Wings of Evolution (WoF AU)

Chapter 36

Murderbasket

Deathbringer had a mission.

He was also very bad at doing missions the right way. Usually, Secretkeeper was able to keep that part away from the queen because usually, Deathbringer's way worked just as well. Somehow Soulseer had trusted him anyway, granting him two animus-touched items to help with his increasingly elaborate improvising.

He was an assassin. Yeah, what a surprise. Nobody would have guessed with a name like that. In all honesty, Deathbringer wished he was named something like Skullcrusher, or Silentstride. Because in the night kingdom, names meant things, so even if Deathbringer hadn't wanted to be an assassin, he probably would have ended up as one anyway.

Thankfully though, Deathbringer couldn't imagine being anything besides an assassin, so it all worked out well for everyone involved. It still undermined his element of surprise because every NightWing out there knew his name was Deathbringer, and nightwings had an annoying habit of living up to their names.

This particular mission was long distance, Soulseer had even gotten Morrowseer to summon the prophecy again for Deathbringer to hear, just in case he thought it was ignorable and changed the dragon's mind instead.

The very existence of a particular dragon was a threat to Soulseer, imagine that. It was almost like anyone with a spear could be a potential problem for Soulseer. Deathbringer didn't get the point of prophecies. Life happened, things might happen for a reason, sure, but Deathbringer didn't care one way or another about the snowball effect of stepping on a butterfly.

Morrowseer had explained it to him once, to stop Deathbringer from badmouthing the seers, and it had exactly zero effect. In fact, Deathbringer had purposefully upped his badmouthing just to see if it would throw the queen's top seer for a loop. Morrowseer didn't seem to have noticed, but that was perfectly fine on Deathbringer's count, it proved that prophecies were pointless.

Either way, Deathbringer had finally met a mission where he had to actually do his job. It was exhausting really, the assassination itself would be easy, but he'd found it fun to think of increasingly elaborate ways to fix the situation without actually killing the target himself. Usually, he would kill some dragon completely unrelated, spread some nasty rumors, and then set up the target as the accused murderer.

The prophecy broke that plan before it even formed, it was a line long but far more specific than anything Deathbringer had ever heard, which made him wonder if Morrowseer had made it up. Death from above, northward from which he comes, a dragon full-grown but never grown, unlike anything you've ever seen.

So like a good little queen, Soulseer immediately sent Deathbringer to deal with this. Bah. Deathbringer was getting annoyed at how effective Soulseer could be.

So for the last several weeks, he'd been scouring the north for a runt that was unlike anything he'd ever seen, he was used to taking a while to find the target, but it took him a long time. There were some weird dragons out there, but all the unusually small ones were just regular dragons. He took notes on those because perhaps the 'nothing you've ever seen' was more internal.

When he first saw the target, he assumed it was a dragonet, but the large ears and strange scale color immediately drew Deathbringers eye. After a bit of observation, he concluded that this was indeed a fully-grown dragon. And it was indeed a weird-looking dragon.

His scales were grey-blue, almost white in some lighting, which would be horrible for stealth, and his ears were almost three times the size of a regular adult dragon. He was practically half Deathbringers size, and Deathbringer wasn't even all that large.