Wings of Fire Oneshots

Sweet Raptured Light | Blaze x Glacier [ANGST]

A/N: Okay, I'll be blunt. This one's bittersweet angst. You'll understand the situation shortly after you start reading, but also, pretty major spoilers for late arc 2, and occasional spoilers for book 14.

I was about 5 chapters into The Flames of Hope at the time I wrote this (I've finished FoH now), so I'm sorry if there are any inaccuracies... I just wanted to think of some ships I could write to fill in the space between now and if/when I have another Wings of Fire phase - at which point I can get onto some post-canon oneshots.

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Summary as written on AO3: Glacier receives a visit from Blaze, come to bid her goodbye in her final moments before the IceWing plague takes her away.

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Glacier stared at the ceiling above her. It was quiet. Completely dark. Completely empty, aside from herself, and a lone arctic mosquito she barely noticed buzzing about somewhere above her. How in the world had it gotten this deep into the IceWing palace without being squashed, she dimly wondered.

     Her eyes were half-lidded and sunken, her gaze equally as hazy as her head. She felt as if everything was only... half there. She felt as if she was only half there. Between the figurative hammers pounding the spot between her eyes, the unfathomable exhaustion weighing her eyelids down like anvils, and the shivers wracking her body despite its near dormant state, it seemed safe to say that Glacier was not exactly the spitting image of a pristine queen of the IceWings.

     Despite feeling like she could sleep for the next two thousand years, if not longer, Glacier couldn't remember the last time she'd slipped out of consciousness. She had laid in her chamber for hours, somehow both on the brink of deep slumber and agonisingly wide awake, silent save for the occasional groan of anguish, or futile attempt to shift into a more comfortable position; she had never thought she would curse how intricately carved the bed that stood in the centre of the room was, but after having wallowed in a pool of her own SandWing-like body heat for so excruciatingly long, all she wanted was to be able to roll over. But if she did, she wouldn't be lined up with the drifts and dips that could perfectly contain a dragon body.

     It was like the sickest form of torture. She was the queen. She had an entire tribe of dragons to rule, thousands of lives in her talons each and every day. And yet... She hadn't known much of what was going on outside of her chamber for the past few weeks. Sometimes she might subconsciously overhear bits of a conversation going on beyond the door, or have reports of recent events brought to her by messengers. But that wasn't enough to rule a whole tribe.

     As far as she knew, there was a plague killing off her tribe, and said plague was potentially magical and sent by a certain colossal animus NightWing who had lived for far longer than he had any business living. The plague part was believable enough, if the fact that she had been hopelessly bedridden for days wasn't evidence enough, but the rest of it was just a few pieces of a very vague story. Even so, it made Glacier's blood boil. Apparently, there was also some form of cure going around, in the form of hundreds of earrings belonging to a SandWing student at Jade Mountain Academy, and one was being rushed to her as quickly as absolutely possible. It was dubious, but it sounded like it came from a good place in a good dragon's heart.

     Other than that, Glacier knew much less of the current events than most other dragons. All she had to break the nothingness was the unimaginable pain wringing her body, and the blaring ringing of her ears. Among the noise, she would most likely have missed it when the door to her chamber creaked quietly ajar, if not for the fact that the silver of light shining through the doorway flooded and stung her unadjusted eyes like the stab of a billion SandWing tail barbs at once. When she turned her head and squinted very narrowly, hoping to get a closer look, she instead got what felt like the sensation of flying up to the sun and staring directly into it. Not that she could even imagine flying, with her strength in that moment.