Third Antinomy

Genres	OCs & canon characters	Pyrrhia	Post canon (+30 yrs)	Prophecy	Doomsday	Science fiction	AU	animus magic still works

Thirty years after Darkstalker's "death", the kingdoms are bending over backwards to prevent a new prophecy they can't control. A SkyWing with apocalyptic fire, an omnipotent NightWing, and an indestructible IceWing are all fated to supposedly topple the network of peace and prosperity in Pyrrhia.

Three replacement dragonets are artificially created to hijack the prophecy and assassinate its original foretold. But the operation isn't perfect; mistakes are made, and vital dragonets are lost. Now it's up to a team of commissioned scientists and secretaries to accomplish more than what the Foundation bargained for... and time is running out.

This fiction is written by FourFlames.

Continuum's Prophecy

When three decades have passed since the dark king's undoing,

three destined dragons will bring Pyrrhia’s ruin.

Hatched with broken gift they are destined to restore,
an IceWing whose scales of power, from a darker legacy, endure;
cursed never to mature yet transformed by their paths,
every resistance their invulnerable armor shall refract.

For the end of beginnings, a SkyWing is to blame,
smiting asunder their rage and catastrophic flame;
Their trust will be entrusted to the dragons who are right,
only after sowing ultimate devastation in their flight.

A NightWing whose visions will reverberate time,
their secret sight unfolding powers superior and sublime;
The sagest and most cunning of the three aberrations,
this deceiver's truths will shake Pyrrhia's foundation.

Dragons in fury will divide, and dragons in vain will create,
but dragons united cannot alter this interminable fate:
Only by answering the questions of power;
can there be hope for Pyrrhia in its final hour.

Prelude

dragons in fury will divide

The warm, occluded glow of the incubator shone through the thief's grasp as his claws closed around the three twinkling eggs he intended to murder.

So, they've done it. They finally modified dragon eggs to imitate whatever odd phrasing was in their prophecy. There were rumors that the dragons here performed mysterious experiments on dragonets— taking lineages with genetic defects, injecting things into the eggshells, smashing the ones useless to them, all to replace the real dragons in someone's vision of the future from years ago. Our intruder knew these allegations to be true. But they hadn't realized just how far the Foundation had come in accomplishing this.

The only witness was the remaining guard he had immobilized on the floor. They could never have fathomed the personal loathings and jealousies stewing within this individual. Nor could they possibly understand the extent of his cruel plans.

This scheming dragon who'd come in the night stood just far enough out of their reach, grinning in recognition of his victory. For he was, unmistakably, victorious. A dragon with broken wings, broken hindlegs, could do very little to prevent him from taking the nearest disposal chute in his hooked talons and throwing it open on its hinges.

An eerie, metallic wail, and then he was staring down into a biowaste dropoff that terminated in unimaginable blackness. He felt that primal tug on his reptilian soul. And he summoned the resolve to kill. Hurled all three ovoids triumphantly down into infinity. This was followed by a loud splash at the bottom, and the sound of hollow eggshells scraping the stone walls, and by the newborn embers of guilt which his conscience immediately began the work of smothering.

"You!" cried out the guard the Foundation had posted. They were undoubtedly bought with meager wages to protect the eggs, thought the intruder, they don't move at all like a trained warrior.

Well, now they don't move at all whatsoever, he thought wryly.

"I know you! You're that worm..." Talons stretching helplessly like a plant starved of light, the guardian dragged themself towards him in an effort that would have been noble if not so pathetic. He very tempted to step on them-- oh, why not?

He stomped on their wrist, making an awful cracking noise that caused their individual claws to curl. They screamed savagely and keeled over to coddle their crooked paw.

"The only worm here is yourself," the egg-snatcher sneered, his voice tainted by self-righteous rage. "It almost disgusts me how easy this was. No self-respecting dragon would give their left talon over such an uninspired individual." He slashed into their windpipe with a scalpel and flung them aside in a gurgling heap on the floor.

They convulsed and twitched towards the awful creep of rigor mortem, and then all at once were still. The dragon regarded his own handiwork in grim admiration and awe. Every other battle, he'd won just barely, and with much more capable opponents.

With his pride aglow, he locked the dungeonesque room shut behind him, leaving the barren incubator and its defender to their sleep.

---

Several hours later, a cave nearby had erupted into complete panic.

Locked in hot debate around a stone table was a ring of five to ten 'wings of differing tribes. One such dragon-- a NightWing, and decidedly the leader-- seemed to be wrestling for some semblance of order, but the whole assembly was utter turmoil.

Left and right, voices were shouting over one another, each with their own priorities as heads of different Foundation departments.

comprehension

An IceWing was listening to the rickety sound of a building breathing.

Dragonet feet splashed through the facility's murky underbelly-- the scurrying of her quarry. The tunnel system walls standing between them were stained by years of grime, shuddering ominously from the thunder of distant machines far above. If any sprang loose-- of which she was acutely aware-- this entire tight passage would crumple inwards like a crushed can.

Would anyone be able to find her down here, if that happened? The possibility that anything had managed to crawl away from the cairn of sunken eggshells and survived its first hungry days in a maze of squelching filth was beyond the faculties of Terra Nova’s imagination. She'd protested to the others that there was no point in looking-- the dragonets had probably either smashed to pieces, or reached the sanitation system's exit by the time anyone even realized the incubator was down. But she could hear them right now, and they were very much alive. Close to escaping, though? That was harder to tell. If the answer was yes, then she was going to be in quite some trouble with Hegemony.

~

This hall felt like it was neverending, and every corner the same; dark stones, old water-level marks still a memento on their ugly faces. She found that the more she looked at them, the more unpleasant details revealed themselves to her. It was hard to make talons or tails of what she was stepping in or what strange debris might lie underneath it. And this was of little interest to her; for one thing, it was disgusting, and for another, she was hunting by sound, not by sight.

Every so often, though, she could hear a pattern of quick, furtive padding sounds in the tunnels closer by. These were surely the consecutive pat-pat-pats of a clever dragonet observing her from the shadows. But when she arrived at the location-- or at least, where she thought the dragonets had been-- they eluded her. They had managed to outsmart her thus far, which is why she was so surprised that when she did finally spot her first glimpse of silhouettes, they were not expecting her.

She had prowled past the bend to find them playfighting, and immediately ducked around it again in surprise. Filthy water slopped at her underbelly as she sank to a crouch in the deep, pungent solution, and her sleek head peered uncertainly around the corner.

She had never seen them this young. The dragonets’ features were delicate and miniaturized, untouched by the weathering clutches of age. Their shadows danced ephemeral and ghostly on the dismal yellow rocks.

Then the smallest of them— a little IceWing, like her— swiveled his triangular head in her direction.
The white hatchling had a soft, doughy face, and his tail and wings were marbled with stripes of charcoal brown like exposed snowmelt. Oblivious of her presence, he pounced on a dark mauve NightWing with a delighted squeak. The two of them rolled over one another in the muck, smearing each other's scales with dirty olive streaks as they affectionately roughhoused.

Her instincts told her to approach with stealth-- but Hegemony's command still nettled her. Leave no opportunity for failure. Strike fast and without hesitation.

Her talons slid out from under her as she launched herself at the nearest dragonet, landing with a hard splash on the slick stone floor. She twisted and rolled to rise again to her feet, and the dragonets spooked and turned tail, flying crookedly down the tunnel like uncoordinated prey.

“Stop!” she barked, charging after them at full sprint. Mud greased her underbelly, and the deformed skid marks which her talons had thrashed out just barely prevented her from slipping.

In one impressive and desperate leap, she cleared the gap between herself and the fledglings, and flung out her claws to snatch the closest dragonet to her. The mottled scarlet mutt scrabbled at her like an enraged lizard, his tiny nails digging ferociously into her paws in a vain attempt to free himself. She could see the beginnings of powerful muscles rippling beneath his front legs that made her grateful they were pinned back.

Around her head wheeled a frenzied blur as the feisty NightWing turned back to dive-bomb like a bird protecting its nest.
Great Ice Dragon, she growled, nearly dropping the scarlet dragonet on his face. The mutt in her clutches squirmed harder, writhing and making himself only more difficult to hold onto. She grasped at whatever she could— the snout, in this case— and clenched her serrated talons around his soft hide. An emphatic squeak alerted her to the sudden realization that she’d scored blood.

The mutt opened his mouth and spat forth the whitest puffs of flame she’d ever seen, which sailed right into the armored scutes of her chest and exploded.

As a former wing-sergeant, Terra Nova's pain threshold was high, but this was a fire so neatly concentrated and refined by science that it might rival fireborn scales-- and it landed in such a cleanly partitioned burn mark that she felt like a sheet of superheated metal had just lacerated through her. A wretched croak spilled out of her lungs as one free talon flew to her torso, hastily flinging the dragonet sideways. The two of them crashed into the rank water, plumes of flame recklessly spraying in every direction as they fell.

The scarlet mutt staggered to his feet and whirled around, little vents of glowing smoke still hissing from his extinguished mouth. Terra Nova did the same, wheezing to clear the burnt air from her lungs. She saw no chance of convincing this one to cooperate-- most dragons this young couldn’t be reasoned with in the first place-- and she regarded the further agony of handling him with the utmost unexcitement.

As she was about to snatch the NightWing instead (who was really asking for it), a pebble smarted her across her snout unexpectedly, alerting her attention to something directly above her. She tilted her head up, teeth bared as she expected the third dragonet to strike her, when she paused in abject horror.

Nightmarishly thin sutures were snaking across the ceiling. She was looking at hundreds of splinters in the rock above her, collectively resembling a massive lightning scar, and they rumpled against one another like the subduction of the earth beneath a glacier. An ominous sigh passed through the grimy corridor and dreck bled down through the gaps onto her head again.

The snatches of "wrongness" she'd been feeling throughout the errand converged on Terra Nova at once. This is seconds away from tragedy, it grimly occurred to her. Run. RUN YOU FOOL.

She fretted as the tunnel heaved and groaned. She had no escape plan, or at least not one that could be executed in the few precious seconds she needed. What of the dragonets? she wondered. How do they factor in?

Forget it! scoffed one voice in her head. Leave them!

Too late, replied another.

The tunnel wall tore itself down with a deafening boom, bursting its cobbled ulcers into the scummy corridor. There was a seemingly endless crackling and clanking as crumpled iron beams and stony rabble popcorned over one another.

The tsunami swept the IceWing off her claws before she could even unfurl her wings and kamikazed her into the adjacent end of the tunnel. Rubble crammed against her lungs.Air! her whole body screamed out, the lactic acid hot and vile in her muscles as she fought to unearth herself. The flotsam prison pressed relentlessly into her limbs and dug into her burn with the terrible pinching feeling of friction.

The dragonets were more startled by the din than trapped by it; the SkyWing bolted away from the newly burst exit and disappeared around a tight curve, and without hesitation, the NightWing fled into the shadows in the opposite direction. She supposed they had been so accustomed to the groaning of the walls that until now they’d accepted it as a fundamental fact, like rain or the seasons; they couldn’t have comprehended the danger which such a horrible sound might herald. She, however, should have seen the signs.

Then the point of a broken girder slit through her scale armor and son of a polar bear, she hissed, feeling her own blood ooze down the debris her leg was pressed between.

She burst one talon free and started slashing at the rubbage to excavate the rest of her. The injured tissue hurt prodigiously, and the sting of her fresh scrapes did little to temper it at all. But with a great gasp of air, she pulled her leg clear of the wreckage, and found herself free again.

It was as she had expected; a nasty stripe of cerulean blood ran from her knee down to the ankle. But she was alive.

Tremors wandered up and down the corridor around her like the bowels of some great leviathan dragon, offering no reassurance that the worst of the onslaught was over.

Still visible through the rotten haze was the particolored IceWing, wedged under an upended support beam. The little one scampered between patches of barren ground, picking his way around the minefield of debris with some tripping and tumbling. Every so often he paused to let forth a long caterwaul, hesitating as he waited for some subdued reply from his playmates, and then took off scurrying again.

Terra Nova limped sloppily through the muss towards him. Boulders nicked painfully against her scales as she brute-forced debris out of her path to get there. This time, the dragonet didn’t flee as she approached, but observed her with an inquisitive tilt of his small head. His black, almond-shaped eyes were attentive, but pitying; intelligent, but warm.

The older IceWing blinked slowly. “You,” she said. He did not cower from her cutting voice, but he did not seem to understand either; he stood his ground indifferently.

“Come. With.”

In every sense of the word, he didn't follow. He hopelessly resumed caterwauling into the void.

Terra Nova's ears flattened against her head in annoyance. She was aching and shell-shocked, and yet... something called her to demonstrate courage to him, like a good soldier.

Gently she knocked the bridge of his snout with her own and held it there for a few moments. She tried to comfort the dragonet somehow, to give him some semblance of security that she knew wasn't there. Something similar had happened long ago during the Great War-- she remembered enemy wings, little silt-smudges circling the skies. She was hiding with this displaced youngling in a dark and cramped tunnel, expecting destruction from above.

His piteous cries dimmed into weak chirruping.

"Easy," she said, her black eyes steadied on him. It was awkward for her to play this maternal role; his tiny breaths were a pulsating discomfort against her leathery skin, an unfamiliar sensation of being needed that she had long forgotten. She tried to imagine what it would've been like if she'd been able to calm the other targets to this degree and found she simply couldn't. The inborn sense of tribe loyalty was their only common experience-- and even that was barely enough for her to tolerate his needy grabbing.

Then he clung tighter, closer to her heart. The burn site on her chest was still raw and stung like an open wound, and as his cold anemic body dove straight into it she couldn't bear the physical contact any longer. She knocked him over with a backhand swipe out of instinct, snarling ferociously. It afforded her only a moment of respite, bitterly earned at that-- his pain at her betrayal, and the uncertainty in the way he moved afterwards-- but still he didn't budge or retreat from her. His attention was fixating on something beyond them both.

She stiffened. It was that pat-pat-pat sound of claws pacing through water again, but the more that she thought about it, the more disturbed she felt. They sound closer, she decided, so shouldn't I see the dragonets? But didn't they just run as far away from here as possible? She wanted to think they'd come back for their friend, but she wasn't so sure. The dragonet didn't seem so sure either because he didn't listen after it with the same hopeful gleam in his eyes as when he'd cried into oblivion.

And it suddenly occurred to her, as the sound stopped and started again, that the intervals for the talonsteps were all wrong. One-two-three and then quiet, she thought, not one-two three-four five-six, how an excited dragonet runs its legs.

The spines down her back rose like dominos falling in reverse. If it's not a dragonet... then who is stalking me?

Pat-pat-pat. Ripples from quick footsteps swept lightly over the pool.

And why didn't they help?! she realized. They could have grabbed the other dragonets, instead of leaving me to do it all by myself. They could've jumped in when the red mutt burnt me, they could've revealed themselves when the tunnel collapsed. So if they're not here to help, then why were they lurking underneath the Foundation? Her indignance gave way to alarm, and then to anger.

She had seen two fireflies blink and disappear again into darkness. But they were filmy and translucent, and slid like something being shut.

"Let's be on our way without a fight," she snarled, "or so help me, I will gut you from throat to tail."

"In front of a dragonet?" mused a decidedly male voice. "C'mon now, have some self-awareness." She was close enough to the speaker now to extrapolate a long ribbon of pearlescent scales moving in tight circles through the darkness, just barely within the visible light range. Those were unmistakably SeaWing stripes.

"Well, if I had known your footsteps were a trespasser's, I would have eliminated you before you bungled my mission. Which has already happened, thank you very little for that. By the way, you're not as stealthy as you think you are-- why don't you come out and tell me what you want, in the open, instead of lurking around like a miserable lizard?"

"Oh, my apologies," the voice exaggeratedly sighed. She saw his movement before she could distinguish any shape; the dragon peeled away from the dank corners of the water-carved cavern, his sulky face edging into the light so that she could properly identify him. He was glossy midnight-blue, like a sailfish's spine, with a brooding scowl on his face and curly azure webs.

This was Hegemony's stepson, she remembered now. What was his name-- Harpoon? Harbor? Something with a hard "are" sound. He had practically immortalized his bad temper, but from what she could remember, was no-one important. She wasn't entirely relieved to see him, but she supposed it made sense that he was down here; he was the custodian and keeper of keys, though they weren't around his neck or they'd have been jingling in the corridor.

"Sergeant Terra Nova, what a relief to know it was you. I thought someone else had been crawling around down here and just had to investigate. You know how important my job is. Security is SO important to me."

She rolled her eyes. "Hegemony told you I would be down here, didn't he? Did he ask you to spy on me? Or, let me guess. I'm going to go out on a floe and say it didn't have anything to do with him. You just couldn't resist being nosy."

"Maybe I was a little curious about the prophecy," he admitted.

"Well, maybe I would at least have the NightWing if your snooping were a little more mutually beneficial."

"I know," he grumbled.

"Why did you even come?!" she hissed. For all the maneuvering he tries to work directly on the prophecy-- for all the times I've tripped over him-- what could have made him back off this time?

"I don't have to answer for that. I'm allowed to be down here, and I was only watching; and anyways it gets awfully boring doing the bucket-pushing."

"You--" Terra Nova began to protest. No, insulting him won't be effective. She inhaled sharply, and restarted in a less condescending tone. "You deliberately followed me, and then made no effort to prevent the dragonets' escape," she fumed. "You were right there. If the leaders of the Foundation knew about this, they would be livid."

"I've long stopped caring about what they think," he huffed, "so maybe you should, I don't know, stop trying it as a manipulation tactic?"

That is such a lie, she thought. "Oh, please. One bad public opinion about you and you're rolling on the floor exchanging claws with someone. I am not above informing your parents that you are partially accountable for the--"

She hesitated, glancing from the crumbled walls to the creases on his neck where the keys usually sat. Now that she'd allowed her eyes to wander, a glaringly probable motive was becoming more and more evident.

"I don't know if you're just negligent or dumb or up to antics," she snorted, "but generally a well-maintained tunnel system doesn't collapse. So help me, if this cave-in was deliberate, I will have no reservation telling your fathers that you sabotaged the mission. Would you like to help me out, or would you prefer I go straight to them?"

He really considered this, and after a long pause he reluctantly answered, "No, I don't want anything to do with what happened here. Like I said, dad won't be angry about the fact I was down here. Only about crossing paths with you."

"Okay." She exhaled through her teeth. "Look, I'll make a deal with you-- I might have to tell them about the cave-in, but I'll make it like you were never there. But I'm only going to cover your tracks if you tell me why you were following me, and what you were actually planning to do, if not your job-- or mine."

"Right," said Hegemony's stepson, his half-lit emerald eyes glittering. "Then I guess you ought to know a few things about what I've been up to."

your failure is assured

A seasoned dragon, twilight-black, had coiled himself around his theodolite collection in an unusually peaceful position. His stately figure balanced precariously on the seesawing hinges as his chest rose and fell in sleep, sighing in deep contentment; his tail looped comfortably over the knobs like an extension of the instruments, and he mumbled fondly whenever its curled grip turned them by just a nudge. Loose-leaf papers littered the floor around his resting place like they had been tossed about or hurled by some frantic whirlwind-- the remainders of a trying night and unfinished business that he'd fallen asleep before he had the chance to complete.

He dreamt of standing wingtip-to-wingtip with his partner on a seaworn cliff. There was a warm look on the azure SeaWing's face: sunlight gleamed triumphantly on his spectacles. Hegemony purred sadly, knowing they hadn't been this happy together since the wedding. He'd had this dream before.
But their respite was always short-lived, and in a blur of motion his partner was scrabbling beneath him on the roughened rocks, pinned under some creature with... feathered wings? The NightWing blinked awake in an animated cry of despair, his eyes slightly crusty and confused. As he came to his senses, a powdery blob resting on his paw blinked open its rosy eyes and cooed. The feathered enemy terrorizing his dreams was nothing more than a nestled-up dove.

He grumpily ate it.

There was a stamp of claws in the entrance to his study; an IceWing with horns like masts entered the room scowling. Hegemony regarded her with half-awake disdain; he only foggily recalled the reason for this encroachment, but he suspected he'd given her some sort of assignment.

Then his spouse appeared beside her, and the events of that night came rushing back to him; an emergency meeting, dragons congregated around the broken incubator in Cave 229, the decaying body of a guardian, the gaping jaws of the disposal chute.

That mission.

He slunk airily from the teetering instruments to meet them. "Good morning, Maldives," he rasped in the sleepy, pondrous tenor which characterized his voice. My love. "And Terra Nova. What is your report? Did you secure the specimens?”

"For the love of Pyrrhia, don't call them 'specimens,' you grumpy old creature," the IceWing hissed. Then, less rebelliously, she added: “I have brought you one."

“And there should have been three,” Hegemony wrinkled his snout reproachfully. “Well. Let’s see what you’ve got for me, then.”

She nudged forward a small IceWing, and he recoiled from it with a scathingly critical eye. The young creature looked underwhelmingly small in the light of his neatly furnished cave; its wings were awkwardly small, its head a blunted spade, its legs frail and knock-kneed. Hegemony had no reservations in telling her how unimpressive it was.

“And, of course, you rescued the one that looks like you,” Hegemony glowered, finding this the greatest transgression of all. “Evidently you didn’t try very hard to get the rest.”

"THE TUNNEL UP AND--"

Hegemony watched, still disapproving, as she struggled to collect herself.

“One dragon wasn't enough force for three specially hatched dragonets," Terra Nova corrected him hotly. "I wouldn't be 'incompetent' if you weren't asking me to give 300%. And the only reason they managed to escape is because of a utility failure that I had NOTHING to do with."

Hegemony did not immediately reply. Perhaps I shouldn't have expected much from a dragon working alone, even if they were a sergeant. For a moment she’d wrestled a shred of her integrity back.

“I take no pleasure in patronizing you,” he answered finally, after a few moments' contemplation. “But you're supposed to be a sergeant, Terra Nova, you're supposed to deliver on that title. The Ice Kingdom spoke so highly of you, and well, you know how they are about merits and 'circles'. It’s imperative that your work ethic improves. We're in serious trouble as an organization.”

"The feeling's mutual."

He pretended to ignore the jab, and turning to Maldives, conferred in a low voice: “I can't decide what to do with it.”

"Well," rambled the SeaWing-- back to his bumbling, frenetic self, which Hegemony loved but just could not deal with right now. "We should test it of course-- Terra Nova did return a dragonet like you asked, and that ought to count for something. Oh, I'm just glad it was still alive and to some extent contained.”

“But you know more than anyone how finicky the success rate is with our IceWings,” Hegemony said crossly. "All twenty-six have been worthless to the prophecy. This will be no different."

“Well... it's true, the IceWings haven't been noteworthy,” the azure dragon confessed. “But we should run some quick procedures on him before making any decisions."

“And what do you expect to do when those brown streaks on him aren't darkscales? There's some ounce of power lurking in the IceWing bloodlines we've got, but it's just not enough. I mean, look at him. We can't keep dead weight.”

Maldives knew what he'd insinuated-- he'd said it the last twenty-five times-- and simply replied, "Your pessimism is not making this very easy."

"Wait, you can't be serious?" Terra Nova bristled. "I just risked life and limb to get back that dragonet! If you keep... disposing of the IceWings then what's the point of even trying to create one? What have we been doing for the past twenty years? See this through, you coward!"

Coward? Hegemony growled. "Did you see any reason to bother checking? I was under the impression that the dragonet you'd bring back would be able to fight at least a weasel and win. You expect me to have faith that this dragonet can slay an animus someday?"

"It's very young; that's hardly fair," said Maldives. "I thought I mentioned to you that there are some unglorious side effects on the dragonets' physical appearances--"

"Clearly," snorted Hegemony. "I haven't forgotten IceWing #12. Which was also useless if I recall."

"Then you'll also remember," pleaded Maldives, "that it means we can at least be confident they have the first half of the linked gene."

"Even if this dragonet were to manifest any power," Hegemony said icily, "it's not going to be able to fulfill the prophecy. This should be done now, before anyone gets too attached to it."

"Please. I know we're all under a lot of stress, but that's no reason to turn self destructive--"

"I can't believe this is the dragon we're expected to put our trust in," muttered Terra Nova. "You're too easily defeated. I'm going to claw the thick-skulled idiot who put you in charge of saving Pyrrhia. You think when the three real dragons from the prophecy crawl out of their hiding places, they're going to care what their replacement looks like?"

"Oh very well!" snarled an exasperated Hegemony. "If you both absolutely insist on it!"

He charitably turned to Terra Nova-- who had stepped in front of the tiny IceWing, defensive-- and handed her a parchment cluttered by his hurried scratch marks. He watched her hesitate in taking the slip and smirked at her clumsy attempt to read-- it was padded with pompous fluff like all of his stationery.

"Take this to Hrimgicel and he'll know what to do," Hegemony instructed her. "I personally doubt this runt is worth the trouble he's been, but you've at least earned the right to contest me." He stretched unamusedly, the light draining from his eyes as he knew the real work was about to begin. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to explain to the queens how our Foundation just lost the replacement dragonets."

facsimile

The torches in the testing room were dim and jittery. A coterie of five dragons now gathered in the center of the broad cavern as a male IceWing attempted to proofread in the bad lighting.

"You want me to what now?" he groaned rhetorically. It was still the early morning hours and he was the least nocturnal dragon in the facility, so his brain was ridiculously scrambled.

Terra Nova questioned why anyone had woken him up at all. The instructions were right there in his talons, and anyone could throw a few switches.

Yawning mildly, he began unwinding the pulley system, lowering the mortar from its chains on the chamber ceiling. Down came a sinister pipe-shaped cannon on its default 45-degree angle, like a metal stick of rusty cinnamon.

"Get the hatchling in position,“ ordered Hrimgicel-- for this was the scrambled IceWing's name-- to his assistant handlers.

Clacking claws advanced on the quaking dragonet and gently lifted him by his shoulders, hoisting his mottled white wings into a harness snugly welded against the adjacent wall. The dragonet dangled in the harness without fuss and regarded the strange sounds and smells of the unfamiliar room with a cheerful awk while they worked. When both assistants had determined everything to be tightly secure, they gave him a nod, and stepped clear of the machinery.

Hrimgicel gave the cannon locks a final adjustment, took a lever in his serrated claws, and thrust forward. The barrel raised its awful creaking head, launching a volley of shale plates that smashed against the wall and slithered in a crumbled heap on the ground. Those which hadn't missed their mark slammed perfectly into the immobilized dragonet, whose limbs went stiff on impact like a dead thing that had been stuffed. Sand-sized crumbs ran down like rivulets between its scales, but it made no effort to move.

The body on the end of the harness swung back and forth, with a limpness Terra Nova had seen from casualties covered in snow. She couldn't tear her black eyes away from the violence of it, her spines involuntarily rising at the horrible and fascinating scene.

Then she blinked, noticing tiny vibrations in the scales on its marbled white-and-brown hide. Movements she had mistaken for sand pouring between the gaps where each fit together. They were all squirming in microscopic unison, like the back-and-forth motion of pines-- how their swaying picked up speed while indecisive winter gales battered them this way and that. Starting with the leaves quivering, then the branches viciously beating one another, and ending with the storm barbarically splitting the trunk apart. This is what it reminded her of as shale shards pushed their heads out from between the dragonet's scales.

The juvenile's frail exterior-- at least where the shale plates had punched dents into it-- armored itself with the same asymmetrical, cruel spikes of shale, ready to impale any dragon foolish enough to attack.

Darkscales, came the terror of recognition.

Hrimgicel mouthed something unintelligible and flipped the cannon upright again. All at once he was sent into a raving fit of exultation at this sudden success. Terra Nova was nauseated that he could be so ecstatic and wondered grimly how he must have felt about killing twenty-six dragonets just like it. She halfheartedly parroted the excitement.

To Terra Nova's relief, the little IceWing reopened his eyes, studying their faces in confused fascination. The dragonet wobbled clumsily under the pillars of heavy stone jutting from his neck, overexerting himself just to hold his head upright on his shoulders.

Meanwhile, Hrimgicel was rambling sleepy suggestions to his team on how they might increase the size of the spikes.

It's dangerous to have more than one replacement for each dragon in the prophecy. She knew this. For that reason alone she had pardoned-- no, enforced-- the questionable treatment of their other defective experiments. But she wasn't ready to push a dragonet whose special gift had actually manifested on day one.

"I think that will be enough," Terra Nova interjected. "He's too weak to take another hit. My queen didn't turn me over to your prophecy project to break little hatchlings-- besides, we've got the confirmation we needed."

Hrimgicel's claws lingered on the switch as if contemplating disobedience, before finally conceding to the higher ranked dragon. "Of course." He cleared his throat. "I almost got carried away. Besides, we still have other tests to run-- to be sure there's no animus magic."

She squinted down her snout, thoughtfully, at the still-wobbling dragonet. I should raise him myself, she thought. Selfishly.

No. You're no more qualified than Hrimgicel, she chastised herself. "Ensure the dragonets are safe to be around. Train them to comply." That was your assignment.

The dragonet would be under the watchful parentage of the Foundation's nursing program-- they should be the ones to handle socializing him. Or... was he too unstable to be given that kind of an upbringing? Did he need to be supervised by Terra Nova at all times, or should she only intervene when he was considered a threat... given another dragon's discretion?

And what if the other dragon's discretion is stupid? the sergeant worried, thinking of Hegemony's apathy in particular. She couldn't fight down this burning feeling that she needed to be there, and in control of everything. What if he is mistreated-- then what? He grows up and becomes vengeful like the prophecy says?

She shuddered, trying to erase images of the plague from her mind.

If there's anyone who cares about preventing this prophecy, it's me, she thought. I will be there to speak on his behalf. And they better believe I will make myself heard.

Starting with today.

"I'd like to oversee the next test," Terra Nova stated.

Part 1

scales of power

6 years later...

The first time Pyrenees ever asked his caretaker who the Darkstalker was, she'd been anxious to let him wander the facility alone. In fact, she'd kept him in a solitary cell all day, which seemed to be her solution for every scary question he asked about the Prophecy.

The topic of animi was somehow forbidden to himself. Which was preposterous because his one goal in life was apparently to defeat one. Pyrenees hadn't the slightest idea of the meaning behind it.

Everyone he met already knew that this Darkstalker was the "dark king" who made the Prophecy necessary and that this animus' evil deeds were the reason Pyrenees now needed to stop a mysterious animus IceWing. But they wouldn't give him this information as a straight answer sometimes. It was an unfunny game they played with him.

Eventually Pyrenees had just assumed this Darkstalker dragon to be a fallen god of sorts, but even suggesting that hypothesis had very nearly put him in confinement for an entire MOON. Dragons should not be allowed to play god like Darkstalker, he'd been admonished, which wasn't enough to convince him that his theory was wrong exactly.

Besides, Pyrenees wasn't really an animus himself-- his entirely different condition would suffice, as far as the prophecy was concerned-- so he thought it was unnecessary to keep him ignorant. Ignorance had achieved the proper effect of making him afraid, but only in the manner that one could fear something useful like fire.

If you asked him, it seemed far more likely for his training exercises to kill someone than an actual animus.

"Pyrenees!" barked his caretaker, the sergeant-- harshly-- as a lobbed brick of calcite scraped across his shoulder. A massive bloom of calcite crystals erupted from his darkscales where it made contact, their bristling needle-thin tips halting only inches from his sparring partner's face. Pyrenees' lungs still heaved as he stepped sheepishly out of the mock combat scenario, attempting an apologetic smile at the dragon standing adjacent himself. Sorry.

"On the Great Ice Dragon," Terra Nova bemoaned. She turned and glared at the whispering cannon operators huddled on one end of the training cave. "You call that shot slow?"

As the dragons broke into a heated argument, he hoped to himself: Perhaps she isn't personally angry with me, after all?

"--and Pyrenees," she snapped, descending upon him, "you've been volatile and unfocused all morning! I don't care whether you have performance anxiety, if you don't screw your horns on in a real fight, you're just asking to be crushed alive!"

Never mind. He broke off the long scales in front of her, wincing at the tender pinprick of each brittle shaft snapping.

The process for this exercise was not a simple one, but the instructions were easy to remember after running through the motions a few times: as he fought, he should aim to be hit in his darkscales by projectiles-- the hazardous ones, exclusively-- to provide better armor. The stronger the force hitting him, the bigger the spikes.

Well, except in this case, where the spikes were waaaaay bigger than the brick hitting him.

He studied the cannon operators' ongoing debate composedly. There's no way their numbers were wrong, he thought. I barely even felt that one, it can't have been going that fast.

If the calculations were all correct, it meant his ability was misbehaving again.

Now, let's be clear about one thing. Pyrenees had no conscious control over the mirroring effect on his scales as far as anyone was aware, but the Foundation could still only explain these overacting incidents as interference from Pyrenees' own mental state. He didn't like that explanation-- it made him sound like a rogue science project. A magical threat.

Surely they must realize by now, he thought to himself, surely there are some dragons in the facility who know I'm not doing this on purpose.

Yet even Pyrenees could not, in full confidence, doubt whether there wasn't some pseudomagical element involved. You see, dragon "science" hadn't jumped quite far enough (at least since Continuum had prophesied everything) to allow for the projects which the Foundation needed to execute for her prophecy. Pyrenees didn't hold that against them-- they were only trying to protect Pyrrhia, for it was the Pyrrhian Defense Foundation after all-- but he didn't sleep well knowing the way they went about things, either.

For example, the Foundation had only managed to modify eggs to the bare minimum specifications of the prophecy by studying a few random traits and hoping it would work out, which had resulted in twenty-six defective IceWings (all killed for good measure) and one Pyrenees.

The disposal process most certainly was not humane-- they even had traditional exams to identify animi, telling them those IceWings didn't have magic and therefore weren't "the prophesied one"-- but because all objects enchanted to detect magic with complete certainty had been destroyed with Darkstalker, no one could be certain and no one was chancing it.

He still recalled the day he'd learned this; it started rather harmlessly, as all terrible things do. A researcher had offhandedly mentioned that he'd never reach adult size, and as any dragonet would do upon being told they were going to be a fledgling forever, a disconsolate Pyrenees demanded why.

"We discovered darkscales are only linked to certain deformities," they had kindly informed him, though this knowledge was lost on him. "The ability rarely manifests, and only if those conditions are met." They'd rattled off increasingly concerning complications, which he'd only half understood: permanent adolescence in size and wingspan, chronic exhaustion, brittle bones, no ice breath. "It's not a great tradeoff, but it checks all the boxes in the prophecy for an eternally youthful dragon with magic scales. Closest we can get to an animus IceWing without making one, I suppose."

"But I don't want to be a dragonet forever," was Pyrenees' response.

"Well, sometimes we just have to do things for the prophecy, remember?" Penitently, they'd added: "Besides, you didn't come out small and useless, right? We had other IceWing dragonets, but they're gone now, because they weren't what we were looking for. That's why you're special, Pyrenees."

But the past Pyrenees had not been satisfied with that answer. He also completely overlooked the frightening implications, in the way self-centered dragonets often do. "Stupid prophecy!" he'd only said on behalf of his stuntedness. And then rather selfishly he had pretended his scales had vanished for a whole week, but no one in the Foundation would entertain those fantasies of denial, so they didn't last long when they informed him what'd actually happened to the other dragonets.

To be told you were only brought into the world because of a prophecy, and learn you were only kept alive because you could be useful-- he couldn't forget that; there are some things you never can. The lucky dragonet out of dozens who wasn't destroyed after hatching! he thought bitterly. What a great deal of luck indeed!

Still, something told him the Foundation had good intentions at heart. Because when Terra Nova declared there would never be another dragon as dangerous as Darkstalker if she could help it, that was an oath. Pyrenees believed in the dragon who raised him more than anyone in his life. And he could trust that no harm would come to him, or the dragons he cared about, if she could have such a level of faith in her mission.

That was what he reminded himself, anyways-- though some days were more difficult than others for him to put on a tough face about it.

"I'm sorry, drill sergeant m'am," he grimaced, looking for an answer that didn't make the whole thing sound deliberate. "It was my fault, not theirs--"

"Of course I know it was your fault," she scoffed. Then her gaze softened a little. "So why do you think I let those other dragons have it too?"

"You know I didn't mean to," he sighed, genuinely relieved.

"Of course you didn't. But you've got a long way to go before you're ready to put destiny in its place, if this is your best."

"I'm sorry I wasn't focused, I promise. I want to be ready."

"Well, finish removing those little calcite icicles and then we'll see if we can move on to a different exercise for today."

He plucked out the last of the accidental calcite shards, turning it over in his claws. He was about to drop it to the floor dismissively when something pulled him back: an overwhelming temptation to keep it for later. Perhaps it was his primitive dragon instincts just telling him to hoard shiny things, but this ivory shard was only barely chipped, with meandering stripes inset on the crystal, and he found himself strangely attached to it. This was a beautiful thing, and it was indisputably his own, and when he looked at it he found himself feeling very pleased with his messed-up scales.

I created this, he thought. It was the first time he'd really thought of himself as making anything.

He set it aside gingerly, and turned back to Terra Nova with an affirmative nod.

"Ready," he said, and this time he meant it.

wrath

Harper was beating up the fourth scientist in a row that week.

"Run back to your parents, you little squid!" spat his SkyWing opponent, wiping the measly stripe of blood from their snout with a flex of their massive red wing. A scrappy package of enraged lean-muscle, Harper pounced viciously onto the strong trapezius of his challenger, his emerald eyes and thalassic scales glittering like a cat's in moonlight as he sank his teeth into their bobbing collarbone. He clung on, beating at their back with his noodly tail while they thrashed about the corridor.

"I can-- make you-- lose your job faster than-- they ever could--!" Harper retorted through a mouthful of scales, clambering higher up their back. They bashed their head into the side of the wall, tossing him around like a wet rag clinging to a storm-whipped tree. Every fierce nerve fiber in his limbs was riled up and burning to wrestle.

With a cursory lick of his teeth, Harper sprang from the reeling scientist. His legs tucked up beneath him as he bounded to the floor and away again, fighting fast, slippery, and dirty. Before the red dragon could register, he'd already come at them from the side again, clamping the dragon's throat from below and sinking them like an enormous ship. Fighting SkyWings is easiest, he thought, with their big cumbersome wings.

By now, several other scientists had gathered to witness the spectacle put on by their notoriously aggressive keeper of keys. There was no telling what suggestive remark had set him off today; he took so unkindly to any insult on his character, and had such a mulish concern for things like reputation, that brawling was an unfortunate habit of his.

As he fought to keep the SkyWing's head forced down, a hissing line of fire escaped their mouth; it whizzed past and blowtorched him in his handsome periwinkle underbelly. He recoiled like a serpent whose head had been stepped on, and yanked a curling crimson tail in retaliation.

"You cheating--" cried the SkyWing, scorching the stone floor black with another bolt of fire that smarted him across the leg. Flames wreathed the two of them as they rolled around the hall, their bickering mouths and gnashing claws clearing out a thick swath of the onlookers.

Suddenly Harper tripped and toppled a cabinet full of empty glass beakers onto himself, throwing him unexpectedly to his stomach. A force dragged him back again as the SkyWing arrested him by the jangling keyring on his neck-- spraying glass shards everywhere with their oversized wings-- and flung him sidelong into another cabinet with a loud bang. Splinters crashed around him in fragments just large enough to cut through scales.

Harper's whole head whined like he'd just been concussed. Again the SkyWing picked him up by their teeth. Metal dug into Harper's throat as the SkyWing tugged at his security necklet like it was a choker, swinging him effortlessly with their powerful bite force, and effortlessly dashing him against the jagged floor. The crowd went wild, cheering on their coworker.

Pelvis aching and legs half numb from adrenaline, Harper stayed down, stunned. He struggled against his paralyzed frame-- moons above, get up!-- and only barely regained the strength to rise. With one trembling heave he lifted himself from the floor, vision blurry. What happened next was all slurred in his mind; a clamor of awkward tackling ensued as he sank his claws into their ribs.

Bucking, the SkyWing fell backwards and pivoted in sloppy arcs to snatch Harper out from under themselves, twisting and whirling like a hurricane with the blue dragon trapped beneath them.

"Harper!" thundered someone enormous.

Both combatants froze-- Harper was unceremoniously ejected from the SkyWing as they came to an abrupt stop. A stout, stern-looking behemoth of a SeaWing sauntered in, followed by the tall loping shadow of project executive Hegemony.

Must they do this now? thought Harper.

"He-- I--" the SkyWing stuttered, uncertainly pointing their talons in shifting directions. They were so clearly afraid of punishment that Harper would be reveling in how pathetic it was, if it weren't for his own complicated relationship with the two dominant powers in the room. "The janitor started it," protested the SkyWing, "I swear I didn't--"

Hegemony glared straight past the bumbling red dragon. "Shut up," he ordered, and it was enough. His condescending brown gaze deadened excuses, their disapproval palpable as they swept the battlefield of destruction Harper had created before finally settling on him. The towering black dragon seemed as though he were about to speak, but he simply tented his wings and acquiesced to the irately twitching azure blob beside him.

"Son," Maldives fumed. The head researcher's expression was contorted and bloated like ugly weather on the sea, and the indigo wrinkles beneath his eyes flared like swollen whitecaps. Despite how comical he looked when enraged, there was nothing funny about any of his demeanor; his presence would've frightened any dragon who knew the power and intelligence he held.

"Let's go. NOW."

Harper knew this meant consequences. He met this command with his most querulous glare and slithered reluctantly towards the atrium of the cave, his head bowed in loathsome submission. His green eyes blazed mutinously, and as he exited the warzone of broken equipment his lashing tail sideswept a light fixture that came crashing down behind him.

"Wh-- what about me?" trembled the SkyWing.

"What about you?" Harper's father began, incredulous.

Hegemony paced in front of them both, having all the dark authority of a citadel. "You're working for the prophecy; so long as you quit responding to this foolishness and act like it, I have no reason to care what happens to you."

The SkyWing took this as their opportunity and bolted around the corner without a second thought.

~ ~ ~ ~

"Wh-- that fool accused you of nepotism!" Harper objected as they walked him down the corridor, whacking his willowy tail emphatically against the stone floor. "I had to do something!"

Maldives sighed. It was embarrassing that his parenting was on display for all to see-- save for the eyes and curly fins, Harper was a spitting image of his ex-wife, and evidently had inherited all of her temperament too.

"You might've done me a favor with this janitorial position," his son glowered, "but they can't think that everything's fallen into my lap just because I'm your son! I can't allow that, especially not when you refuse to let me work on the prophecy! And if they-- if you could just see how much I work with the other departments, you would know--"

"Working?" spat Maldives. "You've picked fights with every branch of the Foundation from genetic counselors to weapons foundry!" He swung his wings in an arc that spooked half the scientists lingering in the hall.

"Furthermore, I don't recall ever assigning you to prophecy work. We trusted you with facility upkeep and full maintenance access, which itself is a very vital task that you continue to neglect in pursuit of some greater glory. I don't want another incident like the security breach six years ago, that was a disaster of--"

"I should have the authority to choose where I work by now and you continue to deny me," Harper brooded, "and expect me to appreciate this actual tadpole cess of a job."

"Do you even realize how petulant you sound?" It's utter nonsense, complaining that everything's been handed to him and then begging us to just hand him a role like this, thought Maldives. "Do you even realize that this is not a family business he can just let you inherit?"

"And good riddance you don't," their son grumbled, "or somewhat might think I get everything I want."

"Harper, I've quite literally given you the keys to the Foundation," bristled Hegemony, who had been reserving judgment. "We could give you the entire Foundation and you still wouldn't be satisfied."

"And I don't WANT your stupid keys, or this foundation either!" Harper retorted. He yanked the janitorial keyring from his neck and flung it down on the floor.

The absolute nerve of this haddock! Maldives seethed. "You think you can earn our respect by defying us, is that it?"

"I will never earn the respect of this organization apparently," Harper declared, entering such a rage that he couldn't keep up his flippant approach, "so I'll do whatever I like!"

The fathers exchanged telepathic glances over the rather unfortunate reality that they had been responsible for raising this oppositional son.

Hegemony folded his claws over themselves disapprovingly, doing his best to remain calm and demonstrate control over the situation. "I've told you before, Harper. If you want the organization to think you have any dignity at all-- if you want to be included in important work-- then this kind of behavior won't help your image. As it stands, you're notorious for acting like an unruly dragonet."

"And I earned that reputation myself, thank you very much."

Maldives was about to deliver a scathing retort when a stringy MudWing walked unannounced into the center of the cave as though he meant to say something.

"What is the meaning of this?!" he roared indignantly.

"I'll take care of it," offered Harper, flexing his talons like he intended to claw the trespasser for their insolence himself. But Hegemony flicked his tail in warning, and addressed the cowering dragon with a cold brown eye.

"You've interrupted us," he observed simply.

"I-it's urgent! There's a messenger from the Sky Kingdom--"

As if summoned, a huge, wine-red snake of a dragon made her entrance beside the MudWing. Her imperious stance and curling smoke made every fin down Maldives' back bristle. They looked professional, well-regarded-- not to be trifled with. The dwindling audience outside the room seemed to think the same thing, because they fled from her presence as soon as she gave an unimpressed snort of ash.

"I am Gall," she scowled, "of Queen Ruby's court. Your peon was very accommodating. Is he a guard? Not a good one if so; he seems too soft for that." The thinly veiled threat to their security was not warmly received.

"Oh, you'll have to excuse him," Harper sniggered, "for you see, he's an eggsitter and acts like one too."

The MudWing left the room with as much dignity as he could muster.

"Harper!" scolded Maldives. "You'll have to forgive that one for being a brat. He has no excuse for his disposition and will be apologizing to Heath later."

"Fantastic," said Gall, once the unexpected guest was out of earshot. "I didn't like his face; it reminds me of that simpering court jester Vermillion. And what about this SeaWing prawn with the smart mouth? I want to see him disciplined for something trivial. It would be so fun to crush his spirit."

"That's actually what we were in the middle of doing," Maldives remarked crossly, "before you decided to insert yourself."

"Oh, do go on with it, then!" Gall insisted. "Do you have dungeons here? He looks like the type who would detest that."

"Try to throw me in one and see what happens," Harper interjected fiercely.

Hegemony, who hadn't retreated an inch for the entire exchange, was nearing the end of his patience with this foolishness. He glowered at the SkyWing, his black tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. "Get to the point. What's your business being here?"

"So glad you asked," she purred. "That firescales dragon your prophecy had a vested interest in, yes? Ruby finally agreed to revoke the royal protections and turn her over for execution. The firescales went along with it. Everyone was so... thrilled, as you can imagine."

The room fell silent.

"WHAT?!" boomed Maldives, whose voice was starting to break at this point.
Why? She refused to let anyone harm her for so long. What happened to her will to live?

"Excellent news, I know," finished Gall. "The real prophesied dragon is scheduled to die a month from tomorrow! Part of your plan working at last must feel like such a relief."

"I'm sorry," Maldives laughed forcedly, "I'm not sure I'm hearing you correctly. You said Queen Ruby is letting this happen? I find that really hard to believe." They must be talking about the wrong firescales. They only had one, and she was well enough integrated into society to be beloved; was it possible that the SkyWings had lied about that?

"Are you calling me a liar?" Gall snarled, as if conjuring the thought from his mind.

Harper was watching the interaction with heightened interest now. He's probably hoping we get in a fight so he can escape the room.

"No, of course not," hesitated Maldives, "and none of us would dream of contesting Ruby's word, it's just that--"

"We thought our replacement SkyWing would have to kill her too, from how much resistance she was putting up against our mission, and if that change of heart doesn't sound surprising to you, you're even denser than I gave you credit for," Hegemony put in frostily.

"Great blazes, that was the most treasonous sentence my ears have ever heard. You don't have to be so nasty about it."

"And yet I am. One must wonder why it was deserved." Hegemony slapped down an empty scroll and began scrawling the details. "One month is practically a last-minute notice for us, and we're not on the best of terms with the original prophet, so would you care to mention where this execution's being held?"

"It's at the old arena, sundown. All of the queens in Pyrrhia have received a summons for it, but it's just between the Foundation and its patrons."

Then the red dragon's eyes slitted. "Oh, but there is one other thing which Her Majesty wanted me to mention. You must bring the dragonet with you to the execution, or the firescales won't go along with it."

Maldives glanced nervously at Hegemony, knowing there were only a few reasons why the firescales would request those conditions. She's going to kill him, he fretted. Why else would she want to see the experiment?
But his husband seemed completely unbothered by the risk, taking it in stride. "I am sure our replacement dragonet would not protest to come along."

Gall hissed in amusement at this response. "Good, because it would really be such a letdown if you turned up empty-handed." A cold talon sank straight through Maldives' chest as she added, "Especially since I've heard it's your SkyWing the firescales wants, after all."

Maldives searched Hegemony's face, helpless to respond to this outrageous request. He was not in charge of the organization; he did not handle anything beyond research and development. "But... the hunt for the runaways has gone cold, yes?" he whispered heatedly, bringing his azure face closer.

He could tell by the NightWing's expression that his mind was racing; his black talons flew to the rack of scrolls on his desk, sweeping through the most recent ones at warp speed.

"We've had informants following the SkyWing for years," he whispered back finally, "but he's infamous for escaping capture, and the lucky ones to find him are always tangled up in negotiation hitches involving... money. As is currently happening in the Kingdom of Sand."

"Do we have anyone who can run a mission that quickly?" swallowed Maldives. "It seems virtually impossible to that pull off."

Suddenly, as they shared a despairing grimace, the idea struck them for the perfect punishment; slowly they turned towards Harper's corner of the room. The young SeaWing's eyes widened with excitement, then horror.

"Wait, hold on," objected Harper, gills flaring. "You couldn't get your talons on this dragonet for six years, what makes you think I can--"

"You said you wanted to be trusted with the prophecy," Hegemony snarled out of the side of his mouth. "You're quite proficient at fighting SkyWings, aren't you? You can make yourself busy helping the recovery team in that case. And if you disappoint me again... it'll be no trouble at all expelling you from the Foundation. How's that for nepotism?"

their trust

Harper wanted Terra Nova's advice on something, which was a premise so unbelievable to her that Terra Nova agreed merely out of curiosity. Naturally, the best way not to be overheard was a stormy windswept flight over the mountain lake. She was currently battling a squall for volume.

"EXPLAIN," Terra Nova shouted. Harper cavorted beside her in the roaring air currents.

"They've tasked me with capturing the SkyWing. Except... I don't want to see the dragonets captured."

"Your opinion's not changed since that night, then." The IceWing thought back to his confession in the tunnels. "Have your reasons?"

"It used to be jealousy. I'll let them keep thinking that it is."

Through narrow eyes, Terra Nova contemplated (not for the first time) whether it was more in her interest to report him than keep his secrets. He was an odd young fellow.

"Better for them to think I'm acting alone," he added.

"Oh, you're not alone?"

"As it turns out, there are dragons who don't like betraying their friends and families for a vague social mission."

"Hm."

He beat his wings once and glided. "It might be better to let fate play out than try to mastermind it, don't you think? It just seems wrong to chase the dragonets the way we have. From what I've gleaned about the SkyWing, he's a bit... messed up by it."

She fixed him with a hard look. "We wouldn't have to chase them if it weren't for you."

"I was doing them a favor."

"And there are things out there worse than the Foundation. You'll see, eventually."

"So it's a control thing. This is about control for you."

She growled. "When do we finally get to the advice part?"

"Alright, alright, don't get your ugly icicles in a knot! I'll tell you this-- it's actually in my interest to take the SkyWing right where my dads want it. The problem is, I don't... I mean, I've never dealt with fire like this, and you..." He pressed a talon to his chest, right over where Terra Nova's scar would be.

"Wow," she scoffed. "You, finally admitting you're a rookie?"

"Am not!" Harper protested. "

the questions

Terra Nova woke at once to the feeling of something moving around her tail.

"Who's there?" she growled, raising her head on a swivel as her eyes adjusted.

In the darkness she could barely make out a fuzzy pale shape, trembling, curled in the space between her scarred leg and belly.

"Sergeant m'am?" Pyrenees' voice emanated from the dragonet-sized object.

"Mmmph." The IceWing sergeant lowered her head back down, and with it, her wings. The fact he'd crawled into her cave as she slept without her noticing was concerning for a number of reasons.

"I've... I had a nightmare, and i-it felt so real, and I thought it was true."

She frowned sympathetically. "Alright."

"It was about the other IceWings. The other experiments, the ones they..." He swallowed. "Well, they were all angry at me because why should I get to live, they said, and then my darkscales felt all scabby, like rocks were caked all over me. And they just kept growing over me, until I couldn't breathe anymore, and I was a rock completely. And... and sometimes I wish they wouldn't stop at halfway and they would just make me a rock completely. I wish I were a rock." He shivered under her wings for a moment. "A-Anyway, I have nightmares like that a lot," he confessed.

"I didn't ask what it was about."

Pyrenees shook inconsolably, his voice possessed by anguish.

"Can you please tell me that I'm better the way... that I'm ...? Anything reassuring?"

"Just sleep, Pyrenees," she warned. Perhaps he was just imagining it, but it seemed like her sides were rising and falling faster. "You'll feel better."

I won't, though, he sulked. "Do you even care?"

No response.

"Do you love me?"

"Pyrenees," Terra Nova muttered in frustration.

a SkyWing is to blame

Harper had not expected that he himself would be incarcerated on this trip.

The SkyWing retrieval mission began with an unbearably dry flight to Possibility. Then a rendezvous with informants from the "Enclave" (the local gang that the Foundation was backing, apparently)-- so far so good. But then their scheming was interrupted by an ambush from the rival gang, and one of Queen Thorn's Outclaws showed up at the absolutely wrong time and caught him strangling the wrong SandWing, and now he was going to be sacked out in a prison for at least a few days because in his humble opinion everyone had overreacted.

“You impaired dung beetle,” the Outclaw had insulted him, “he’s still got a pulse. He’s probably concussed, and there’s blood gushing everywhere, but you haven’t killed him for the love of Pyrrhia.”

“So I don’t have to go to prison, then?” asked Harper innocently.

“Oh, you are absolutely going to prison,” roared the yellow dragon, leashing the SeaWing's legs together with anklets. “Whether you're with the Foundation or not. Now get in the cage."

"In my defense, I have no idea what is going on and who I'm supposed to punch. Come on, help me out here," he'd pleaded to his Foundation escort, whose name he'd already forgotten.

"We really don't need him," the escort had said.

So, an eventful night to be sure. But now it was morning of the next day-- or so he thought, as he couldn't be sure due to the heavy black cloth draped over his cage. He had no idea how long he had been in this cramped thing or how much longer he would be, but it was dreadfully hot, the bars were scalding, and he was already parched.

"THE SUN HAS NOT MOVED," yelled the SandWing pulling the cart, after what felt like hours of him moaning at the top of his lungs for what time it was.

"But I need to peeeee," complained Harper.

The cart stopped abruptly and the dragon yanked apart the curtain so the SeaWing could see the vast expanse of 'nothing plus a tumbleweed.'

"Happy now?" they hissed.

"I fail to see how this development is going to help me pee."

"Oh, piss yourself, good riddance, just shut up and let me concentrate."

Harper forlornly regarded the bars of the cell, thinking that was such an awfully narrow thing to make him pee through. "Where are we going, anyways?"

"Queen Thorn decided we don't keep our prisons in the middle of cities anymore."

"Weird. This seems too far in my opinion. Why am I in a cart and not, y'know, flying?"

"Something tells me letting you use your wings is not a good idea whatsoever."

Harper looked at them quizzically. "You couldn't just carry me while my wings are bound or something? You had to use a cart?"

"Do I look like I can carry an entire dragon that far?"

Harper strained to look at the captor. "Fair point. But most dragons consider me quite scrawny. Also we could have walked."

The SandWing looked like they were seconds from snapping. "You're really nosy, you know that?"

"A few dragons might have mentioned that, yeah."

the beginning of the end

A firescales, thought Pyrenees, I'm going to see a real firescales.

Terra Nova, for a dragon with so many reservations towards discussing the original dragons of power, had seemed unusually excited about letting him come along to witness the graphic execution of one.

"It will be a necessary evil for your training," she had said, "or else you will never be able to stomach killing anything."

It was not a cheering thought.

They'd left the Foundation outpost early in the morning, mostly for Pyrenees' sake; he had never flown for very long before, and by the time they reached the mountains his limbs were starting to feel like lead. The sky was a lovely glazed color like blue and gold porcelain as they landed on one of the old prison spires, which baked in the brilliant heat of the setting sun.

Below them lay the arena, blanketed in a sheet of sand that the shrubs and flowers of the mountains had claimed in force. In its centre sat an empty pedestal awaiting the dragon slated for death.

The Foundation's retinue consisted of Maldives, Terra Nova, and himself tonight, though Hegemony would be representing the organization as a whole. His keepers' apprehension was not subtle, either-- their eyes darted warily about the stadium, agitated tails and talons like there were hot coals underfoot. Even the towering Hegemony, who normally had the personality of steeping tea, had stiffened, so Pyrenees didn't know whether to feel threatened or humbled by the presence of the tribe leaders.

Though the audience was small, a kaleidoscope of colors perched on the adjacent prison spires in stoic solidarity: the wiry tumbleweed-yellow streak of Thorn against the deep cinnamon mantle that was Moorhen; Snowfall's spindly white silhouette seated beside the tropical blue wave of Coral. Two NightWings were bent over like a pair of vultures speaking in hushed voices to one another, their shadows growing as the daylight sank away. Only the RainWings were absent, their queen having refused to watch the execution for personal reasons.

"Those are really the Queens?" he whispered in disbelief. "I thought only the Foundation knew about Continuum's Prophecy."

The NightWing's discontented growl echoed in Pyrenees' bones. "Yes," he rumbled, "but the Queens are our patrons. They funded the Foundation after the Darkstalker incident, so they get to know things the tribes don't. Their subjects are only aware of the prophecy through what they choose to relate, so try not to anger any of them, especially Queen Clandestine."

"Who? Why?"

Hegemony's eyelids narrowed in contempt. "You see that pair of black dragons there, yes? One of them is the recently elected NightWing queen, and she has a particularly infuriating habit of using her prophet as a means of controlling what we say and do. Continuum is refusing to speak with us anyways, for reasons I don't entirely understand."

Pyrenees frowned at this; it seemed unfair. But before he could say so, a rustling hush fell over the stadium.

The sun had slipped below its rim.

Queen Ruby was pacing uncertainly on the dais overlooking the scene. Pyrenees could tell she was buying time; perhaps she had some hope that the RainWings would show up after all.

Or, he wondered, she could feel the same impending tension as his caretakers.

The world below the spires melted into threadbare light, becoming a thrumming pool of long silhouettes as the moons climbed into the rapid-bluing atmosphere. Curtains of black cotton flowed over the lunar bodies, like milk running at glacial speed. But Glory did not arrive, and the pedestal remained as it had been when they'd landed.

Finally one queen could wait no longer. "So where is it?" Thorn hissed, rising.

"This execution was supposed to be an inspiration, not a complete bore," yawned Coral.

Queen Ruby curled her mouth, revealing a few angry teeth at their comments. "The Foundation didn't bring its replacement SkyWing. It was the firescales' dying wish to speak with the dragonet and I wanted to give her at least that dignity."

Hegemony's spines rose in indignation at this shameless assignment of blame. The tips of his dark scales ruffled like pinfeathers as he shot a scathing look at Ruby.

"The replacement SkyWing is not in our possession," he orated, planting his stupendous talons firmly in front of him. "It has evaded recapture for six years and you know this. I assure you we had every intention of delivering it."

"How very interesting that you are missing dragonets, plural, after six years," leered Queen Snowfall.

"They might want to hurry up," growled Queen Thorn. "Some of us have kingdoms to run."

Hegemony snarled. "It's not as simple to contain a wild dragon with fire as powerful as his, especially one with no interest in reaching an understanding with society. I sent someone to retrieve him with experience in fighting SkyWings, and he wasn't back in time for the execution."

"Your incompetent son, I'm told," responded Queen Ruby airily. "It doesn't shock me, as you're the neglectful sort of leader who makes decisions like that. I'm not surprised that he couldn't make it."

Hegemony stamped the ground in repressed fury. "I'm surprised you even invited us to this execution knowing we couldn't meet your demands. What did you expect of my team? What point are you trying to make?"

Ruby merely sighed a cloud of smoke.

"Well," said Queen Clandestine, "if the firescales isn't going to be killed with her dying wish, then it looks like there's nothing to be done here. Perhaps we should just ask my prophet whether this whole gathering can be called off." The Foundation glared at Clandestine's suggestion with ire, but the other queens had already started contemplating the idea, and whispered spiritedly amongst themselves.

"Suppose we allowed her to speak with our IceWing dragonet instead?" Maldives pleaded, attempting to defuse a desperate situation. He was squinted upon in disapproval as the Queens resumed muttering over their woes, but Ruby--perhaps out of pity-- paused momentarily, her dark red tail a serpentine pendulum as she turned over the suggestion in her head.

"I will go and ask her what she thinks," said the queen of the Sky finally, unfurling her massive bloodred wings and gliding into the holding chambers below her dais.

She reemerged several minutes later with less ceremony, her expression a disquieting one.

"She has spoken," Ruby announced. "The firescales... begrudgingly allows this substitution, as long as the IceWing passes along what she tells them to the SkyWing. I have given the order to escort her out now."

A procession of armored guards emerged from the wing, leading their prisoner into the arena. She was completely unshackled, as there was no metal powerful enough to contain her; if she had really desired, she could burn off the guards' faces as effortlessly as wax and bolt into the night sky. Her coppery skin glowed how coals do in a furnace, compressing with her breaths like a bellows.

Pyrenees suddenly recognized the immediate danger he was in. It wouldn't seem a life-threatening situation-- because she had come civilly, and was surrounded by soldiers in a pit far below him-- but he knew that this hardly mitigated the hazard she posed. The dragon was only here by her own volition, and there was every possibility for her to change her mind.

She was an aerial superpredator, and Pyrenees? He was a permadragonet sitting on a perch.

He kept above Terra Nova on their way down to the arena floor, tenting his wings to catch the lift from her upstrokes. As he flapped clumsily, bouncing a bit on the landing, he looked above him at the vast sky separating him from the platforms and shivered. This was a prison once, and it certainly resembled a cage. But the firescales seemed to be in her element. She was seated on the plinth like it was a throne, her talons crossed over one another confidently and watchful eyes gleaming like robin's eggs.

"Oh, hello," she purred. "So you're that IceWing dragonet."

He didn't know how to talk to her. He didn't want to talk to her-- especially not with Terra Nova watching-- either.

"Well, you don't look very fierce at all," she observed flatly. "They created your egg or something, right? How much of you did they invent?"

Terra Nova glared, but kept her tongue in her mouth.

"I hope you have a personality," the firescales added, less judgmentally. "I don't want to give my last words to a mindless dragonet."

Pyrenees tried to recall anything about himself-- at least anything that was appropriate to say under the eyes of every queen-- but rather distractedly, he could only think about finding an escape to this arena.

"I assure you, he's a mind truly his own," reported Terra Nova, tired of his shy struggling. Pyrenees, peeved that she had spoken for him, growled under his breath.

The copper dragon's eyes seemed to catch on the slight rebellion. Her demeanor was unusually expressive and bright; perhaps she seemed a bit jaded, but it came nowhere close to approaching the miserable, enraged animal that Pyrenees had imagined. Pyrenees didn't know whether to be afraid of it, because he couldn't tell whether she was toying with him or if she was always like this.

"Look at how nervous he is! I bet you told him I eat dragonets for breakfast. Let's see if he really can think for himself." Her sinewy neck leaned towards him. "I was a dragonet once. I've been in a prophecy before, with other dragonets in it. Do you think I would kill something I sympathize with?"

He deliberated, then decided not.

"I would," she continued. "In fact, I already have. This arena was mine years ago, and I killed my fair share of dragonet soldiers while I was still a dragonet. And I have these wonderful deadly scales and a few hundred dragons all over Pyrrhia who hate me to remind me about it every day."

"That's horrible," stammered Pyrenees.

"It is. I chose to be horrible. But I was also convinced there wasn't another choice." The firescales arched her back for a stretch, and settled down again. "So I followed the destiny that was given to me. Dragons with power, we're very alike, you know. Easily flattered, don't know any better, but super convenient for smarter dragons. Did you ever question why all the prophecies are about dragonets?"

Pyrenees stared at her, dumbfounded that treasonous words could flow so freely from one's mouth. "I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."

"You do," insisted the SkyWing impatiently.

"Prophecies are about dragonets because...because we're full of hope? Right?" He turned to Terra Nova, who was wiser and more sensible than himself.

The SkyWing grimaced pityingly. "Oh, I envy your naivety," she said.

"Don't go putting poisonous ideas in his head," Terra Nova warned, moving towards Pyrenees protectively.

"Bold of you to assume I take orders from bossy IceWings," the firescales replied in a flippant tone. "I only thought he should know that the prophecies are about dragonets because grown-up dragons can't handle having their problems all to themselves. They have to use dragonets' innocence to prove they're right. They have to find clever ways around their own moral objections to things they want. But I'll let him decide for himself whether that's wrong."

"That... that doesn't make sense," puzzled Pyrenees, rejecting her outlandish proposal. "The prophecy is real, and even a prophecy that isn't real would eventually come true anyways, wouldn't it?" He was thinking of the story of the Dragonets of Destiny as he said this. "And this one has to be very serious. Whoever Darkstalker was, everyone was really scared of him."

"I met him," said the firescales. "I would say he was mediumly scary at best."

She knew him?! Pyrenees suddenly felt his insides lurch, and his remaining courage sink through the arena sand. He was acutely aware of one thing: that he could not say another word to this SkyWing. I don't like how the things she says makes my head spin. He must have done something to her mind. Just through her presence I'm going to be tricked into betraying--

"You look a bit faint," she loudly pointed out, shaking Pyrenees out of his daze. He could've sworn the ground had been wobbling at him aggressively. "Maybe you should take a seat?"

He shook his head in refusal, barely managing to stay upright. Can't sit down. Mustn't do what she asks. What if I obey her and... and I... I don't know, catch a curse from her?

"Good grief, can someone else tell him to sit down for his own good?" The copper SkyWing rolled her eyes.

Part 2

can there be hope

"Ngh..."

Pyrenees rolled himself onto his stomach, then upright. Miserably, he adjusted his bleary eyes to a humid explosion of colors and smells unlike any he'd experienced in his life. Snakelike trees ribboned into the sky above him, with egg-shaped fruits nestled under their paunchy canopies. The ribbed trunks were making his vision sway, and the muggy air buzzed horridly.