Chapter Text
Drought . The young, smart, and charming young Sandwing prince. He was cunning and clever, and had a way with people. The public always loved him.
But while the pro was that he was very convincing, the con was that he was extremely power-hungry. He was greedy for power, he wanted to take over the entirety of Pyrrhia.
He had killed his mother, Queen Bronze. The crowd went crazy over this. He had pushed his greed too far. And while he was occupied with his new-found power for a few months or so, he once again got greedy .
He almost succeeded in his assassination against Queen Spinel of the Skywings. She is as, if not more, power-hungry than he was.
He was furious at his failed attempt, and took his mind off world-domination long enough for a group of dragons to knock him out. Coincidentally, one of the dragons in that group was an animus .
They decided to contact a tribe to see if they would take him in as him enchanted to be a different dragon, and the Rainwings decided to take him in.
He was turned into a Rainwing citizen named Sublime. Drought had been turned with a purple-pink horn ring that would glow at night time, as a side-effect of the animus enchantment.
Most of the Rainwings living in the same area as Sublime felt uncomfortable around him, including Ash, but Nectar didn’t feel that way. Whenever Ash or anyone else asked Nectar about him, she’d always say that, “Well, someone has to take care of him, right ? No one else liked him, but I like his personality.”
Returning to reality, Ash stared into the eyes of the unbelievably tall and muscular Sandwing. Ash had met Sandwings before, but the pure hatred in Drought’s eyes and the muscular build was something that even Queen FearSlayer of the Nightwings would back down from a fight with him.
“Tell me. Why exactly am I in the rainforest with these stupid Rainwings?” The deep voice boomed. His eyes narrowed at Nectar, seeming to remember her from his other life as Sublime.
“... Sublime-” Nectar whispered loudly.
“I KNOW NO SUCH NAME!” Drought furiously shouted, throwing Nectar into the wall.
“Nectar!” Ash roared. She tumbled into the now white and pale-green Rainwing, bleeding from her wing, back leg, and snout. She stared lividly at Drought.
Ash checked Nectar’s pulse, putting what little she knew about healing into place. Cove and Highland were both looking extremely startled behind them. Drought was looking around, seeming to be thinking about which direction it was back to the Sandwing Palace.
“Guys, Highland, Blurrysight! Bring Nectar to a healer! The huts are by the arboretum! They have Alliums on the roofs!” Ash yelled. “And Cove,” She ordered quieter, “Distract Drought please, I have to find the horn-ring.”
Ash didn’t have time to think. She went straight out to Sublime’s Hut, and there it was. The horn-ring, glowing purple in the sun-kissed leaves of the bedding. She hastily grabbed it up, and catapulted from the hut’s sturdy walls back to the canopy.
Cove must’ve brought Drought out of the canopy, there was no one inside. She did a quick check around the perimeter of the leaf canopy, and saw Cove and Drought outside, Cove throwing whatever he could find at Drought, and Drought slowly advancing towards Cove.
Stealthily, Ash leaped onto the platform behind Drought, and threw the horn ring onto his horn.
Drought melted into the beautiful pink and blue dragon she knew. “Sublime! Thank the Moons!” She exclaimed.
Sublime turned towards her with a horrified look in his eyes. “It happened again.. Didn’t it?” He murmured.
“Yes, but it’s solved now,” Ash said. “Gosh, we have to put some super sticky paste on your horn to make it stay!
“Wait,” he blurted. “Why is there a Seawing.. And.. And an Icewing ? AND AN UNFAMILIAR NIGHTWING ?” He yelled. “ Three moons , what did Nectar bring in this time?”
Ash turned to see Highland and Blurrysight behind her, looking frazzled. “She’s..”
“She’s not..”
“No, no. Not dead.” Blurrysight sighed. “Just knocked out, but the healers don’t know how to fix her.
“ Woah woah woah ,” Sublime blurted. “ What happened, and WHY?! ” He looked around frantically, as if Nectar was going to appear suddenly and tell him what happened.
Ash sighed. She didn’t want to be the one to tell Sublime that Drought knocked her out of commission, but was anyone else going to? No. “Uhh,” Ash started. “Drought kinda knocked her out when she was trying to calm him down.”
Ash hated to see dragons hurting. This was testing her eyes’ limits of holding back tears to look at his sorrowful expression and seeing his scales turn to almost the same shade of scales that she had.
“Uhm, hate to ruin the moment here, but is anyone going to tell him about the prophecy or why all these dragons from different tribes are actually tolerating each other?” Highland murmured, glaring at Ash and Blurrysight.
“Oh, right!” Ash barked, a little louder than anticipated. “So basically, I have this weird power, and it lets me see the future sometimes in my dreams, and apparently sometimes I have visions. This one came out like this,” Ash handed Sublime the crinkled-up paper with the prophecy sloppily and quickly wrote out on it by Nectar.
“Nectar wrote this.” Ash told him. Sublime mumbled sadly as he opened the folded piece of paper and quickly read it, glancing up at the dragons around him back and forth. “So this is really.. This is the real deal?” He asked.
Ash and the others nodded. “I’ve never really had a meaningful prophecy, and I was hoping you could help us, or at least tell the others in the rainforest.” Ash said. It was true, even though Ash and Sublime had always had their differences and mixed feelings on each other, they had to set aside their differences and help each other out.
“Uhhh.. okay. I don’t think I’ll be that big of a help, though. But I’ll do what I can, I suppose.” Sublime agreed reluctantly. Ash was relieved, she was worried he would do his weird worry-thing where he just would talk and talk and talk about all the ways something could go wrong. Admittedly, Ash had anxiety as well, but Sublime wouldn’t do anything if he had the slightest worry about it, so he was labeled quite lazy in the village. It wasn’t quite true, but still. Ash couldn’t argue with it.
“So…” Sublime mumbled. “I’ll uhhh, go do that.” He flew out of the canopy calmly, and of course not-at-all in a ‘This is a very important task I have been told to do’ way. Ash rolled her eyes.
“Would you guys come with me to check on Nectar?” Ash asked. She was hoping the healers would have figured out at least a little bit of how to fix Nectar. Ash was assuming that Nectar had at least broken one bone because of how strong Drought was. She was really worried about Nectar because she didn’t know how well Nectar healed after injuries, she has always been extremely careful and has never gotten anything more than a bruise or a scratch on her.
“Sure, let’s go.” Cove said. He had been fidgeting with his talons awkwardly the entire conversation. She’d figured that he just didn’t want to talk or was thinking about something, and then she realized that she was just awkwardly standing there in front of the dragons waiting for her to lead the way.
She lifted her head up and flew out of the leaf canopy, trying to remember the internal map she had made forever ago when she first went to the mainland. She took a turn to the right after a few minutes and was at the arboretum. She landed in the center and looked over to see if all of her friends were there, and they were.
Ash started walking towards the allium covered hut that she could smell had plenty of herbs inside of it. She went inside of the hut and..
Nectar was lying down on a large wooden table in the center of the room, with four healers crowded around her, poking and prodding to see what was wrong. She was
covered
in scratches and bruises and.. her wing!