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DARKSTALKER

Life had been busy ever since Darkstalker moved into the palace. Fathom was always a lot of work, since he couldn't be left alone for too long before retracting into his shell and feeling terrible about himself. Indigo was extremely outgoing as well, constantly seeking Darkstalker's cooperation for all of the ideas she had to make Fathom happy.

Clearsight operated well enough on her own, but Darkstalker didn't want to let her. He still loved listening in on her thoughts and trying to find creative ways to surprise her in spite of her powers. And since they were both living in the palace now, their parents weren't around to keep them from having sleepovers in each other's chambers every other day.

If it were just those three dragons with whom he had to occupy his time, then he'd be perfectly happy. Fathom, Indigo, and Clearsight were three of his favorite dragons in the world, so he couldn't ask for better dragons to be responsible for.

But there was also the queen, one of Darkstalker's least favorite dragons in the world. In the past, she was usually more interested in Darkstalker's parents than she was in Darkstalker himself. But ever since she found out that he'd used his magic to help protect Foeslayer during the ambush, the flood gates opened. Now she had no problem requesting the occasional enchantment from him, just to give themselves the edge in the war when things were looking bad.

And then there was his mother. After the ambush was successful, Queen Vigilance set her off on increasingly dangerous field missions. Her second task involved destroying a guarded fortification that harbored critical supplies for the IceWing defenses. Her third involved rescuing a NightWing commander that had been captured during a raid. Her fourth involved an offensive ambush on a platoon of skilled frost breathers. According to Clearsight, none of the missions guaranteed her survival.

It stressed both Darkstalker and Clearsight out to the extreme, and they had a miserable lack of control over the situation. Clearsight had the support of her council, and Darkstalker had the support of his family, and they all repeatedly petitioned the queen to keep Foeslayer in the palace. But it all fell on deaf ears. The more often Foeslayer was successful in her assigned missions, the more inclined Vigilance was to keep assigning her new ones. But the more missions Vigilance assigned to Foeslayer, the harder Darkstalker and Clearsight tried to ensure Foeslayer's success.

It was comforting to know that Foeslayer was good at her job, at least. She knew how to keep herself safe, and her two enchantments have thus far been enough to keep her alive. But it was such a terrible feeling whenever Darkstalker knew that Foeslayer was out serving more orders for the queen, unsure whether or not she'd come back again.

On the queen's orders, Foeslayer would be setting out on another mission tomorrow. She and her squad would serve as bait against a fortified IceWing patrol along the eastern frontier. The plan was to create an opening, allowing a larger division to come in and seize control of the main fortress. It would be the riskiest mission she'd ever been on.

"Are you sure there isn't some extra enchantment I can give her?" he asked Clearsight during lunch. "I have some ideas."

Clearsight shook her head. "If the IceWings find out that we've been using magic to protect her, they might start using magic themselves. And that is not a future we want to encounter, trust me."

Darkstalker let out a huff. "You should tell that to the queen."

"I have," she said. "All she did was get all snooty and make me promise not to tell anyone about the spells you cast for her. As if I would tell anyone. Does Fathom know about them yet?"

"No, I decided he probably shouldn't know," Darkstalker said. "It'd be too risky. I don't want the wrong mind reader overhearing him while he's worrying about me."

Clearsight frowned, looking away from him. "I hate that I agree with you," she said quietly.

"Well, what he doesn't know can't hurt him," he said. "I'm sure he'll understand when the time comes to tell him."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," warned Clearsight. "You tested their goodwill once already when you made them the soul reader."

"And I think I passed the test. They still love me all the same." He rose to his feet. "Speaking of which, I should probably go say hi to them."

"No, don't," Clearsight said. "Fathom just confessed his feelings to Indigo. You should probably leave them alone for the rest of the night."

Darkstalker beamed. "Attaboy, Fathom! At least one of us is happy right now. In that case, I'll go find some cooks and ask them to prepare some of Mom's favorite food for dinner tonight. You're invited, of course."

"I'll be there," she said.

Darkstalker walked around the table and gave Clearsight an affectionate nuzzle. "Good luck in your meeting. Make sure Mom is fully prepared for her mission tomorrow, alright?"

"I will. She'll be ready for anything and everything that can go wrong, I promise."

Darkstalker left the cafeteria and navigated down the palace halls towards the west wing. As he turned a corner and made his way towards the kitchens, a voice rang out from behind him.

"Son!"

Darkstalker couldn't have asked for a better way to dampen his mood. He turned around and saw Arctic, staring at him with those cold blue eyes that always made Darkstalker's skin crawl. Whiteout was beneath his wing, wearing a custom harness designed to hold paint canvases on either side of her body. Her smile managed to keep Darkstalker from completely ignoring the two of them.

He sighed and walked up to them. "What do you want, Arctic?"

Arctic folded his brow, and Darkstalker heard him contemplating whether or not he should scold his son for his rudeness. But he let it be, and instead looked down at Whiteout. "Your sister wishes to move into the palace," he said. "I think she hopes to become a full-time painter for the nobility here."

"The palace would be lucky to have her," he said, nodding encouragingly at his sister. "Would you like for me to throw in a good word for you to the queen?"

"I don't think she likes your seasoning," Whiteout said. "It's too salty for her taste."

Darkstalker's mind simmered for a moment. "Okay then," he said. "What would you have me do instead?"

"Feed the birds of her feathers," she said. "When they flock together, they'll share the meal, then come fluttering to me."

"I think she wants you to look around the palace for dragons with close ties to the queen," Arctic clarified. "If they become Whiteout's clientele, they may recommend her to Queen Vigilance themselves."

Darkstalker nodded. "I'd be happy to do that."

"I have something for you, brother," Whiteout said, looking over her shoulder at the canvas strapped to her harness. "Take it from me, and copy it into your mind."

The musicality of his sister's words always brightened his mood. Darkstalker loosened the buckles around the painting, then pulled the canvas out from the harness.

The painting showed three NightWings in a rainstorm. Two dragons were in the sky, spreading their wings wide to shield the third dragon from the rain. At first, it was hard to tell if the NightWings were anyone specific, but when Darkstalker looked more closely, he could clearly identify himself and Clearsight as the two dragons in the sky, and Foeslayer as the dragon on the ground.

The metaphor certainly wasn't lost on Darkstalker. "It's beautiful, Whiteout."

"Tell me what you see," Whiteout said.

"I see me and Clearsight, protecting Foeslayer from the rain."

"Anything more?"

"Well … the water is soaking me and Clearsight," Darkstalker said.

"Anything more?"

Darkstalker looked closely for any details in the painting he might have missed. And he found one: a glimmer of gold within the clouds, obscured by the foggy foreground. Its shape was clear now that he noticed it. "I see a crown in the rain cloud above," he said. Another pretty clear extension of the metaphor.

"Good. What else?"

Darkstalker was running out of things to mention. The rain was falling diagonally? The wind was bending the trees in the background? The sky was gray and the grass was green?

"Listen, Darkstalker," Arctic said. "We'll be having a family dinner at home tonight. We expect you to be there."

"I know," Darkstalker said. "Mom already told me the plan. I was just about to make arrangements with the cook."

"Don't bother. I've already gotten everything planned. Just show up and behave yourself. We don't need your sour attitude ruining your mother's final night at home before she sets off. She's nervous enough already."

"I know that," Darkstalker said, leering. "What do you think Clearsight and I have been doing these past few nights?"

"I don't know," Arctic said, his voice soft and seething. "You never bother to tell me what you're doing with your life."

Darkstalker huffed. "Well, we've been helping Mom prepare," he said. "We're actually trying to keep her alive."

Arctic's spikes flared. "And I'm not? Is that what you're saying?"

Darkstalker didn't bother responding. He was tired of talking to him. He picked up the canvas and folded his wing around it, holding it in place against his body.

"Have you forgotten about her earring?" Arctic said. "She's probably still alive because of me! And what about you? What have you done to protect her? You've only ever wasted your soul on stupid, petty spells. I don't see you using your powers trying to keep her safe."

Darkstalker was actually a little surprised to hear that. Foeslayer must not have told him about the invisibility spell he'd made for her. He let out an angry sigh from his nostrils and said, "I've made promises about the use of my magic. Unlike you, I'm trying to keep them."

The edge of Arctic's mouth twitched into a snarl for half a second. You ungrateful little salamander, the IceWing thought.

"If you're going to be angry at anyone, be angry at the queen," Darkstalker told him. "She's the one who keeps sending Mom on these ridiculous missions."

"I am angry at the queen!" Arctic said, flapping his wings angrily and accidentally whacking Whiteout in the process. "I'm angry at everyone in this stupid kingdom that makes these stupid decisions! I want Queen Vigilance to stop trying to get Foeslayer killed just as much as you do, you know that."

Darkstalker clenched his teeth. Yes, he knew that. Arctic's one redeeming quality was that he loved Foeslayer as much as Darkstalker did. But Darkstalker wasn't going to give him the pleasure of hearing him admit that.

Arctic let out a sigh, and patted Whiteout on the head, where his wing hit her. "Dinner at the house," he said to Darkstalker. "Don't be late."

"I won't," Darkstalker said, turning away from him and walking off towards his chambers.

When he made it to his bedroom, he propped Whiteout's painting up on the windowsill. He studied the painting some more, just to get his mind off of his irritating father. It really was a gorgeous painting too. Whiteout had become so incredibly skilled with her use of colors.

What was it Whiteout wanted her to see? Maybe he could figure it out if he studied it long enough. Maybe it was important.

But there wasn't anything in the painting that didn't already stand out to him. It was a metaphor for Darkstalker and Clearsight's efforts to protect Foeslayer, that much was obvious. The rain cloud was Queen Vigilance, and the rain was the peril these missions were putting Foeslayer in. But was there something else?

Maybe there wasn't. Maybe Whiteout just wanted Darkstalker to appreciate her painting, and there was nothing more to it than that.

But something in his mind insisted that that wasn't true. Whiteout did seem to have some seer powers, despite being hatched the day after the full moons. And Clearsight's experiences from the previous timelines she'd gone through confirmed that Whiteout's prophecies had meaningful predictive power — even though they weren't communicated in the most conventional ways.

This painting felt like a prophecy, or something close to it.

The only extra thing Darkstalker noticed after staring at it for several more minutes was how expertly done the composition was. It was framed beautifully, with a horizon line along the bottom third of the canvas, and a choice of lighting and shadows that directed one's attention to the center of the piece, where the three dragons were. It was dark and hazy around the edge, and brighter in the middle. The raindrops reflected the soft moonlight, shining like silver, but they didn't glisten like that around the edge of the canvas. In fact, there weren't raindrops around the edge of the canvas. They were all in the center, as though the rain cloud were falling on Foeslayer and Foeslayer alone.

That might have meant something, or it might have just been something Whiteout added to make the scene feel more supernatural and metaphorical. Darkstalker really had no way of knowing for sure. If it did mean something, he couldn't figure out what. Maybe it meant that the rain cloud was following Foeslayer — in other words, that Queen Vigilance was going to keep sending Foeslayer on these deadly missions for the foreseeable future. But he wondered if he really needed a prophecy to know that.

He didn't know exactly how long he'd been studying the painting for, but at some point he felt like he'd gone too long without moving his body. He stood up, stretched, and headed out into the halls to find a clock and check the time.

There was a grandfather clock swinging in the palace's main hall. When he looked at it, he saw that it was a quarter past three. Clearsight should be wrapping up her council meeting pretty soon.

"Actually, we just finished," a voice said from behind him.

Darkstalker straightened up and reared his head. Keen Eye was approaching him.

He'd heard a lot about this dragon from Clearsight. She was sharp, fiercely analytical, and one of the most influential dragons in the palace. Clearsight warned that she was not a force to be reckoned with, so Darkstalker made sure to avoid getting in her way — to avoid meeting her at all, in fact. He'd been successful up to this point.

Clearsight didn't tell him that Keen Eye was apparently a particularly skilled mind reader, though. Not many dragons were able to penetrate his mind.

Whatever the case, he strengthened his mental efforts to push her out. Keen Eye had her own mind block active, it seemed: Darkstalker failed to pick up any of her thoughts.

"You must be Keen Eye," he said, nodding his head in a half bow. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"We can skip the formalities, Darkstalker," Keen Eye said dryly. "I'm sure our powers have already introduced ourselves to one another."

"Actually, Clearsight gave me more of an introduction to you than my powers did," Darkstalker said. "She's so much better at seeing into the future than I am, so I tend to use my own future sight sparingly."

"I see," she said. "Well, I need to have a word with you. Do you have a moment?"

There was an existential dread that made its way into Darkstalker's gut. It wasn't anything prophetic, just a nasty feeling that he always got when someone important 'needed to have a word' with him. It was particularly nasty this time. Something told him he needed to choose his words carefully. "I suppose," he said. "What do you need?"

"I need …." She paused, tapping the ground with her claw. Her mind block was keeping Darkstalker from reading her exact thoughts, but he could tell that she was struggling to find the right words. "I need you to … tone it down a little bit," she finally said.

"What are you talking about?" Darkstalker asked.

Keen Eye let out a frustrated sigh. "Look, I'm sure Clearsight already knows about this very distinctly and has talked to you about it at length, but you're on the verge of overthrowing the NightWing government, and you need to stop."

"What? No I'm not!"

"No, don't pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't done anything!"

"But you will," Keen Eye said. "Or, you might. Darkstalker, your mother's in danger. We both know that. And if she gets killed, you'll get angry. We both know that."

Darkstalker narrowed his eyes. "I still don't see—"

"—You'll blame Queen Vigilance for her death, kill her out of revenge, and try to take her place as ruler of the Night Kingdom."

"That is preposterous," Darkstalker hissed. He suddenly got the feeling that he should probably keep his voice down.

"I am a seer, Darkstalker. This is what I've seen." Keen Eye stepped towards Darkstalker and lowered her voice. "Look, I'm not your enemy, okay? And I don't want to become your enemy. But the longer this goes on for, the more likely it is that other seers are going to figure out just how much of a threat you are. And when they do, they're not going to come to you first. They're going to go straight to the queen, and she'll deal with you and Clearsight the same way she deals with every other threat against her."

As much as he hated being accused of doing things in the future, he had to admit that Keen Eye had a point here. If Vigilance ever suspected that Darkstalker would try to kill her, then both he and Clearsight would be in serious trouble.

"Listen, I'm doing everything in my power to protect Foeslayer," Keen Eye continued. "All of us are. And I'm not in any position to tell you how you should feel if the worst should happen to your mother. But I need you to try and be prepared. This is a war we're fighting in, and your mother knew the risks she was taking when she decided to participate in it. If we lose her — and we won't, but if we do — please, do not take your anger out on Queen Vigilance. She may be a bit thick-headed at times, but she's not trying to get your mother killed."

That was when it finally hit him. All at once, it hit him. He felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. The rain cloud: it was following Foeslayer. It was deliberately, incessantly, actively trying to rain on Foeslayer.

It took all his mental fortitude to keep his mind blocked and his face composed. And even then, Keen Eye clearly noticed something was awry. "Did you hear me, Darkstalker?"

Darkstalker blinked. "Yeah, yeah, I heard you. Hey, unrelated, but do you happen to have a spy network in this palace?" he asked in a very hushed whisper.

Keen Eye tilted her head. "That is a very unrelated question."

"Let's just say I had a vision. One involving the queen. I think … you should keep an eye on her."

Keen Eye clenched her teeth, closed her eyes, rubbed her temples, then let out a long sigh. "Darkstalker, I thought I made this pretty clear, but I'll say it again slowly," she said. "I'm worried. That you. Are a threat. To Queen Vigilance. What you're saying right now is not helping me ease those worries."

Bells of alarm chimed in his head. Choose your words very carefully. "I'm not asking you to spy on the queen for me," he clarified. "This is about Foeslayer's safety. I don't know exactly what's going on, but I think someone close to the queen might be out to get her."

Keen Eye paused for a moment, and then shrugged her shoulders. "I'll consider it. In the meantime, please take my warning into consideration."

"You have my promise."

Keen Eye walked off, and Darkstalker nearly collapsed from exhaustion. He was amazed that Clearsight managed to deal with her almost every day. The whole time they spoke, he was afraid that if he had said one wrong word, Keen Eye would have been arresting him herself.

He was an idiot for mentioning Keen Eye's spy network so carelessly. Of course she had a spy network. In fact, she was probably already spying on the queen. But he had to make sure she had her sights focused in that direction.

And he couldn't outright tell her what to look for. If he had told her that he wanted proof that Queen Vigilance was deliberately trying to get Foeslayer killed, he doubted that it was going to end well for him.

But if she figured it out herself, she very well might solve this problem all on her own.