Thank you to QueenGloryTheFirst for your fav, follow and review. I'm happy you have decided to stick around, I welcome any comments or critiques you may have on future chapters.
This chapter starts off from a different perspective than you may have expected. I wanted to show what ramifications the dragonets left behind them without realizing, and to flesh out a few characters of the Sand Kingdom. That aside, the story is moving into the end of this arc with this chapter. I'm hoping to have this story around 20 chapters long, so there's plenty more to come!
As the sun's rays began to spread through the shadowed forests of the Night Kingdom, elsewhere in Pyrrhia they had already disrupted the fragile rest of slumbering royalty.
The immense, regal bulk of Queen Scorpion gave an irritated growl and rolled over on her bed of treasure to escape the meddlesome rays. Faint clinks echoed through her chamber as the disturbance sent multitudes of jewels and gold items tumbling about. Her scales were decorated to match the treasure at her feet; she wore a sweeping cape of translucent black along with a golden crown and earrings of yellow diamond.
But the piece of which she was particularly proud was that which wound around her neck; The Eye of Onyx, enchanted on request by the SandWing's old animus Jerboa. Queen Scorpion valued her magical trinkets most of all, and this was the most precious. Supposedly, when worn, it would have let her rule forever. But it was later discovered that this was a lie; the Eye had really been enchanted to choose rightful queens regardless of their bloodline and destroy those unworthy. Even so, Scorpion reasoned that so long as she alone wore it, her rule would not be challenged.
A rule which, in times such as now, could be a real pain in the tail. She didn't usually have so much trouble waking in the morning, but recent events had gravely disrupted her daily schedule.
'That accursed NightWing...' Scorpion's thoughts hissed with all the venom of a dragonbite viper as she clenched her jaws, 'I knew she was a handful, but the sheer audacity of what she's done!'
The queen continued to silently fume for a few more minutes, before reluctantly conceding that she would not be getting back to sleep anytime soon. Wondering if perhaps a prickly-pie might wake her up she rose with a yawn, once more scattering her hoard of riches.
'A very impressive hoard.', she thought with a smile of satisfaction, lifting up and inspecting a ruby before flinging it away.
Much of it had been looted from the NightWings, sure, but it wasn't like they'd bothered to take it with them when they flew off to Moons-knows-where. As far as Scorpion was concerned the SandWing tribe could put it to much better use than those cowards. The treasure was good for trade, yes, but the real wealth was the magic.
Another thorn of irritation caused Scorpion's anger to flare, 'I'll nail that NightWing's treacherous wings to the wall when I get my claws on her! I can't afford to let her power be squandered after all this work, or worse, taken by another tribe.'
Some of her guards leaned back against the walls as they caught sight of her stomping past. It was a bad idea to be in her way, sleep-deprived and furious as she was. No dragon would risk her wrath if they could help it.
Grumbling under her breath, Scorpion swept into the extensive royal kitchen. She made straight for one of the wall cabinets, ignoring clatters and thumps as her swishing tail knocked over a few things. Inside the cabinet were wrapped packets of small, pink-topped tarts known as prickly-pies. As the name implied they were made from the sweet fruit of prickly pears that grew all over the desert. They were a popular sweet within the SandWing Kingdom, and Queen Scorpion's personal favorite.
In a gross lack of royal etiquette she tore open the wrapping of one of the packets and stuffed the contents into her mouth. She sighed with relief as the sugary taste flooded her senses and made her forget about her scrambled tribe and lack of sleep for a moment.
"Mother?"
Queen Scorpion flicked an ear, annoyed at her feasting being so rudely interrupted. She swallowed her mouthful and turned to the speaker, snout covered in sticky pink syrup and pastry crumbs. There were only a few dragons that would dare to bother her while she was in such a foul mood; her old mate, Jackal, was one, but he was long gone. In the kitchen's doorway peering at the scattered jars and bowls stood one of the others, her youngest daughter, Princess Tarantula.
She wasn't much older than the runaway dragonets, having graduated from Scarab School the previous year. Like her mother she was adorned with jewelry, though more subtly so, with simple onyx-studded bracelets. They shared the same golden-brown scales with spatterings of dark cream, but Tarantula's eyes were her father's brown rather than her mother's deep black. She and Scorpion did not particularly like one another; Tarantula found her mother's greed and obsession with magic to be a weakness that would cause her to neglect her more important duties such as keeping the tribe in smooth order. Scorpion thought that Tarantula was foolish to dismiss the power that magic offered, and that her frequent questioning and complaints might suggest she wanted to take her throne.
"Daughter." Scorpion answered dryly, wiping the prickly-pie's remains from her snout and turning with a frown, "What do you want?"
Tarantula wrinkled her snout at the mess before her and said, "We've managed to crack one of the NightWing's caretakers. She told us that the dragonets have likely flown across the border into the Night Kingdom, and that she suspects they'll return."
"How does she know this? Did the NightWing tell her their plans?" the SandWing queen trod forward and stood before her daughter, studying her with a piercing gaze.
Tarantula shook her head, unfazed. "No. But she gathers that evidence suggests it is true. Marble; the NightWing, had often told her about her plans to visit the Night City one day. It would make sense that her friends went with her, and missing items suggest travel." she raised a talon and began to list them, "A few maps, one of which was taken from the library. Provisions with a size suggesting use for a long flight were found to have been skimmed from storage. Lastly, and probably the most obvious, the caretaker confessed that a compass she owned vanished the day before the dragonets left." she lowered her talon and met her mother's eyes. "It isn't surprising that she'd disobey you eventually, given her reputation and the fact that you've always denied her travel permissions."
Scorpion growled deeply, pushing past her daughter out of the kitchen. "The fault lies with the caretakers, not my decisions. I kept her here safely away from enemy claws; in exchange for this I merely asked her loyalty." she moved at a quick pace down the sandstone halls, Tarantula following her. "It would seem that not only did the broodmothers fail to inform me of her dissent, but I suspect they may have encouraged it."
As the queen and princess moved through the palace, SandWings parted like windswept dunes before them. A pair of guards fumbled and nearly dropped their spears in fright when Queen Scorpion barked at them to follow. Together they made their way to one of the palace's remote corners, down a bare corridor lacking the usual tapestries and carvings that marked the rest of the structure. At the end was a large, heavily-fortified door constructed from a several layers of dark iron. Scorpion ordered the guards to stay in front of it and prevent anybody from disturbing them until they emerged. They were also ordered not to eavesdrop or speak about what they heard, lest they end up on the other side of the door.
Tarantula took a key from behind each of her ears, both of them matching to individual locks upon the door. With several heavy clanks and clunks, she unlocked them, and with some effort pushed the wall-like iron open with a loud scrape.
The room inside seemed gloomy, to say the least. It was large but bare of any furniture or implements, save four sets of thick iron shackles along the back wall and a termite-gnawed wood table littered with menacing-looking metal tools. But then, these weren't ascetic living quarters; this was, after all, the dungeon.
The two central shackle sets were currently occupied by a pair of female SandWings wearing thick metal muzzles. One was an adult in her prime strength, the other, a heavily scarred and tough-looking old dragon without wings. Despite their imprisonment they had not been tortured; no fresh cuts or bruises lay upon their scales. Even with their crimes, Scorpion did not want to be barbaric about extracting information from these subjects of hers. Especially when there were other, easier ways to get to them.
It had taken a while, to be sure. Visits by both Scorpion and Tarantula, casual conversations about how the hatchery would be functioning at half-strength while they were gone, how they might be removed from their jobs if they proved so negligent. Food was given only sparsely so that the prisoners starved, but slowly. When they failed to budge the chats took a more sinister turn. Oh what a shame it would be if a relative made a mistake and was demoted, or injured, or perhaps.. killed. The threats of death were meant as a bluff; Scorpion didn't want to be killing loyal soldiers that would be better off dying doing something more useful. She was betting on the fact that danger so close to home would make even the iron-willed soldier squirm, and after some time, it did.
It became obvious that Sunbeetle would be the first to break. Headstrong as she was, she did not have the years of experience and loss that had hardened Sidewinder's heart. In this moment, her love for others was able to be exploited. She began to tell everything she could that would help in the search for the dragonets, on the terms that no-one innocent be harmed.
Now Queen Scorpion strode towards them in triumph, taking in their emaciated forms and the fiery defiance in Sidewinder's eyes. Sunbeetle, who had been looking at the floor, raised her head to regard the royals wearily.
After Tarantula swung the door closed behind them, Scorpion addressed the prisoners.
"Clearly, I made a mistake in giving the pair of you responsibility of something so important." she stepped closer to the prisoners and looked at them with contempt. "You have grown soft, and blind to where your loyalties should lie." a slow smile crept upon her snout, but it held no warmth; only poison. She turned to face Sidewinder and said, "Because you have served me so well in the past, I'll give you some leniency."
The old broodmother eyed her with confusion, expression sparking to horrified realization as Scorpion reared back and raised her tail. The iron muzzle muffled her growls as she struggled with her last strength against her restraints, and muted her roar of agony when the queen's stinger pierced straight through her chest. Crimson blood spattered across the floor in an arc as Scorpion withdrew her tail and shook it of the excess fluid.
Tarantula stepped back from the pooling red stain, flicking blood off her claws with disgust. This wasn't the first time her mother had killed someone, nor would it be the last. But this particular case seemed a bit extreme, in her mind, considering how useful this dragon had been to the tribe. She quietly steeled herself for what would come next, keeping her thoughts private.
Sunbeetle had screamed behind her muzzle as she watched her old friend, her mentor, die so gruesomely before her. Tears were running down the cold metal around her mouth as she turned away from the grim sight, fighting to keep from sobbing aloud. This was her fault; she'd been the one to break, to tell them everything. Now Sidewinder was dead, and she was probably next.
Malice glinted somewhere behind the obsidian blackness of Queen Scorpion's eyes as she regarded the living prisoner in her grief. In a sudden movement she gripped Sunbeetle by the jaw and forced her to match her dark gaze. With some fragment of resistance restored by the death of her friend, Sunbeetle closed her eyes tightly and refused to give the queen the satisfaction of seeing her terror.
She could still hear that horrible joy in her voice as Scorpion leaned in and said to her, "Don't worry. I'll stop your crying, and I think you'll find it easier to see your loyalties properly afterwards."
Far to the west, the trio of wayward dragonets took wing, propelled forward by strong gusts. None of them yet knew the horrors taking place back home; instead, they flew on, energized by the anticipation of what they would soon see.
The trees below them were growing sparse, giving way to swaths of rocky canyons. The dragonets were coming up over the crest of one when they first saw it sprawled across the horizon; The Night City.
It was an awe-inspiring sight, one that left them speechless and wide-eyed. As though it they had grown from the very stone, buildings ranging from humble to magnificent wound through the various levels of the canyons. In the center of the city was a massive diamond-shaped plaza. Each of it's points seemed to lead towards one of the largest buildings of the city. To the south, they recognized the legendary NightWing library, and not far from it, the grand museum. Northwards was the school, once one of the finest education centers in Pyrrhia, but now a dusty husk.
But the dragonets found their eyes drawn to the northernmost point of the diamond in particular. The grandest structure was, predictably, the NightWing palace. It spiraled upwards, carved and built from unyielding granite and marble. Windows, like myriad eyes, glinted as they reflected the rising sunlight. Some were made of stained glass, and some had long ago been broken. Many balconies and roofs often were carved to a point, giving the whole thing a spiky, hard-edged appearance. Pillars and dragon statues held up the more precarious parts.
The palace section itself towered like an imposing mountain peak, casting a long shadow upon the lower homes that made up it's base. More homes extended up to a point near the top, growing fewer and more elaborate with height. The trio had learned about the class system of the old NightWing Kingdom; the higher the class, the higher the home. They would be making their search in the upper tiered parts where the council had lived.
Marble's eyes shone as she beheld the magnificence she'd been wanting to see for so long. Having it all here, in front of her, was so much more than just seeing an illustration, no matter how well drawn. A rising giddiness grew from her chest, and she found herself spinning in the air with exhilarating whoops and laughter.
"We made it!" she cried, diving down towards the diamond plaza with a pump of her wings.
Torque and Adder followed after her as she landed with a clumsy thump in a paved marketplace. Marble shook out her wings, holding back a sneeze at the dust billowing from the ground.
"Look at this place..." murmured Torque incredulously, wandering over to an empty stall.
Scattered upon it were little trinkets, most broken. Torque was poking at a little weighted hourglass, similar to ones used for timekeeping back in the Sand Kingdom. Adder came up behind him, wrinkling his snout.
"I don't know about you, but I'm getting a creepy feeling about this place." he said, looking around at the overturned stalls in some spots, "It's barely been touched since the raids. There's enough dust around to keep a dragon sneezing forever!"
Torque turned to his brother, skeptical, "Those old stories about ghosts are false, I'm pretty sure. Maybe everyone being scared kept them away, and now even more dragons are scared because they figure the others must have something to be scared of!"
"I don't know, brother," Adder smiled mischievously and held his talons towards him, waving them. "With that attitude the ghosts will probably go for you first."
As Torque rolled his eyes at his brother's teasing, he realized that a third of their group was missing. A jolt of panic seized him, and for a crazy moment he almost did believe the city was haunted.
Fortunately, Torque did not have to worry long, as Marble's shout echoed towards them. "Guys! Come over here!"
"Marble?" he called, running out of the stall-section and towards the more open central plaza.
The brothers found their friend standing upon some kind of large, grand wooden stage. She appeared to be frozen in place, wings shivering slightly. They moved to climb it and stand beside her, and before either could ask what was bothering her, they caught sight of it themselves.
Sprawled at Marble's talons, exactly as it had been in her dream, was the corpse of a long-dead dragon. Frozen in a terrible scream, as it had been since the city was abandoned. Seeing the grisly, decayed thing again had sapped Marble's brief joy and replaced it with foreboding. Death's cold talons still cast a shadow over the once-grand home. Marble turned her head for a moment to look back at the silent marketplace and shivered. The three of them seemed like the only living things in the entire city.
She looked back down at the ravaged corpse and thought,
'This is what I should've expected. The city truly is dead and abandoned, just like this poor dragon.'
"Three moons... what.. who was that?" Adder broke their shocked silence, covering his snout.
Torque didn't answer; he was fighting down a wave of nausea that threatened to upend his breakfast if he opened his mouth.
Marble, despite having expected this vision from her dream, felt no less sickened than her friends. She answered with a wince, her prior excitement thoroughly shaken out of her.
"That must be what's left of Prince Arctic..."
Torque spoke up shakily, pointing a claw at the corpse's broken ribs, "I-I remember now, from our books. Darkstalker... he made Prince Arctic claw out his own insides on this stage, in front of tons of NightWings."
"I don't blame them for leaving." murmured Adder, turning around and jumping off the stage.
Torque and Marble quickly followed suit, eager to be away from the grim scene. They stopped beside a large, intricate fountain of white marble that marked the center of the diamond plaza. Marble traced the material that was her namesake, trying to soothe her fears.
'We're safe,' she thought, 'if there really is anything skulking around here, we probably won't run into it...'
Her vision said otherwise, but really, she told herself, the city was so huge that the odds of it happening would be slim, right?
"Well," Adder said, looking up at the looming palace, "Spooky dragon skeletons aside, let's get to ripping up some floorboards."
Following their plan, the three dragonets pushed off and away from the haunted plaza, angling up towards the high spires near the palace. The grand perches there had once been covetous homes for those of high status in the Night City, but now they were just as dusty and empty as the lowest huts. The trio would begin their search for the Gift of Diplomacy in the bottom rung house and move up from there.
"Here's a good spot to land." Adder called, swooping down to a wide stone plateau.
Torque and Marble followed, and the three of them studied the shell of a residence. Like the others it was built into the central rocky pillar that ended in the palace towers. Etched along the exterior walls were artistic designs depicting stars, fire, and dragons in flight. The plateau that the dragonets stood upon was circular and had probably once been some kind of balcony.
Marble noticed, after glancing at the ground beneath her talons, that a central relief of some kind of tree had been carved into the middle of the plateau. She thought that perhaps it had something to do with the plant pots grouped near the house. A few of them had been knocked over and smashed for years, while others still remained upright. Anything growing within them was long dead, except for the creeping blanket of moss and lichen that was slowly overtaking the ceramic of all the pots.
"This place is pretty gloomy, huh?" Marble said as she stepped over a few pot fragments on her way to the door.
Adder concurred, wrinkling his snout as the three of them stopped before the entrance. "Definitely. I don't think I'd want to be neighbors with whoever lived here."
What he referred to was the scene spread across the thick circular wood, what looked to be a gory battle between NightWings and IceWings. The IceWings were clearly losing, each of them screaming and falling amid fountains of blood, or being impaled by the NightWings' spears. The backdrop seemed to be somewhere mountainous, perhaps the range the dragonets had passed near the border.
Torque was the first to step forward, pushing the heavy wooden door open with a grunt of effort. The trio collectively winced at the drawn out creaaaak the rusting hinges created as it swung open. They blinked at the dust billowing up to greet them, entering what must have been some kind of living room once.
"Yikes," Torque broke the silence, "Looks like the scary door didn't work on whoever got here first..."
As expected the home seemed to have already been ransacked thoroughly. SandWing raids had stripped all the valuable metals, art pieces, and even some furniture from every room. The dragonets split up to search the rest of the house, Torque using his metallic detector to help root out hidden stashes where the enchanted bracelets might be. What items had been left behind were torn, smashed, burned, or otherwise damaged.
Marble found one of the more interesting things left, some kind of old painting that was hung above an ornate fireplace. It had been torn by talon swipes and was hanging askew, but the portrait on the canvas was still recognizable. It seemed to be a regal, serious-faced NightWing, presumably the former owner of the house. They wore an emerald-studded silver necklace, the gems complimenting the greenish tinge of their dark scales.
'They don't exactly look friendly.' Marble thought, turning to inspect the grate of the fireplace, 'Good thing their angry ghost isn't around to bother us.'
Now and then her ears pricked at the echoing rings of Torque's metallic detector, but didn't go to investigate. The three of them had agreed that whoever was using the detector would call out to the others if they found the bracelets with it. As they spend the next hour or so sweeping every room from top to bottom and floor to ceiling, they unfortunately had no such luck.
Eventually they agreed that the bracelets weren't there, and proceeded onto the next house. Their searching went on into the late afternoon as they made their way up, each of the homes interesting but lacking the objects they were seeking. Adder had taken a small bag of marbles; "To pass the time if we get bored," he'd said. As the sun began to bleed across the horizon, the trio alighted on the perch of one of the last houses. They had agreed to eat and rest there until morning when they'd resume their search.
Marble munched on her dry rations, thinking. Across from her Torque and Adder were playing a game with the marbles, while she had opened her book about the dragon tribes to check the NightWing section. The sky was fading to black, the stars coming out to shine until dawn. A light wind blew across the plateau the three dragonets were on; they'd be heading inside soon.
Remembering her recent visions, Marble flipped a few pages to get to the small section about "NightWing powers". It was very small, consisting of a few paragraphs and a sketch of a dragon's eye. From one corner of it a teardrop-shaped scale had been drawn.
'I guess the NightWings did a really good job of keeping info on their powers secret,' Marble thought with frustration, 'This book has the most information about NightWings that I've seen, and it barely has anything.'
She sighed, dropping her head onto the book as she idly reread the section for the umpteenth time.
The NightWing tribe is unique in that many of them are known to possess certain powers. These are not the same as the powers of an animus; NightWing powers seem unlinked to specific ancestry, as any NightWing may have them regardless of their family, whereas animus power is passed down only through certain bloodlines. There doesn't seem to be a consistent pattern of power inheritance either; a mother and her child and grandchild may all possess powers, or perhaps only the child will and not the other two. It remains a mystery to every other tribe just where these powers come from; I suppose it is for their safety that they keep this secret, though it pains me to never learn it.
As to the nature of these powers, there are two distinct types. One is marked out on the dragon's scales, while the other is not. NightWings that possess silver teardrop scales at the corners of their eyes possess the power to read minds. They can hear the thoughts of any dragon, with some exceptions (see fig. B), and many of the ones I have met learn the practice of blocking out the thoughts of others when they are young. This stops them from getting overwhelmed in crowds or if they want to avoid reading specific dragon's minds. Conversely other dragons, regardless of whether they possess powers, can shield their thoughts from mindreaders with practice.
Marble skimmed the mindreading bit to get to the part about the powers of foresight. Other than what she'd figured out for herself, it was the only real information she had on the nature of her visions.
The second power is that of foresight, or the power to see the future. These dragons are often known as "Seers". Unlike mindreaders, seers have no external differences that mark them out. With most seers their foresight comes in periodic visions, sometimes when sleeping. These visions have been described as fragments of multiple futures, or parts of a future. They witness the visions as if living the events depicted in them. Not all visions are guaranteed to come true; visions of disaster, for example, can be avoided if the seer knows what may lead to them.
The ability to look into the future has been a boon to the NightWing tribe for a long time. For particularly grave or important visions the seer may recite a prophecy, which in a puzzling manner explains terrible or great events to come. A prophecy always heralds a time of change in Pyrrhia, good or bad, and dragons of every tribe have learned to heed their warnings.
Written below was a list of a few significant prophecies delivered by NightWing seers. Marble was glad she'd never had one. If just regular visions could get her worrying this much, a full-blown prophecy would drive her crazy. Feeling her mind linger again on what she'd seen, she decided to close her book and take some time to think.
'If I try to analyze the vision, it might help me understand it better.' Marble thought, tucking the hefty tome into it's satchel.
She decided to find a quiet spot inside the house; perhaps an old study.
"I'm gonna have a look inside," Marble said over her shoulder.
Torque looked up from the marbles game and asked, "Do you want my metallic detector?"
Marble shook her head in reply and pushed open the wooden door of the dwelling. It was noticeably more battered than the others, covered with scrapes and scratches. When Marble peered closely, she could see something of the original carving behind the damage. In the center it seemed to depict two dragons sitting and facing one another, holding talons. The background was some indistinguishable landscape and a starry sky. The most curious part about it was that the dragons were of two different tribes; the left one, spiky-looking and with a diamond-shaped snout was clearly an IceWing. The right was stockier and had speckled wings; a NightWing.
'That's weird,' wondered Marble, pausing to look, 'Considering there was a war between their tribes at the time, why would there be two of them-'
Her eyes widened, realization jolting her with shock. The war had begun because of an IceWing-NightWing couple. One of whom they had already seen, down in the plaza.
'Is this really the place...?' Marble, walking slowly and carefully, crossed the threshold of the house that, unbeknownst to her, had once belonged to her grandparents.
That's a wrap on this one, folks. I enjoyed delving back into the Sand Kingdom and getting to properly introduce Queen Scorpion. In this story she is envisioned as intelligent, powerful, and with something of a temper. Her greated weakness is her greed for treasure and near-obsession with magic. She is not above interrogating and executing subjects that she believes have wavered in loyalty, either. Sidewinder is dead and, unfortunately, Sunbeetle was left an arguably nastier fate. I'll leave it up to you guys to guess what it was, it'll be a bit yet before it is revealed. On the brighter side the trio at last have made it to the Night City and are on track for finding the bracelets.
All are welcome to fav/follow or leave a review if they wish. I enjoy any input/critiques , it helps my writing skill to grow. Feel free to guess who owned the first house the dragonets searched; I couldn't help putting in a callback to the original books. The next chapter is something of a crucial one for the story, I hope you all enjoy it.