Glorious Politics
AN: After the short breather in the last chapter, it's back into the action.
Disclaimer: I do not own Wings of Fire. My OCs Horus, Mistral, Levante, and Sobek belong to me. Bloodwalker belongs to SpyroAndSisuFan.
Chapter Twenty-Three:
"What do you mean 'he's gone'!?" Mistral demanded.
"I think you're focused on the wrong thing here, Mistral!" Glory snapped at him before turning back to Turtle. "Is the attack still ongoing?" Turtle nodded shakily, making several dragons curse aloud. Ruby ordered Levante to assemble a number of guards. While the Skywing Queen's readiness to offer assistance was appreciated, Glory had to wonder what the ulterior motive here was. She'd have to worry about Ruby later, though. "How many?" she asked the shaken Seawing.
"U-Uh...a lot," was his entirely unsatisfactory answer.
Glory growled, grabbing the Seawing's snout and pulling his face up to meet her furious gaze, which he flinched at. "I need numbers, Turtle! Twenty? Fifty?"
His answer caught all of them by surprise. "A-A few hundred."
Glory blinked in shock, running that through her head, as her talons fell from the Seawing's snout. The other Queens watched her carefully, but Glory recovered quickly. "Send me there," she ordered Anemone, who looked about to argue before another voice interrupted.
"Send us there," Mistral spoke as he stepped forward, Qibli nodding in agreement as Winter stood next to the former Lord. Then, the Icewing turned to address Ruby. "Could we borrow Horus, Your Highness?"
"Yes, of course," Ruby answered. With permission given, the Skywing soldier joined both Mistral and Qibli. "Though perhaps it would be best to wait for my guards to be readied."
"My Kingdom is under attack as we speak! I do not have time to wait!" Glory shot back before turning to Anemone. "Now, send us."
Anemone nodded, instructing those who were going to form a circle and hold each other's talons. Right before Glory could take Mistral's, Thorn stepped between them and grabbed both of their claws in her own. Qibli spluttered in surprise as this action, but Thorn just glared at her son. "I may be a Queen now, but I'm also the founder of the Outclaws. And dragons didn't follow me just because of my looks."
With no one else arguing against her presence, though Qibli still thought it highly unwise based on his expression, Anemone uttered a spell, and then the group of seven were on the other side of the continent in the midst of an ongoing battle, though from first glance, it looked more like a massacre—and not one in their favor. A lot of the buildings and nearby trees were on fire, though it looked like it was about to rain, so that particular problem should take care of itself before long. Battle cries and screams split the air as the highly coordinated attackers slaughtered the disparate groups of defenders or fleeing civilians.
"Well, isn't this a target-rich environment," Anemone grinned in malicious excitement, making the rest of them nervous. The Seawing flashed the lot of them a gleeful smirk before taking off towards the closest group of enemies, a pair of Sandwings, one male and one female, that had just noticed the new arrivals. Anemone didn't even bother trying to dodge their tails, the tips bouncing off her scales without penetrating, before the Seawing sent the male into a nearby tree with a swipe of her powerful tail, the audible crack signaling the dragon's back was broken. The female was hit with an uppercut so powerful, the body did several backflips through the air before landing. The Sandwing did not get up.
And then the Seawing was running off again. "I am so glad she's on our side," Qibli muttered before tagging Horus. Winter glanced between the two and Mistral before joining them, and the three darted off the opposite way Anemone had, though not before Qibli sent one last concerned look to Thorn.
Mistral and Thorn, however, didn't move, staying on Glory's flanks. Both were on guard as they awaited Glory's instructions. Neither were going to leave her alone since she was the physically weakest of the group. Glory observed the carnage around them, using sight and sound to figure out where the dragons she was looking for were. Unfortunately, she didn't see any sign of them in the immediate vicinity, so she turned to explain the plan to the others. Before she could, however, Mistral intercepted a hostile Nightwing that was darting towards the group. The Icewing didn't hold back at all, the fight probably cathartic for him, in a way. In fact, while she was no expert, she saw a few opportunities where Mistral could have ended the struggle cleanly, but the Icewing used a more straightforward approach and brutalized his opponent. Both Thorn and Glory were staring at him warily when he snarled at the corpse, as if regretting his opponent was already dead. "That was satisfying..." His voice was low and deadly.
"Just make sure you recognize friend from foe. Not every Nightwing here is an enemy," Glory warned him, to which he just gave a sharp nod. "Now, follow me!" Thorn and Mistral followed her closely as she weaved her way through the battles, never slowing down or openly engaging anyone. Thorn's fire, Mistral's frost, and her venom was usually enough to keep any hostiles away long enough for them to get by. She was looking for either Bloodwalker or Foeslayer, but with any luck, the two should be in the same area.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case when they arrived at Foeslayer's hut. The ancient Nightwing was clearly injured—there was a spear sticking out of her left hind leg and one of her wings were clearly broken—but she was still fighting the half dozen dragons who, by the looks of it, were attempting to capture her. Two Sandwings were pushing the larger Nightwing back while two Nightwings stood nearby with chains. Another Nightwing and the lone Mudwing were brandishing spears at her from behind. None of them were attacking to kill, merely to keep her attention split and wear her down.
There wasn't much she could do by herself, injured and outnumbered as she was. When she spotted them, however, she called out, "About time reinforcements got here!" Both Sandwings glanced behind them momentarily, but that was all the opening Foeslayer needed as she breathed fire on one before lunging at the other, thereby creating distance between herself and the spear-wielding dragons. The one who got hit by the fire screamed in pain but survived the initial gout of flame by leaping away. The Sandwing who got tackled was quickly dispatched, his tail useless when caught in Foeslayer's iron grip. The spear stuck in her leg fell out during the short scuffle, and when she stood shakily, the Mudwing threw her spear, which ended up impaling straight through Foeslayer's left thigh. The Nightwing roared in agony as both of her rear legs buckled. At this point, the Nightwing knew she was all but done as she collapsed on her side, breathing heavily.
As soon as Foeslayer had begun her initial attack, Mistral had launched himself after the two enemy Nightwings with the chains, leaving Glory and Thorn against the Mudwing and third Nightwing. "It's Queen Glory!" the Nightwing shouted, clearly surprised to see her. "How the hell!?"
"I do believe you're focused on the wrong Queen here," Thorn snarled as she stalked forward with both confidence and predatory grace. Glory hadn't kept up with her combat training since they escaped the mountain they were raised under. Deathbringer showed her a few things before...that happened, but she'd not really cared for sharpening her skills since. As she had pointed out earlier, Thorn was still an Outclaw at heart, meaning the Sandwing Queen was no slouch when it came to fighting.
The two dragons looked between each other for a moment before the Mudwing pulled out a horn that had been hidden beneath her wing. The sound it created was deep, sonorous, and loud, a sound that would no doubt carry a good distance. "Retreating already?" Glory smirked.
Though her premature victory was quickly crushed when Thorn corrected her. "That's not a signal to retreat, sweetheart. That's a call for reinforcements." Oh... Well, the intricacies of different horn calls weren't really her specialty. The Rainwings weren't really military-minded, after all. "Our location is probably about to get swarmed."
The horn call was cut off with a strangled gurgle, the Mudwing collapsing to the ground with her throat slit, the cut clean, precise, and oh so familiar. The Nightwing was tackled from above as a familiar, and thankfully friendly, Nightwing assassin dispatched the downed dragon with a clean slash across his throat. Bloodwalker stood from the corpse, ignoring Thorn's surprise. "The thing about horn calls, though, is that everyone can hear them."
"Where have you been?" Glory asked him, and he huffed in frustration as Mistral walked over, having finished with his own fight. There wasn't a scratch on him.
"Tracking the dragons that captured Peacemaker—or trying to, anyway. I kept getting delayed by other dragons, and I lost sight of my targets. I did manage to track them to the tunnel, though," he explained briefly.
"What!?" Thorn all but shrieked. "How did—" Her question was cut off as the first group of enemies arrived. Mistral growled as he readied himself, his muscles coiled and ready to leap at a moment's notice. "Later, then," Thorn growled. "You two do what you do best," she ordered both Mistral and Bloodwalker. "I'll stay here with Glory." Both nodded, though neither attacked just yet. With yet more enemies arriving, it would be suicide to let themselves be separated. Staying together meant staying alive in this case.
"Oh, don't mind me! I'll just lay here and slowly bleed to death!" Foeslayer called.
The downed Nightwing's voice caught several of the enemy dragons' attention. Like before, most of them were Sandwings and Nightwings, though there were a few Skywings and Mudwings here and there. "Don't let Foeslayer die!" one of the Nightwings, a male, ordered. "Lord Darkstalker would not be pleased!"
"Damned fools," Mistral muttered. Glory grunted in agreement. Maybe they were just misguided or bitter, but she was more inclined to believe they were all insane. Their motivation wasn't what worried her, however. She was far more concerned about the sheer number of them. If this attack was everything they had—their endgame—she wouldn't be as concerned, but something told her this was only the beginning, and they had a lot more reach and resources than any of them had expected.
Only a minute had passed since the horn call, yet there was probably a score or so enemies in the area. Most were surrounding the small group, but a few were tending to Foeslayer. With her injured as badly as she was, she couldn't fight them off as they placed a collar around her neck. Glory growled at the sight but knew there was nothing she could do for the moment. They were too far away to use her venom on; she'd be more likely to hit Foeslayer herself or miss entirely at this range. "Long odds for just the two of us," Bloodwalker commented.
What happened next was a blur of activity that took every single dragon there by surprise. There were four dragons surrounding Foeslayer, one of which—a Sandwing—was currently tending to her wounds. Two were standing guard nearby, and they were both Nightwings. The last, a Skywing was fitting chains around Foeslayer's legs, a spear lying on the ground next to him.
The sound of snapping branches caught the two Nightwings' attention just as an Icewing tackled the Sandwing from behind, the momentum throwing the two dragons into a roll that ended with the Sandwing flying through the air into the stunned Skywing. The Icewing recovered frighteningly quick as the Nightwings moved to engage, slashing the one on the left with his right talons, ducking under a gout of fire from the Nightwing on the right, and using that maneuver to spin around, smacking the left Nightwing across the face with his spiny tail, which mangled that Nightwing's left eye. In the same motion, the Icewing slashed the right Nightwing's neck open with his left talons, grabbed the dying Nightwing to block a tail strike from the Sandwing, jumped over the now-dead Nightwing to latch onto the Sandwing's neck with his teeth, the momentum enough to snap the Sandwing's neck. Then, he rolled to dodge a gout of flame from the Skywing, countering with his own frostbreath which did connect, and finally, picked up the Skywing's discarded spear, spun around, and sent the weapons straight into the injured Nightwing's neck.
The whole thing happened over the span of seven seconds.
Pretty much everyone was stunned silent by the quick dispatch of the four dragons, but Glory had to laugh in mockery when the Icewing stood and placed himself between the cultists and Foeslayer. "Oh, you guys are screwed now!" Winter had arrived.
"Fancy meeting you here," Foeslayer commented.
"Yeah, well, I already saved your life once. Might as well save it again," the Icewing Prince spoke, never taking his eyes off the cultists, half of which had split from the group surrounding Glory's group to focus on the newcomer.
"You know something? I like you, Icewing," Foeslayer replied, making Winter snort in mild amusement. However, Glory noticed that Mistral didn't appear too happy as he glared at the other Icewing in anger. Apparently, Winter's part in releasing the ancient Nightwing had slipped his mind until now, and she had a feeling the two Icewings would be having a nice, long chat after this mess—and with the Queen, no doubt.
Despite how outnumbered they were, the cultists weren't attacking yet, and the reason why quickly became apparent as yet more of them arrived to surround them. "This is some mess we've gotten ourselves into," Thorn muttered. Bloodwalker had a chakram ready to throw, vapor trails were rising form Mistral's nostrils, and Winter's tail was lashing back and forth in agitation.
And then came the inevitable. The cultists all leapt at them in a wave from all angles, Bloodwalker, Thorn, and Mistral managed to take out a couple each with their breath weapons. Glory managed to strike one in the face with her venom, too. She couldn't see what happened to Winter through the melee, but thankfully the chaos didn't last for long. The cultists had waited so long that friendly reinforcements ended up saving the day, but from what Glory could see of the fighting, most of the hostile dragons weren't actual soldiers. Their forms were mostly sloppy and improvised and none of them really worked well together, meaning Thorn, Mistral, and Bloodwalker could hold them off relatively easily.
The cult's initial attack on the village was probably only successful because of the element of surprise. That, and the fact most Nightwings nowadays weren't professional soldiers. Once they came across some actual opposition, the attack stalled and collapsed, especially when it was revealed just who Ruby had sent as backup.
If the screams of terror weren't enough of a clue, the smell of burning flesh was. "This is the most fun I've had in years!" That maniacally gleeful shout was heard over everything else, and Glory had to question the wisdom of sending her to the rainforest.
"RETREAT!" It was unknown exactly which cultist ordered that, but they all scattered in every direction, a veritable legion of Skywing soldiers giving chase.
The five original defenders all had some minor wounds, but it could have been a lot worse without the Skywings' timely arrival. And that's not even mentioning the living inferno walking towards them with Prince Cliff a safe distance away. Glory eyed the smoldering leaves left in Peril's wake suspiciously, but a good portion of the forest was already on fire, so it's not like things could get much worse with her here. "Typical," Peril groused. "Right when I get in the groove, they all run away with their tails between their legs. COWARDS!" A gout of smoke erupted from her nostrils before she focused on the others, her frustration instantly melting away.
"Thanks for the save," Glory nodded at her. "I think we all owe you one." Peril grinned at that, happy to have helped. Then, the Rainwing Queen turned to Mistral and Winter. "Can you two do something about the fires?" It had just started sprinkling, but she didn't want to take any chances. They weren't completely out of control yet, but it wouldn't take much longer for them to reach that point.
It was around that time when Anemone, Qibli, Horus, and Turtle showed up, as well. She assumed the Seawing Prince was responsible for bringing the Skywings. "Once she heard someone had attacked her favorite Seawing, there was no stopping her," Cliff said with a small grin. Peril just huffed at that. It was then that said Seawing passed Peril a necklace—one that didn't immediately melt when she grabbed it—and when she put it on, her firescales were nullified.
"Well, he is my best friend," Peril defended herself before giving Turtle the stinkeye. "Even if he doesn't visit as much as I'd like." Turtle just mumbled an apology before Peril rolled her eyes and wrapped a wing around him. The Seawing couldn't help the small smile from forming on his muzzle.
"I think this is the first time I've seen you since I arrived in the Sky Kingdom, Prince Cliff," Thorn pointed out. And Glory realized she hadn't seen him until now, either. Same for Peril, matter of fact, though that one was probably more easily explained. Peril did live with Clay in Jade Mountain, after all, and knowing Clay, the two probably hadn't arrived for the wedding until the day of, meaning they arrived after she was captured.
"Levante put me in charge of the night shift," he explained. "But this is a big enough mess that I decided to get personally involved." He looked around at the carnage with a sigh. Near a quarter of the Nightwing village was destroyed, and there were bodies scattered everywhere, both innocent civilians and enemy combatants. "Speaking of messes, my mother is assigning a garrison of fifty Skywings to your village." Glory went to argue—Ruby had no right making that decision without at least consulting her first! "This is non-negotiable," Cliff continued, his tone making it clear he wouldn't hear any excuses. "These cultists may have all but declared war on Pyrrhia, but they also ruined my mother's wedding, and she is not happy right now. As the investigation into them now seems to be centered on your former rival and a traitor to Queen Thorn, it seemed prudent to put measures into place to make sure this..." he gestured around them, "...doesn't happen again."
"She has no right to do that without asking me," Glory argued, regardless of the Prince's earlier comment.
"Feel free to speak with her about it, but you won't change her mind," Cliff replied, though he did seem to understand where she was coming from. He sighed again before motioning for Glory to come closer. She did, and Cliff leaned forward to whisper in her ear. "She'll never admit it openly, but she knows how good you are for Pyrrhia. She would much rather have you as an ally than an enemy, yes, but this is more because she's worried about what your death would do to Pyrrhia as a whole."
He backed away with a small nod, Thorn and Qibli watching the two of them curiously, wondering what was said. "I'll try to keep that in mind...but I still want to talk to her about this."
"Very well," Cliff nodded. "But I have orders. Captain Horus!"
The named Skywing stepped forward at attention. "Your Highness?"
"General Levante wants you to lead the garrison here until such time as this matter is resolved." Horus saluted and bowed his head to show he understood. "Then my presence here is no longer needed. Come, aunt Peril, I'm sure mother is anxious to know we're alright." Peril nodded, waved bye to the lot of them, and then followed after the Skywing Prince.
"Well..."Anemone began. "I think having a garrison of Skywings here is a good idea. There's not many dragons that can best them."
Glory didn't answer at first. Truthfully, she was more concerned about what the Skywings' presence would say about her as a Queen than the Skywings themselves. Having ten guards loaned to her by Thorn hadn't worried her because the two Kingdoms were extremely close allies. No one would have batted an eye at that offer of assistance. The Sky Kingdom, however, was not a formal ally of the Rainforest. Yes, they were at peace and they did trade, but her and Ruby weren't particularly close allies. Accepting a garrison from them without any argument might make others think they could take advantage of her.
"Sobek did," Thorn eventually said. Anemone frowned at that before Thorn continued. "And I'm pretty sure I know what you're thinking, Glory, and I agree. If the Skywings want to get involved, fine, but this is out of line." Then, she frowned. "This is probably her showing she's not afraid to flex her power, most likely a result of the alliance between our three Kingdoms." Anemone perked up at that. "Yes, Anemone, I haven't forgotten you," Thorn finished with a small grin. "But the question remains: are you willing to honor that alliance by entering negotiations against the Sky Kingdom?"
Anemone just snorted in amusement. "Oh, please, I'm already in negotiations with the Sky Kingdom," she revealed, to their surprise. "Mother may have been content with letting bygones be bygones, but I want reparations for the destruction of the Summer Palace."
"Then we're agreed. We stand together against Ruby's overreaching," Thorn nodded. That's when she turned to Horus, who was still nearby and appeared very concerned about this particular discussion. "Nervous?"
"I am now," the Skywing admitted. "I'd rather there not be a war."
"Well, that depends entirely on how reasonable your Queen is willing to be," Anemone shot back. "She may have the strongest tribe on Pyrrhia, but that doesn't give her the right to do what she wants."
Glory would be the first to say that Ruby was a great Queen, but she would also admit that the Skywing Queen tended to throw her weight around where it wasn't wanted. While she almost always did so with the best of intentions, the simple truth was that she had a history of interfering in the politics of other Kingdoms.
"While I agree that we need to take care of our Skywing problem, we also have a more pressing issue at claw," Thorn continued as she turned towards Bloodwalker. "You mentioned you tracked the fleeing cultists to the tunnel?"
She was interrupted by a rather annoyed Nightwing. "Still bleeding over here!"
AN: So the cultists may have numbers, but most of them aren't very competent fighters. At least so far. We got to see Winter in action, though.
But Ruby might be putting her nose where it doesn't belong, so I wonder how complicated this'll turn out to be. Guess we'll find out soon enough.
Until Next Time
AdmiralCole22