Chapter Text
It was the first time she had felt warm in centuries.
Foeslayer’s shaking talons hovered over the small campfire she’d made for them, the heat on her numb scales feeling like lightning. It was nighttime, somewhere in the central Ice Kingdom, which was mostly devoid of dragons; no evergreen forests, no igloos, only the occasional fleeting fauna with polar-white fur.
White on white. Nothing but tundra plains under a dark sky, where white met black evenly at every horizon.
The moons were cut so crescent-thin, they almost weren’t there.
Winter was off hunting something for the both of them right now—curious little Icewing. Bitter, grumpy, but ironically not completely cold like the rest of them seemed to be. Only a few dark hours had passed since he’d freed her from her prison.
She couldn’t fathom why. Maybe her words had gotten to his sympathy (ha!), or maybe Icewings had finally changed, and held values other than pride. She didn’t know and didn’t care; she’d be happy if the Ice Kingdom melted into the ocean.
But for now, she was happy to see the dead sky again.
All of this felt like some twisted dream. Cold, vast, isolating, silent, surrounding, and above all else, the tundra was still. The snow wasn’t white in this darkness, descending clumsily into grays and blues and purples and browns and none of those things at all. A dim color that no painting could capture. A mix of painful, faded memories and the frostbitten madness of loneliness that consumed her in her scarce waking moments in the Diamond Caves.
The snow bit her. The snow dug its claws and teeth into her and killed her all over again. The snow didn’t care enough to hate.
The snow made her homesick for places that didn’t exist anymore.
She wasn’t even sure she could still breathe fire, with how long she’d been trapped under ice, but she could start a campfire well enough. She’d forgotten what warmth felt like. The first spark in hundreds, thousands of years.
Foeslayer closed her eyes, forcing back tears. She could still see the warm glow from behind her eyelids.
—Two arctic fox corpses hit the snow in front of her, and Winter landed right alongside them.
“That fire’s going to get us seen.”
She looked up at him; his scales were white, tinted just a touch blue, his face angular but more rounded at the edges than some other Icewings she’d known. His eyes would’ve worried her if she didn’t know Icewings as well as she did; no, they worried her more. He was about as frigid and lethal as an angry wet cat.
“Seen by who?” Foeslayer shot back. “There’s nobody around for miles. Especially at this hour.”
“You don’t know that. Icewing scales blend in with the snow, making us undetectable to our prey until it’s too late. We would never see anyone coming, but they’d see us all the way from the horizon.”
Proud of his tribe, if nothing else. Foeslayer pointed to his kills, “They are the same color as you, and you spotted them just fine. I don’t see how anyone could surprise us when there’s no cover anywhere.”
Winter’s brow furrowed—in a way that was achingly familiar. “I’m saying we would be the prey in this scenario. And they don’t need to surprise us; neither of us are supposed to be alive.”
“They wouldn’t know that.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I feel like your metaphor is falling apart.”
“Well, I feel like you’re letting it.”
“Then stop worrying and sit down.”
Winter blinked, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, huffed. And then sat down across from her.
Wordlessly, he pulled one of the dead foxes closer to himself, and let Foeslayer take the other. Something ignited in her at the thought; over hundreds of years, her stomach had become a hollow, churning cauldron of acid, hissing as all she had to feed it was the saliva between gritted teeth. She had felt the rancid bile clawing up her throat until there was nothing left inside her, and only cramps to keep her company.
Her vision blurred as she tore off the pelt and set fire to the raw meat, salivating through the flames that still poured out of her maw as she dipped her head down to feast. The still-flaming meat burned her mouth, still bloody and raw on the inside, all too chewy and fleshy and making her shudder as she forced herself to swallow.
It was the best meal she’d had in her life.
Winter looked up from his own late dinner—that’s right, Icewings eat meat raw, not that she could judge anymore—and stared at her with an expression somewhere between revulsion and concern. “Moons, is that how you eat? That’s terrifying.”
She shot him a frigid glare, which she’d gotten good at in her years in the Diamond Caves. “It’s how anyone who’s been frozen for centuries would eat.”
“...Oh.”
Winter’s face turned shameful, and his gaze darted away. He said no more.
Foeslayer shuffled closer to the fire, taking a moment to cook her meat more thoroughly. The air was dead around them. That was the only reason she could even start a campfire without a windbreak, and it was also the only reason she could bear to stay out in this frigid wasteland for another few hours; it was unpleasant, and they obviously couldn’t sleep here, but she’d survive if there was no windchill.
The still air only made the Ice Kingdom seem even more inhospitable than it already was. It didn’t even feel like she was on Pyrrhia; no, the whole landscape looked like she was settled on a moon.
She expected to glance up and see the entire continent plastered on a blue marble in the sky. She did; it wasn’t.
“...You said you aren’t supposed to be alive?”
Winter blinked up. “What?”
“Didn’t you kill that brother of yours? I didn’t see him when you woke me up the second time. You should be renowned by your Tribe now, in your ‘Circles’ or whatever, not on the run. Unless freeing me did that. If you threw away your honor for my sake, well, thank you, and I’m not sorry.”
“What? No, I didn’t—” He shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t kill Hailstorm. I didn’t want to kill him, and he didn’t want to kill me. So he walked away while I stayed behind to sneak out with you. I essentially faked my death.”
“Really?” Foeslayer blinked. Could’ve fooled me. I never saw the other dragonet die—I always went first—but I saw the number of statues in the room grow. Never stopped to count, though. Again, busy being dead. “How kind of you.”
Winter grimaced. “It’s terrible, what they were doing. Not only your torture, but using that to make other dragonets kill each other…” He had yet another familiar look on him; stewing in his own rage and pity. “They never even got a fair fight. The parents always picked one to win beforehand. I only survived because Hailstorm spared me.”
That was news to her, but somehow, it didn’t surprise Foeslayer. “I figured. They were told that whoever killed me first would win, but only one ever attacked me at a time, while the other always hung back, waiting…” Her brow furrowed. “You’re telling me you were the one they picked to die? You didn’t move a claw from your spot until you tackled me.”
Winter’s breath hitched; with what she knew, he understood how she might’ve seen it that way. “No. No, I was… always a coward like that. That’s why they picked Hailstorm over me.”
Foeslayer sighed. She was silent for a long moment; long enough that Winter thought the conversation had trailed off as she mindlessly wrapped her talon around the fox’s tail, yanking it off and discarding it into the fire as she stared off into the middle distance.
“Do you know where you’ll go now?” She could use ideas.
Winter straightened up, nodding. “Possibility. I—”
“Possibly?”
“No, Possibility,” Winter hissed at the interruption. “It’s a town south of here, wedged between the Sand, Sky, and Ice Kingdoms. We should be about halfway between there and the Ice Palace right now.”
Foeslayer’s brow furrowed again. “What kind of town lies right on a border? Who owns it?”
“Uh, nobody, I think. It was a Skywing settlement on one side and a Sandwing one on the other, but they merged together over the course of the Sandwing War of Succession—”
“A succession war? When did that happen?”
Winter closed his eyes and counted to ten. He was resigning himself to his fate of catching up Foeslayer on two millenia’s worth of history.
“It just ended less than a year ago, and lasted for twenty. Queen Oasis had three heirs—Blister, Blaze, and Burn—but she was killed by a scavenger, so a war broke out over who got the throne. They each looked for allies in the other Kingdoms, turning the Sandwing war into a continent-wide one.”
Foeslayer, to her credit, didn’t interrupt him again until he finished. “The Sandwing Queen was killed by a scavenger.”
“It’s not that unbelievable! They’re quick, resourceful, wildly intelligent; I suspect they’re almost as smart as dragons are. They seem to have a language of their own, but I haven’t managed to translate or make any sense of it yet, and it’s going to be a lot harder to do that when I lost… Bandit…”
He trailed off, realizing Foeslayer was staring at him with a smirk.
“...Forget I said anything.”
“As smart as dragons, you say.”
Winter’s wings flared out. “Of course! Haven’t you seen one before?! They make their little dens, they have those pointy stick things, one time I saw they’d built some bizarre contraption that launched a flaming spike at dragons and—”
“Relax, relax,” Foeslayer chuckled. “It’s been a while since I saw an Icewing who was passionate about anything. It’s quite refreshing.”
Winter’s eyes and mouth were wide open, a blue embarrassed flush across his face before he looked away. He had no idea why Foeslayer’s words had such an effect on him; maybe because he’d never heard anything like them before.
Foeslayer sat up. “So who won this succession war?”
“Huh? Oh, uh, none of them did. Blister and Burn died, and Blaze abdicated the throne to a dragon named Thorn. She used to be the boss of the Outclaws, but that just meant she had leadership experience.”
She did a long, slow blink at him. “An ‘Outclaw’? The Sandwings made a criminal their queen?” She huffed. “Actually, maybe that’s not so out of character…”
“Apparently, she’s a great queen. My Clawmate refuses to shut up about her. And to think he still makes fun of me for mentioning that I’m Queen Glacier’s nephew…”
“Clawmate? What, are you married to him?”
Winter’s reaction was immediate and visceral. “What? No! No, that’s like—” He paused. “Okay, a Clawmate is a dragon you share a sleeping cave with—”
“—Sounds like marriage to me—”
“—at Jade Mountain Academy. That’s a school set up by the Dragonets—Uh, they helped end the war I was just talking about—and it’s basically meant to be a school… as an inter-tribal peace project, by… helping dragonets get to know each other with… new perspectives…”
He waved his claws in front of him, vaguely gesticulating as he struggled to come up with the words. Foeslayer watched him in silent amusement for some time before his arms flopped into the snow.
“Look, it wasn’t my idea.”
“I think I get the gist of it,” she spared him. “Dragonets from all the tribes come together to help ease relations after the war. Am I correct?”
Winter huffed grumpily while avoiding her gaze. She was right, then, and put it more succinctly than he could as someone who actually attended.
“My Clawmate, Qibli, and the rest of my Winglet—That’s, um, a group of one dragonet per tribe—are waiting for us in Possibility. Come to think of it, the idea of Jade Mountain Academy and Possibility aren’t too different; dragons from all the Tribes gather at both places and get to know each other. Maybe Possibility’s a bit more organic, but…”
He trailed off, then seized up.
“Oh, Moons, am I still going to be able to attend? I’m dead. Will the rest of my Winglet move on without me? They wouldn’t let that happen, right?—”
“It sounds like you care about them.”
Winter paused at that. He was silent for a long moment, the panic in his eyes fading as he pulled himself out of his spiral. His talons clenched in the snow, and he still wasn’t looking at her.
“...Maybe.”
Foeslayer stared at him, the flames of their campfire starting to flicker and dim. She’d never, ever met an Icewing who cared about anyone outside of their Tribe.
Not except for…
“So let me get this straight. A scavenger killed the Sandwing Queen, so the continent blew up for twenty years until—did you mention Dragonets?—they started a daycare for dragonets from every Tribe to coexist, and the town we’re flying to is founded on that same principle. Coexistence.”
Winter blinked, as if he’d never heard that word spoken out loud before, and was only now processing what it really meant. “...Yes.”
Foeslayer looked away, back into the campfire that was only smoldering now. It didn’t matter; the sky was starting to lighten, and soon, it would be sunrise. But for now, it was still cold and grey, the Ice Kingdom as much of an alien planet as any dragon could be on, and just as isolating.
Foeslayer and Winter were alone, a million miles and a million years from any home they’d ever known.
“Coexistence. Maybe dragons do get dumber every year after all.”
Winter turned and frowned at her, a familiar, indignant scowl that only made her heart ache. But Foeslayer lazily rolled over to lay on her side, giving him a wry smile that he could barely see in the light of the dying embers.
“But it looks like someone was finally dumb enough to free me, so maybe dragons ought to be a little stupid.”
Winter stared at her, mouth agape before forcing himself to take a breath. At her words, something seemed to click for him. Some kind of resolve settled deeper, and he glanced over to their south, where the arctic desert turned into an arid one, where his friends were still waiting for him. The friends who would still be there when his family wasn’t.
Foeslayer didn’t look anywhere. Only up at the moons; the moons, maybe, were the only thing that never changed about this new and strange world she found herself in. She’d known long ago that she would never see her loved ones again. But the grief was easier when she didn’t have to think about it; not through the pain and the cold and the hunger. Now, she had to live on without them. She’d woken up and everything was different. Everything was gone.
The sky lightened, the grey of the snow rising as the pale sun crested over the mountains and shined down cruelly onto them—mountains, ones she couldn’t see before in the darkness of night. Through the hazy morning, the sunlight danced in soft tangerines and pinks and reds, drifting clouds in purples and azures; the shadows were pale blue and the snow was a soft fluffy white; over the mounds and clumping on the evergreens.
Foeslayer thought she would never see the sun again.
“Winter,” she addressed him as she watched the sunrise.
He turned to her, attentive and a bit startled; maladjusted at living on his own and at being with others. His crystalline-white and baby-blue scales reflected blindingly, beautifully, in the orange fireball sunlight. He was definitely one of Arctic’s relatives.
“Give it to me straight,” Foeslayer said without looking at him. “What year is it?”
Winter didn’t answer for a long time. He turned away from the sunrise, watching her campfire crumble into black ash and smoke that drifted off into nothing. His mouth was dry and he felt sick.
“...It’s been five thousand and twelve years since the Scorching,” he answered honestly. “I’m sorry.”
Foeslayer didn’t react. She didn’t look at him or say anything, though he thought her head dipped just a little bit lower. Only now was the frigid wind picking up again, blowing away bits of ash and cinders across the bright, untainted snow; ink spots, black freckles across the page. Black stars in a white nighttime sky.
She didn’t say anything when she stood up.
She didn’t say anything when she spread her wings.
She didn’t say anything when she took off, flying across the sunlit tundra.
And Winter didn’t say anything when he took off after her, away from his homeland and towards hers, only the wispy smoke of their dead fireplace as proof that he was ever here.