— Epilogue —

4 days ago

After Winter's departure at about midday, Oracle had a rather peaceful day at the mountain, well, besides the times where he'd see Tsunami while he walked by and she threw him an unamused look for having run away alongside five other dragons. Well at least she hasn't been told yet that two prophecies were made yesterday.

He met up with Sora during the day, checking the library first and indeed there she was, reading a scroll while having Bandit's cage on the nearby table.

"Howdy, Sora," he called out to the Mudwing, who turned her head towards him.

"You're back," she said softly with a small smile as Oracle walked closer and sat down nearby. "Are the others back too?"

"Yep, most of the Jade Winglet is back, only Winter had to go back to his kingdom for a couple days, family business," Oracle nodded at her.

After he said that, Sora looked towards Bandit, who was just sitting in his cage with his head resting on his hands.

"Oh, well, that's good I guess? Been a day and half, I haven't got to teach him any words yet," she said and pointed at the scroll she was reading. "And I've started to read some scrolls about scavengers."

"It's great to see that you seem to be getting interested in this topic," Oracle said, smiling brightly. "Now that I'm back, I could help you with this, and then we surprise Winter by showing him that scavengers are intelligent beings that can even talk back to him."

Sora nodded lightly, but as he said that, she seemed to be in thought.

"Are they really that intelligent? Really able to understand all of our language if trained?" She asked, and Oracle nodded immediately. "Oh… You realize that's rather a big thing to suddenly reveal, right?" Sora looked slightly sick, and Oracle wondered if either she ate a scavenger before, or saw one of her sibs do it.

"I know, and you can bet that I'll try to make other dragons see it, scavengers are highly intelligent creatures with their own language and societies, able to build towns and cities and have civilization, if other dragons saw that…"

"Well… If you start to spread the message at some point, maybe I could help you?" Sora offered, and Oracle was even happier now.

"Oh! Yes please, I mean if you want of course, but it's easier to say something when more than one dragon is saying it," he quickly agreed with the idea with a lot of glee.

He did wonder for a moment if Sora's motivated by her interest on the cause for humanity, or because she still feels guilt about the fact of nearly killing him with an explosion while Oracle just kept being nice to her afterwards, but he dismissed this train of thought, Sora has been reading and trying to learn about scavengers when she didn't outright need to.

The rest of the day went by without any complications, and his winglet even had music alongside the Jade winglet, so he got to see Qib dance and play these drums.

Eventually when night was closing in, he went to his cave. Icicle is gone so it's just him right now until they probably give him another clawmate, he got into his sleeping spot and laid down.

But he barely even got to sleep.

Oracle will stand up and grab the magic scroll in complete silence.

His voice of reason spoke, and the Nightwing didn't even really get time to process that before he was already up and standing, one of his talons reaching for the scroll in the pouch on his neck.

Oracle will hereby write "I enchant myself to appear a mile south from the Great Ice Cliff of the Ice Kingdom, and this spell will also grant me the same effect of the Icewing Gift of Diplomacy so that the Ice Cliff will not react at my presence.

The Nightwing's eyes widened, what… Is happening? The instructions appeared clear in his mind, but he did not know why, he didn't want to go there! He tried to stop writing… But his talons were moving by themselves, he realized with horror that he couldn't stop it.

And then Oracle disappeared from Jade Mountain, suddenly finding himself in a much colder environment as he looked up to a big cliff looming basically in front of him, he gulped and tried to move back, but his body was locked in place. He wasn't shot down at least, and the Gift of Diplomacy meant he wasn't outright freezing right now… But this is bad.

Oracle will come to find me.

His body suddenly moved forward towards the base of the cliff then followed along it to the right for a mile and a half, he then approached the cliff and there he pushed off snow from a specific spot… Which was covering a cave entrance.

What 's going on!? Why am I going there? My body… What's happening to my body!? His mind panicked, trying still to resist to no avail as he entered the cave, and was now inside the Cliff.

It was incredibly cold in here, even with the magical gift, but his body simply moved forward and through different tunnels and passageways, some even quite hidden like one directly on the ceiling that he had to fly upwards to get to the next section.

And after some time, suddenly he had finally arrived to his destination, it was a massive room, made out of ice and crystal and clearly not natural but taloncrafted, he saw a lot of different items scattered around the place, and on shelves or holes digged into the ice, there was a table and a couple of crystalline chairs, several paintings of many different Icewings, and a big chandelier at the top of this room. At the sides he saw openings to other caves and based on what he saw from this position, those were other rooms as well.

And most importantly, there at the table was someone sitting on one of the chairs, a scroll laid down in front of the dragon on the table, an inkpot by one side and a large quill by the other.

The dragon turned his head towards Oracle, deep blue eyes looking at him, then the dragon stood up and walked closer to him.

This one looked quite different, for the most part he looked like an Icewing in matter of his body shape, although there were far less spikes over his back, and the thin whip-like tail trailing behind the dragon was completely devoid of any.

And there were black scales on his body, like a line of black scales trailing from his neck to the other side of his body, his talons were black as a high contrast of the white legs right above.

And on the underside of his wings, among the light-blue scales, there were several shimmering silver scales that looked like small twinkling stars whenever his wings moved.

"Oracle," the dragon spoke up with a cordial tone, but Oracle just could feel the cold beneath the words. "Do not fret, these may be strange circumstances, but you know me, I'm that "voice of reason" that's been helping you survive."

"And I can tell that you've been enjoying yourself in Pyrrhia, so you should also thank me for that, I am the one that brought you here after all."

The tale of Oracle will continue…

In the next part of the saga: He who Changed the Future.

Author's Note: Thanks to all of you, for sticking through with this 'till the end, you don't know just how excited I am to start the next book!