Ink let out a great yawn, stretching out his tail and wings, almost hitting a passing SandWing. Colorful light fell into both of Ink's eyes from glass globes strung on the roof of the cavern, filled with flame. He wondered how much the headmasters had paid for that. Back in Possibility, all of these would have cost a fortune. Did the RainWings make them? If so, Ink wondered why. Did Queen Glory order them? Or maybe they all decided to pitch in to help out the school? How did they get the glass? Ink would have to ask if he remembered.

"Ink," a flat voice stated, summoning him. It came from Ink's brother Loresearcher, a NightWing-SeaWing hybrid around the same size as Ink. Unlike Ink's, Loresearcher's scale color was almost uniform across his body, with the exception of his underbelly. His SeaWing features were much less noticeable than Ink's, with a slight curve in his horns and barely noticeable flaps of webbing between his spines and claws. The scales on his neck were raised slightly, but there was no membrane between them as there would be in a SeaWing's gills. Down his neck were large white dots that gave off a faint glow of light, casting shadows over the rest of his scales.

As Loresearcher walked through the hallway, he didn't give his brother even a glance, his eyes focused on two scrolls. Each of the scrolls was held up by a small wooden contraption attached to each of Loresearcher's wings, making it so that he could use all four of his legs while walking and read at the same time. The tops and bottoms of the scrolls were each inserted into a metal tube to hold the scrolls in place. A small pot of black ink rested on the left side of the contraption, with a carefully carved circular glass on the right side. The entire thing was attached to Loresearcher's back via a harness, which appeared to have a number of pouches and scrollcases hanging from it.

"What is it?" Ink asked Loresearcher, turning around to walk with his brother.

"Have you been eating fruit?" Loresearcher asked, his eyes still focused on the two scrolls he was reading, glancing back and forth between them. Suddenly stopping, Ink almost running into his tail, Loresearcher raised his right forepaw, all but one of his talons creamy white color, with the furthest left instead almost entirely black, stained from years of writing with ink. He licked the talon then dipped it into the ink cup, and wrote a few short notes on the left scroll while still focused on the right. After he was done, he started walking forward again, Ink eagerly following behind.

"Fruit?" Ink asked. He thought for a moment. "Yeah, I had some this morning. Why?"

"Fruits contain a large quantity of water," Loresearcher answered, glancing from the scroll on his right to the one on his left, then back again.

"So I can eat lots of fruit instead of drinking water?" Ink reasoned out. His brother didn't correct him, so presumably Ink was correct. So that was why he didn't feel so thirsty as when he'd arrived at Jade Mountain, after days of having nothing to drink. "Does that mean we don't have to worry about the drought, and can just eat fruit instead?"

"No. If the fruit-bearing plants don't have water, they'll be unable to perform transpiration."

Ink opened his mouth, unsure what transpiration was, but Loresearcher interrupted him.

"It means they'll die, and we won't have any more fruit. Drought conditions across Pyrrhia mean that our current dragon population is unsustainable."

"So how do we stop it?" Ink asked. "Can we get more rain somehow?"

"No, but we can get water from the ocean."

Ink frowned. He'd tried drinking saltwater before. Loresearcher had asked him to once, wondering if Ink could drink it since he was half SeaWing. It didn't work. He waited for a moment, knowing that his brother had more in mind.

"Most dragons can't drink saltwater," Loresearcher continued, turning right, into a larger corridor. "So we can make it drinkable by desalination."

"Desalin-what?" Ink questioned.

"Removing the salt," Loresearcher responded. "I think I've developed something that will work, although it will take time to set up. I plan to talk to the dragons in charge of this school in order to use their resources for it after I finalize the project."

"Okay," Ink replied. "That sounds good. Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No," Loresearcher answered matter-of-factly.

Ink's expression sunk. Once again, there was nothing he could do. He was the incompetent brother. There wasn't anything wrong with Loresearcher, per se, but sometimes he wished that his sister and mother were still alive. His father was inattentive at best, and sometimes Ink just felt like Loresearcher's plaything. If Midnight and Nightreader were still alive, there would be dragons he could talk with, ones he could share his ideas and jokes with who would enjoy them. At least from what Torrent had told him, Nightreader sounded like that type of dragon, that type of mother. And even if Midnight had died far too young for Torrent to have told Ink much about her, Ink could still imagine what she'd be like if she was still alive. She'd a be happy and kind dragon, who would love to play with Ink. They could make up stories together, pull pranks on their father together.

"I'm useless," Ink muttered, loud enough that Loresearcher heard him.

"This is a time of crisis," Loresearcher coldly responded. "You need to put your personal feelings aside for both of us to succeed."

Ink sighed. He glanced up again to see an ice-blue IceWing in front of him, glaring down at the two hybrids. A single circle of silver hung from his neck, and the IceWing wore it with pride. Ink gulped.

Polar poked one of the wooden braces of Loresearcher's scroll-holding contraption, causing it to creak slightly. "What's this?" the first-circle IceWing snorted, a hint of disdain in his voice.

"Don't touch that again," Loresearcher growled, his snout still looking at his scroll, not bothering to give Polar eye contact.

Polar flicked his tongue in and out, unhappy that he was being ignored. He poked the contraption again. Loresearcher raised his head up, glaring at Polar. Ink shuddered, and took a step back. He didn't want there to be a fight. He'd seen what happened to dragons who got in a fight with his brother. The outcome was never pretty.

As Polar and Loresearcher locked eye contact, Ink noticed the tip of Loresearcher's tail moving through the space between them, too slow for Polar to notice. Ink winced. He opened his mouth, ready to plead for Loresearcher to back down, but his tongue was stuck in his dry throat. He closed his eyes and heard a smack of scales against scales.

Ink opened his eyes and let out a sigh in relief. Loresearcher had done nothing more than whip his tail lightly against the silver bracelet on Polar's left arm. Polar jumped back in surprise, not having noticed the tail. He gritted his teeth, clutching his right paw around the bracelet in pain. Ink could see small dots of blood coming dripping from where Polar's talons cut through his own scales. Ink frowned in confusion. He was certain Loresearcher hadn't hit Polar that hard.

Although a hint of fear quickly flashed in the IceWing's eyes, Polar hid it and snorted defiantly. He walked past the two hybrids, heading in the path he originally planned to go.

As soon as Polar was out of earshot, Loresearcher turned back to his scrolls. "Ink," he spoke, his voice expressing a hint of disappointment, "I thought I told you to make friends with Polar."

"I tried," Ink protested, "I really did. He's just really rude to everyone. How can I make friends with a dragon like that?"

Loresearcher sighed. "That's your job. Keep an eye on Polar, build rapport with him, and warn me of any plans the IceWing has that might be a threat to us."

"Fine, I'll try," Ink grumbled. "What do you want me to do?"

"Follow him," Loresearcher ordered, "but don't stalk him. Do it openly, and in an amiable fashion, like you desperately want him to like you. I'm going to go look over my design for the desalination machine with Tiger. After that, we're going to go talk our uncle."

Ink nodded. "Alright," he agreed glumly. He looked over to his brother for more instructions, but Loresearcher's snout was already back in his scrolls, and he was heading away. Ink cocked his head curiously, then turned to the opposite direction, his tail fanning out through the space behind him. Loresearcher hadn't bothered to tell Ink what he did to Polar's bracelet to hurt the IceWing so much.

It didn't take long for Ink to catch up to Polar, who was entering the library of the academy. Ink wondered what the IceWing was doing there — he didn't seem much like the scrollish type. It had to be something suspicious. Ink moved into the library, just as beautiful as he last remembered it. Green light filtered by vines lit up the room, with only the faintest hint of a chilled wind coming from the mountain-slope outside. Small cubbyholes and shelves took up most of the room's space, almost all of them filled with glorious scrolls of all sizes and genres. Polar was in the center of the room, walking away from a round wooden desk with a black NightWing behind it. Having noticed the hybrid walk in, Polar gave Ink a quick glare, then walked towards one of the walls, quickly picking a few scrolls out. He moved to a small rocky ledge and opened one, starting to read it without paying Ink another glance.

Ink bounded towards Polar, giving Starflight a quick, "Good morning!" on the way. As Ink approached, Polar rolled his eyes and seethed. He rolled his scroll up to prevent Ink from reading it and placed it by the two others, one a small scroll that hadn't seemed to have gotten much use, and the other an extremely old scroll made of a strange black paper. Ink caught the title of the scroll that Polar had rolled up. The Animus Histories.

"Hello, Polar!" Ink opened with a smile. "I didn't know you liked to read!" He didn't know much about Polar at all, to tell the truth. Like Ink and Loresearcher, Polar wasn't actually a student at Jade Mountain. He had arrived a day after the two brothers, and was apparently sent by Queen Glacier herself to check on the well-being of the students here during the drought and retrieve them if required. Loresearcher had postulated that the IceWings here appeared to know him from how they interacted. Most of them had treated him with respect and reverence when he was around, but were outright hostile behind his back. He'd picked up from eavesdropping on a conversation between Changbai and Ermine that even though Polar was loyal to his queen to a fault and his late grandparents were well-respected, the previous generation of his family had been deemed traitors of the worst sort. Ink still wasn't so sure why Loresearcher was so interested, even cautious, of the IceWing, but he trusted his brother's intuition.

Polar growled. "What do you want? I'm busy, and don't have time for dragons like you."

Ink could read the intent behind that. 'Dragons like you' meant hybrids, particularly ones who were half-NightWing. He brushed it off. "Nothing," he quickly lied, "just wanted to apologize about my brother earlier. He can get a bit, er, possessive sometimes."

"Ah," Polar answered, feeling a hint of smugness from the apology, "he should really learn some respect and manners. If we were in the Ice Kingdom, Queen Glacier could have had his head for something like that."

Ink wanted to roll his eyes and stick out his tongue in disgust, but held it back. His secret mission right now was infiltration. Figure out Polar's devious plans. "Yeah. What are you reading? Is it interesting? If you want, I can find you some interesting scrolls. I've only been here for a few days, but this library is amazing! Have you talked to Starflight? If you're ever want to find something, he can be really helpful."

"Er, nothing much," Polar answered tightly, his scales tensing up. It was clear to Ink that he wasn't interested in sharing.

Ink made a point of looking over at the scroll Polar had just closed, making the IceWing even more uncomfortable. "The Animus Histories," he spoke out-loud. "That sounds cool. I like animus stories, even if I know not all of them are really based in truth. I've written a few myself, all fiction of course. They're pretty simple. The archetypal plot of an animus legend is that of tragedy, whereby a dragon with originally noble intentions is corrupted by power, leading to their eventual downfall at the end of a 'hero,' a dragon who usually embodies the moral standards that the animus is unable to live up to, but isn't actually the main character. The moral of the story usually tends to be along the lines of 'don't be tempted to take easy solutions to hard problems' or occasionally the slightly subversive 'power should be in the talons of many rather than that of one.' There are definitely outliers, but a lot of legends follow this animus and hero archetype: Darkstalker and Fathom, Queen Fen and Calamity, in the SkyWings, Vulture and Princess Ametrine."

Polar seemed visibly uncomfortable at this discussion. Was it because Ink had mentioned Darkstalker? Maybe that wasn't such a good idea. He knew he looked a bit like a NightWing, and the IceWings still kept that grudge. Was Polar an animus himself? That seemed pretty unlikely. That was why IceWings hated NightWings — they had stolen Prince Arctic, and thus, the kingdom's magic.

"You know, I'm apparently related to some animuses myself," Ink stated, trying to get Polar to open up, "I don't have any magic, of course, and the relations are a bit distant, but I think it's pretty cool." 'Distant' was a bit of a stretch. He had both an aunt and an uncle who were animuses, one of whom lived somewhere in these caverns.

"You're a dirty hybrid!" Polar suddenly exclaimed, surprise in his voice.

Ink frowned, confused. "Yeah, you knew that already," he tried to comment. "You noticed that when you arrived, and I was talking with Skytaker." He suddenly realized that even though he tried to speak them, the words hadn't come out of his mouth. Polar was still looking down at the scroll, and hadn't seem to notice anything.

"Who?" Polar asked. His mouth didn't move as he spoke the question. Ink realized that in front of him, Polar's scales were starting to blur together, parts of his image dripping down like paint. The green light started to muddle with light-blue color, and the writing on the scrolls started to fade away. As the scenery in front of him began to collapse, Ink tried to move a forepaw. It didn't budge, and instead the dark-blue colors started to spread out like watercolor paint.

Even though he couldn't see anything moving, Ink felt the sensation of leather on his claws, and quickly pushed it down. As his eyepatch covered his left eye, the vision in front of him finally dissipated, and Ink opened his right eye to see Polar standing above him, claws outstretched and teeth bared.

Ink let out a yawn, and looked around. He was in the Claws of the Clouds, right where had gone to sleep the previous day. Not Jade Mountain. That was where he and Polar were heading right now. He shook his scales back and forth and stretched out his wings. "Good morning," he drowsily bumbled to the IceWing, menacingly standing over him.

"I thought you were a SeaWing," Polar snarled. Seeing Ink's webbing in the dim light last night was what had convinced him, but it was clear now that Ink was not fully a SeaWing. He had no gills, and instead of glowscales, he had normal-looking NightWing scales that were slightly flattened.

"I'm half-SeaWing," Ink suggested, "so you were half-right."

"You're half-NightWing, too, aren't you," Polar said in disgust. NightWings. It was because of them he was doing this. If they hadn't stolen Prince Arctic from the Ice Kingdom, the IceWings would still have animus magic. Polar glanced down at his left forearm. The silver bracelet with the purple stone inlaid in it was still there. Ink hadn't tried to steal it from him in the night.

"Yeah, haha, sorry," Ink answered haphazardly. "You don't need to worry though. If I wanted to steal from you or hurt you, I would have done it while you were asleep."

Polar snorted. "I had an eye open," he lied. "I would have torn your throat out if you'd tried. I still might. NightWings are devious; how am I supposed to know what you're planning?"

"Sorry," Ink chuckled uncomfortably, "I didn't mean that as a threat."

"It doesn't matter," Polar hissed, baring his teeth. "You can't threaten me. I've seen you fight. You can't even lay a claw on me." Queen Glacier would send me to the Seventh Circle if she knew I accepted water from a NightWing, he thought, frustrated with his own naivete. "I've deduced it. That's how you knew to collect water for the drought. You foretold the future." Polar had to tell Queen Glacier about this the next time he saw her. The NightWings had claimed that they'd lost their powers when they left their previous home for the rainforest, so this meant that they were lying. What a shocker.

"Er, sure," Ink responded, surprised. Polar was right, well, sort-of. He couldn't tell the future, like in the fabled NightWing powers. And his visions weren't as clear or controllable as Fracture's. But Ink had predicted the drought because he'd seen it happen in his left eye. He'd predicted that Polar would be on his way to Jade Mountain. And he'd been right, both times.

"Can you read my mind too?" Polar asked, a hint of worry in his voice.

"Um, yeah," Ink answered without thinking. Polar's claws stiffened up in fear, and Ink didn't need mind-reading to tell that Polar was deciding whether or not he should kill Ink. So there was something he was thinking that he didn't want Ink to know.

A hint of shame suddenly passed over Polar's eyes, which quickly turned to scorn and derision. "You're lying about that, half-NightWing," he accused Ink, "you would have been shocked if you had known what I was thinking just then."

"Oookay," Ink replied. "You got me. I can't read your mind. What were you thinking? Do you think I'm cute or something?"

Polar froze up. "What?!" he exclaimed. "No! Not that at all! You're an ugly mongrel. And I can't tell you what I was thinking if you don't know it. It's secret IceWing business. Not for your ears."

Ink rolled his eyes. He was very tempted to jape about how Polar was trying to hard to deny his crush on Ink, but didn't want to push the IceWing any further for fear of angering him irreversibly. He'd already made far more progress in making friends than vision-Ink, and didn't want to ruin it! But secrets were interesting. "Secret IceWing business? Can you tell me, just a little?"

"No," Polar growled. "Of course not. That's why it's a secret. Not for non-IceWings, especially not half-NightWings. Can you predict what I'm going to do next?"

Ink shook his head. "No. I can't really do that. That's not how it works."

Polar snorted, unimpressed. "I'm going to keep an close eye on you. We should get to Jade Mountain before our water runs out. Hopefully they have water there."

'We.' So Polar was still going to travel to Jade Mountain with Ink. "I don't think they will," Ink commented. If Polar thought he had prophecy powers, he might as well go along with it. "But they'll have fruit."

"Fruit?" Polar asked, confused and slightly disgusted.

The hybrid nodded. "Fruit! It contains lots of water, so we can drink fruit instead!" Polar seemed slightly more displeased at this prospect. Ink searched back through his memories of the vision. Parts of it were starting to fade, but some of it was still clear. "I think I can also build a desalna . . . desalination machine."

"A what?"

"It can turn saltwater into freshwater," Ink explained. He tried to keep the image of the sketches his deceased brother had made in the front of his mind. He quickly pulled out his sketch-scroll, causing Polar to take a step back at his sudden movements. Ink dipped a wet talon into water, then into his ink, and started drawing what he remembered. The IceWing watched with fascination.

The sketch wasn't good, and Ink wasn't quite sure what much of it meant, but it seemed to mostly match what Ink remembered Loresearcher drawing. As a finishing touch, he wrote the name of a dragon on the top of the machine. Tiger. That was the name of the dragon that Loresearcher had mentioned. He'd probably met them, but he didn't remember ever seeing that in his visions, so he'd just have to find whoever Tiger was and hope they would understand what the sketches meant.

"Is that the machine?" Polar asked.

Ink nodded. "I saw it in my vision. Or at least sketches. If we make one, we can bring it back to the Ice Kingdom!"

Polar snorted. "We have enough freshwater in the form of ice and snow to last us as long as we want." Although it might be difficult to melt it all in the cold climate.

"That's good," Ink smiled, putting the scroll back into his pack. "We should go now, right? Bright and early?"

Polar sighed, slowly grumbling in agreement. He twitched his tail slightly, and pulled out a piece of jerky from his pack, then tore it in two. "Here," he muttered, giving part of it to Ink. "It's payment for the water." He felt awkward, giving something to a dragon who was half-NightWing. Helping out a dragon who wasn't an IceWing seemed like something he could be pushed down in the rankings for. But Ink had shared his rations of water with Polar, and a dragon in the First Circle needed to have honor.

"Oh, thank you!" Ink answered, popping the jerky in his jaws and swallowing it in a few gulps. He went over to one of the sacks of water and got his fill while Polar carefully chewed his jerky. The IceWing went to one of the other sacks and started drinking. Once he was done, he strapped it and and another sack beneath him, and spread his wings open, ready for flight. He glanced over towards Ink, who had done the same with the third sack. It seemed like the two of them had emptied them enough that they were light enough to fly with.

The two walked down towards a small clearing in the forest, and spread their wings wide, lifting off into flight, Ink following directly behind Polar. With the sun on their left, the two dragons soared towards Jade Mountain.