Gift or Curse?

Chapter Two

Kite landed on a ledge near a hallway of the Sky Palace. She ducked aside to avoid a dragon with an armful of scrolls and maps before making her way down the hallway. After winding through the corridors for about an hour and ending up in the same courtyard twice, she turned to a passing SkyWing.

"Excuse me, can you tell me where the library is?"

The dragon pointed over the edge of the balcony. "Second-to-bottom floor, north hallway. Third hallway on your left, then the second room on the right. Be careful, because Goose can be cranky if he thinks your purposes aren't worthwhile. He's strangely possessive of his scrolls, for a librarian."

"Thank you," Kite said, wondering what Goose would think if he knew what she wanted to research.

She found the library and avoided the cranky old dragon shelving some scrolls. She inspected the titles on the shelves around her. The History of the Scorching, The Royal MudWing Catastrophe, The War of SandWing Succession... Not what Kite was looking for.

The next section included some philosopher's treatise about scavenger's society and a battered scroll by a pair of NightWings from the time they were trying to take over the rainforest, among other things.

A third section was shelves full of fiction scrolls. But the fourth had what Kite was looking for. It was a long shelf, half empty, about family lines and genealogy of the SkyWing tribe. The further left on the shelf, the older the families.

Kite reached for the shelf labeled '2500 yrs. after Scorching,' then realized that, though she knew the approximate time the animus line was supposedly eradicated, she wasn't sure exactly when. She looked around, making sure she could find the place again, then found her way to a section on the seven tribes. She scrounged up a dusty scroll on SkyWing Aberrations between a list of hybrid dragons and a biography of an ancient firescales dragon. She pulled it out, glanced over her shoulder for Goose, then opened it and began to read.

Flawed dragonets, the scroll began, are a danger to the entire SkyWing tribe.

The wording made Kite imagine an imperious tone saying the words, like a teacher she and her friend Cinder had once had.

Dragonets with dangerous flaws must be eradicated before they do great harm. Even if they never intend to use their abilities, the risk is too great. Allowing them to live is tantamount to treason. The risk they pose far overshadows any possible benefit they could give the tribe. Their deaths are the best and only thing they can give the SkyWing tribe.

Kite gritted her teeth, then skimmed the rest of the scroll, looking for dates, and words like 'animus', and the name the dying dragon had mentioned, 'Eagle'.

After a moment, she found it. Animus dragons are deadly. Their power is unlimited and unstoppable, and it can be near impossible to know when they are using it. An animus can kill without knowing where their victim is, or can warp the minds of an entire tribe to their will. They are second only to firescales dragons as the most efficient murderers. The death of Eagle, the last animus, two thousand three hundred forty years after the Scorching and nearly two hundred years after the realization of their danger, lifted an enormous weight of fear off the SkyWing tribe.

Kite could not put that scroll back on the wall fast enough. She moved quickly back to the section of genealogy scrolls and grabbed one from the middle of the '2300 years after Scorching' section. She unrolled it and searched the lines for the name 'Eagle'.

After some searching, she found it near the end of the scroll. It said;

Eagle