AN: Sorry about the wait!
If you see any typos or other mistakes with this chapter, please let me know! I always try to keep them as flawless and accurate as possible, but I had to write this one in tiny snippets at a time, so no matter how much proof-reading I do, it always feels a bit jumbled up and disjointed. Thanks in advance!
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy reading it more than I did writing it!
Tumbleweed shoved her way unapologetically through the crowd for the rest of the group, and they secured a table in one of the corners of the room. Now that he'd enjoyed the scorpion, Tumbleweed chattered to Ozone about other kinds of desert food, insisting that he'd love the cactus juice. As the other two SandWings followed, they speculated about the nature of the competitions their commander had mentioned, meaning Jackal spouted unusual ideas and Kulta scoffed dismissively at them.
Once they settled down with their food, Ozone picking experimentally at a piece of ostrich meat, Jackal smiled at him across the table. "So, Ozone, what's it like training as a SkyWing soldier? Want to enlighten us?"
The red-and-gold dragonet shrugged, feeling a bit uncomfortable at being put on the spot like this. How could he describe the past few months in only a few words? "It's just normal, I guess. Probably the same as training to be a SandWing soldier."
"So... friendships, rivalries, getting up unnaturally early, etc.?"
Ozone let out a surprised laugh. "Yeah, pretty much."
"So which dragon's your friend?" Tumbleweed asked, leaning forward. "Who's your enemy? I want all the juicy details."
"My best friend is Sard," Ozone said. "The orange dragon with the red wings. I don't really have any enemies." Sure, Gale didn't like him, and Buzzard could be a bully at times, but he didn't hate them, and he didn't want to make a bad impression for them on the SandWings. The desert dragons could decide for themselves whether or not they liked the rest of the SkyWing soldiers-in-training.
"Really?" Tumbleweed sounded surprised, maybe a little doubtful. "There isn't even one dragon who picks on an easy target like you?"
Ozone wrinkled his snout, trying to decide whether he should reevaluate why he liked this particular dragon. But despite her harsh words, she didn't seem unfriendly, and it was hard for him to shake off a good first impression.
The SandWing dragonets were still looking at him expectantly. Even Kulta had a thinly-veiled look of interest in her glittering black eyes.
"Well," Ozone admitted reluctantly. "There is one dragon who doesn't like me, but that's mostly because she knew Sard first and doesn't like her. Somehow she ended up hating me more than she hates Sard, though." Sure, Gale and Sard had some pretty viscous arguments, but Gale oozed resentment whenever she looked at Ozone. He still wasn't sure why or how her disgust towards him had surpassed her rivalry with Sard, but it definitely had somewhere along their training.
"Ooh," Tumbleweed said, pricking her ears. "Who's that?"
Ozone rubbed his snout, feeling highly uncomfortable. "Gale," he told her at last, feeling like a gossip. "The one with the pinkish-red scales."
The SandWings all not-so-subtly studied her. Ozone didn't turn around to look with them, but once the others returned their attention to the table, he felt Gale's yellow eyes land accusingly on his back. She knew they were talking about her. And she would probably hate Ozone even more now for it.
"Anyway," he said, trying to deflect their attention so they couldn't get any more condemning information out of him, "what about you guys?"
"Tumbleweed's nemesis is Mesa," Jackal replied, indicating a pale yellow dragon sitting by the commanders. He was deep in conversation with both the leader of the SandWing troops and Claret, who looked genuinely interested in what the dragonet was telling her. Ozone couldn't help but wonder what they were talking about.
"He thinks he's better than everyone else," Tumbleweed said, apparently having no qualms about discrediting one of her own fellow soldiers-in-training. "Acts like he'll be a commander one day—no, more like he already is one. Look at him there, talking to the big dragons like he's their equal!" Her tail twitched in disgust.
"Kulta," Jackal went on, "despises Sear. While he, unlike Mesa, is a decent, good-hearted, bookish soul, he has the misfortune of being head over heels for our snake-like friend here. He continues trying to win her heart even though she crushes all his hopes and dreams on a daily basis, with a dedication which annoys her to no end."
He nodded towards the dragonet he was talking about, and Ozone glanced over his shoulder to see a beige dragon chatting with Ridge. Ridge seemed to have relaxed a lot since this morning, judging from the way his wings hung loosely at his sides, and Ozone hoped that he would become close with Sear. Trapped between Sard and Gale's constant arguing with only haughty Buzzard and timid Ozone as companions, the red-orange SkyWing could use a friend or two who shared his academic nature.
"Well, it's not my fault he couldn't take a hint," Kulta said loftily, bringing Ozone back from his hopeful daydream.
"What about you?" he asked Jackal, noticing that the dust-colored dragonet hadn't mentioned any rivals of his own. Ozone wouldn't normally ask, but he felt guilty for talking badly about Gale and wanted the others to tell him about their own enemies to validate his willingness to complain.
"Me?" Jackal smiled enigmatically. "I don't have enemies. Everyone loves me."
Kulta shoved him, and Tumbleweed snickered. "Except Kulta."
"I'm in the same unfortunate circumstances as Sear, I'm afraid," Jackal said, and then laughed, making it impossible for Ozone to tell how serious he was being.
They chatted for a while longer, thankfully about safer topics, before Claret and the SandWing commander announced that it was time to move along to the competitive activities. Tumbleweed fluttered her wings excitedly, while Jackal pricked his ears, and Kulta settled her shoulders in a confident posture.
"The first competition will be a relay race," Claret announced, amid interested murmuring from the dragonets. "There will be three teams of three and two teams of two, with one dragonet from each of those smaller teams flying a second time to make the race fairer. In order to be fair and promote intertribal coordination, there must be at least one SkyWing and one SandWing in every group. Any questions?"
Tumbleweed grabbed Ozone by the shoulder, almost knocking him over. "I claim Ozone for my team! Since you're a SkyWing, you can be the one to fly twice, and it'll be like having two SkyWings on our team. And we'll do better than everyone else because there're only five SkyWings and five teams, so most of the others are stuck with two SandWings. The only ones who can possibly stop us are the other pair!"
"Lovely," Kulta said witheringly. "Now I'm stuck with Jack."
Ozone would have been hurt if she had talked about him that way, but Jackal only laughed at the disgusted tone in her voice. "I know you secretly love being my partner. C'mon, let's go see if Ozone's friend Sard wants to team up with us."
They waded over to her through the crowd, but Tumbleweed's rival Mesa and a SandWing Ozone didn't recognize reached her before they did, and Sard warily accepted their offer to team up. Jackal and Kulta ended up with Buzzard instead, who seemed to have retained his hostility towards the desert dragons.
"You'd better not hold me back," the pale orange SkyWing growled, but neither of the SandWings rose to the bait; Jackal only smiled and politely promised not to, while Kulta yawned at the threat, unimpressed. Ozone hid a laugh as he saw Buzzard's facial expression, caught somewhere between baffled surprise and indignant frustration.
He doesn't know how to react to them, he realized. After what Ridge told us this morning about their respect for strength, none of us expected the SandWings to be like this. Maybe now Buzzard will realize he can't intimidate his way out of everything.
Tumbleweed surveyed their opponents, making a face at Sard's choice of a group, passing over the SandWings teamed up with Gale without interest, and homing in on their rival pair—Sear and Ridge—with a gleam of satisfaction in her dark eyes. "Sear's smart and great at fighting—built like a stone wall—but he's got a pretty short wingspan, so he's a slow flier. We've got this, no problem!"
"Are you sure?" asked Ozone, rubbing his snout nervously. He wasn't totally comfortable with the idea that their success depended mostly on him. Furthermore, he wasn't sure how big a typical SandWing's wingspan was, but Tumbleweed's looked a lot shorter than Ridge's, even though the two were about the same height.
"Of course!" she said confidently, with a flick of her tail. "You're bigger than the weedy little SkyWing that Sear's paired up with."
"You called me weedy earlier, too," Ozone reminded her.
"Yes, well... he's even weedier than you," Tumbleweed scoffed. "There's no way we'll lose to those two. C'mon, be a little more enthusiastic!"
Ozone wasn't sure enthusiasm was synonymous with brash overconfidence, but he decided not to argue with her. "Want me to go first?" he offered instead, trying to plan a strategy. "I can fly first and last so that I have time to rest in between and you'll only have to do one stretch in the middle."
"All right," Tumbleweed agreed cheerfully. "We've totally got this!"
Once they exited the caves, in a much more orderly fashion than they'd entered in, the dragonets lined up on the cliff. Behind Ozone, Tumbleweed hummed to herself—a bit too triumphantly in his opinion, considering they hadn't even started yet—as Claret soared a fair distance away. She turned to face them and hovered as she explained the rules. Each dragonet would have to fly around her and back. The first team to have all participants back on the cliff would claim victory.
Ozone glanced warily at his competitors. Alongside him, Mesa shifted eagerly on his talons, a SandWing he didn't know glanced back nervously at his teammates, Gale stared resolutely ahead as she waited for the signal, and Ridge made eye contact with him. Apparently, he and Sear had the same strategy as Ozone and Tumbleweed.
"Go!" shouted the SandWing commander from behind them, and the dragonets immediately launched into flight. The initial chaos of flapping wings was disorienting, but Ozone soon regained his wits as he and the other SkyWings quickly pulled ahead of their SandWing counterparts.
Glancing at him, Gale scowled and spread her wings wider to catch a breeze and soar ahead. Beside her, Ridge propelled himself forward with powerful flaps.
Ozone caught up to them by the time they reached Claret, and managed to wheel around in midair with commendable swiftness. But Gale growled low in her throat as she passed him and swept her wing beneath his as she turned, disrupting the air current keeping him aloft and causing him to lose his balance.
Not again, Ozone thought frantically, flashing back to their warm-up race on the day the storm started. He had to flap his wings wildly to right himself, which cost him valuable time. Being disrupted at the turn is always what makes me lose!
On the cliff, he could see the SandWing commander narrow his dark eyes. He'd noticed Gale's sabotage. But he said nothing as she touched down on the cliff, glaring at him with defiance in her yellow gaze.
Ridge had been the first to reach the cliff, and Sear flapped swiftly past Ozone as he approached his destination, where Tumbleweed was bouncing impatiently on the balls of her feet. She swept forward as soon as Ozone's claws touched the ground, a look of fierce determination on her face.
She must have noticed Gale unbalance him, because she immediately cut across the other dragons' paths to fly over to Gale's team's second flier and yank on his tail. Ozone glanced back to see the SandWing commander give a huff of annoyance, but it was Claret who berated Tumblweed as she reached the turning point. The SandWing dragonet blithely ignored the SkyWing commander's scolding and came flying back to Ozone with a self-satisfied smile on her face.
You shouldn't have done that, he opened his mouth to tell her, but she shooed him away with her tawny wings as soon as she landed. "Go, go, go!"
Ridge was already almost halfway to the turning point, but Ozone leapt obligingly into the air after him. Beating his wings as quickly as they would carry him, he managed to close most of the distance between them by the time he whipped around the spot where Claret was hovering. Though the howling of wind stole whatever sound the rest of the dragonets were making, he could see Tumbleweed shouting something at him at the top of her lungs, probably something along the lines of, You'd better win!
He reached the cliff an instant before Ridge and only because he didn't slow down enough to land properly, tumbling head over claws as he crashed to the ground. "We did it!" Tumbleweed exclaimed, jumping on him and pummeling him enthusiastically (and rather painfully) with her wings. "I told you we could!"
"I guess you were right," he panted, once he could breathe again. His talons were throbbing where he'd stubbed them against the edge of the cliff.
"Always am!" she crowed triumphantly.
"Nice job, Ozone," Ridge conceded graciously, inclining his head. Behind him, Sear nodded in agreement, looking impressed.
Ozone couldn't remember the last time he felt as proud as he did then, basking in Tumbleweed's sense of accomplishment and his fellow trainees' congratulations.
"Yes, nice work," Jackal called in agreement, walking over and pulling Ozone to his feet. "You're on my team for the next game!"
The next few competitions went by in a blur. Ozone was unable to recreate his success in any of them, but none of his SandWing partners seemed to mind much. The competitions were surprisingly enjoyable, at least until the time came for sparring and he was paired up against Kulta.
She looked down her snout at him and smiled ominously. "Hello there, SkyWing. "Don't worry, I'll try to make being knocked out as painless as possible."
Ozone gulped, feeling somewhat cowed. As friendly as Jackal and Tumbleweed had been to him, it seemed the third member of their group could be considerably more intimidating when she wanted to be.
He settled into a fighting stance, trying not to think about the threat behind her words as he waited for Claret's signal to begin. She and the SandWing commander were circling the pairs of dragonets scattered across stone platform, making sure everyone looked about evenly matched. Unfortunately for Ozone, Kulta had a lean build similar to his own, even though she was significantly taller than him.
"Begin!" Claret called sharply.
Immediately, Kulta pounced, more quickly than Ozone had expected her to move, knocking the wind out of him with the full weight of her body. As he fell limp beneath her, she struck out, biting his shoulder with powerful fangs before leaping back out of reach and prowling around him, searching for another opening to attack.
Ozone grimaced at the stinging pain, but managed to get to his feet and dodge her next strike. It was disorienting how she circled him so unhurriedly and yet attacked so quickly. He had to remain fully alert at every moment just to keep up, and almost never found an opening to hit back at her. She was toying with him, Ozone quickly realized, playing completely offensive while trapping him on the defensive.
Just as she had him backed up against the wall, a sharp yelp of pain cut through the scuffle, diverting Kulta's attention. The rest of the pairs stopped their battles as well, looking over in concern as Claret pushed her way through the crowd to help the injured fighter, the SandWing commander close on her tail.
It was Gale, clutching her shoulder to hold back the flow of blood and casting an accusing glance at her opponent. The SandWing backed away from her, folding back his wings and holding up his claws to look harmless. Ozone realized with a jolt that it was Jackal who had dealt the injuring blow.
"It was an accident," the dust-colored dragonet assured Claret, his eyes gleaming apologetically. "When she tackled me, I lost my footing—accidentally clawed her harder than I meant to."
"Still, you should be more careful," the SandWing commander scolded him, as Claret inspected the wound. The impatient edge to his tone made Ozone guess that this wasn't the first time he'd needed to berate Jackal for something. "This was meant to be a friendly competition only. I told you earlier that I expected you treat our guests as you would your own tribe-mates, didn't I?"
"Sorry, Commander Hogback," Jackal said, hastily dipping his head to pacify the older SandWing. "It won't happen again."
"It better not," Hogback snorted. "Still, just to be safe, I think we should call off the sparring section of the day's activities early. What do you think, Claret?"
The burgundy dragon looked up from Gale's injury and nodded. "I agree."
Jackal caught Ozone's gaze behind their backs and winked one dark eye.
But the SandWing dragonet wasn't paying attention to where anyone besides the commanders was looking, and didn't notice the way Gale's gaze traveled from him to Ozone and back again, narrowing slightly. A faint trail of smoke rose from her nostrils.
Does she think Jackal did that to her on purpose? Ozone worried. To him, it was impossible to tell. The way he explained what happened made it look like an accident… but I did just tell him and the other SandWings that Gale and I are enemies. And why else would he wink at me just now?
Either way, he knew that Gale's suspicions meant he was in trouble. As the rest of the day passed, Ozone couldn't put the incident out of his mind.
Jackal didn't bring it up again, not even when he joined Ozone, Tumbleweed, and Kulta for dinner as the two tribes prepared for the SkyWings' departure later that day. Still, Ozone couldn't help but wonder if his friend had intentionally injured Gale to get back at her for bullying him.
I didn't mean for him to retaliate, he thought, rubbing his snout nervously. And I can't help but feel like his interference will only make more trouble.
"Hey," Jackal said, nudging him across the table with one wing. "I'll write to you. There's this one dragon in Possibility who runs a delivery service, so we can use that to keep in touch. It's only what—a day's travel?—between our bases, and Possibility isn't too far from here. The messenger comes by all the time looking to see if we have letters to send. She'll be glad that I finally have one for her."
Ozone was caught somewhere between feeling flustered and excited that his new friend wanted to stay in touch. "Sure, I'll write back."
It wasn't much longer before Claret called all the SkyWing dragonets to her, and Ozone bid his new friends a hasty goodbye before hurrying over to join his tribe. Jackal and Tumbleweed waved after him, while Kulta gave a short nod of farewell.
"Don't forget to ask Claret when we can meet up!" Jackal called.
"I won't," Ozone promised, doing his best to return the other dragonet's smile.
"So what did you think of the SandWings?" Ridge asked the other trainees, once the desert base was out of sight and the SkyWings shifted out of formation.
"They were all right," Sard answered guardedly, glancing back the way they had come. "But I don't think we should treat them like our best friends or anything." Her yellow gaze flitted to Ozone so briefly that he couldn't be sure whether her comment was a jibe at him or just a general warning.
But what reason did she have to distrust the SandWings? If anything, Jackal's accidentally injuring Gale should have won him a spot on Sard's good side.
Ozone glanced at the pinkish-red dragonet, hoping her anger had subsided, but she was gazing straight ahead with her jaws clenched slightly. She didn't cast him even a single evil glare—those seemed reserved for Sard's heckling—but Ozone wasn't sure that was as good a sign as it seemed. Gale wasn't the type to let things go.
By the time they returned to their base, the sun had set and the sky had gradually darkened to black. Claret dismissed the soldiers-in-training with the reminder that they were expected to be up before sunrise according to their usual schedule, despite their late arrival home.
Buzzard gave the others a grunt that seemed to pass for "goodnight" before disappearing into the cave the male dragonets shared; Ridge acknowledged them with a verbal farewell instead before vanishing after him. Ozone would have followed as well, but Gale's shoulder was blocking his way through the entrance cave and he didn't want to further aggravate her by rushing her to move.
Sard's "goodnight" was obscured by a yawn as she slithered off towards the other dormitory. Gale made no move to follow her.
Ozone gave Gale a worried look, wondering if he should speak up, and caught a malevolent flash of yellow as she glanced at him. She was intentionally holding him back, waiting for everyone else to be out of earshot.
Ozone ducked his head nervously, preparing for the worst.
As soon as Sard's footfalls faded, Gale whirled around, nostrils flaring furiously. Ozone only saw a blur of amaranth scales before her claws slashed across his snout. He fell back with a yelp of surprised pain.
Gale advanced on him, hissing up flames. The light from her jaws cast menacing shadows on the walls all around, phantom teeth surrounding the two dragonets. "What did you tell your SandWing friends about me? Did you tell that Jackal dragon to attack me? His claw slipped—yeah, right! As if I'd believe that load of pigeon guts for an instant! Don't think I didn't see the lot of you whispering dirty secrets about me!"
Ozone remained silent through her tirade, bracing himself. Whatever he told her wouldn't help—he could tell that from one look at her face, contorted with rage.
"What did you tell them?" she demanded again, when he didn't respond.
Again, he said nothing, backing further away and waiting for her anger to pass and reason to replace it. She can't actually hurt me, or she'll have Claret to answer to. He felt his tail brush against the wall. But I hope she realizes that soon… right now, I'm literally getting backed into a corner.
Gale let out one more menacing hiss before backing off, her sides heaving angrily. She spat her fire onto the ground, where it left a scorch mark against the rock. "You and your SandWing humiliated me! You made me look weak in front of our enemies, Ozone! I hope you're satisfied with that dirty trick. Because when I get back at you for this, it'll be extremely satisfying for me."
With a gleam of contempt in her malicious yellow eyes, she turned and vanished down the tunnel, leaving Ozone standing in the entrance cave on trembling legs.