King of The Dragons (Wings of Fire X Monster Hunter)

Part 3: Chapter 25 & 26

(3rd Pov Starflight)

(Just letting you all know now. Shit is about to go down in this and the next chapter)

The fortress seemed eerily quiet as they flew toward it. The air felt thick with ashy smoke. Starflight's nose and throat hurt even worse than before, and occasionally he heard Glory and Fatespeaker coughing behind him.

He rubbed his stinging eyes and stared at the fortress ahead, wondering where an entire NightWing army would assemble. Queen Battlewinner wouldn't be able to lead it, since she could leave the lava. Greatness would have to really make some queenly decisions if she was planning to lead their attack.

Had Starflight's absence been noticed yet? If not, surely at least Morrowseer would have gone to check on Flame and found him missing. How had he reacted?
'Maybe he'll think Flame tried to fly home to the continent,' Starflight thought. 'We'd be in luck if Morrowseer tried to follow him.' He really did not want to encounter Morrowseer in the halls of the fortress.

"Please tell me there's an invisible army with us," Starflight said. 
"I'm your invisible army," Glory said cheerfully.
"I'm serious," Starflight said. "We shouldn't go in there alone, just the three of us until we find Stormcaller."

"Tell me something," Glory said. "The dungeons you saw - how do we get them open? Will those spears work on the doors, or do we need keys?"
Starflight closed his eyes for a moment, picturing the dungeon. "We need keys, I think," he said.
"So let's start with the queen," Glory said. "We'll make her tell us where to find the keys."

Starflight could not imagine making Battlewinner do anything at all, but then, Glory was a lot more persuasive than he was - and even more so now that she had a queen's authority, He swerved down toward the entrance closest to the council chamber.

The three of them padded silently through the hallways. Loud voices rang out from a few of the rooms. Starflight caught snippets of an argument about who would to wear some shared armor, a monologue about another battle the storyteller had been in, and a conversation about how killing RainWings would have been easier than killing MudWings.

He'd forgotten all about the dead MudWings on the rainforest border.
'Why would the NightWings kill them?' he asked himself, and almost immediately a possible answer came to him; 'to keep the MudWings out of the rainforest. If they believe there's a deadly monster lurking in there - that it's not safe to go anywhere near it - they won't be tempted to conquer the rainforest themselves. Leaving it untouched and read for the NightWings to move in anytime.'

'That explains the howler monkeys, too.' He remembered Jambu saying that the monkeys used to make a normal monkey sound, but then suddenly they started screaming like dying dragons instead. 'I bet my dad is responsible for that. I bet he did something to the monkeys so their screams would scare the MudWings away.'

Everything the NightWings did was part of their grand plan of taking over the rainforest. Starflight sighed and glanced at the map as he led the way into the room with the secret entrance. Of only there were somewhere else the NightWings could go . . . but they clearly have been all over Pyrrhia, destroying scavenger dens, for whatever reason, and if there had been somewhere else for them to live, surely they would have sound it.

"Someone's coming," Glory whispered a heartbeat before Starflight heard claws tapping on stone and smelled the rank odor of NightWing breath.

Fatespeaker shot across the room to the map, but before she could lift the corner and duck underneath, scales slithered in the doorway and they all whirled to see Greatness staring at them.
The ground rumbled under their feet.