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CLEARSIGHT

"I'm a little confused," Fathom said. "If you want more spells to be cast in secret, why don't you just ask me to cast them? There's no need to write them down in your scroll."

"I don't want to abuse your soul, Fathom," Darkstalker answered. "If we can use my scroll instead of your magic, I'd rather we do that."

"Darkstalker, it's okay. I've been checking myself every day with the soul reader, and I'm still mostly good."

Oh right, the soul reader. Fathom had been holding onto it this whole time, and with how little they'd all been using magic until recently, it slipped Clearsight's mind that he still had it. "Do you know what the soul reader says for us?" she asked him. She wanted to say 'for Darkstalker,' but she didn't feel comfortable singling him out. And besides, she was interested in whether or not her own soul was still almost completely good as well.

Fathom shuffled a bit on his seat cushion, glancing nervously off to the side. "Uh … I do," he said. "I'd tell you, but with everything that's going on right now, I don't want to give you something else to worry about."

Clearsight felt something cold settle into her chest. "Fathom, tell us. What did it say?"

"Well …" Fathom lifted his eyes to meet Clearsight's. "You've both gotten worse. Clearsight, about a third of your soul reads white. And a little more than half of Darkstalker's does."

Darkstalker and Clearsight exchanged mirroring looks of concern.

"I wouldn't think too much of it," Fathom quickly added. "You've become king and queen, right? You should expect it to be harder to stay perfectly good."

"I don't feel any different," Darkstalker said tentatively. "Do you?"

Clearsight shook her head. "I might have gotten more … assertive since I became queen, but I'm still after the same future. I still want to keep the same bad things from happening."

This was definitely a problem. She couldn't let her soul get even remotely tainted. She was supposed to be Darkstalker's guide. If her soul was populated with even a little bit of evil, she would no longer be so sure that the paths she was trying to go down were actually the brighter paths.

"Guys, can we worry about this later?" Fathom said, breaking her out of those thoughts. "The meeting is in two days. We don't have time to get sidetracked with anything else."

Darkstalker nodded. "Right, sorry."

"Anyway," Fathom continued, "my point is that you should leave the secret spells to me. It'll be safer this way."

"Fine," Darkstalker said. "I'll do that."

"So, what sort of spell did you have in mind?" he asked.

"I'm … not sure," he said. "I was hoping we could figure something out together."

Fathom blinked. "Oh. Well … I've got nothing."

"Yeah, I thought the plan was pretty good already," Indigo said. "Do we really need anything more?"

"Maybe as a safety measure," Darkstalker said. "As a way to make sure we're still in control."

"But we have a safety measure already," Fathom said. "If anything goes wrong, we can leave the meeting and take the scroll with us. We're going to make enchantments for that, remember?"

"I do," Darkstalker said. "But the problem is that I still see futures where I don't have my scroll or my powers anymore after the meeting. Clearsight, you see them too, right?"

Clearsight nodded. She'd still been seeing a lot of different futures, actually. Not very many fell out of the realm of possibility, although the ones where they kept their powers and protected their tribe were becoming more likely.

At least, she thought they were. It was very hard to tell when the meeting itself was still inaccessible to her. She might have just been feeling more optimistic as of late, and so focused more on the brighter futures.

"I'm not sure how, but there's still a way for them to win," Darkstalker said, pondering. "I just want to be absolutely sure that we erase those paths."

Clearsight was feeling things tangle themselves up further in the fabric of time. She didn't like this. "Casting secret spells can be a dangerous choice as well," she tried to argue. "If the other queens grow suspicious that we're deceiving them, we might not be able to make peace."

"I have to take Clearsight's side on this," Indigo said. "If we start using more animus magic on them, then we're giving them a reason to believe we're evil. The only way I can see our current plan failing is if they never wanted to be on our side in the first place."

"If worse comes to worst and the queens decide to keep the scroll for themselves, and they somehow keep us from taking it back, then I'll enchant the scroll to turn into dust," Fathom said. "If they believe by that point that we're the power-hungry ones, then they're delusional and we wouldn't have been able to reason with them anyway."

Darkstalker still looked unsure. His eyes were pointed at his talons, scowling.

"I know you're not used to taking risks with the future, Darkstalker," Clearsight said, extending a wing to brush against his back. "But I've taken dozens of risks with the future by trusting you, and I have no regrets." Almost no regrets, she corrected in her mind, remembering the previous timeline that she reset. "As far as I can tell, we're a lot more likely to come out on top here. You just need to trust yourself."

Darkstalker lifted his head, and his eyes brightened a little bit. He looked over at Clearsight and nodded. "You're right," he said quietly. "We'll win this."

Clearsight couldn't help but grin with pride. Darkstalker was usually so confident all on his own. It was nice to know that in the rare moment when he was feeling unsure of himself, she was able to set him straight again.

The next day, Clearsight and the others made arrangements for their departure. Darkstalker wrote in the spells that granted the four of them impenetrable scales and invincibility. Per Clearsight's request, he also wrote the expiration into the spells themselves, so that none of them could violate their precommitment to shedding their vulnerabilities after the meeting was over. Once the two full moons set, the spells would expire and they would become mortal again.

Clearsight rummaged through the palace treasure room and found a golden bell which produced a high chime that nearly sounded like a scavenger squeak. She brought it back to her private chamber with Darkstalker, and they agreed to equip this with the failsafe teleportation enchantments. When the bell was rung, Darkstalker's scroll would immediately teleport behind it. And when Fathom, Clearsight, Indigo, or Darkstalker covered their heads and said, 'take me to the bell,' they would be brought into the same room as the bell.

Seeing the animus enchantments in writing made Clearsight realize just how ambiguous the Dragon language could be sometimes. Darkstalker had originally worded the spell so that once one of them covered their heads and said the right words, 'they' would be teleported to the bell. Fathom pointed out that this 'they' could be interpreted to mean all four of them rather than just the individual who'd activated the spell. Indigo, more alarmingly, pointed out that this 'they' could also be interpreted to mean just their heads. The spell was promptly adjusted to make it clearer.

They had to wake up early tomorrow for the long flight to the Sky Kingdom. In the hours before they retired to their beds, Darkstalker, Fathom, and Indigo decided to have some fun testing their invulnerability while they still had it. Clearsight watched in disgruntled amusement as they played a game of chicken, where they fell from the cloud layer to the ground to see who would let up first. It ended up being a tie, with all three of them crashing belly-first into the valley and putting dragon-shaped dents into the ground. They were all fine, of course — the sudden deceleration merely made them dizzy upon standing back up. But it was still difficult to see and hear the impact without her heart jumping out of her chest.

Clearsight wasn't nearly as daring. The most ambitious she was willing to get with her temporary powers was a particularly rough cuddling session with Darkstalker before they fell asleep that morning.

An hour before sunset, they all woke up, gathered their belongings, and met up at the front of the palace.

While waiting for Fathom and Indigo, Darkstalker enchanted his scroll case to be invisible until he unstrapped it from his back. He normally wrote enchantments with his claws, but since he didn't have the cloth that he used to clean the ink off of his talons, he instead used a black feather quill. When he put his things away, the scroll vanished into the now-invisible leather case, and the quill vanished into a slick black quill holder that blended into the starry void under his wing.

Indigo and Fathom soon arrived, covered in luxurious apparel. Indigo had armed herself, equipping her concealed dagger and whale tooth spear as she usually did when acting as Fathom's bodyguard. She also wore a pearl necklace — the same one, apparently, that Fathom had enchanted to save her life after she had saved his during the SeaWing massacre. It was technically a gift from Pearl, so it made sense that she'd choose to wear it to a meeting with her.

Fathom wore old jewelry, including some emerald earrings that he used to always wear at the royal parties. He also wore a pear of gold armbands, carved with the symbols of SeaWing royalty.

Clearsight and Darkstalker wore a humble supply of jewels as well, wearing earrings and bracelets that came in a matching set. They knew that they'd be asked to remove all of their jewelry upon entering the meeting room, so they didn't spend too much effort on ornamenting themselves. The only reason they went through any effort in the first place was because there was a dress code associated with attending meetings that had royalty present, and violating that dress code might have come off as a bit suspicious.

"Is everyone ready?" Darkstalker asked, looking to the mountains in the north-east.

Fathom took a deep breath. "Yes. Let's get this settled."

"We've been preparing for this for two months now," Indigo said. "We're ready."

"You two lead the way, then," Darkstalker said as he extended his wings. "We'll be able to keep our eyes on you once twilight hits."

Fathom and Indigo took to the sky, and Darkstalker and Clearsight followed after. Before long, the warmth of the sunlight fled from their scales, and as they ascended above the clouds, the air grew cool as autumn.

The flight was leisurely and quiet. It was a still evening, with hardly a gust of wind to blow them off course. Sun rays scattered in the atmosphere, coloring the clouds a pastel orange and the band of sky above the horizon a soft pink.

Clearsight still struggled against the futures that she couldn't see. The barrier of mist in her visions made it so challenging to use her powers at all, now that the futures were so close.

The possibility dawned on her that the meeting ahead of them might not be the be-all-end-all moment that she thought it was. There were still numerous futures ahead of them — so many different paths they could end up taking. Would this meeting really be the thing that decided which of those paths they would take, or would all of the futures still be there by the end of the day? Now that her powers were so overtly compromised, it was hard to know for sure.

But she knew the meeting would set forth a course of action that would define the years to come. It had to, simply by its very nature. This would be a congress between the most powerful dragons in the world, and they would be making decisions that would dictate the future use of animus magic. She didn't need future sight to acknowledge how far the ramifications would take them.

She flapped her wings a few times, picking up height. As the sun began to set, the shadows grew within the curves and contours of the clouds beneath her. Fathom and Indigo remained ahead of them, green and purple outlines against the reddening horizon.

They flew past the mountains that bordered the Night Kingdom, their stiff black peaks breaching the cloud layer and casting long shadows. To their east was the snowy peaks of the mighty Jade Mountain, now the tallest mountain on the continent. A vast sea of desert sand lay ahead of them, belonging to the southern lands of the SandWings, whose queen was surely winging her way to the Sky Palace at this very moment, if she weren't already there.

Sunset turned to twilight, and twilight turned to dusk. The stars in the sky began to brighten, and a pair of full moons rose up from the east. The foothills that buffered the land between the desert and the Claws of the Clouds Mountains came into view, and before long they passed over them, crossing the border into the Sky Kingdom.

As the skies cleared, Clearsight came to appreciate the true vastness of the continent. The mountain range, as it was drawn on maps, resembled a cluster of closely knit mountain peaks that ran north to south. But in actuality, it was more like a vast field. Even as she flew high above the tallest peaks, where the sparse trees in the valleys looked no bigger than grains of sand, mountainous terrain spanned the entire landscape below. It was impossible to say when one mountain ended and another began. Rather, the peaks and valleys wove together, each carving its own network of river-like formations into the earth.

They stopped only once in the mountains, finding a lake in the valleys where they could drink some water and hunt some animals. After eating, drinking, and stretching their wings, they headed north to the heart of the Sky Kingdom, where it would be nothing but more mountains until they reached Queen Carmine's palace.

They continued to fly for another hour. Or perhaps two: Clearsight was beginning to lose track of the time. It was a good thing that the other queens were generous enough to schedule the meeting for midnight, or else she would have started to worry that they'd show up late. Her wings burned. The four of them were flying in a V formation to save energy, but it was painful just to keep her wings extended.

When the palace finally came into view, all four of them let out a tired cheer. The building had a footprint the size of a small village, and was nearly as tall as it was wide. It boasted walls of pale golden limestone, faintly illuminated by the moonlight. Turrets and bridges and flying buttresses adorned the building, visible even from miles away. Over a dozen spires jutted from the fortress, and hundreds of narrow windows spanned the grand walls, many of which were aglow from the lamps burning inside.

When they reached the palace, they spent some time circling around it to find a place to land. It was so chaotically designed, as though someone had taken several smaller palaces and glued them together.

Soon, however, they were greeted by a SkyWing guard standing at the top of a turret. With a bright torch, the guard waved them over to get their attention, then pointed the torch towards a taller part of the palace, a little further north.

They followed the guard's directions, flying over the bordering walls towards the taller spire. Soon they found a landing site of smooth flat stone that bordered a small iron gate, surrounded on all other sides by crags. They touched down gracefully, relieved to finally be able to give their wings a break.

The gate opened moments after they landed, and a pair of guards emerged from the other side. They both bore cardinal red scales beneath their bronze helmets and chest plates, and both stood taller than all of them. "Queen Clearsight, it is an honor to have your presence here," one guard said with a bow, his voice crisp and direct. "Shall we show you to the conference room? The others are awaiting your arrival."

"You may," Clearsight said, nodding. "It was considerate of the queens to work with our nocturnal schedules. The least we can do is be as punctual with them as we can."

As the guards led them into the palace, Clearsight enjoyed the feeling of using her legs again. Her body felt so light when it was being supported by four walking limbs, especially after it had been supported for so long by nothing but the wind.

The palace interior looked the same as it had in her visions of it in the past, but Clearsight hadn't paid extremely close attention to the details at the time. The NightWing palace decorators liked to cover empty space with mirrors and tapestries (and, as of late, Whiteout's paintings). Meanwhile, the empty space in the halls of the SkyWing palace were mostly filled with statues. Busts of proud, long-horned SkyWings stood between the windows, and sculptures of phoenixes, mountains, or royal emblems of the sun stood at every corner.

Darkstalker walked with a brisk gait, his head high and his face rapt with focus. Fathom and Indigo stayed behind them. They stood straight as well, but Clearsight could see in their eyes that they were nervous and very much in the mood to find somewhere soft and secluded to curl up and take a long nap.

They reached the end of the hall and stopped in front of a large door that was guarded by another palace guard. She stood beside a stone shelf, which she gestured to with the broad end of her spear. "Please remove all jewelry and other personal belongings before stepping inside," she said.

Clearsight was about to unclip her earrings when Darkstalker interrupted. "I beg your pardon?" he asked. "In the Night Kingdom, it's considered bad manners to be in the presence of royalty without at least a little bit of formal attire. Is it not the same here in the Sky Kingdom?"

"This is a safety measure by the request of the other queens," the guard said. "In case any of your jewelry is animus-touched."

Darkstalker rolled his eyes and started unclipping his earrings. "Fine, then," he murmured.

They proceeded to shed their jewels and other items, placing them on the shelf beside the guard. Indigo also placed her spear and her dagger there as well. Within minutes, none of them had anything visible on them.

"There," Darkstalker said. "May we step in now?"

"We'll also need to check for concealed items," she said. "If you may let us pat you down. It'll only take a few seconds."

Clearsight pretended to look worried, while Darkstalker threw a scowl at the guard. "Will I let you run your talons up and down me and my wife to make sure we're not hiding anything? No, I don't think I will."

"Searching guests for concealed items or contraband is standard security procedure here in the palace," the guard said. "We're under strict orders not to let you proceed until we've done so. Would you rather we tell the others that you will not be participating in the meeting?"

Darkstalker hissed out a sigh. "No," he conceded. "Fine, then. Go ahead and search us."

The three guards checked them rather gently, and looked as though they tried to be quick about it. Of course, they eventually touched Darkstalker's invisible scroll, and were quick to bring it to his attention.

"There appears to be something on your back, King Darkstalker," the guard said in the middle of his search. One of his talons was over Darkstalker's back, resting right where the scroll would be. "Some sort of invisible case. Would you happen to know what it is?"

Darkstalker closed his eyes and emitted a long sigh. "…Yes. Let me take it off."

Once he unstrapped the scroll case from his back, it immediately reappeared. "I need to bring this into the meeting," he said. "Trust me, it's important."

"We will hold onto it for now," the guard said. "Once you need it back, speak to the others. We will return it to you on Queen Carmine's orders."

Darkstalker held the scroll closer to him. "No. I must keep hold of this myself. I can't let it into anyone else's talons."

"Your scroll will be safe as long as it remains with us," the guard assured. "But we cannot let you in until you hand it to us."

There was a long silence. Clearsight pretended to look nervous as Darkstalker pretended to look torn. Finally, he followed through with the act and threw his scroll case at the guard. "There, happy? I'll be back for it soon. And don't even think about opening it up. Trust me, I'll know."

The guard caught the scroll and nodded, setting it down on the shelf with the rest of their belongings. "You may proceed now," he said as the other guard opened the door for them.

Clearsight swallowed. From this point forward, she wouldn't have her future sight to help her. She was blind now.

The first sight of the meeting room gave her a bit of relief. Nine dragons sat around a wooden table, and that was it. There weren't any secret weapons or flashy looking devices. There weren't any signs of a complicated plan that would completely ruin them. Just the queens, the table, some lamps to brighten the room, some doors, a rack of scrolls against the far wall, some statues of peregrines in the corners, and themselves.

The only concerning thing was that there were nine dragons, not eight. If she was recalling the list of known living animuses correctly, there should have been five in the room: Fathom, Darkstalker, Arctic, Diamond, and Jerboa. Since Diamond was already a queen, that meant that there should have been eight dragons waiting for them: the six queens, plus Arctic and Jerboa. But there was an extra SandWing. A daughter of Jerboa's, perhaps? Another animus?

"Ah, the guests from the Night Kingdom arrive at last!" the SkyWing queen said, bowing shallowly to the four of them. "We've been waiting for you for some time now. Did you get lost in the palace? I had instructed my guards to help direct you this way once you arrived."

"The guards were very courteous and of great help, Queen Carmine," Clearsight said politely. "Were it not for them, we might have spent another hour wandering your halls." Not that that's very impressive, she thought. What else would you have instructed them to do? Open the doors for us and let us prance around in your palace to our heart's content?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Darkstalker hold back a chuckle as he smiled at her. It suddenly dawned on her that he could read her thoughts now. She'd taken off the bracelet that kept her mind from getting read.

She thought that after all these years, she'd be okay with him entering her mind. She did trust him. Or at least, she thought she did. Did that buzz of nervousness that she still felt at the thought of him listening to her thoughts prove otherwise?

"I think introductions are in order, as for many of us, this will be our first time meeting any of you," Queen Carmine said. "I am Carmine, queen of the Sky Kingdom, and I welcome you to my palace, Queen Clearsight and King Darkstalker of the NightWings. I welcome you as well, Prince Fathom and Indigo of the SeaWings."

"It is an honor," Prince Fathom said, bowing in a manner that appeared as though it were rehearsed dozens of times. Indigo followed, mimicking Fathom's movements.

The MudWing queen rose to her feet. She was easily the largest queen among them, which came as no surprise. She was in her nineties, and had been ruling over the Mud Kingdom for over fifty years now. "I'm Crane, ruler of the MudWings," she said before sitting back down.

The RainWing queen then stood up, her scales a neutral swirl of lavender and gold. "Queen Anaconda of the RainWings," she said, sounding a tiny bit bored. "It is a pleasure to finally meet with you."

Queen Diamond was next. She stood and lowered her head gently. "Blessings to you, my grandchildren," she said, frowning. "I'm Queen Diamond, and this is my son, Prince Arctic."

"We're already well-acquainted," Darkstalker said with a cold eye towards his father.

"As are we," Queen Pearl said, standing up herself. "Though I don't believe we have met face-to-face, Darkstalker and Clearsight. I am Queen Pearl. It is good to finally meet you."

Darkstalker responded with a short snarl.

"And I'm Queen Scorpion," the large SandWing said with a sly smile and a bow. "The SandWings to my right are Jerboa and Jerboa Junior. They were both quite the challenge to find."

"It is an honor," Clearsight said, bowing back to the three SandWings. "As I'm sure you're all aware by now, I'm Queen Clearsight and this is my husband, King Darkstalker." She then pointed her wing at the SeaWings, adding, "The SeaWings here are Prince Fathom and Princess Indigo."

"So," Darkstalker said, "shall we get started?"

"I think so," Pearl said, starting towards the far end of the table. "The sooner we begin, the sooner we can all return home."

"May I have my scroll first?" Darkstalker asked. "The guards outside had me take it off, but I have a proposition to make and I need it back in order to make it."

"That won't be necessary," Pearl said, her back still turned to him. "We have a plan for what we'll be negotiating already."

"I seriously think that you would like to hear my proposition," Darkstalker said with a bit more force. "Let me have my scroll. I promise it's important."

Pearl ignored him. "When the rest of the queens and I convened to discuss how we could safely mitigate the threat of animus magic, we knew that we wouldn't be able to contain it without using some of it ourselves," she said as she gathered a pair of scrolls from the rack on the far wall.

She turned around and continued, "So when I called forth the rest of the animus dragons, they each agreed to cast one spell in order to help. The first spell, cast by Queen Diamond, was a shrouding spell. As I'm sure you've figured out by now, this room has been enchanted to be hidden from any futures that would otherwise be detectable by seer powers or animus magic. We wouldn't be able to maintain any control if we allowed you to learn about our plans potentially before we even made them."

"Doesn't it seem a bit malicious of you to be using animus magic to suppress the natural powers of another dragon?" Darkstalker asked. "I thought you were supposed to be against this sort of thing."

"Not when so much is at stake," Pearl said. "We also needed to make sure that this room remained safe. So many animuses in one place would pose an obvious risk, so Prince Arctic enchanted the room to keep all current animus dragons from casting new spells while they remained inside of it."

Clearsight looked behind her and noticed that the door that they had entered was now shut. She suddenly didn't feel so good about this.

Pearl placed one of the scrolls on the table. "The next enchantment we decided to make was perhaps the most enlightening of them all. It was Jerboa's idea, and she was the one who cast it. See, the only way to keep Pyrrhia safe from dangerous animus spells is to know what those animus spells are. So, she enchanted this scroll to make a list of every spell that has ever been cast, along with who cast it, and when."

Cold numbness washed over Clearsight as Pearl opened the scroll.

"I was surprised when I found out that it was actually Fathom who'd killed Albatross, and not Indigo," Pearl said, pointing at one of the lines written down in the scroll. "Don't worry, Fathom. No one needs to know."

"She still saved my life," Fathom said in her defense, sounding as nervous as Clearsight felt. "I would have been dead before I cast the spell if it weren't for her."

"And you saved her life in return," she said, pointing at the spell below. "But that was the last spell you cast for many years. Good on you for holding to your promise for so long." She slid her talon against the scroll. "But look at this next spell. It was the very last one that Darkstalker had cast. 'Enchant this scroll to absorb all of my animus powers, so that every spell written in it will act as an animus enchantment; furthermore, if this scroll ever gets destroyed, enchant it to return all of its powers back to me'."

Darkstalker swallowed.

There goes our entire plan, Clearsight thought, feeling herself grow pale. Darkstalker: if you're listening, I think we might want to leave.

He glanced over at Clearsight, quickly shook his head, then turned to face Pearl again. "Congratulations, you figured out my secret," he said. "I enchanted a scroll to take on the burden of my animus magic. Which means that since I'm technically no longer an animus, my soul is no longer being corrupted by those powers."

"Yes, but it also meant that we couldn't see any of the spells you cast," Pearl said. "Which, annoyingly, meant that we had to use our last spell to make this." She opened the second scroll, which had Darkstalker's claw writing scrawled on it. "A copy of your scroll — which, might I add, updates in real time."

Darkstalker rose to his feet, furious and panicked. "If you even think about taking my scroll away from me —"

"— You'll what, teleport back home and ring that bell you enchanted?" Pearl asked, casting a smirk at Darkstalker that even made Clearsight want to claw her in the face. "But look! That guard who took your scroll seems to have written down a new spell," she said, pointing at the copy of Darkstalker's scroll. "It says, 'Enchant the bell from the above enchantment to teleport in front of Queen Pearl once she finishes reading this sentence'."

At once, a little golden bell appeared in front of Pearl, before dropping to the table. It let out a ring, which summoned Darkstalker's actual scroll, along with its black leather case.

"I guess you're not gonna be teleporting back home, are you?" Pearl said calmly.

Darkstalker exhaled a plume of smoke through his nostrils.

Pearl rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't try and act all intimidating on me, Darkstalker. We both know that you're out of plans. I know every spell that both you and Fathom cast, and none of them are going to help you." She reached up and grabbed Darkstalker's scroll, slowly rolling it up in her talons. "You NightWings aren't the ones in charge anymore. You won't be able to use magic to get your way this time. This time, you're going to sit down, and listen."

She glowered across the table at Darkstalker, waiting for him to sit back down. It took several heartbeats, but eventually he did, though his eyes only grew more bitter as he did so.

"Good," she said. "Now, let's start some peace negotiations."