unlike every other member of his troop sans Reed, Clay didn't have to go back and re-practice tree gliding, his evil arch-nemesis (other than Scarlet and the like, of course), and, as another point of relief, crossbow firing had been deceptively easy. Reloading the weapon was the hardest part; all firing detailed was a simple process of lift, cradle the thing and aim, then pull the trigger and brace for the kick. Clay hadn't had much issue with using it. Most members of Clay's troop hadn't had any issues with it, actually, except for Marsh, who hadn't been able to hit anything until the Nightwing crossbow teacher had come to Clay's brother's side and put the weapon in his other claw, telling Marsh "to use the other eye when you fire." It had seemed like a strange order at the time, but it had somehow managed to work, and Marsh was soon firing the crossbow as well as any other Mudwing from Clay's troop.
Of course, Jambu had told them, it wasn't likely that Clay's troop would be given crossbows this night, as the weapons were considered too valuable to be allowed to leave the rainforest, especially due to the fact that the Nightwings apparently had snuck an earlier model off on Scarlet, and the tribe wanted to keep the newer versions secret. However, Jambu had said that if any Mudwing got the chance, they would be allowed to temporarily pick up a discarded or ownerless crossbow and use it as if it was theirs, as long as it was dropped again before the weapons left the rainforest.
The main issue for Clay, actually, was the rundown he had gone through over melee combat. Fighting a Rainwing was completely different than fighting a Seawing, Icewing, or Sandwing. The ranged venom spray was always the most dangerous attack possible from the dragon; most other attacks would be negligible in comparison. Fighting one of the previously pacifistic dragons required almost dancing outside their venom range until an opportunity for attack presented itself. But Clay's problem wasn't really with the new fighting style; Clay's problem was his back, which he had quite quickly found out was not better.
If Clay could flawlessly dodge every attack during a fight, then the pain in his back was limited to a constant, yet minor irritation. But at one point during fighting training, Clay had jumped backwards, rearing up to avoid a blunted attack coming from one of the trainers, and he had accidentally crashed back-first into a tree. Clay had literally shrieked and fallen back down without defense when he had slammed into that bark; it had felt like something sharp and spiky had impaled him, except that actually being impaled would probably have been less painful. The wound was a gigantic weak spot, and Clay had to remember to cover it and not let anything touch it.
Clay took another step away from Jambu and the other Rainwings and made it into a patch of sun that came shining down from the canopy above. Clay sat down, letting the light shine on his scales while he glanced around. The wall, as promised, was only yards away, where unfatigued Rainwings and crossbow-holding Nightwings stood watch. Opposite the wall was a small space of rainforest before the land transitioned into the war zone Clay had run through on his way to the castle. Clay could see Crane, who was almost directly above him, managing to tree glide through those standing rainforest trees relatively easily. Umber and Pheasant were up there too, if Clay remembered right. Their attempts at tree gliding were going a lot closer to Clay's early ones, as the eldest Mudwing saw, from the corner of his eyes, when Umber suddenly slammed into the ground from above, kicking up dirt and rolling for a good couple of seconds before dizzily regaining his feet. Then there was Marsh, trying to find more hidden Rainwings over with another Rainwing general, keeping his eyes on a spot above him like he was trying to decide if a discrepancy was, in reality, a disguised dragon. And Sora was with Reed and the Nightwing crossbow teacher, both of Clay's siblings holding crossbows in their claws, both slightly hovering in the air within a relatively clear space that had been designated as "the firing range."
There was a somewhat large purple fruit on a wooden stand in that space, and Clay saw Reed lift up and aim his crossbow at it. The Nightwing instructor gave the order to fire, and Clay's brother let his arrow fly. The projectile slammed through the fruit, never even slowing down, and the fruit was annihilated. Red juice exploded out of it, coating both the stand and the surrounding rainforest with crimson. It was almost as if, Clay visualized with a twinge, a small dragon had exploded in front of him, leaving blood everywhere. That kind of power—it could slaughter dragons, like they were nothing more than that fruit. And Scarlet had that power in her claws, and she could use it to massacre his tribe. Dragons would die, just like before, and their corpses would fill the battlefields by the dozens or by the hundreds, just like before, and Clay, even if his troop wasn't going to go back home to Moorhen and were going to instead join the Outclaws, which was starting to look like a better and better possibility with Scarlet on his queen's doorstep, he would still have to fight, just like before, and that meant that he'd have to—
Clay suddenly realized what his brain was doing when he noticed that he was breathing heavily, and that he was starting to shake. The Mudwing tried to rationalize, but it was too late: The memories of war were coming back. Flashes of dragons he had been talking with just seconds before suddenly dying next to him, flashes of one of his siblings almost getting speared, clawed, or burnt to death, and then came the flashes that Clay hated, the flashes Clay was petrified of, the flashes of them.
The Icewing always came first. Always. Not the one who had almost killed Crane that same day, but a different one, although she had still been female, and had still been young. Crane's near-death experience had enraged Clay that day, although not because someone had tried to take the life one of his siblings, and not because someone had tried to kill sweet, innocent Crane. The fact of the matter was that the Mudwings were at war, and dragons were going to die, and there could have been acceptance and forgiveness and the thought, "That dragon who killed Crane—they were just following orders, and they didn't want her dead any more than we did," no matter how much not having Crane next to them would truly hurt inside. No, what had enraged Clay was Crane's attacker's reaction: After the Icewing fell down towards Crane with the clear intent to kill, and after Clay had forgotten everything around him and forced himself towards his sister, and after the Bigwings had slammed the Icewing away right as her claws were shooting towards his sister's throat, the Icewing recovered and retreated from Clay and the other members of his troop, but not before she hissed towards Clay's youngest sister, as clear and as chilling as ice, as feral as a beast thirsty for blood, and so angry that Clay couldn't even conceive a comparison, "You got lucky, Mudwing. If we meet again, you won't be, and I will kill you." As if that Icewing had wanted to kill not to defend herself, not because she was following orders, but because she took pleasure in the act.
Clay had found himself furious as the Icewing had flown off, furious at the fact that there were dragons who could be so psychopathic as to want war, as to want to kill, and at the fact that dragons like the ones in his troop were being dragged into these dragons' war. Then his thoughts turned hypocritical: Clay wanted to fight these dragons, he wanted to protect his siblings from them, and he would do anything to further that goal. Clay's fury started to empower him, and dragons began backing away from his siblings faster with this fury commanding him, so Clay had forced himself to let anger, an emotion uncommon but nowhere near unknown to the Mudwing, take over. So when Clay had engaged that Icewing, the one who had looked so much like the dragon who had almost killed Crane, he had been uncontrollably inflamed. He had also been dislocated, as war had slowly overwhelmed him, with nothing but its death and blood and crying surrounding him. Clay had gone into that fight only half-believing that he was really fighting for his life in a war, only half-believing that the dragon he was battling was real, only half-believing he was even capable of doing what he was about to do. Clay had hit the Icewing in front of him with an unexpected attack, knocking her the slightest bit into the air and off-balance. Clay could have slammed into her again, pushed her down, and then he could have overpowered her, still winning the fight by quickly smashing her head against the ground and knocking her unconscious.
But Clay hadn't done that. The Icewing's defenses fell, and Clay didn't think. He followed his years of military training. His next action was only habitual, as if that could nullify the terribleness of it: Clay had clawed forward, and he had torn the Icewing's throat out.
After that, Clay had almost shut down. It only took about a second; it only took Clay seeing the Icewing's throat pouring out icy blue blood, and Clay seeing that same blood already drying on his own claw, for his brain to start connecting things and for the empowering and blinding rage to vanish. Clay remembered everything, even at present: stepping back from the Icewing, whose eyes, the eyes of someone who was just another dragon, were wide open with shock, that same crushing shock that Clay was feeling. Beginning to panic, feeling as much terror as the dying dragon in front of him. Watching the Icewing sway, her arm only making it halfway to her blood-covered and blood-pouring throat before she fell, hitting the ground with a thud that Clay could hear clearly, the only thing he could hear clearly, despite the deafening sounds of war around him. Her twitching, then her movements ending forever, because of him, because of Clay. Losing his innocence and becoming a killer. Not being able to handle it. Shaking. Falling apart. Hyperventilating on the battlefield. Older Mudwings pushing him back, yelling at him to get a grip on himself before he was killed. Forcing himself to regain himself. Forcing himself to remember that his siblings needed him, and that he couldn't just stand here, die, and leave them in the middle of war. Jumping back into war, leaving the dead Icewing behind like she had just been another part of training. Trying to lessen the blow, trying to tell himself that he had been forced to do it, that he had been in war and that he had needed to do it, that the Icewing would have killed him if he hadn't killed her.
Cuddling alone with Asha that night, crying, literally crying about what he'd done, wanting to believe that it would never happen again, swearing to himself that it would never happen again, knowing that he could never bring himself to do it again.
Clay had been very wrong.
A Sandwing, scales burning as she screamed and turned to ash. A Seawing, his stomach ripped open in a massive gash, the dragon clutching it as he futilely tried to contain the blood and organs and life within. Another Icewing, one whose wing got caught in a burst of flame during a mid-air battle and who fell, that wing useless, farther and farther away, out of the sky and towards the ground, where he slammed into it and never left. Another Seawing, older and fiercer, who had come in an ambush, who Clay had almost been speared through the head by, and who Crane had jumped on, distracting him for long enough to Clay to counter back, slash the aquatic dragon's chest into nothing, and end his attacker's life.
Clay had never lost himself to the point where he would allow himself to simply kill without thinking, but there had been a point, a horrifying point, when Clay had realized that killing was becoming easier, that dragons he fought no longer had distinction, that thinking of the enemy like they weren't other dragons had become second nature on the battlefield. Burn had been killed before Clay could completely lose his morals, however, and because of this, each death that he had caused still stuck out like a fire in his mind. A Sandwing that Reed, Umber, and him had all surrounded and then clawed to death once the Sandwing's deadly counters failed. A Seawing, who Clay had been forced to strangle because she just wouldn't stop fighting, and Clay hadn't been able to think of anything else to do, so he had squeezed her throat and had fought off the struggles and hadn't thought and had just kept squeezing until he had realized that her breathing was over. An Icewing, who had been hit by two simultaneous bolts of fire by both him and Sora, who Sora had sworn afterwards had almost melted in front of them. More fires in Clay's mind. More deaths. More dragons gone forever, because of no one else but him.
He didn't enjoy it; he hated it. But Clay had grown up in war. Asha had drilled it into the whole troop, but especially into the relatively soft-hearted Clay: Sometimes there wasn't time to talk. Sometimes there wasn't time to feel guilt or aversion or humanity; sometimes killing was unavoidable. Other dragons had whipped Clay's compassion away, too, by telling him that "they" aren't dragons, that "they" are enemies. Objects. Obstacles. Things. And Clay knew what happened to dragons that didn't fight: They died. Clay had seen entire troops, oftentimes the ones comprised of the friendliest and the most peace-loving Mudwings, killed from one single ambush. And yet, even though Clay knew he'd do anything, anything, for his siblings, he wanted to promise himself that he'd never kill anyone. He wanted, when he was a dragonet, to think that there was a way to talk, a way to compromise, a way in any fight for both dragons to come out alive. Then Crane almost died, Clay forget those vows in the chaos of war, and then the promise was broken. And as the war dragged on, Clay started objectifying his enemies, starting forcing himself to hate the dragons he was fighting like they didn't have mates and friends and families just like he did, and started turning from a peace-loving and caring Mudwing into a nothing but a killer whenever he was forced onto the battlefield.
Clay closed his eyes and breathed, suddenly feeling very cold despite the heat of the rainforest. He didn't want to kill anymore. He had thought that he wouldn't have to kill anymore. And now he was back at war, the only difference being his opponents and his allies. Was that even a real difference? It would still be like before: every day going by with Clay unsure if all his siblings, all the dragons he loved, would still be alive the next. Every day going past always with the mention of more death, more blood, and more horrors. Every day leaving Clay wondering if the war would ever end, if he'd ever be safe, or if the war would go on forever, and if Clay could only leave by letting death take him.
"Hey, are you okay?" Jambu's voice, concerned, suddenly asked. Clay was roughly reminded that his thoughts had sent him into a shaking fit when the Rainwing broke Clay out of his thoughts and brought the Mudwing's attention to his own shuddering body. Half of Clay wanted to chide himself for his breakdown; he wasn't even on the battlefield yet. How was he supposed to survive and lead his troop if he started falling apart on the training ground?
The other half of Clay's thoughts, however, matched up with what Jambu clearly thought when he had taken a better look at the Mudwing and seen Clay's uncontrollable trembles: The Bigwings needed help. Jambu shook away the few inquisitive Rainwings that had come with him, talked softly towards Clay, and offered the Mudwing his tail for support. Clay curled his own tail around Jambu's and just breathed, trying to calm down. "Clay, you'll be fine," Jambu supported in a quiet tone, "and your troop will be fine, too. None of you are going to die, okay? I won't let it happen."
"Thank you," Clay managed, quickly, before making himself take slow breaths, feeling a bit better from Jambu's comfort. He squeezed Jambu's tail, trying to force his worry out on it. Eventually, Clay, feeling a little better, tried to elaborate on his condition, but all that came out was, "It's just..." Clay stopped; his voice wasn't cooperating, so the Mudwing calmed himself further before he said, "I'm just worried about everything. I'm worried about dying. I'm worried about my siblings dying. I'm even worried about other dragons, even the ones from the Tears of the Rain, dying. I don't want to fight, Jambu. I don't want to go to war. But what else can we do?"
"Exactly," Jambu replied, quietly. "Blister, Scarlet, Glory… they've all forced our claw." Then Jambu's words stopped, and the Rainwing stared out into the rainforest and destroyed village beyond, only breathing, his scales still controlled, although Clay thought he saw some flashes of blue or grey shine through them. Then Jambu gave a final squeeze back on Clay's tail and uncurled his own, letting the now calmer Mudwing go.
"No," Jambu restated, distantly, confusing Clay until he realized that the Rainwing was repeating his earlier promise. "Clay, I'm not going to let any one of you die. Because I know how absolutely destroying it is to lose someone close."
"What do you mean?" Clay asked, not thinking too clearly, his brain still foggy from his minor panic attack. It only took Clay a second after the sentence had left to realize that Jambu had probably been talking about Glory—his sister, if he recalled correctly.
But Jambu did something surprising in response to Clay's question. He wasn't direct, and didn't just state, "Glory." He wasn't circuitous, and didn't just mumble, "My sister—she... she's gone now." He just started talking. "Glory and I," he muttered, looking out to the rainforest for just a second more before he turned towards Clay, clearly not finished with his speech. "We… when..." Then Jambu stopped, Clay saw the smallest release of emotion reveal itself in the Rainwing's scales, and then Jambu took a breath and started again.
"Glory and I grew up together," Jambu stated, calm, yet melancholic. "The Rainwings didn't start keeping track of which dragonet was theirs, who was whose cousin or sibling or anything like that, until Fierceteeth came in and started forcing us to, in order to moderate our numbers better. So I didn't know she was my sister at first, when she crawled out of her newly-broken egg, and when I was just a dragonet. And yet, we still became friends almost right after she hatched… best friends. The only thing that changed when I found out that she was my sister was that all our potential mating prospects with each other disappeared. We were literally already doing everything else together.
"And I mean everything, Clay." Jambu stopped a bit here, letting his scales start showing a bit more of that blue-grey that had rushed through him before—emotion Clay hadn't truly been aware the Rainwing had been hiding. Jambu continued, "We would talk together, tree glide together, lay in the sun together, play together, sleep together, and comfort each other after anything bad—nightmares, mainly—happened. However," Jambu suddenly turned the slightest bit of pink as he chuckled the smallest amount in remembrance, "I have to say that we were quite the odd pair. I was the sleepy one, the one who preferred sun time to exploring the forest, the 'Glory, just twenty more minutes of sun...' kind of dragon—the stereotypical Rainwing. Glory was different. She was the mischievous one, the one who the adults disliked but who all the dragonets loved, the one who would always push us to do more than sleep, the 'Oh, come on, Jambu, just one more race around the rainforest!' kind of dragon—a Rainwing that could have been amazing if the world had let her.
"No, not 'she could have been amazing.' She was amazing," Jambu corrected himself, the pink fading back into blue-grey around now. "She'd do all sorts of spectacular things for our tribe. She was helping build gardens and even new houses when she was hardly two. She'd never leave a dragon in need; she'd hand over her own fruit if need be to keep another Rainwing happy. And she was motivated, Clay. She wanted to learn about Pyrrhia, when most Rainwings didn't even care about the rainforest around them. She would purposely miss parts of sun time every now and then to talk with our older queen, Grandeur, about some of her stories from the days of old. She was unlike so many of us that a very small few of the nastier Rainwings would actually make fun of her and call her weird. Glory didn't care; all she wanted was to make us a fantastic tribe again, and she was determined to do that no matter what anyone thought. She wanted to fix our overindulgence of sun—I remember her telling me that we could do so much more if we would get out of the sun for just a couple hours each day. She wanted to go out into Pyrrhia and show the dragons outside of the rainforest all that the Rainwings could do. She wanted to do, and probably could have done, more for the Rainwings than a whole group of other queens could do at once. Clay, she loved the entire tribe, and she just wanted to better it.
"That's not to say that she never had fun," Jambu stated, chuckling the smallest bit, although again in a bittersweet tone, as the hint of pink came back. "Three Moons, Glory was always having fun. She was always swinging around the trees, always practicing her camouflage so she could get better at our games of hide-and-seek, always playing in the rainforest with her friends—not just me, because despite all her quirks, she was still very popular among us young dragons. She was always laughing, always so fulfilled, always so playful, always so… happy, I guess. Always, in her 'oh, Three Moons, come on' tone, 'Sun time's great, but I don't want to sleep all day! Come on, Jambu! Let's go hunt for mangoes; it'll be fun!' Always, in a giggle, 'You know why I practice my camouflage so much? I do it so I can spy on Splendor and Magnificent and the other queens when they're not looking!' Always, 'Three Moons, Jambu, come on! The sun will be there tomorrow! This frog won't be! Look at how awesome it is!' Always, 'When I'm the queen—yeah, I'm gonna not just be a queen, but the queen—I'm going to force you not to lay in the sun all day, Jambu! Now get up and help me find my kiwi!'" Jambu paused for a second, the pink suddenly disappearing to be replaced with a guilty purple. Jambu put his head down; he was struggling to get the next sentence out. He finally managed, brokenly, "'Jambu, shouldn't we be worried about that Rainwing who disappeared yesterday? I mean, Rainwings have been disappearing for years, and none of them have ever come back. What if something is going on? Come on, help me look for him, please?'"
Jambu swallowed, his scales flushing with a small wave of dull red as he did, although, mainly, Jambu's scales just became a darker shade of purple. Then there was a pause, and Jambu was obviously having trouble getting the next sentence out, too, showing weakness of fortitude Clay hadn't entirely been aware the Rainwing had possessed; even though Jambu hadn't ever seemed like a very emotional dragon to Clay, he was almost breaking down in front of him right now. "Then the Nightwings came," the Rainwing finally managed, a snippet of anger intermixing itself with the depression.
"They took everything from us. They took away our sun, they took away our friends, they took away our life. Rainwings didn't grasp what was happening, that the Nightwings were planning to enslave us, until after they were around us. We just fell asleep one night, and when we woke up, the Nightwings were ruling. Our queens were dead, and their corpses were on display for everyone to see. The ones who tried to resist, or who panicked and made it look like they were resisting, were beaten and muzzled. If someone did anything to displease our new masters, then they were humiliatingly and viciously punished, if that dragon wasn't executed first, of course.
"Some dragons ran. Some were lucky and were taken in by your queen or the Talons of Peace. Some were unlucky and were captured by Scarlet, who would rip their wings off and leave them to die or throw them into her arena after the world was told about Rainwing venom. But Glory would not leave her tribe; she wanted to stay here and save it. Now, Glory was smart. She didn't resist when the Nightwings came; she played the submissive the second she saw how demonic the Nightwings acted towards the our tribe, and she never let anyone catch on to how dangerous she actually was. But this came with a price: watching her tribe mates suffer and die, watching blood pore and dragons convulse and corpses burn into nothing, and being forced to do nothing about it.
"For the first few days, maybe, Glory was confused, unbelieving, and in shock. Then, when she started grasping what was truly happening to us, she started breaking down. She told me once, about halfway through Fierceteeth's reign, that she didn't know what to feel. She said that sometimes she'd feel scared, and she told me that sometimes she was just so scared that she wanted to leave everyone behind and try to run. Sometimes, she told me, she'd feel dismal, especially after one of our friends came back from a beating covered in blood and unconscious, and she only wanted to cry. And then she said that sometimes she felt unforgivably angry, and that she wanted the Nightwings who had taken everything away from us to all just die."
Jambu shook his head, shuddering the smallest bit, as he said this. Then, going back in his tale, he said, "Look, Clay. Glory had become irritable—grumpy, unhappy, frustrated at her own apathy—when Fierceteeth took away her sun, maybe more so than the rest of us. But, like I just said, we all became like that, and, at first, Glory was still there. Glory, who would try to cheer us up after a bad punishment. Glory, who would try and persuade us that it would get better, that the Nightwings would have to change eventually. Glory, who'd nudge me at night, when we were huddled together for comfort, and whisper, trying her best to sound playful but actually just sounding like she was about to break out sobbing, 'Well, I always said that you'd have to get out of the sun one day. Guess who was right?'
"But then things got worse. The euthanizations started—dragons of all sorts were taken away and never came back. The dragon who had originally been in charge of administering our punishments, who, at least by the Nightwings' standards, had been fair with his sentences, lost jurisdiction of the task and was replaced by a harsher, crueler, and an irredeemably more horrible dragon. And then, one day, Glory dropped her cover and stood up for a Rainwing dragonet. The dragonet had unknowingly taken a Nightwing's fruit, and Glory defended her younger tribe mate, trying to tell the angry Nightwings that it had just been an accident. She even took the fruit from the dragonet and gave it back to the Nightwing it had belonged to. And then, in retaliation for 'interfering with Nightwing affairs,' for 'disobedience,' she was beaten. Savagely. My sister was dragged into a hospital, covered in blood, massive rips through her scales, barely breathing, and that, I think, is the one event that truly began to erode her into what she is today. The only things she would say as she recovered would be furious murmurs, generally only given to me or another close friend when we were alone, and always in the reign of 'I hate the Nightwings, Jambu. I hate them. They need to die, and I want to be the one who kills them.'"
Jambu had grown angry during his speech, although towards whom—Glory, or the Nightwings who had perverted her, that "horrible" dragon, perhaps—Clay wasn't sure. The Rainwing took a moment to calm himself, then continued, "Rage had filled Glory, and before long, that rage had turned into hate. Clay, what happened with Glory was the exact same thing that happened to a lot of Rainwings: They felt hate, and they let it control them. Quite simply, most of us couldn't do anything except let it take control. When it was just the Rainwings and the rainforest, we would feel angry or sad sometimes, but there was never hate or depression, these long-lasting, never-fading, hideous emotions. But then the Nightwings came, and these horrible emotions started seeping into us. And…" Jambu struggled for the words here, before he just shook his head and said, "Look, hate is powerful. It takes control of you if you give it half a chance, but it's also unbelievably empowering. Rainwings like Glory let hate fill them and twist them because of that power, because hate was something inflaming that they could use to fill the emptiness the Nightwings had caused, something that could make up for all their friends that were gone, something that could make up for their lost way of life, something that could fill the void where love and joy had been before.
"Glory began to hate the Nightwings, and this is when she changed. Slowly, hate twisted Glory away from what she had been before. She started thinking only about revenge, only about killing those she hated, and she lost sight of everything else—being kind, helping others, caring for dragons. That happy dragon? The dragon who had been loving, and caring, and amazing? Gone, as if she had been killed. In her place was nothing but a husk that had been carved hollow by the cruelty of the Nightwings, which was now letting hate fill what had used to be its insides as a sort of cheap replacement. She became what she hated: cruel, intolerant, and evil."
Jambu, who had simply put his head down now, let his scales alternate between the colors of anger and depression, clearly undergoing much more of an ordeal than he was letting onto. This time, the now-calm Mudwing offered the Rainwing his tail. Jambu nodded, took it, and was silent. Then, after a second of comfort, Jambu suddenly said, his voice piercing through the sounds of the rainforest, "I wasn't much different than Glory. I felt that same hate, and, sometimes, I wanted to let it take me and control me. But, for me, there always was, I don't know, a sort of..."
There was another pause as the Rainwing lost his train of thought, then Jambu started over, reiterating, "Look, I used to teach Nightwings how to tree glide. I had done it before with Rainwings, so they figured that I could do it with Nightwings. The job was... it was tolerable. At first, I used to be able to try and pretend that nothing had changed, that I was just teaching black and purple Rainwings how to jump, that whenever one of the more prideful Nightwings fell and hurt themselves and blamed me for their injury, that the cuts and bruises that came afterwards had only come from a fall from the branches, from an accident. But then the lack of sun and all the abuse got to me, and part of me started dreading everything—work, the Nightwings' abuse, living—and then that part of me started hating everything. That part started wanting revenge, started imagining Nightwings dying, their scales melting into nothing but tar because of my venom, and then I realized that that part of me, so badly, wanted to kill Nightwings, and to make them pay. That part of me was the part that wouldn't mind if I turned into a monster, or if I could only feel spite, as long as I could get that revenge. It was the part of a dragon that Glory let take control of her.
"But there was another part of me—the part that only saw other dragons in Nightwings. A lot of times, I think Glory never saw the things that I did; she, considered a skill-less but not worthless Rainwing by the Nightwing higher-ups, was assigned to hard labor, and I think that her work never gave her the view of the Nightwings that my job did. There were a lot of terrible dragons who came to learn how to tree glide, yes, but there were other dragons that simply were different.
"There was a time when a Nightwing ripped one of his wings—it didn't render him flightless, but it was still a tear—when he fell from the trees above. He could have had me executed; Three Moons, I was supposed to have been executed, for 'harming a Nightwing and almost permanently handicapping him.' The Nightwing from the trees defended me, saying that the injury was his fault, not mine, and he talked me out of my death. There was a time when a Nightwing who had been injured among the treetops had me whipped to the point until I had almost fainted. A different Nightwing carried me to one of the Rainwing infirmaries, and whispered that she wished she could do more—and then she managed to send me a couple pounds of fruit the next day. There were Nightwings who would pay me for extra tree gliding lessons, generally in food, like they couldn't just force me to give my time to them. I saw hoards and hoards of nothing but evil, but I also saw dragons who didn't want what was happening to the Rainwings, and who tried to change things. I doubt any Nightwing wanted a Rainwing takeover, but I knew that some didn't want what Fierceteeth did. That was why I never could agree with Glory's policies of genocide, the policies that I want to believe were brought upon by the fact that Glory never saw that good in those dragons—I don't want to think that Glory was just innately more violent or heartless than the rest of us, although... although that might have been the case.
"Now, I followed Glory as she built the Tears of the Rain. But I had realized that some Nightwings were different, and I tried to remember that we weren't fighting beasts. I tried to keep Glory's mindset under control; I tried to make her remember that every dragon was different, and that just because a Nightwing was a Nightwing, that didn't make him or her automatically evil. That didn't mean I was pacifistic. I followed Glory into the Nightwing Castle, I was with her when she killed Fierceteeth, and I even finished the former queen's mate myself. But that was when I wanted to stop. We had won. Glory didn't—she couldn't—see that.
"Glory couldn't see past her hate, she couldn't work through her hate, and she couldn't control her hate; she became nothing but a vessel for hatred itself, like she had been possessed. Part of me thinks Glory wanted her old life of pure happiness and no Nightwings back so much that she completely lost herself in the quest for that ideal, and part of me thinks Glory realized that she could never truly re-make the Rain Kingdom into what it had been before, and she decided to destroy the dragons who had done that to her. She told me, the first day during her rule, before I broke away and an hour before she murdered the Nightwing dragonets, that she couldn't feel anything for the Nightwings, that her heart had been destroyed by them, that she only hated them for all they had done, and that she only wanted them dead. The last time I saw Glory—Glory, my real sister—was right after she said that, right when she asked, with a bit of fear sneaking its way into her voice, 'Why can't I feel anything but hate towards them?'
"I tried to reason with her. After she executed every Nightwing in our new castle, I stood up to her and told her, in front of a huge congregation of members of the Tears of the Rain, that she was turning into another Fierceteeth. What was left of Glory disappeared at that exact moment. She broke, Clay, as if my sentence had been the gust of wind that toppled the tree, and she screamed, 'Why shouldn't I be another Fierceteeth, Jambu!? Why shouldn't the Nightwings suffer like we did!?' That precise moment, when my sister left and never returned, was when the Tears of the Rain split in two. Some dragons, who had suddenly been hit with the knowledge of how heartless they had become, rushed to protect me. Others grouped around Glory, and then my group backed away towards the doors of the room we had been in. It wasn't a fight, not yet. I tried to turn her once more. I tried to ask Glory to accept Nightwings, to let them change, to give them another chance, and she snapped at me, and she yelled, 'The Nightwings have poisoned your brain, Jambu! You're wrong! They have to die, and if you're not with me, then you're against me!'" Jambu stopped again, closer to breakdown here than ever before.
"'You're my best friend, Jambu! We'll always stick together, no matter what!'" Jambu quoted, weakly. "What ever happened to that Glory? What ever happened to my sister?"
Jambu waited a few seconds, letting sorrow overtake him and his scales for those few moments of time, and then he sent the smallest flash of color down his scales, bringing them back to a light, purple-ish, controlled shade. Then he stared out at the rainforest and the destruction again, and then just murmured, "It hurts. And I try to hide how much it hurts. I try to hide how much I hate the fact that I couldn't reach her. Clay... I'm not going to let any of you die tonight—because that emptiness, that terrible, unnatural emptiness of losing someone so close to you, that emptiness that I feel all the time, is something no one should ever experience."
A/N: *in Deathbringer's "emotional and dramatic" voice from Chapter 9 (of Part 2)*: Do you see why this was originally one chapter? Do you see why I originally wanted all these relatively unexciting (although fairly depressing) backstories and descriptions to be concentrated into one big blob so it didn't slow the plot down too much?
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the fact that I've written down so many words that I have now surpassed 100,000 of them. The amount of insanely awesome that accomplishment is? It's, well, insanely awesome. (Hopefully—I mean, half of those 100k words could just be me spouting nothing but crap, and I'd still be at 100k words.) I don't really even know what the heck to say except to repeat myself again and say, "Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who actually reads this thing, because without all of you, I would not be pushed to do as much with this as I do with you at my back." So, to celebrate, I'm going to write more words!
Basically, this is me posting why I did certain things certain ways (oh my gosh it's an actual Author's Note)—which has never happened before mainly due to spoiler reasons. But the rainforest's history is more or less developed, so I'm going to give you all an in-depth look at why I felt it would turn out the way it did. Which means that this whole, bold thing is a massive analysis and interpretation about characters in a book series about dragons and how they would all change without a certain fictional world-defining event. (Sometimes I think I like Wings of Fire just a little bit too much. But, hey, if you've gotten this far into the story, then we're probably all in the same boat, huh?)
Let's start where the story does: with Battlewinner. One thing that my choice of setting (a purposely vague amount of years after when the actual books took place—I'll release an actual timeline of this AU one of these chapters, I think) in conjunction with the way I made the world pan out didn't allow for was a good look at some of the Nightwings that were prominent in canon. Case in point: Battlewinner was only developed in two snapshots, one of which was before anything actually changed, and then she gets blown to bits.
The first major change that the lack of the prophecy caused was that it led to Morrowseer preparing for the Rainwing invasion with no hesitation whatsoever. Stonemover enchants the first tunnel around the exact same time in canon—likely earlier, actually, since the prophecy didn't need to be refined between Battlewinner and Morrowseer before they released it to the rest of their tribe. Morrowseer sends scouts into the rainforest immediately after this enchantment is finished in order to spy on and observe the rainforest and the local Rainwings. A group of scouts comes back one day with news that Rainwings can apparently melt any living thing with their venom, which rightfully freaks almost everyone out. Battlewinner sends Morrowseer to get allies, the Nightwings ally with Burn, stuff starts going wrong for Morrowseer, stuff starts going even more wrong for Morrowseer, and so on. You've heard this story before. The thing that's important about it (along with the fact that it allows Sunny/Beetle to exist, because I was not going to lose two Dragonets of Destiny, gosh dangit!) is the fact that Battlewinner is purposely stalling.
Battlewinner may have had an epic design, but she isn't characterized a whole lot in the books. She's evil, she's heartless towards those in her way, and she wants to kill all the Rainwings so her tribe can have a new home. But there was something else about Battlewinner that caught my attention for use in this story: She is, quite obviously, scared of being left behind by her tribe. She wants to lead the Nightwings, and she is not going to accept anyone else on the Nightwing throne ("I am their queen. I am." (from The Dark Secret)). More or less, from what I got of Battlewinner, I couldn't see her launching an attack towards the Rainwings if, like Morrowseer said at the beginning of Part 2, she couldn't be at the helm to lead it, and that massive flaw of hers delays the attack to a point of complete insanity and almost leads her whole tribe into complete extinction.
This transitions into Morrowseer, who I also did not allocate a lot of writing space towards developing even though I really should have. Morrowseer is pretty dang evil in canon, and here, for the most part, he's still pretty dang evil. There's one major change with Morrowseer in this universe, though: He becomes very well aware that he's powerless, and he's absolutely furious about that. The thing with Morrowseer is that, unlike Scarlet or Burn or Blister, he at least had a somewhat idealistic goal: save the dragons of his tribe from dying. I got a sort of dark, almost Knight Templar vision of him throughout the books, a "the Nightwings are doing the terrible things we're doing for two reasons: because we have to, and because we are superior and deserve to" kind of villain—uncaring about anything except the dragons of his tribe. So, when his queen repeatedly bars him from doing anything to help that aforementioned tribe, therefore striking him in the one and only spot where it hurts, Morrowseer basically gets really, really mad, and goes against his own queen to try and do what he believes is right. I like to think that going against Battlewinner in the process of trying to save his tribe broke Morrowseer down a little, and that learning that his daughter actually existed did so even more. He was shocked and confused, no matter how much he'd hate to admit it. He'd been forced to think that maybe everything he's been doing has been wrong, especially once Secretkeeper reveals that Moon has been hidden for that exact reason. Maybe he changed a bit that day; maybe it was just shock and he would have returned to his old, evil state once that surprise left. Too bad we never get to find out, as he kinda gets incinerated.
Now that we've talked about why the attack was delayed, and why, therefore, a good portion of important Nightwings were blown up, let's talk about the attack on the rainforest itself. Unless Battlewinner (or Greatness) flat-out didn't launch the attack, the Nightwings were going to curb-stomp the Rainwings, no question. There was no possible way for the Rainwings, especially without a learned Glory leading them, to have defended against a surprise attack planned to almost total perfection for what was the better portion of a decade. So even with the Nightwings, especially their leadership, decimated, they still manage to re-group and take over the rainforest with those that were left. For me, there were two main options for the outcome of the rainforest takeover: complete, with the exception of a few who would escape into the Talons of Peace or elsewhere (Glory, Mangrove, maybe Grandeur or maybe Jambu), extinction of the Rainwings, or a slave society with the Nightwings abusing the Rainwings using all manners of horror emerging. I decided somewhat quickly that the rainforest would almost certainly start out as Option Two, especially since the Nightwings had lost a good amount of resources and dragons in the volcanic eruption and would therefore need cheap labor (or slaves) to replace the dragons they had lost. (By the way, that aforementioned loss of resources is why every single Rainwing wasn't muzzled (along with the fact that communicating with a muzzled dragon would be quite hard), and why only the ones that resisted were—the designated muzzles for the Rainwings were part of that huge resource loss; they were supposed to come in with some of the dragons that made up Charge Three, and since a good part of Charge Three was blown up...)
There's many things I could talk about now, but I'm not entirely done with the rainforest, so I'm going to focus on the early rainforest leadership. There was more or less always going to be a "bad queen" before there was a "good queen," but it took me a while to decide on who to put on the throne as the bad queen. In the end, I basically decided that the Nightwings, now desperate for leadership, would look towards their military leaders of the invasion and demand them to take control, since there simply wasn't anyone else left. In the process of making this story, Deathbringer always was going to lead an assassin-based and queen-targeting strike, and that was always going to be Charge One, and Charge Two was always going to be "take control of what was left of the Rainwings' village center," but it took me a while to decide on Fierceteeth for the leader of that aforementioned attack.
Now—and I know that this wasn't really shown in the story, which is why I'm resorting to telling it you in an Author's Note—Fierceteeth here is not the Fierceteeth in the books. I mean, she's still ferocious and irritable, and she's still a supremacist, but when it comes to fighting, she's something else. Remember when Deathbringer said that Morrowseer had trained her almost since birth? Well, Morrowseer had trained her almost since birth. As an attempt to do something in order to further his invasion plans, Morrowseer ordered the Nightwings to start training promising young dragonets for an elite invasion force. Fierceteeth was that promising dragonet. Years of nothing but battle training comprised Fierceteeth's childhood, and by the time the invasion was ready, she had a whole different aura to her than she has in the books. No longer did she ever come across as even the slightest bit whiny or pretentious; she was just powerful and commanding. That skill and that presence, and the fact that she was female, of course, was how she could go toe to toe (talon to talon?) with Deathbringer for the throne, even when she was still young.
Very bad things happen in the rainforest for a while—this chapter is the main indicator of that, as I didn't want to lessen how awful the Nightwings originally were to the Rainwings. Of course, this just makes the tormented want to go against their tormentors more. Especially without sun, the Rainwings would have formed a resistance group against the Nightwings sooner or later, and with most Nightwings not expecting a rebellion, it was only a matter of time until their forceful reign toppled.
This leads into Glory, who I felt, during the design of this story, could turn out one of two ways: a) she could be a completely normal Rainwing who didn't want to wake up or move any more than the dragons around her or b) she could be some sort of half-insane and definitely-deluded-and-prejudiced villain. Guess which option I took? It didn't take very long for me to decide how Glory was going to turn out, either; I like to think her motivation is more of an innate quality, not something living in a cave and away from sun gave her. I think it should be fairly obvious why Glory turned out a villain in this universe: I took Glory, more or less an anti-hero without her sun, gave her no knowledge of how to handle her negative emotions or her irritation due to her relatively conflict-free childhood (at least Glory was much happier (and nicer, although nowhere near as smart) than she ever was in canon before the Nightwings came), forced her through something hundreds of times worse than anything she underwent under Kestrel, Dune, and Webs, and then gave her the power to do anything she wanted to do to the dragons she hated when she didn't have any control of herself. What I got from that concoction was a half-mad monster. (Besides, even though I do ship Glorybringer (who doesn't, really?), utterly obliterating WoF's biggest and strongest ship was just too good of an opportunity for the evil person in me to pass up on.)
Jambu, I believe, is pretty well explained in this very chapter. I'd say that he almost acts like Glory does in canon: He tries not to let the world see how much everything affects him, how much everything hurts. He's just more subdued and less grumpy than Glory in canon, though, because Jambu really isn't a grumpy dude. The one thing I should clear up is why he's not useless and instead a military commander: It's, like Deathbringer said, partly a side affect of no sun, but it's also because Jambu has a bit of Banana-syndrome (the "sun did bad things to me" dragon, not the fruit) and has forced himself to become smarter because of what happened when he wasn't intelligent: his home and then his sister were both twisted away from him.
The Tears of the Rain, I think, has a very understandable reason for existing: Because there are still Rainwings, like Glory, who can never forgive the Nightwings, and who never want to see them again. Fun fact: I picked the name because it sounded cool and because it's symbolic (Rainwings are crying because of the nightmare they're living through). That's pretty much all you need to know about the rebellion in the ra— wait, the Eclipse? Oh yeah, the Eclipse. It hasn't been very important, and that's mainly because it hardly exists anymore; what's left of the Nightwing intolerance towards Rainwings has been forced to fade, just like the terrorist group. I mean, the only important thing about the Eclipse is that Obsidian indirectly made it before crushing Peril's heart... right?
This all takes us to Deathbringer. When I was first joking about this prospect with my sister, I told her, in response to her asking about Deathbringer, "Deathbringer would be, like, exactly the same." Guess what? He's not. He's similar—he's got that joker, snarker, and ladykiller still in him somewhere. But, a lot of the time, those traits from canon are covered by the traits of the leader that he's been forced to become. Sure, Deathbringer isn't exactly a king, but he's still exceedingly important, and lots of dragons still depend on him; he's started to garner actual worry (or, as he said, responsibility) directed towards the dragons of his tribe because of this. That fact, and the knowledge of his that he didn't do anything to fight the Nightwings' abuse has, as insane as this is, humbled Deathbringer (although he wasn't necessarily prideful in the series) and made him grow very, very mature (now that's a surprise); he's acting like a king should.
I've got one final thing to talk about: the council system. For a good portion of time after this thing's conception, I was pretty sure I'd still have a monarchy of some sort in place ruling the rainforest. Heck, Deathbringer actually wasn't going to be the main leader of the rainforest at first; there was actually a major debate with myself about putting Starflight on the throne (he was a prince, after all), maybe having him just pull strings behind Fatespeaker, maybe ruling himself. But then I really got into Starflight's character, and I decided that him being king really didn't make sense, even if he was a prince—I'll talk more about Starflight later, so for now I'll just say that he more or less grew up like that kid who doesn't ever socialize and instead spends all his time in his basement, with his dad (and later, Fatespeaker) as his only real friend, especially after his mom died. That's not exactly good leadership material, especially wartime leadership material, and at the point the rainforest was in, good leadership potential was a whole lot more valued than if one was royalty or not. But you know who had great leadership potential? Deathbringer, the dragon who had already been leading the military during Fierceteeth's reign—plus, he had already been considered for the throne once, so why not again? Problem, though: Deathbringer had no family (like he's said), which meant that if he died, there would be another massive succession crisis—and Glory really wanted Deathbringer dead. Eventually, I just went, "You know what? Screw the monarchy! They don't even have a real queen anymore, so why not make their government even more radical? Why not split the power so that if one of the leaders die, there isn't another apocalyptic crisis? Why not just take the progressive nature of the Rainwings' succession system and combine it with the Nightwings' intelligence in order to make something completely different?" And that's how we came to this meritocracy-type government: Because, like Deathbringer said, I figured that the Nightwings and the Rainwings would just be desperate enough for peace to create something new, as long as it worked.
That's it for now. Obviously, I'm nowhere near done explaining everything about this story, but there will probably be more of these notes as the story continues forth (otherwise, this chapter would never end). Maybe, if this ever gets finished, I'll compile all these types of notes together in one great lump as the last chapter of the fanfic. But, for now, I'm only going to say (for the hundredth time) thank you, and stay tuned!