One True Queen: A Wings of Fire fanfiction

5.

Eclipse

This castle gives me the creeps.

I never met any of Queen Vigilance's daughters, and that almost makes it worse.

One time, when Prince and I were two, we got really into tracing back our family trees, which was pretty easy actually, since I'm technically an IceWing princess, and the NightWing royal family is fairly well documented. I tried to learn more about my mom's side of the family too, but gave up trying after a few generations.

Anyway—I remember we found all the stuff we could on his parents, and aunts and uncles, all these dragons who were supposed to look after him he never ended up even meeting.

His mom looks exactly like him--there were a few portraits, and even one really obscure biography we found about her. He had a cousin, apparently, Princess Epiphany--but she vanished after the throne challenge. She'd be about seven now, I think.

And anyway--it's just weird to sleep in a place where thousands of years worth of dead princes and princesses have also probably slept. (Especially when most of them would have lots of reason to hate me, since my family did end their royal line and all.)

Sometimes, I lie awake for hours, thinking about them. I feel like I did something wrong.

After a few hours of that, I quietly slip down the hall to my parents' bedroom.

"Mom?" I whisper, gently shaking my mother awake.

"Eclipse?" she murmurs, rubbing her eyes. "What's wrong, honey?"

"I can't sleep."

She sighs, keeping her voice down so as not to wake up Dad. "Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to make you some tea?"

"Tea would... be nice." I feel awful about waking my mom up like this. She's already tired enough without having to deal with me all the time.

"Okay." Mom gets out of bed, and leads me down the stairs to the palace kitchens. "C'mon."

"I'm really sorry—"

"Don't worry about it," she says, forcing a smile. I don't believe her for a second.

***

We sit in my bedroom for a while,  drinking chamomile tea and looking out the window at the sunny day outside.

"This is really scary," I admit after a long silence. "I just—don't know what I'm doing, and everyone hates us now, and everything just keeps changing, and--" I bury my face in my talons. "I don't know what to do, Mom." She's the first dragon I've admitted that to.

"Yeah." She laughs sadly. "It's really hard."

I lean into her shoulder, and she wraps me up in her wings.  "Can you... tell me about my future? I don't really wanna think about this right now."

"Of course." She scrunches up her face, closing her eyes. "Let's see. Well, you have a little cottage in the woods, with the most gorgeous garden. You know, there are some futures where you work with the government? You travel the continent and mediate peace negotiations, and arrange trade deals, it's pretty epic."