"...and one last thing, Your Majesty." Deathbringer looked up at the stern visage of Queen Ruby on the Galena Throne, the royal seat of the Sky Kingdom. She sat a good ten arm-lengths above him by its virtue. "According to a witness, one of the offenders called himself Siyayo. Queen Glory, who as I have told you was the foremost part of our investigation, has posited the idea that this was an acronym: CIO. Have you any knowledge of such an acronym or what it may stand for?"

Glory stood just next to him, in the throne's shadow; the largest window in the room was just behind it, and the circular lights of the small windows on each wall narrowly missed her. The height disparity did feel a little humiliating, she had to admit, but it wasn't as though they'd be perfectly equal without the throne's assistance. She'd levelled with Ruby before, and she was massive in a way that didn't really come across from below.

"No."

That was about the answer Glory had expected. The day-and-a-half's travel to the northern edge of the Sky Kingdom had given her plenty of time to think about the Siyayo-CIO connection, and while the forever turning wheel of innumerable doubts in the back of her kept her from ever forming an answer on what Siyayo could be other than an acronym, it had made quite clear that it was not a misinterpretation of CIO. She'd cringed a little as Deathbringer brought it up, but the thoroughness was worth it.

"Actually... there was one thing," Ruby said. It was difficult for Glory to tell if her pause was out of reluctance or if she was just remembering what this one thing was. "A farmer in the south, near Jade Mountain... she said that a wagon stopped by, and the 'ruffians' who were driving it ordered him to give them all of her pigs 'by the order of the CIO.'" Ruby wasted no time in clarifying: "Obviously, 'the CIO' is not an organisation that holds any authority in the Sky Kingdom, if it even exists."

It took some effort for Glory to keep her colouring as Ruby brought up this incident. It wasn't hard by any means, but Glory had to actively try—it was about as difficult as keeping composed after clipping the tip of her wing on a long branch. Ruby had been unhelpful, or else was stonewalling her for some unknown purpose, for this entire interview, and it was this stupid idea that got results? It almost made her wonder if Ruby was messing with her.

She stepped before the throne, Deathbringer elegantly moving into the shadow as such. "Your Majesty, might we be privy to the name and whereabouts of this farmer, that we might speak with her?"

The light pouring in through the elliptical window behind Ruby's head gave her visage, as she pondered Glory's request, a trace of divine authority. She raised a claw and took a breath, but did not speak for another second or so. She pointed to Glory. "No."

This no was far less certain than her previous no, and that one had turned out false, so Glory had high hopes that it would be reversed sometime soon. A cloud covered the sun for a moment, and Ruby's red scales stopped glowing with heavenly radiance. Glory found herself abruptly without reason to squint, but by the time she found this out and stopped the moment had passed. "We shall respect your wishes, Your Majesty." Glory noticed Deathbringer moving sideways into the light, and the way things had been going thus far this meant she had to step away, but she wasn't done speaking; her lack of movement caused Deathbringer to awkwardly stop and move back to where he was. "However, we do hope you reconsider, and ask why you have denied our request."

"I understand your desire to see this crime investigated by yourselves," Ruby replied, her uncertainty having been vanquished. "It is one of your tribe that is the victim, after all. I say to this, though, that you have done your part; that which can be done within your borders. Now, we must do ours. I shall have a small regiment speak further with this farmer, aided by the information you have provided me, and gods willing they shall find these kidnappers."

Glory... didn't like that arrangement. She didn't trust Ruby to be able to properly investigate—perhaps even unwilling. Glory wasn't really able to get a read on the SkyWing Queen; she was fairly reserved in any circumstance, but Glory's perspective in this instance made it hard to read her face and body language. For all she knew, Ruby was still harbouring a grudge over having to give up Jade Mountain; maybe only about the part of the deal that involved stationing her troops there. Glory supposed that, if Ruby did want to withdraw her military from Jade Mountain, she could offer that in this bargain and have Thorn protect it instead—she was the ideal choice, actually liking the idea of the Academy. Ruby was only the first choice for her proximity.

On the other hand, perhaps she would see withdrawing from Jade Mountain as relinquishing her sovereignty over it. Glory'd been made aware that crime, corruption, and the like were much more prevalent further away from the palace... and from Jade Mountain. Maybe this was just due to the soldiers stationed around it, but Glory had to consider that Ruby might have held some attachment to Jade Mountain, some duty to protect it. It was fairly symbolic of SkyWing culture, after all, its peak being the highest point in all the world and SkyWings being fond of such tall places. Glory was getting far off topic, now, and it seemed to her that all this thinking about her relationship with Ruby had done her no good, but that fact about crime and its proximity to Jade Mountain did factor into Ruby's potential inability to investigate.

If the trail lead sufficiently far away from Jade Mountain—as it must have, considering the distance from there to the rainforest—would Ruby actually have the resources to follow it? Glory didn't have a spy network of any kind, but she had Deathbringer and rumours, and the two of them had put in her mind the idea that Ruby had massively downsized the SkyWing army in order to afford the various post-war efforts to rebuild—and, the Sky Kingdom having no gendarmerie, the small squadron investigating would be a part of the army. These rumours might not have been so credible, but Deathbringer believed them, which lended them automatic support in Glory's mind; perhaps misguidedly.

There was evidence for these rumours beyond Deathbringer said so, of course. In truth, Glory had heard quite a bit about financial difficulties in the Sky Kingdom. The provincial governors to the east had been skirting around taxes for the better part of a decade, only stopped by military intervention once the war ended, and the rich cities around the Great Five-Tail had managed, through uniting into a strange league called the Enclave, to bargain their way into being exempted from most tariffs and being allowed to trade almost exclusively with the SandWing cities across the river rather than further inland.

In addition, there was one thing that did involve another rumour, but if that rumour turned out to be true then this was the most damning evidence of Ruby's thin coffers there was. But a week or so after the war ended, before the high had worn off, Glory had heard that a number of high-ranking SkyWing officials and generals had been executed for embezzlement and, thusly, treason. While she did suspect that just to be an excuse for a purge of those still loyal to Scarlet, if some embezzlement did occur then quite a lot, she supposed, would have been taken; les guillotinés apparently had almost unfettered access to the treasury.

The other rumour teased at the beginning of the previous paragraph added on to the already rumour-like story of these executions. It propounded that there was indeed embezzlement taking place, that it had started only when the war ended, and that Ruby could get back almost none of the pilfered treasure due to its being sent to Scarlet by these disloyal officials.

Glory had her doubts as to the veracity of this tale, but it was true that Scarlet had only escaped that weird tower Burn kept her in around the end of the war, and she knew well that there were still nobles whose allegiances laid in the Ex-Queen. If all this was correct, or had a close enough resemblance to the truth in any case, then Ruby didn't even have the ancestral treasury to back her up; most of it, in any case. Ergo, she would definitely have to scale back the army to afford all her various reconstruction projects, and Glory didn't think Ruby would consider this important enough to supply that small squadron with the expensive supplies and support needed to actually catch the culprits—especially if they were a criminal organisation grand enough to have an acronym.

Now, how was she supposed to communicate that to Ruby?

Well... she couldn't, not really. To so readily speak of Ruby's weaknesses would be a diplomatic blunder, to say the least. Glory needed to inoffensively insinuate that Ruby needed assistance in the investigation in order to convince her to let her and Deathbringer seek after CIO themselves. A few ideas as to how to go about this had sprung up from the rich soil after the recent rainfall. Glory picked one up, twisting it around and plucking petals off of its head. Could it have been, she thought, that CIO were an established threat, and Ruby only knew of this specific instance due to its proximity to Jade Mountain? That was likely; almost certain, if they had an acronym.

Glory was knocked out of her pondering—only about seven seconds had it actually lasted—by a vital observation from her peripheral vision. Deathbringer looked like he was on the precipice of quipping to Ruby, and to keep things civil she had to shoot him a look, an anti-quip weapon with about eighty percent accuracy. Respectfully, he withdrew from his near-humour, and Glory could return to thinking.

So, if she could bring that up, she could bring to mind the likely inability of the small squadron to do what they're charged; she would have to only imply the part about Jade Mountain, though. To skirt around the issue of the Sky Kingdom's lopsided law enforcement, she'd have to give her argument as though the world were random, and Ruby, through the rolling of cosmic dice, was just as likely to know about this farmer's troubles as she was those of a farmer thirty miles from Jade Mountain. She cleared her throat and began, turning her eyes up to Ruby after they briefly flickered down to the escutcheon decorating the base of the throne.

"Your Majesty," she said, "forgive me if you have already considered this possibility, but is it not possible that this was not a singular incident? Perhaps these ruffians are known, and you only happened to be informed of this one occurrence?"

Ruby did not respond, and Glory wasn't fervently focused on thinking of something to say, so not much travelled into Glory's ears. She could hear for the first time Ruby's steady, low breathing. It got deeper as the silence progressed, until Ruby finally spoke, her voice echoing down from her judgement seat.

"It is possible. Our army has been preoccupied elsewhere," Ruby was kind enough not to sneer the word preoccupied, "and they are not well-represented in the east or far west. Perhaps a thousand farmers have been descended upon by these vultures, and the message of only one has reached us."

Glory hestitated to speak her lines in this scene, but she saw no other option that didn't burn the very folio upon which they were printed. "Might we request, considering this, that whatever force Your Majesty sends is proportionately well equipped and sized? A small squadron, if you do not mind my saying, hardly inspires confidence."

Ruby, surprisingly, did not take long to respond to this request. Glory had expected another long pause as she read her own script, but it seemed that these lines she had memorised. "I can make no such guarantee," she said. "Our preoccupation is serious. Do forgive my inability to share any details, but..." The regality of Ruby's voice suddenly swooped down like a falcon. "It's bad."

Hm. Glory hadn't stressed Ruby's duty to protect Jade Mountain this badly when the deal was struck. Perhaps she was right about her holding an attachment to Jade Mountain? Or, more likely, there was some other threat that needed to be kept in check. In the west, perhaps? That Enclave did seem rebellious.

Despite her persistent thought that Ruby would mess everything up if given the chance, Glory's job here was not to convince Ruby to let her and Deathbringer search for Jambu, but to convince Ruby to let some capable party do so, whether that be she and her bodyguard or a well-equipped SkyWing batallion. "If you draw from the troops stationed at Jade Mountain, then we might supplant the deficit, Your Majesty," she offered to this end, "with the levies of The Right Worshipful Queen Thorn. She is not averse to protecting Jade Mountain, during and after the construction of the Academy."

Ruby opened her mouth, and Glory expected another timely reply, but she shut it soon afterwards. Clearly, this offer was not as easy to dismiss or accept as she had anticipated. Glory looked at the escutcheon again, its ornate design plainly the fusion of two coats-of-arms. It was bisected into its two constituents down its middle. The left of them was a pool of silver interrupted by the detailed form of a red SkyWing brandishing an axe, ready to go to war with the empty space around it. The right was bisected itself, also down the middle. Gold blanketed the right side and black the left, and what broke them up was a drawing of a mountainside fortress.

Ruby spoke again, stopping Glory from looking any more at the shield at the base of her throne. "I could not allow that," she decreed. "I do see what you hint towards, Your Majesty." That was the first time Ruby had styled Glory as such during this meeting; what was with the sudden respect? "I will consider allowing you to search for the victim within our borders."

That was what Glory was waiting to hear. Only some half-an-hour at most of consideration stood in the way of finding Jambu. Well, a lot of things stood in the way, but this was the most immediate obstacle. Letting us investigate is less humiliating, she guessed Ruby's reasoning to be, than having Thorn guard her territory; it would loosen her grip on Jade Mountain even more, as well.

Ruby was not finished. "In all likelyhood, you shall be granted this privilege. I will take a day to confer with my advisors. In the meantime, lodgings will be prepared for you if you wish to stay in the palace until a decision is made."

Okay, a day was a much bigger obstacle. Glory flipped through the pages of her script for her rebuttal, but Deathbringer, apparently, had her covered. He stepped in front of her, and Glory moved out from behind him after she realised why her eyes didn't hurt anymore.

"With respect, Your Majesty," he boomed, trilling the r in respect, "this is time-sensitive. The longer it takes, the less chance we have of finding the victim. We hope that you allow us leeway in this instance for his sake."

Little specks of dust flew over Ruby's head as she considered this, and Glory started drafting something to say if Ruby insisted on saying no. In the end, Ruby did owe her ascension to Glory disfiguring Scarlet, so there was some unspoken debt there, but if Ruby paid any heed to it at all than it was repaid during the talks over Jade Mountain. Besides, that was a real last-ditch card to play, ranked in Glory's hierarchy of strategies below just going ahead and looking for Jambu without Ruby's approval. How was she supposed to word it, even? I almost killed your mom, so you have to let me do this, alright?

Glory, having successfully sassed and refused to listen to her own mind, was soon met with Ruby's reply. "Very well." Ruby made a hand signal to an unarmoured SkyWing in the corner, who promptly took a scroll and a sealed jar of ink from a pouch around his neck. "I grant you the temporary authority to conduct your investigation and, if need be, make arrests within the borders of the Sky Kingdom. This authority shall be revoked as soon as you report the end of your investigation or, failing that, after a period of six months."

Make arrests. Glory realised the difficulty in taking down CIO with just her and Deathbringer. The two of them might be able to spring Jambu, but doing anything more would be a challenge—though this was a challenge that might not have been her responsibility. These were SkyWing criminals, after all, and she could stop them from trying anything more in the rainforest easily enough by posting guards along the border and encouraging her subjects to be watchful. Perhaps she could even deter them by killing one of them while rescuing Jambu and making sure they knew it was her? In any case, they were Ruby's problem, a fact Glory etched into a massive stone wall in her mind to ensure she didn't forget it.

A half-hour passed from there, during which Ruby told the pair what she knew and bid them good luck. Once he and Glory were fully out of earshot, gliding between the sun-drenched slopes of the Claws of the Clouds, Deathbringer breathed a sigh of relief.

"Could you believe her?" he said. "Temporary authority, all that. Haughty is what she is."

Glory did not deign to respond to this, instead conjuring a vivid scene of her swooping under an archway that was coming up instead of flying calmly over it as she intended to. After she received a compliment from her imagined Deathbringer following this feat, his real counterpart continued speaking.

"I should've told her, you know. Something about keeping track of every rat in her palace." Deathbringer paused theoretically. "I mean, come on. You're looking for your brother—"

"You do this every time I bring you along." Glory sighed as she passed above the treacherously cool natural bridge. "You don't get a reward for not being sarcastic, alright? That's the natural state of most dragons."

Deathbringer, using his tail and wings to fly, had to communicate his disappointment with his face, an overactedly dejected frown crossing it. "I don't get a reward for not being sarcastic, I don't get a reward for being sarcastic; what do you want from me?"

"I want you to shut up," Glory answered.

Deathbringer scoffed. "You do not!" he shouted. "Encore, you're always shouting. You love me."

"I tolerate you," Glory corrected him. "You're the most annoying dragon I've ever met, but you're also a great bodyguard—this is my burden."

"Oh, you tolerate me, do you?" Deathbringer was a master at controlling his voice. Here, it was indignant—restrained enough that it was clear he wasn't serious, but at the maximum level within those bounds. "If you tolerate me, you must love Ruby."

"What—" Glory was legitimately surprised; this was new material, comedic terra incognita. "What's that mean?"

"Did you hear yourself, throwing around all those Your Majestys like it's nobody's business?"

This was worth dropping the bit to answer honestly. "Okay, fine, I'll admit that I might have been a little too careful. Ruby just... kind of reminds me of her mother."

"Okay, but what about what you called Thorn? Does she even go by The Right Worshipful?" Deathbringer scoffed. "It makes her sound like a priestess."

"Technically, in her position as head of the Outclaws," Glory answered. "She doesn't actually use it, but she doesn't use any other title, either, and I felt like I had to style her with something."

"I've heard her generals call her Your Majesty before." Deathbringer paused in thought. "You have, too. Don't you remember? When that meeting got disrupted last month?"

"...oh, yeah. Damn."

The rest of the flight proceeded smoothly enough, with little patches of conversation among long stretches of silence—and occasional mountains of banter. Four hours had passed by the time they arrived in the hills the farmer's cottage was protected by, and Glory saw fit to launch into a final short dialogue before they had to get to business.

"I kinda wonder if Ruby really could have done a better job than us," she said. "We're two dragons, and she has thousands under her command..."

"I mean, she's in great claws." Deathbringer smiled, something he did so often Glory wondered how it wasn't worn onto his face. "I guarantee you that I'm way more competent at this sort of thing than whatever Ruby could put together. Those pigs are coming back."

"I think getting them back at this point entails at least something bloody and at worst something gross," Glory joked. "I think you're right, though. Sure you had to track down a lot of dragons in your time as an assassin."

Deathbringer didn't reply with any more of the self-aggrandisement Glory expected, but only turned to her with his smile, widening it slightly in response to her humour. It didn't seem perfectly happy—there was something in his eyes, a mute sadness. Deathbringer wasn't usually shy about his past; in this conversation, he was the one who brought it up. What was troubling him now?

"You alright?" Glory asked.

"I'm fine," Deathbringer answered, and Glory believed it. Deathbringer was about as difficult to read as she was; she'd probably just imagined whatever small sadness she had seen in his smile.

That marked the end of their talk, just as Glory finally sighted the farmer's residence. There it was, settled among the foothills that edged onto the vast plains, all the majesty a cottage enclosed by a fence could muster. Nothing else was kept in by the fence, and cottages didn't tend to walk away; this farmer had subsisted only on her stolen pigs. Glory fluttered to stop on the grass just outside, taking in the workmanship of the house. It didn't look good, to be frank. There was no foundation; normally this lack was just an insecurity which might not be immediately fixed, if ever, but here in these hills it was a true miracle that this cottage hadn't been destroyed long ago with nothing to anchor it to the ground. The outside walls didn't really look to be supported by anything except, perhaps, willpower, and the roof was less of a roof and more of a very thin membrane stretched over the walls. Did it never rain here? The gray clouds above suggested otherwise.

Glory knocked on the door once Deathbringer had joined her. She knocked again, harder but with caution so as not to break the rotting wood of the door. She then knocked a third time, and only then did she hear the sound of movement from inside. It was quick and disordered, at least one crash reaching Glory's ear as it approached, and within a mere two seconds it reached the door. It opened swiftly, and Glory feared it would be torn off of its hinges. On the other end was a small SkyWing, teeth escaping their mouth and bending in odd ways. She looked shiftly at the pair before her.

"You're not soldiers," she quickly deduced. She spoke in the same erratic fashion as she had moved, short bursts of loud whispering. Glory couldn't get a good read on her age until now—the knowledge that Sunny was as old as she was had ingrained in her never to judge someone's age by their size—but she sounded thirty-something. "They told me they would send soldiers. SkyWing soldiers. You're not SkyWings."

"Things came up," Deathbringer said. "We're here for something a little different, though. You're a witness."

"What?" The snaggletoothed SkyWing again eyed Glory and Deathbringer. "No, it's not legal. You're foreigners. You can't talk to me."

"The Queen has given us the authority to pursue a certain group of criminals," Glory said, acting on some dramatic instinct and waiting to reveal CIO's name. "You were witness to one of their crimes. We need to speak with you. We have her grant of authority in writing should you need proof."

The farmer paused. "No," she decided. "I wouldn't understand all the big words. I'll trust you." Despite this, she untrustingly backed up a few paces.

Deathbringer cleared his throat, his eyes scanning an imaginary list of questions. "Have you ever encountered an organisation calling itself CIO or the CIO?"

"Bright-throats..." the farmer cursed; not under her breath, but not directed at either of the dragons before her. "Can't be bothered. Send foreigners to do it." She turned to look at Deathbringer. "Yes. Robbed me just yesterday. Get down on the ground. They left, went far away. I got up. Pigs were gone."

"So you didn't get a good look at them?" Glory asked.

"There was a big one pulling it. Dull yellow-red. All I saw." The SkyWing sounded like she was hiding something, though Glory was fairly sure she wasn't. "I did see the cart. Heading west. Along the caravan trail." She had a tendency to lengthen her sonorants—caravannn trailll.

"Wait, wait," Glory pleaded unecessarily. "They didn't head east?"

"No, no," the SkyWing matched Glory's reduplication. "Due west. Deeper into the mountains."

That was... really weird. Criminals infested the eastern Sky Kingdom like woodworm, but the Claws of the Clouds themselves were locked up tight by the military. Did they need passage to the west? Were they colluding with the Enclave, perhaps?

"Okay, you saw the cart." Deathbringer made a motion with his claw, placing it in the air like a tack onto a timeline. "Can you describe it?"

"It... was a cart!" The SkyWing sighed as she spoke; her isolation, Glory guessed, had resulted in a low tolerance for being annoyed. "Big cart. Big, big cart. Not tall, just long. One of them was pulling it."

One of... them? Glory thought. The SkyWings?

"Long, okay." Deathbringer paused. He suddenly furrowed his brow, only relaxing after a few more seconds had passed. "Wouldn't suppose you remember anything more about the outside, so: any guess at what was inside?"

He's grasping for straws, Glory thought, and she felt self-satisfied that she had a good question to ask when this one failed to bear fruit.

"Big wooden cover over the top," the farmer answered. "Couldn't see in anyway." A few seconds passed, and it became apparent that that was all she had to say on the topic of the cart.

Glory loaded her question into the trebuchet and prepared the sandbags. "And they were pulling it... themselves?" she said. "No beasts of burden? Horses, oxen?"

"Was odd, that." This question got the farmer to speak a little louder—she, too, had wondered about this. "Cart was massive. Wheels turning like they were in mud. Something heavy was in there. Came from the mountains, maybe. No horses there."

Something heavy... Jambu? Glory felt that a few horses could pull Jambu well enough, but the farmer was right about beasts of burden being few and far between in the mountains. "A moment, please," she said. She stepped around the back of the shoddy hut, talons sinking into the mud. Above her loomed a nameless hill, the overcast sky absent beyond it. She could hear the grass squelching beneath Deathbringer as he followed.

"I don't think there's much else we can get from her," Glory whispered—a real whisper, not the stage whisper that the farmer had been speaking in. "Her not having seen them precludes a lot of things..." She trailed off into silent frustration. She had expected a great many more clues; at least as many as the effort it took to travel here was worth.

"She mentioned a path they took—I think," Deathbringer replied. "The caravan trail. We should follow that, see if there were any other witnesses."

Glory sighed at the mention of other witnesses, to which her bodyguard gave a rueful chuckle. "Long road ahead of us. If only there were some kind of... intertribal police," he posited—unusually without irony. "We wouldn't have to be doing all this. Just let them know, have them take care of it..."

"Alright." Glory didn't want to dwell on the long road ahead, and hearing Deathbringer legitimately stressed made her uncomfortable. She moved back before the door, where the farmer was tapping her talons on the ground impatiently (and nearly inaudibly.) "One last thing," Glory addressed her. "You mentioned their moving along the caravan trail. What is this trail?"

The farmer laughed, an unpleasant and throaty sound. She suddenly cut herself off to talk under her breath, quiet enough that Glory couldn't make it out. She spoke up: "The Trod. Firestorm's Way. L'Artère des Diamant-Queues." The farmer, although having stated her inability to understand big words, pronounced the last of those names with ease. "Wide path of gravel, vastest you've ever seen, running from Moorhen's palace to... Burn's? Don't know who won the war. Impossible not to follow out here. There are tributaries in the east and west, but it's the only way to take a cart through the Claws." She paused. "Well travelled, anyway."

"Gravel?" Glory asked, taking off her investigatory hat for a moment. Gravel roads were fairly rare—they were in the inbetween of proper brick roads, which were able to support without difficulty more weight than the average dragon could carry, and dirt roads, which were quick and inexpensive to build. Gravel roads were sort of neither—unless they were quite well maintained or the cargo was especially heavy, it was easier just to lift whatever you were transporting, and their building and maintenance was quite labour intensive. Moons, being Queen had turned her into a hyperspecific kind of scrollworm...

"Easier to lay bricks on gravel." The farmer smiled as she imparted her wisdom. "Forty years back, they wanted a brick road and intertribal connection." She shook her head. "Never ended up laying the bricks. Never ended up with intertribal connection, either."

"Okay." Deathbringer ended the detour with a nod. "Thank you for your time. If there's anything else you want to tell us..." He looked to Glory, but neither did she have an idea as to how to finish that sentence. Fly into the rainforest and die, perhaps? "Speak with... whoever you told this theft about before. Ask for... Glory. I guess."

He and his liege talked for a few minutes about how the farmer could possibly get back in contact with them, and their eventual answer was that she couldn't; not without flying for hours at least up to the palace—Glory and Deathbringer had only managed to make it down here in four hours due to the mania that strikes all who attempt amateur criminal investigations—or risking her life trying to find the RainWing village. They also agreed, though, that the farmer wouldn't have any more information, so in the end it didn't really matter.

Once this conversation concluded, and the farmer had been bid farewell, they set off along l'Artère. The SkyWing had been right; Glory couldn't see a single alternate path through this stretch of mountains. Once she got deeper in, she saw a few branches towards places named but not described on the signs, but which Glory presumed to be cities. The SkyWing had given three, perhaps four (depending on whether the caravan trail was a name or a descriptor) names for this road, but the one favoured by the signposts was invariably Firestorm's Way. Upon seeing one of these signs for about the third time, Deathbringer muttered something.

"Speak up?" Glory asked.

"Oh, I was just saying to myself..." He breathed in. "I'm remembering this, now. I've been down here before."

"'Course you have," Glory joked. "Only places you haven't gone are the moons."

Deathbringer chuckled a small bit. His reply only came after a delay of a few seconds, during which time Glory managed to predict it word-for-word: "How do you know?"

"You'd be bragging about it." Glory smirked, thus completing the bit, and returned the topic to its proper place. "I guess Firestorm's Way rings a bell for you?"

"Yes... yeah." Deathbringer paused. "Never heard anyone refer to it as the caravan trail until now."

"And her sneering its proper name didn't help any?" Glory said.

"I don't suppose so," replied Deathbringer, and those were the last words they spoke for around half an hour. They were both dead tired from the flight up to the palace and down to the hills, and by now stars were starting to speckle the sky. The both of them wanted to go to sleep, but there wasn't really anywhere adequate. It was chilly in the mountains at night, as it turned out, and all the caves were concentrated up high—only a dragonet could fit in the holes down in the valley. At last, they found an alright place to rest. Here, Firestorm's Way split again—there was one road leading to Jade Mountain and another running into the savannah that protected the desert. They would need to take the road to Jade Mountain in the morning, CIO possibly having come from near there—if so, that did give Glory a reason to get rid of them; who would want these kidnappers around dragonets?—but for now they wordlessly agreed to rest among the tall grasses.

Well, not properly among the grasses. It was still cold down here, as well, so Deathbringer needed to light a fire. He dug his teeth into a thin-but-servicable tree nearby, ripped the trunk in twain, and carried it back to a stretch of fairly light grass where Glory was already falling asleep. Through closed eyelids, she saw the flames start to dance, and she silently drifted off...

"Moons above!"

The RainWing was shocked out of her sleep much quicker than she had entered it, a sharp pain digging into her chest as the world tumbled around her. By the time she was aware anything was happening at all, it had ended, and she was left pinned down by some great and warm weight, a noise reaching her ears like screeching. That, too, had stopped by the time she became aware of it, but a very crucial mental faculty of Glory's had risen from the slimy water: her short-term memory. It absorbed into its membrane the great scream, preserving it for careful analysis once Glory was awake enough to do so. She realised quickly, aided by this memory, that the great, warm weight atop her was Deathbringer, arms wrapped around her torso and head, once upright, collapsed onto her chest. It was a nice sensation—comforting. Less comforting was the screech that she'd figured out had come from him—it was shouting, actually, a more refined form of incoherent loud vocalisation. This all kept track of, and the more complicated of her inner bureaucracies not yet in working order, Glory saw fit to speak to the nearly-invisble shadow atop her.

"Death..." She was unable to form the second half of the compound word as she craned her neck so as not to be speaking directly into his horn. "What... happened?" She tried to roll over—and failed, being blocked by the arms still tightly placed just under her wings—and waited for her answer to come.

"A rhinoceros ran over to us." Deathbringer tsked, as if scolding the rhinoceros. "They go crazy when they see a fire."

"What... a rhinoceros?" Glory struggled again, and this time her captor relented. She moved over to her front. "You tackled me for that?" She raised her neck up, scouting the plains for rhinocerotes; there were none.

"You don't..." Deathbringer shook his head, an action barely visible in the darkness of night. "Those things are deadly, Glory."

"I'm sure they are, but..." She looked further—behind her, even above and below. "I don't see any."

"Well, there was... there was one." Deathbringer didn't sound so sure that this was the truth. "Again, I made a fire, and they hate those—"

"They hate fires, so they run right for them?" Glory cut her bodyguard off. "Deathbringer, be honest with me." She tried to think of what he could be lying about, and saw only one possibility. "If you wanted to cuddle, or whatever, you could have just curled up next to me. You don't have to tell this whole story..."

"I'm not lying!" Deathbringer argued; Glory expected him to provide some kind of evidence for this claim, but he fell silent for a good ten seconds. "Um... thank you, I guess, about that... It's good to know."

"Yeah, we have that kind of... relationship. I think, anyway." Glory felt embarassed; this wasn't the most monarchical of interactions. If only she'd been able to practice as a dragonet...

Deathbringer clicked his tongue. "Okay. Rhinoceroses hate fires. They try to stamp fires out so they don't spread. Natural firefighters. You're supposed to keep watch for them until the fire's big enough that they can't go and stomp on them, but..."

"Fine, then," Glory said, though she still didn't quite believe him. "I guess we have to move. We need a fire, don't we?"

"Well, I can just keep better watch," Deathbringer replied. "They're brave things, but not too brave. Once it gets high enough..."

Glory was too tired to comment on this—what could she even say? There were no more thoughts to be vocalised. She laid her head back down in the short grass, watching the flames reignite and hearing Deathbringer start shouting again; hopefully preemptively. She turned over onto her stomach, resting her chin on the ground and letting the stalks tickle her chin...

Sleep didn't come.

Twenty minutes passed as Glory bobbed in and out of oblivion, unable to submerge herself for longer than thirty seconds or so. The shock of being tackled was still swimming around in her shoulders, wings, nerves. Sleep, it said, was only an invitation for another rhinoceros to come and naturally firefight. She opened her eyes and saw that Deathbringer, too, was still awake, surveying the savannah. She sighed and decided to sit next to him, and it was then that she had a thought she was surprised she hadn't had earlier.

"If rhinoceroses stamp out fires..." She felt wheels turning in her head. "Why don't we bring them to the rainforest? You remember what it was like, just after the war ended, those riots... the only day it didn't rain."

"Oh?" Deathbringer ended his ceaseless sentinelling to raise an eyebrow.

Glory nodded. "Get a nice, stable population, running around and stopping any careless NightWings from torching their own village." A sequence of words struck her, total and holy, setting her skeleton alight. "A rhinoceros fire brigade. It's ingenious."

"It is." Deathbringer sounded serious—too serious. "I'm afraid I have sour news for you, though: rhinoceroses can't fly."

Ah. That was why she hadn't had that thought earlier. Yes, that was a fairly serious caveat to her plan... but was it insurmountable?

"Once we have enough," she said, "we can just have some for each level of each walkway, and some for the forest floor—"

"And some for the canopy?" Deathbringer finished.

"Uh..." Glory was not equipped to handle this problem in her current state, but she didn't feel like giving up. "There can be dragons whose job is to transport them. Then they can get from fire to fire with no problem."

"And this is somehow superior to giving those dragons a bucket of water and having them put out the fires?"

Glory realised that the wheels had stopped turning a few sentences ago and, recognising this as the herald of doom it was, decided to cut her losses. "Alright, fine. I'll come up with a way to make this work, though. Mark my words."

Deathbringer said something in reply, but he happened to say it quietly and while Glory was rustling the grass as she laid her head down next to him. She did enjoy these moments of closeness, and the strange system she had built limiting them to certain occasions had been broken, at least for tonight, by her strange comment that she and Deathbringer had that kind of relationship. He was as warm as the fire, keeping her sheltered against the cold night and able to slowly recede into nonbeing.

"...have you not already asked me that?"

Such was the reply of one of the SkyWing workers who were chiselling the Academy out of Jade Mountain to the question have you seen a group of SkyWings manually pulling a long cart? He was perched atop a cliff, looking down at Glory and her bodyguard-esque NightWing as their talons gripped gravel.

"No?" Glory said.

"Huh. You're the second RainWing in two days to visit, then." The SkyWing crossed his eyes in thought. "They went east along the Trod, through Firestorm's Way. Your tribemate, there, followed them."

"Another RainWing?" Glory had to avoid sounding too surprised, but she allowed herself a small reserve to expend. Could Jambu, too, have been following CIO? How? He was supposed to have been kidnapped.

"Mhm." The worker nodded. "He was all blue and grey, you know. Gloomy colours. Sort of... long tail, but you have that too. I can't really describe him. He was serious when he talked to me."

Well, that would check with being kidnapped; Jambu did tend to wear his heart on his scales, even more so than other RainWings, and Glory couldn't say she would be happy about being kidnapped. He must have escaped..?

Glory had expected his speech done, but the worker continued. "He had... well, I don't know if they were together, but near him, at least, there was this dragonet. Four... maybe even five. No, not five..."

"A dragonet?" Glory echoed.

"Yes!" The worker was amused. "Yes, my mate told me about it a day before I saw him. RainWing and a dragonet, he said, and I couldn't believe him. They were going west when he saw 'em."

"West, then east," Deathbringer noted. "When you saw them, did it look like they were following the SkyWings with the long cart?"

"They were heading in the same direction," the worker answered. "That's all I know."

"Mhm." Glory wished she'd brought a scroll to take notes with; in the rush to get everything together, bringing one had slipped by her. "I understand that the Trod has many branches once the Claws of the Clouds end. Do you have any information at all on which of these branches the SkyWings could have taken?"

"Uh... they were taking something heavy with them. Cart was having a hard enough time going along the Way; couldn't be going on the dirt roads, or even the gravel roads they don't touch up so often."

"Just the main highway, then?" Glory put her most optimistic question forward.

"I suppose so." The SkyWing did not sound certain of this.

Glory and Deathbringer questioned him a little further about the cart and its path, but he hadn't much to tell nor gotten a good look at any of its crew. When they were done with him, they spoke with a few more of the workers, but they hadn't seen anything at all—bar the aforementioned mate, who confirmed that a RainWing and a dragonet did indeed pass by Jade Mountain.

From there, they set off to the east. Jambu's odd detour to the east was intriguing, but Glory agreed with Deathbringer that the trail would only be harder to follow the more time passed; Deathbringer posited that they might drop their cart off somewhere, and thus lose the only thing the two of them were identifying them by. Luckily, while there were indeed barren stretches of the Trod, it wasn't uncommon to see buildings along the main highway—their inhabitants, which skewed more heavily towards MudWings as the road progressed east, had all witnessed the strange claw-pulled cart.

During this long travel, Glory and Deathbringer didn't speak much unless it was about the investigation—they were both feeling awkward about last night's conversation. There was one thing about whether the entire road was called Firestorm's Way or if it was just the part that ran through the Claws of the Clouds, but that fizzled out after thirty seconds and was cleared up by a witness an hour later—the Diamond-Tail Thoroughfare was the official name, as it turned out. No, the only proper talk that ever cropped up during their journey was the most important talk. It was the middle of the afternoon and the plains were slowly turning into heaths. Glory was beginning to feel hungry as she opened her mouth to speak:

"I figured it out, by the way. The rhinoceros fire brigade."

"Did you, now?"

Glory smiled with almost cruel confidence. Oh, but she had—how she had.

"All we need is to build ramps. Gentle ramps, so they can climb up as well as down. Maybe even some kind of rope-and-pulley system." It sounded even more genius now that it was free in the world, no longer confined in Glory's head. "It's perfect."

"Hm." Deathbringer didn't sound appropriately impressed. "Okay, this would be a lot of work for not much gain—remember when I said rhinoceroses are deadly? I meant that. Vicious things; you don't want them just hanging around, especially not if they're frenzied by a fire."

"Tamers!" Glory had no trouble answering the basal rebuttals Deathbringer could offer; this idea razed even his rhetorical skills to the ground. There was no fault in it. "Just make them nice and calm. Docile."

"Docile? It's an instinctual reaction, trying to firefight. Getting that out of them would defeat it all." Pity suddenly entered Deathbringer's voice; perhaps the tides were turning for the rhinoceros fire brigade, as impossible as that may seem. "Also: going up a ramp, getting carried, whatever—that instinct'll have gone away by the time it gets there. What if the ramps catch fire, by the way?"

"They can totally go up the ramps quick enough." Glory scoffed. "You're not giving these ramps enough credit. They're good ramps."

"And... the fact that they will charge dragons that they see as a threat?" Deathbringer smiled, but he did not love the idea; his smile was vicious. "It's even worse if you're putting them around dragonets; are you going to ban them from the walkways?"

Glory tried as she might to pretend everything was in order, to work up the will to send those letters and have a thousand rhinocerotes imported and a thousand ramps built—to turn the Rainforest Kingdom into one massive rhinoceros megalopolis, RainWings and NightWings made equal in their becoming stewards of this new penultimate stage of urban development. (The ultimate stage is the rhinoceros necropolis; it is wholly unsustainable to put that many rhinocerotes in one place, especially considering their complete lack of adaption to the environment.) It was just too much, though; it was too sad. She loved the world, every last atom of it, but if the world didn't love her idea...

"Damn it."

That cry of resignation ended the conversation. Their flight proceeded from there with slightly more frequent bursts of speech, but it was still largely silent. The trail led right into the Mud Kingdom, but it abruptly diverted from the highway proper. More than one witness corroborated that the cart took a turn onto a dirt road leading to a swampside village, taking about an hour to disappear into the horizon as its wheels constantly hitched on the rough terrain. Well, they'd called it a village, but their usage of the word was nonstandard. The settlement comprised of a few mounds of earth, into which tunnels had been dug, and... that was about it. Deathbringer winced as he beheld the poverty. There was a watchtower in the distance, the only structure with any verticality—Glory could see that it was starting to fall apart, out of use for three months. She poked her head into one of the tunnels, wrinkling her nose at the foul smell that pervaded the inside. "Hello?" she called. "If anyone's in there, we'd like to speak with you."

"Coming!" was the almost-immediate reply. Glory retracted her neck just in time to avoid being smacked in the chin as a massive MudWing's head emerged from a hole in the side of the tunnel. She was elderly, but had kept her energy into old age; more relevantly to the present moment, her neck was craning in an awkward way in order to look at Glory.

"Do you... want to talk like this?" Glory asked. Doing that for more than a few minutes was liable to give the MudWing a serious crick.

"Well, I'm in the middle of cooking..." the MudWing replied.

"...alright then," Glory conceded. "We'd like to ask you some questions." She gestured to herself and Deathbringer. Have you seen a group of SkyWings pulling a long cart by claw?"

The MudWing said something eerily familiar. "Haven't you already asked me that?"

Once what that meant registered to Glory, it stirred up trouble in her chest. If Jambu'd lost track of them...

"Someone else," she answered quickly.

"Oh, well..." The MudWing popped her head back to the other side of the hole for a moment before coming back. "No, but we have seen a cart."

Jambu'd lost track of them and these MudWings hadn't seen them. This was almost the worst scenario—unless this cart-spotting turned out to be quite good. Glory doubted that would be the case.

"Where was this cart?" she asked. "What made it noteworthy?"

"We found it in the swamp!" The MudWing smiled, but Glory did not share the sentiment. "Weird, huh? Completely empty."

"Indeed." Glory nodded gravely. "Where is this swamp?"

The MudWing, again, returned her head beyond the threshold for about ten seconds. She started speaking even before she returned, the first part of her answer muffled. "North. Hard to miss. Cart isn't hard to find, either—was left behind at the very edge."

Glory sighed. Deathbringer's fear had been realised—CIO had ditched the cart, their only identification. "Did you see any SkyWings nearby?" she asked—just as a matter of course, at this point.

"Your tribemate asked me that, too!" the MudWing laughed. "There were some flying north, yes, but I wouldn't say they had to do with the cart. We're just by the Thoroughfare; we see SkyWings all the time."

"Did you tell this to the other RainWing you saw?"

"Yes, and he started following after them. What's it you want with 'em, hm?"

"We suspect them of having kidnapped that other RainWing," Deathbringer said. Glory nodded her head in confirmation, but the MudWing didn't need it; those kinds of serious words were always better received coming out of Deathbringer's mouth.

"Oh!" The MudWing gasped, but she tempered herself. "But... he was..."

"We're not sure about what's happening with him, either," Glory said. After a moment's silence, she looked to Deathbringer, who shook his head; the question well had dried up. She turned back to the MudWing. "Thank you for your time."

The MudWing didn't reciprocate the closing greeting before returning to whatever she was cooking. Glory hadn't eaten very many cooked meals in her life—she didn't have an exact count, but it was in the single digits—so she couldn't really identify what was being cooked, but she did think she smelled beef. Having caught this elusive smell in the air, she flew upwards to get a look at the swamp. It really was hard to miss; it was some three times larger than the "village" surrounding it. Trepidation seized her as she glided towards the very edge, which she presumed to be the southern side—if the cart really was empty...

Batting away vines and thick branches, she almost wanted to close her eyes so she wouldn't have to see it. Her guardians were nasty as sin, though, and they had taught her nothing if not bravery. Feeling some emotion adjacent to being horrified, she lifted the cover off of the rotting carcass of a wooden cart. Her eyes met but dust. CIO were gone, and Jambu with them.

This was, for all intents and purposes, the end of this investigation, or at least this leg of it. Glory could theoretically have gone north and hope that Jambu again stopped to speak with someone, but the odds that would end in anything useful were incredibly slim. No longer was there a convienent highway to follow, clue after clue leading to some ultimate destination. Those SkyWings, and thusly Jambu, could essentially have gone anywhere. This was where the trail ended, with Jambu disappearing into the thick of the Mud Kingdom. To look for him any further would certainly be the work of more than two dragons, most likely over weeks; there was nothing more that Glory could do but start organising that. Moons, getting Ruby to let her and Deathbringer investigate was hard enough; how much worse would it be when she had to convince Moorhen to let a whole team of dragons pore over the Diamond Spray? She'd think them spies...

Recognising the futility of continuing any further, Glory and Deathbringer began the journey home. It was heavy and silent, and the sun was low in the sky by the time they saw mangrove trees. Glory abruptly slowed and landed in the cold swamp water, motioning for Deathbringer to do the same. The intent of this stop had been to discuss the investigation—and prior to that figure out if there was anything to discuss—but within ten seconds of his claws gripping roots, Deathbringer began to speak on a completely different topic.

"What you told me, last night..." He inhaled deeply. "What did you mean?"

Glory knew instantly what he was talking about. "I..." She tried to find the words, but she herself didn't even know what she meant. Even trying to recall what she had said was a challenge. "We're close, you know... More than friends—you're definitely more than a bodyguard. What I was trying to say was..."

The words would not leave her mouth. Civil unrest permeated the blood-brain barrier. Fearless revolutionaries tried to unstick her forked tongue, and they created just the slightest crack before they were beheaded and dumped into mass graves. This opening was all Glory needed. She shoved her claw in, prying apart flesh from flesh, and finally spoke.

"I... love you." Saying that had sapped as much energy from her as the rest of the day combined. "I guess?"

"I think you're right. You do love me." Deathbringer smiled, and if his mind had also fallen into brutal civil war, it didn't show on his face. "Well, you know what? I love you, too."

"Alright." Glory's jaw slammed shut, not opening again for another five seconds—it felt like an eon to the words in her mouth which were itching to get out, having been displaced by the revolutionary devastation. "That's good, isn't it? That we love each other?"

"Yes, it is," Deathbringer answered. "I like it, in any case."

"As do I." Glory, suddenly, felt the complete opposite of before; there was now a deficit of words, despite the fact that she had to keep talking about something. "You know, I expected something more from this moment."

"Confessing your love?"

"Yeah. I feel like being lovers with someone is supposed to give you a reward," Glory said. "What do lovers get to do?"

"Uh..." Deathbringer paused. "I guess they get to talk about their feelings. You know, with each other."

That was the most dangerous road of all, cleanly labelled with a thousand skulls. Still, Glory felt an imperceptible allure to it. Something lovely. "Let's do that, then. How are you feeling?"

"Hm." Deathbringer relaxed, the tension that came from touching the cool water evaporating—it was replaced within moments by some worse burden. "A bit depressed, lately."

Wait, this wasn't supposed to happen. Glory was supposed to play around at the entrance of the road, but Deathbringer had gone and dragged her deeper in—why? He should have played along with her—that was how this love first came to be.

Glory shivered, emotions caught in her spine. The predominant of these was anxiety, but for some reason there was also a tingling joy at the back of her skull—an odd, disgusting feeling, like the one she got when she was around the tunnels. She had no name for its formless terror, but it started to roll over her like fog. "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," it said, flowing out of her mouth. "Do you know why, or is just one of those feelings?"

Deathbringer breathed in shakily. "My..." Trailing off, he wasted that breath and had to take another. "My mother died around this time of year."

Oh, god. This was bad. This was the most earnest Glory had ever heard her bodyguard. Talking about his family... Glory was not prepared for that. She never would be. Shying away from this wasn't something a girlfriend should do, she knew, but she couldn't bear the alternative—a better dragon would have listened to Deathbringer, supported him, but the very mention of the idea that her invincible bodyguard might have traumas of his own sent Glory into terrified spasms. That would mean having to deal with those traumas, and Glory had only barely started to acknowledge her own.

"Well, that's..." The shock let her wrest control back from the fog, and she panickedly started coming up with ways to steer the conversation away from anything that could possibly lead to Deathbringer continuing like this. "I'm sorry to hear that," she repeated. "Um..." She couldn't think of a way to organically shift the topic—she had always relied on Deathbringer as her orator. Then again, he wouldn't do this to her... "Let's... talk about something else."

Moons, that was the best she could come up with? Let's talk about something else? Oh, god... She couldn't help but imagine herself in this situation, baring her heart to her bodyguard—immediately after having declared her love—and then being pushed away with those words. She saw that fear well up in his eyes again; that mystical emotion, inscrutable. She couldn't help him with that; he had made no request she could fulfil. She could only move on and hope that snapped him out of it.

Glory waited a moment before fully detaching from the awful turn the conversation had took. "He didn't even get kidnapped, did he?" she posited. "He just followed them without telling us. All the way to the Mud Kingdom..."

"I was thinking the same thing," Deathbringer said, tone having shifted right back to his semi-formal standard as though he hadn't just been so cruelly betrayed. She even saw him calm a little bit, that fear replaced by... determination? Something along those lines. "Like, here's the timeline. CIO comes to the forest, gets the poison and guns that they want, but Jambu... maybe he sees them trying to steal the brew, or maybe he's just suspicious of them in general, but he follows them. And the cart..."

"You know, we should start selling the sleeping poison," Glory interjected. "It's mighty useful—could make a tidy profit off it."

"...why'd you say ofit twice?" Deathbringer asked.

"Profit off it. Off of it."

"Ah." Deathbringer cleared his throat. "Anyway. The cart. I think they were just hauling something heavy and couldn't afford the horses or mules or whatever they'd need."

"Actually, the cart wasn't too low to the ground when I saw it," Glory said. "The wheels gave it enough height that it would be hard for an animal to pull it. It was like it was made to be pulled by claw."

"...alright, well." Deathbringer exhaled. "I'm not a cartcyclopedia, and neither are you. I don't think either of us know what that means."

"Oh, of course," Glory said. "I realised that a little while ago and there hasn't been much of an opportunity to bring it up, is all."

"Sure. Anyway, they take the cart to Jade Mountain, rob a farmer on the way—that's the only criminal act we can actually pin on them. No idea why Jambu went west; maybe they did, too, just without the cart. They head to the Mud Kingdom, Jambu's still following them... is he so determined? He's, like, the laziest dragon I know."

Glory's jaw clenched in thought. "He would have come home," she said, her voice tinged by revelation. "Why did he follow them for so long—even if he was kidnapped? What made him?"

"Could it be to do with that dragonet?" Deathbringer suggested.

"What..." Glory's epiphany had no room for such an idea, and trying to fit it in there burst the whole bubble. "I don't think so. I think that was... just a coincidence."

"You sure?"

"Listen." Glory took a deep inhale. "Why was he draped in all those sad colours? Even if he was kidnapped, they wouldn't carry over from day to day; he'd be stressed, maybe, but the sadness would wear off. I don't even think being kidnapped would make him very sad. Over time, yeah, but not in the moment. Something happened—potentially twice—that made him keep following CIO. Something depressing."

"Something dragonet-related?"

Glory waved her claw at her bodyguard. "Maybe."

"Alright." Deathbringer shrugged. It felt like there should have been something more to talk about, but Glory had voiced all her thoughts and no more were coming to mind, especially with how tired she was. The rest of the flight back to the treehouse was calm enough, the wind swishing the canopy—the howler monkeys were going at it, but Glory'd learned to tune that out. By the time she and Deathbringer got back, three days had passed since they left on the third day—the fifth was winding down rapidly, the sun casting its purple glow across the sky, and Glory wanted nothing more than to go to sleep for three more days. The amount of flying she had done... it would tire a SkyWing.

She tried to collapse as soon as she got home, erasing the remaining guilt with the void of sleep, but there was a single dragon waiting for her, even in these late hours—smallish, blue. Orchid, again? In a perfect world, this meant that she would have more information on CIO that would mean the investigation would be able to surpass the barrier it had hit. In a perfect world, though, Jambu wouldn't have disappeared in the first place, so bringing it up isn't a very useful counterfactual.

Glory did not go through her monarchical motions, instead just landing next to Orchid and asking "what is it?"

"Oh, I just wanted to tell you..." Orchid inhaled hesitantly. "I don't know if it means... anything, but I called Jambu your kid brother when I was talking to Siyayo. I forgot he was older than you—he doesn't act like it."

"Okay, well..." Glory slotted that into her wall of facts. "Thank you. I think that might help, actually."

She and Orchid said their goodbyes, and the latter blended into the shadow as she flew into the rapidly darkening rainforest. Deathbringer, who was about as invisible in the corner of the moderately well-lit room, opined as soon as she was out of earshot. "That's nothing, right?" he said. "Just a... mistake she was holding onto. I still remember the time I called you mom."

"No. This does mean something." Glory grinned with triumph. "They knew he was my brother. 'The Queen's kid brother,' she must have said! They kidnapped him for ransom!"

"If they kidnapped him."

"Sure. But it makes the kidnapping a lot more likely, doesn't it?"

"Fair enough." Deathbringer held up a claw as he yawned. "What's special about ransom, though? Apart from that?"

"Well... there's a lead invariably coming. They'll have to send us a letter, or a note, or whatever; something telling us how much to pay. We question whoever delivers it, they give us info on CIO, Jambu is freed."

"Or we pay it."

"Or we pay it, yeah." Glory shrugged. "Probably easier. Depends on how much they ask."

She wanted to add a quip to this sentence, but the workers in her head were starting to pass out from exhaustion, and she could not relocate the ones who were still awake to the idea mill without passing out herself. Instead, she mumbled a goodnight before collapsing into a hammock—she had to climb into it, actually, owing to its hanging quite close to the ceiling. In the corner of the room, she could just barely see the light shimmer around an invisible guard of hers—or was that her eyes failing from the lack of energy? She imagined that going to sleep after having made her love known would be a rejuvenating thing, but she was fraught with worry and exhaustion and her boyfriend wasn't even next to her; no, she'd been granted the honour of ruling over one hundred and one impossibly skilled maniacs bent on regicide, so he had to stay watching the doorways until he couldn't stand up any longer.

Dwelling on this prevented her from sleeping, compounded by the fact that her head was still swimming with questions—millions of questions. She had fewer answers now than when she set out to speak with Ruby. Stray words and concepts twisted into bizarre shapes. To where did he vanish? Why?

Her constant turning of these questions around in the horrific wheel of her mind made it even harder for her to fall even the slightest bit asleep, and thus very easy for her to be pulled fully into the waking realm by a talon on her shoulder. One of her RainWing guards had done it, immediately returning to invisibility and stepping backwards a few paces after having done so. Glory looked around the room for what they could have been notifying her of, and in the centre of the doorway she was facing, she could see once she craned her neck, stood a NightWing.

"Hail, Your Majesty," he greeted her, saying Your Majesty more sincerely than any RainWing she had ever heard. "I have news pertinent to your search for a missing RainWing—Jambu, I believe is his name."

"What is this news..?" she asked. She didn't know every NightWing's name, despite the fact that there were less of them than there were RainWings; to be fair, she did have a list of everything a RainWing could be named in her head (and in the process of being written down), so that affected the relative difficulty. Most of her subjects would have called him Evil, the generic name, at least in the rainforest, for any NightWing—like Oasis for SandWings and Frost for IceWings. Glory was tired enough that there was a small chance that this name could have slipped from her mouth, but she crushed it with her teeth preemptively.

"Stargrasper," the NightWing answered.

"What is this news, Stargrasper?"

"We have discovered an unusual dart in the area around the two tunnels."

"...okay." Glory skirted the edge of a realisation, but nothing came to her. "How is this relevant to our search?"

"Your Majesty..." Stargrasper paused confusedly. "That was where he was last seen."

A cry of what? very nearly escaped Glory's mouth. She settled instead for the more dignified "...I was never told of this!"

"Your Majesty, there was..." Stargrasper trailed off. "No, we found that out after you left. My apologies, Your Majesty—I should have begun with that. Jambu was last seen near the tunnels."

That would check with his being kidnapped, but Glory, while unable to quantify this information will the deluge that was still swimming around in her head, felt that something she had discovered should have countered the idea that the kidnappers had used the tunnel to the Kingdom of Sand in their crime. She knew she would have an easier time understanding all this interplay once she was rested, but she was wide awake now, and she wasn't getting to sleep while this was still bugging her. "Take me to where it was found," she requested of Stargrasper. She failed to gracefully exit the hammock, just barely avoiding flopping onto the ground and injuring her wrists in the process. She needed her guards, of course—in the corner, she saw Deathbringer asleep. Though it was only wise to bring him, she felt it fair recompense that he at least be able to get a good sleep after the events of the previous day.

It was about twenty minutes' worth of flight to the tunnels. Stargrasper, as unused to tree gliding as the other NightWings, lagged slightly behind as he flew above the trees rather than through them, and Glory had to stop occasionally to let him catch up. She wasn't the best at tree gliding, either; she noticed one of her guards behind her having to slow herself down to match Glory's pace. Camouflaged RainWings tree gliding were a weird sight; it was like an apocalyptic wind had struck a very specific stretch of jungle.

Eventually, they made it to the river that separated the two tunnels, and Glory asked Stargrasper to lead her to the dart. She suddenly felt quite anxious about this whole affair, following a NightWing to an isolated spot in the dead of night. She could picture it clearly in her head. Her guards are tired and indignant, even though she specially picked them for their loyalty and they had adjusted their sleep schedules according to their duties, and their camouflage falters just so slightly, giving a sharp-eyed NightWing hiding in the trees a target at which to aim three sleeping darts. Not even that! Stargrasper, if that was even his name, could attack her suddenly, forcing them out of camouflage—even though they'd been trained expressly not to do that—and making it easy as anything to shoot them down. In any case, Glory notices where the three darts have come from and turns towards there, unaware that a second shooter lurks behind her—the veins in her neck are pierced, blood trickling out of the wound, and she falls down in complete helplessness. Then, commiting the perfect crime, the NightWings hold her hostage somewhere in the SandWing desert, or even just kill her outright. Yes, that's the true motivation for having kidnapped Jambu; it's all to lure Glory to this spot, by the tunnels. It all makes sense now, at the end of the play. Le comédie est finie! their leader cries, and the audience cheers for a beautiful performance.

None of this came to pass. Stargrasper calmly walked to a patch of pondside grass that was before the boulder tunnel. A few other NightWings were standing nearby, but they backed up as Glory approached. "This," Stargrasper gestured to the ground, "is where we found the dart. It's still here."

We—who were these NightWings, exactly? He clearly wasn't doing this alone. "Who is we?" Glory asked.

"Oh, just me and..." He waved his claw towards his compatriots. "...them. We've been doing our own unofficial search. We don't get a lot of chances to exercise our tracking skills anymore."

"I see." Glory nodded in recognition. She approached the patch of earth that the NightWing had gestured to, but she couldn't pick anything out of the thick grass. Maybe it was easier for someone who could see in the dark—and also wasn't exhausted—but she couldn't see a thing. "Stargrasper," she said, "I am unable to see the dart in this lack of light. Pluck it from the ground for me."

"Of course, Your Majesty," said the NightWing. Glory was grateful for a moment where she felt in control in the middle of... all of this. Soon, a small dart was in her talons. It was oddly styled indeed. Thick, made to penetrate scales more easily than a typical dart; if you shot someone in the wrong place with this thing, you could seriously hurt them. Something tugged at her half-lucid mind as she stared at it...

Was that was the realisation that failed to come to her, earlier—that the kidnappers had asked for tranquilising brew and guns, but not darts? Could this have been a dart they made themselves? Perhaps, but she felt more likely that it was something else that had only happened to crop up around the same time as that idea. Something to do with the tunnels, a contextless concept that only now she could develop. It was like clay in her talons. Why would Jambu come here? Nobody liked being near the tunnels; Glory herself was almost shivering. Could the kidnappers have lured him here, somehow? She felt a sudden urge to look down at the spot where the dart had been—close to it, in any case. It was in a straight line from the boulder, as if fired from it...

They did use the tunnels.

A/N: I am aware that rhinocerotes don't actually stamp out fires. Also: do leave criticism. I become more certain that I'm doing something horribly wrong the further this story continues, and I need to know what in order to fix it.