Wings of Fire lemons: Citrus Calamity

Intermission: Ruby, Riptide, and Reality

Riptide of the Seawings had been having feelings recently.

Or, more accurately, he was having feelings about not having feelings. For a good long while, he’d had feelings of the romantic kind towards someone—Tsunami of the Seawings. But that relationship didn’t seem like it would work out. His feelings were probably not reciprocated anyways. And so he tried to move on, but it was just so hard…

And then he woke up one day to find that he felt nothing, which was really a stark contrast to everything before. Once he came to realize this, he thought curiously, replaying every single memory of Tsunami he could think of. They didn’t surface any feelings at all. It was as if someone somewhere flicked a switch, and he no longer had any connection towards Tsunami of the Seawings at all.

For a time, he relished it. And then it became abundantly clear that he had somehow become unable to experience romantic attraction at all and he frankly became a bit scared by it. If these feelings didn’t come back, then what? Would he just not be capable of love? Would he just fall through the cracks of an amatonormative society built off the assumption that everyone would form monogamous romantic partnerships? What would become of him?

And then the lemons started appearing and he felt a grim sense of relief that he wouldn’t be around long enough to have much of a future at all. Or would the lemons—seemingly operating in pairs of dragons in some sort of semblance of a relationship—simply not come to claim him? Would he just be alone in a world of lemons? He decided that he would simply take things one step at a time. Whatever happened to him in the future, he could and would adapt.

The night after Queen Coral ran off to Jade Mountain in order to retrieve the Seawing students of the ill-fated Jade Mountain Academy, Riptide had a strange dream.

He was talking to a dragon that he knew as a part of the dream but did not actually exist in the waking world—or, more accurately, the bits and pieces of them were in the waking world, but scattered between multiple different places and beings. That is how the mind works, after all; it cannot come up with something truly unique, all it can do is mash preexisting details together in a new way. But regardless, the two of them were talking about… something. He couldn’t remember. But the discussion wasn’t important. What was important was what followed.

The dragon began to vanish. They vanished in a very specific way, as if there was some sort of invisibility paint flowing down their body. And they kept talking, but then it was words shooting out of where their mouth should have been.

And then the world melted away. The body of Riptide melted away. The world was nothing but a white empty void. And then there was a sort of almost-rhythmic clacking sound that he had never heard before.

Way at the top left of his vision were the glyphs of a language he had never seen before, appearing in tandem with the sounds. They appeared irregularly and were sometimes erased or even edited a bit later, as if whatever responsible for creating them was thinking through their creation. They appeared left to right, occasionally going down once a line was too filled with them. He couldn't explain why or how, since he had never seen this language before, but he could read them.

The content of the text was unusual; it seemed to be describing his experience experiencing the text. And now the text was being written about itself. And now it was writing about him noticing that the text was writing about itself. And it would probably continue recursively unless he decided to think about something else. He thought long and hard about the first glyph present in this paragraph. T. T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T. And now the text was just repeating it. And now it stopped.

And then Riptide began to wonder whether his experience dictated what the text was going to be like or, conversely, the text dictated his thoughts, actions, and his world. You—the reader, naturally—already know the answer of course. Riptide will not. I will never tell him because he will never understand. It will be a waste of time; his purpose is not to understand anything.