Wings of Honor: Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 12: Chasing Tales

It was getting dark now, but we did not leave. I was too worried about Moon. She kept thinking about Darkstalker for the rest of the day, wandering the tunnels as Kinkajou slept outside. She was anxious, nervous about so many different things. The caves she was exploring ran into dead ends, where she thought about Darkstalker and how it must feel like to be trapped, surrounded by stone... forever. The dangers of Peril, having powers she couldn't control, what she could choose to do with them, whether you can do anything at all with them really. But she eventually realized she would have to talk to somebody. Worse still, it would have to be someone from the Nightwing tribe village, and not friendlier dragons like Starflight or Fatespeaker. While she ran through the options, Marvin snuck out his emergency D ration.
We skipped lunch. It's not much, but it'll keep our tummies from giving us away.
Heh. You said tummies.
Aye. Muy traviesa Grace.
He slid around and slid half of the weird bar into my mouth. I chewed it down, making it into a soup before I swallowed, as per proper procedure.
We followed Moon the art cave, where Mightyclaws was. She hesitated, I noticed the same thing. Normally, this room would be filled with light through skylights and windows, but now it was twilight, and everything was shrouded in shadow. What surprised me was the abundance of art supplies. Brushes, paints of every color imaginable, blank scrolls, blobs of Clay, wood, glass, beads of various compositions, a metal scrap pile, and even a loom where someone was making a decorative carpet or something. Little wooden dragon statues looked on from little shelves with green, blue, or orange glass beady eyes.
There were too many to have been made in the last two days. Who could have made them? One of the founders?
Something drew Marvin's head up.
Hey. Eyes up.
Above us, there was an amalgamation of metal and shimmering copper, shaped to look like tongues of fire. The same fire globes that were in the hallways were suspended from this, providing sufficient light for us to see. Another black dragon stood towards the middle of the cave, inspecting a canvas on a stand. His structure gave me a glimpse of only a small part of what the Nightwings endured on the volcano, supplemented with Moon's memories. Mightyclaws was not scrawny or thin by any means, but his body was not rounded off. He was well fed, as portrayed by his belly. But everything else looked lean.
Lean to starvation.
Marvin's memory flashed to starving soldiers and other humans. Their pitiful figures were similar to the one standing before us. He talked with a rasp, his voice scarred by ash and noxious gasses. His claws shook worse than Marvin's when he was reaching for something. His mind was almost constantly worried about his next meal. Until his head shot up, narrowing his eyes at Moon when he spotted her in the entranceway.
""Hey," he acknowledged her, but not in a welcoming or off putting way. Never know what to say to her. muttered his mind.
"Hi." Moon said nervously.
He fiddled with a few smaller jars of paint on a table next to him, then glanced over at Moon again.
"You here to paint?" He asked. Or just stare at me awkwardly?
"Um — yes," Moon said. This is going to be a disaster. How could I get any answers to my questions if I can't even say two words to him?
Mightyclaws gestured with one wing to a stack of canvases. she took one and propped it on a stand thingy not too far from him, but facing each other, where neither of them could see the other's painting. It felt like it would be too intrusive to stand where she could watch what he was working on.
Strange.
Yeah. Creative people consider their works as a part of themselves. But knowledge is power. And smart people want as little people to really know about them. It keeps them unpredictable, and dangerous. Smart people stay dangerous, stay valuable. Marvin's mind was already directing their actions.
Moon had never tried painting before. She had no idea where to begin. I saw her run her claws over the different sizes of paintbrushes — smooth wooden handles, neat bristles ranging from fang-sharp thin to fat as a dragon's ear. After a minute, she chose one somewhere in the middle and brought it back to her canvas, along with a few shades of blue and green.
Ballence choice. Good to start.
You paint?
Marvin shrugged.
Some of my best friends in class were the art teachers. I got to sit in there during lunch. I guess I picked some things up.
Mightyclaws didn't say anything for a while. He looked as though he was concentrating on his painting, but his thoughts were swooping in all different directions like a disturbed swarm of flies. No idea what I'm doing. Why does Starflight think this will help me? Would it be weird to go back to the prey center again tonight? Maybe there'll be some sheep left. Three meals in one day; will anyone notice? Or yell at me? Why is Moon here? Maybe Starflight sent her, too. Although she doesn't have any trauma to work through. With her perfect life in the rainforest, always as much as she wanted to eat, no adult dragons yelling at her, no classes on lying, no death smoldering right over her head all the time...
"Do you like it here?" Moon finally said, rescuing me from his negativity, and breaking into his thoughts to try and stem the flow of resentment about her specifically. It seemed to work. He stopped and twitched his tail, staring at his painting.
"I guess." It's more like the fortress here than the rainforest, except it smells better and there's sunshine. And prey, and dragons of all colors.
"It's weird being around all the other tribes, isn't it?" Moon tried. Nearly exposing herself.
"Definitely." He said. "We were always told to stay away from them unless we were on a mission. Like, to deliver a prophecy or put the fear of NightWings in them. Otherwise, stay away so they don't figure us out."
"That we're ordinary, you mean?" Moon finished for him. He flicked his wings with a frown.
"NightWings aren't ordinary." Of course she would think so. "We're more intelligent than any other tribe. We shape the world; other dragons just live in it." She and I could hear that he was regurgitating lines he'd heard over and over again from older, more superior NightWings.
"I mean — I just meant, that we don't have the powers we — say we do — right?" Moon stammered, trying to beat around the bush in an unnecessarily tense conversation.
"Maybe we don't right now," Mightyclaws said. He looked away from her and stabbed his paintbrush into a vat of red paint. "But we did and we might again one day. We should have let everyone keep believing in them. We were well trained; no one would have guessed, if we were careful. Especially after the success of the dragonet prophecy."
"Well trained?" Moon echoed.
"Our classes." Mightyclaws swished his brush across his canvas. "How to lie, how to develop a convincing prophecy, how to sound like you're reading someone's mind. You missed out on all of that." Lounging around with sloths, eating bananas all day. "But we had to trade all our secrets for safety. Now, thanks to Queen Glory and Deathbringer and Sunny and Stonemover, the whole world knows that NightWings have no powers. No one respects us anymore." The looks the other dragons give me here — like I either ate their favorite scroll or I might suddenly burst into flames, and they don't know which.
"But is it true?" Moon said hesitantly. "That no one has powers anymore? Not anyone?"
He shook his head, glaring at his painting. Not in hundreds of years. He thought. If the old scrolls were true. If we ever had them in the first place.
"Why do you think we lost them?" Moon wondered
Mightyclaws shrugged. He acted as if he was hoping to get out of the conversation by focusing on his painting. But in his head we heard, Maybe the volcano sucked it out of us. And I could see the heavy smoke and heat that lingered in his memory.
They kept painting in silence for a while.
"Um," Moon said finally. "Do you know anything about the Darkstalker?"
A flash of white erupted through my head. Mightyclaws jumped up, as if someone threw a spider onto Marvin. "Don't talk about him! Why would you ever talk about him?"
"I just wondered," Moon said, startled. "I thought he was a ghost story."
"No, he's definitely real, and he's definitely coming back to kill us all one day," Mightyclaws said with a shudder to his nigh destroyed voice. "My father used to tell me about him while he taught me to fly. He'd say, 'Flap harder! Imagine the Darkstalker is chasing you!' or 'If you can't twist into a dive faster than that, the Darkstalker will catch you and rip off your claws and eat your brain!' He told me about how the tribe buried him a long time ago and then ran away to hide, but he's slowly clawing his way out, and one day he'll break free and come to kill us all for revenge."
All three of us blinked at him for a minute, before Moon realized she was dripping light blue paint all over her talons.
Wow. Darkstalker whispered in Moon's head. I seem to have gotten a lot scarier in the last two thousand years.
You must have been pretty scary to begin with, Moon observed, if the whole tribe moved to hide from you even after you'd been defeated.
Completely unnecessary. A huge overreaction. I killed ONE dragon, who deserved it.
Ha! Try me Darkstalker!
"What did he do?" Moon asked Mightyclaws. "I mean, what was so bad about him?"
Please keep in mind I'll be terribly offended if you believe this scrawny dragonet and his monster fantasies over me.
Even we couldn't stop a smirk.
"He killed, like, twenty dragons," Mightyclaws said, still halfway to being terrified. "All at once. With his MIND. He could make anyone do anything he wanted to."
Is that true? Moon demanded, appalled. Although her mental emotion was being projected onto her face.
I did not kill twenty dragons. Maybe two. On two separate occasions, and I had to. Moon, come on, I promise not to eat anyone's brains.
And I'm the Fürer's great grandson my ass.
I shook my head,
But Mightyclaws was not faking his terror of the Darkstalker, though. A million nightmares over the past few years were replaying in his head. We also saw a game where young dragonets took turns pretending to be the Darkstalker, hiding for a long time, then bursting out to chase and attack the others. Mightyclaws had never liked that game; it always made his nightmares worse.
"Does anyone know where he's buried?" she asked. Mightyclaws wrinkled his snout at her.
"Of course not. That was thousands of years ago."
"What about the old NightWing kingdom?" she asked. "Where was it?"
"I have no idea!" he said, becoming suspicious. "What's with all the questions?"
"Oh," she said. "I just — I wondered — I mean, you're right, I missed out on all the stuff a NightWing dragonet should know. I thought maybe if I ... knew more, I'd ... be more of a NightWing."
Nice improve Moon.
Mightyclaws stepped around his stand to look at her painting. I followed suit behind them. She'd painted what me and Marvin agreed to be an evening sky, twinkling with stars and all three moons; over a quiet rainforest scene of green leaves and crooked trees. Not the best piece, but nonetheless, crafted with care. Mightyclaws took one look at it and snorted. Grabbing his painting, he threw it on the floor at her feet. His was a painting of the volcano I'd seen so many times, Moon, in the NightWings' heads. Bright red and gold lava spilled down the sides of the black mountain, carving bright, deadly rivers. A large dark cloud of smoke hung over everything, so you couldn't tell if it was day or night. It took her a minute of looking at it to realize that Mightyclaws had painted hidden eyes and teeth all over the volcano, in the shadows, as if it was watching, waiting to devour us.
"That's really —" Moon started. She convicted to tell him how good it was. Like Marvin would do. A window of her character.
"This," Mightyclaws said. He pointed to her painting, and then to his. "This is why you'll never be one of us." Because everything was awful, and you escaped, and it is not fair.
He stormed out of the cave before she could respond. Moon sighed.
What's really not fair, Darkstalker appeared again, is everyone blaming you for a choice your mother made.
Moon picked up Mightyclaws' volcano painting and propped it carefully back on its stand to dry. She gazed at it for a moment, then suddenly glanced back at her own painting, her mind turning.
The sky... Her heart flipped over. My egg was laid under two full moons and hatched under two full moons.
Her mother had told her the story of the moonlight and the way her egg had turned strangely silver.
Is that why I have powers and no one else does? Do the NightWing powers come from the moons? Maybe that's why they disappeared... because there was no moonlight on the volcanic island, and the eggs were all hatched deep inside the caves.
Darkstalker rumbled inside her head. Of course our powers come from the moons. One full moon at hatching gives a dragonet either mind reading or prophecy. Two gives them both. Three is so rare.... the theory for a while was that perhaps the animus powers were a third gift, but we eventually determined that those are genetic, not moon-given. We think the third moon makes the first two powers even stronger.
Wait. Marvin, my egg wasn't hatched under any of the moons, I was inside the tent, in the jungle.
Yes, but you were enchanted by Goldman. He was the one who gave you all your powers.
Because he's an animus. Oh... shit.
Moon brushed the silver scales by her eyes, as did I. Are these a sign of our powers? Because Fatespeaker has them, too.
They should be, but I've seen absolutely everything in that silly dragon's mind and she's certainly not a mind reader. Nor a prophet, I believe, although she may have a very weak power. Perhaps she nearly hatched under the moons, or was supposed to.
Makes sense. False dragonette. Didn't quite hatch under the Brightest Night.
The Talons of Peace had her egg, Moon continued, so she wasn't on the volcano, but she probably wasn't out in the moonlight either, Moon thought. And they also had Starflight's, but I know for sure he hatched underground.
Yes, on a brightest night, with three full moons, Darkstalker growled. What a waste. Think of the power he could have had. I shuddered, I was a similar dragon. He paused for a moment. But the connection between moonlight and NightWing powers was common knowledge in the tribe. How could everyone have forgotten that, even in two thousand years? Why would the tribe risk losing all our powers by hatching their dragonets away from the moonlight?
"I have a guess," Moon whispered aloud.
What?
She put her own painting down in a clear space on the floor. Her intention clear. The blues and greens were too bright, all the lines too unsure, and the trees looked like blobby mushrooms. It was a beautiful masterpiece, crafted with the highest respect, that she set it on fire.
"I think ... it was because of you." We watched the flames flicker and wave, mesmerized by their fluid movement. "The other NightWings were so afraid of your powers and what you did with them — whatever the truth is, whatever you did — that they stopped having their eggs in the moonlight. They gave up the NightWing powers on purpose, because they wanted to be sure there would never be another Darkstalker. Another you."
He went silent.
Moon wrapped her wings around herself and watched her painting burn to ashes. Marvin hugged my neck as tight at he could, caressing me with a warm hand.
I hung my own head. The thought of all of this.