Fire and Ice (WinterxQibli) - DISCONTINUED

2

Qibli POV

Darkstalker froze and cocked his head. "What is that?"

"What is what?"

"That... whirring sound." Darkstalker shook his head like there were mosquitoes in his ears. 

I went quiet, listening, and for the first time felt the vibrations coming from my bag. Puzzled, I tugged it open and pulled out the old telescope-hourglass contraption I'd found in the Night Palace. To my surprise, the hourglass was spinning frantically on its axis, and it sped up as I turned the end of the telescope toward Darkstalker and Vulture.

"I found it in a room in your palace," I said. "What is it? Why is it spinning like that?"

Darkstalker edged forward on his outcropping and stretched his neck down toward it. I held the telescope up to my eye and centered it on Darkstalker's bewildered face.

"I made that," Darkstalker said. "For Fathom. Such a long time ago... I mean, it doesn't feel that long to me, but I know it was." He squinted at the hourglass, which was still spinning. "It's a soul reader."

"A soul reader," I echoed.

"I made it to reassure Fathom that we were fine. That we could use our magic safely, without going evil." His expression was curiously affectionate, as if he'd just remembered a version of Fathom he genuinely liked. "It shows how much of your soul is still good."

The hourglass slowed, tipped one way, then the other, and finally stopped. The telescope was pointed at Darkstalker. Inside the hourglass, the bottom half was almost entirely full of white sand. In the bell of the top half, only a few grains of black sand were left.

Darkstalker stared at it, disbelief slowly crawling across his face.

"Well, that makes no sense," he said. "Did you do something to it? Did Turtle put a new spell on it?"

"No," I said, touching the hourglass. It swayed slightly under my claws, the sand shifting but staying where it was. "I didn't even know it was animus-touched. What does this mean?"

Darkstalker snatched the object out of my talons and flipped it over a few times, as if looking for signs of tampering, before turning it back toward himself and squinting at the hourglass again.

"It must be broken," he muttered. "Starting over." He shook it vigorously for a moment and then held it out in his talons. "When this soul reader is pointed at a dragon, I enchant it to measure the good and evil in that dragon's soul and reveal it in the drifts of sand. Black sand to mark the amount of good, white sand to show the amount of evil or damage to that dragon's soul."

Oh, I thought. Interesting. The black sand indicates goodness — makes sense for a Nightwing. I wasn't surprised, now that I understood it, by the balance of sand in Darkstalker's hourglass.

Darkstalker pointed the telescope at Vulture and peered through it. The hourglass obligingly began to spin, sending whirlwinds of sand dancing inside it. At last it stopped and settled into equilibrium. In the top half: a tiny sprinkling of black sand, about the same as Darkstalker's. In the bottom half, a correspondingly large pile of glittering white sand.

"Now that's logical," Darkstalker muttered. "He's obviously terrible. So it's working now." He frowned down at the soul reader, inhaled deeply and pointed the end of the telescope at himself.

Shrum shrum shrum. The hourglass tumbled busily.

It slowed to a stop. As before, the mountain of white sand in the bottom was large, almost large enough to overflow the bulb. And in the top half shone those last few tiny grains of black sand.

"But that's impossible!" Darkstalker exploded. He threw the soul reader away from him violently, and I lunged to catch it before it shattered on the stone floor.

"I protected my soul!" Darkstalker cried. Veins were starting to throb in his neck, writhing like livid snakes under his scales. "First with my scroll, and now with my wristband! I shouldn't have lost any of it!"

"And yet it looks like you've lost almost all of it," I pointed out.

I was shocked to see how much this upset Darkstalker. The ancient Nightwing seemed to swell to twice his normal enormous size. His wings were flared and twitching wrathfully.

"No!" Darkstalker slammed his tail into the crevasse wall, unleashing a scamper of loud pebbles. "I'm not like other animus dragons. I'm smarter than they are. My soul is safe from my magic! That can't be what it looks like!"

"Safe from your magic, maybe," I said. "But not safe from your actions."

"WHAT?" Darkstalker roared.

I squared my shoulders and held my ground, although the expression on Darkstalker's face kind of made me want to retreat all the way back into the crawl space.

"You didn't lose your soul because magic ate it away slowly," I said. "You lost it because you chose to do terrible things, over and over again. Each terrible thing, each betrayal, each murder, added to this mountain." I tapped the white sand side. "That's not the magic's fault. That's you. That's who you chose to be."

"But — I had good reasons for everything I did," Darkstalker said. "Visions of a good future. Doesn't that count for something?"

"Yes, sometimes," I agreed. "But not when your choices are so dark and damaging. Not when there were better alternatives you didn't even explore."

"Blah blah blah," Darkstalker muttered, but he was staring into space now. "Who... that's not possible... is it? Where does that go? How does it end?" He twisted his neck around to look above and behind him. "Can you see what I'm seeing? Come on out; I've obviously known you were there since you crawled down here."

There was a pause, and then a ripple in the rocks overhead, whorls of yellow and blue suddenly appearing on the gray and spreading into the shape of a dragon who was covering the shape of another dragon clinging to the small claw holds in the wall.

"Huh," said Darkstalker. "Actually, I didn't know she was there." He jerked his chin at Kinkajou as she peeled herself off Moon. The Rainwing shot a glare at him and fluttered down to sit beside me. A moment later, Moon landed on my other side, and even though this meant the three of us were crowded together in the small space, I was finally able to breathe.

"Hello, Darkstalker," Moon said.

"Can you see this vision?" he asked, reaching down toward her. I shivered as Moon rested her talon in the giant Nightwing's palm.

She closed her eyes for a long moment.

"Isn't that strange?" Darkstalker said. "It's so blurred, and it ends in darkness. Is someone going to betray me again? But no one's magic can hurt me anymore. And who? Did you see her? She looks like... but she can't be."

"If it was her," said Moon, opening her eyes again, "would you take that path? Even knowing it ends in possible darkness, would you do it to see her again?"

A light was kindling in Darkstalker's eyes. "But — do you —" He stopped, his claws gripping the stone. "Yes. Of course I would."

"Then let's see where this path leads," Moon said, tipping her snout up to the sky.

Darkstalker spread his wings and paused. He leaned over to Vulture, tapped his head, and whispered something. My grandfather vanished again, as suddenly as he'd appeared.

Then Darkstalker took off, aiming for the crack of sky overhead. I exhaled with relief. This was not my final resting place, after all. I would live to see another sunrise, although I wasn't sure I could count on more than one.

"Come on, we have to keep up," Kinkajou said, leaping aloft. Her wings looked like flower petals on a river as she flashed away across the gray stone.

"Time to fly," she said, and we did.

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed! Ciao!