Wings of Fire: A Pale Moon Rises

Chapter five: Justice

Justice trailed behind Palemoon meekly. He was her older brother. Adopted older brother. Wrathful said Justice could never forget that he wasn't her real flesh and blood.

That was made obvious by the strange 'disease' (as mother called it) which afflicted his scales and made them pale. The only scale colour that ran in Justice's 'real' family was a slight orangish tinge to their black scales, rumoured to be from distant skywing blood (though her mother was quick to dispel that rumour).

Wrathful considered herself a true NightWing. Loyal to the tribe. Everyone knew she took advantage of her good health to have as many dragonets as possible, in order to have more allocated hunting days and other benefits, but that wasn't to say she didn't care how the dragonets turned out. She definitely cared.

She did not care about their emotional or physical wellbeing, but she cared if they turned out right. If Wrathful was going to raise dragonets, she would raise them to be loyal members of the tribe, devoted to the tribe's cause, devoted to its survival and its glory.

Justice was not a good NightWing because she was meek and shy. Palemoon was not a good NightWing because he was a pushover, and because he was a freak (in Wrathful's opinion). Vulcan was not a good NightWing either. He was mostly black (despite the orange tinges here and there) and he was brave and strong for a dragonet of his age, but he was stubborn. He did not follow the decrees of the tribe blindly. He would use himself as a shield for his other siblings, protecting them from Wrathful's 'teaching' moments.

That made him empathetic. That made him a bad NightWing.

Justice had heard Wrathful's rhetoric the moment she was hatched, and was trained to fear the sting of pain were she to go against it.

Bloodspiller, Justice's biological father, had died before she was even hatched. All her older siblings who had met him said he was weak. A pushover who let their mother do whatever she wanted, a victim to her will. When he was struck with illness and died a sudden death, it hardly made a difference to the dragonets that he was gone.

The only siblings who knew him were Cruelty, Painbringer, and Ghostseer. They were good NightWings. They had the responsibility of being the eldest, of upholding Wrathful's morals. Of representing their family through demonstration to the rest of the tribe.

Cruelty was the eldest, a fierce warrior-in-training who was soon to reach ten years of age and leave the island as an agent on the mainland to achieve the tribe's goals through physical strength, bending others to her will with brawn. Painbringer was the second eldest, a highly intelligent dragon who studied intertribal politics, and was on her way to going to the mainland with her elder sister, not as a warrior but as a political advisor who could get close to tribal leaders, and whisper things in their ear which would break them into becoming a pawn for the tribe.

Ghostseer specialised in reading dragon's emotions and body language in order to appear like they are reading another dragon's thoughts. She became so adept at this that she began to teach this to younger dragonets at school. She would help the tribe keep their mysterious and all-powerful reputation, a vital tool in controlling the other tribes with half-truths and trickery.

All three of the eldest sisters 'cared' for the younger three in their own way. They believed that they were the perfect example of model NightWings, and they believed they got that way from being berated and bruised by their mother whenever they slipped up. They did their part whenever they could to inform the youngest three whenever they did something 'traitorous' to the tribe, in as cruel a fashion as they could muster. They didn't know any other way of being dragons. They thought it would straighten them out into 'proper NightWings', and that in the end it was really for their own good.