One True Queen: A Wings of Fire fanfiction

9.

Shadowhunter

After a week of slow, painful travel, the thrill of finally getting away from the kingdom begins to fade.

I never thought I'd miss my home so much.

It's so stiflingly hot in here--not just hot, but dry. It makes me feel like my scales are shrivelling up The stupid, irritating shifty sand sinks beneath my claws, and blows in my face every time we get even the slightest breeze.

Permafrost, weirdly, complains the least of us. Way and I spend most of our days griping at each other, and after a week out in the heat, even Precocious is starting to act a lot less chipper, and Gaze snaps at even the littlest things—which is very inconvenient because when she gets mad, she tends to go into prophecy mode, spouting something about "moons-cursed lovers take the throne" and "descend into madness" which is both anxiety-provoking and absolutely useless. She keeps trying to induce a vision on herself, trying to trick herself into feeling stressed out or furious. She just told Way and Precocious to talk for an hour last night, and actually got pretty close to a full prophecy.

None of us have figured out desert hunting. Way and Precocious are supposed to try to gather fruit, which they haven't been awful at so far, but I'm still not entirely convinced they won't accidentally poison us at some point.

I'm glad Mom and Dad enchanted the map to show our progress (and secretly, I even kinda like the little encouraging notes that pop up every now and then) because without that, I think I'd lose my mind. One time, we accidentally walk in a circle for four hours straight, only noticing when Gaze absently decides to check the map at dinner. I almost cry. There are really no remarkable landmarks to gauge our progress, not even that many interesting things to look at. When I was little, I always dreamed of exploring Pyrhhia—or trying to cross the sea, and finding The Lost Continent, like in my favourite scroll. But I never imagined it would be this tedious and boring.

"You know why the desert gets so cold at night?" Permafrost asks, as we trudge through the sand dunes--Gaze's wings all are all sore from flying, and she doesn't want to put them out, which I understand logically, but also it's not really a solution--because now all our talons are just sore and hot and covered in dust instead.

She's been reading up on desert facts--one field she apparently didn't use to know much about, apparently the IceWing tribe doesn't like to let in many scrolls about life outside its walls, for whatever reason--I think it's because their whole culture as I understand it is about isolation and control, and Permafrost thinks there's just not much of a market for it, according to her most IceWings don't really care about life outside their frozen wasteland.

"Uh, no, I don't think so." I try to seem nonchalant, hoping she can't tell what I'm really feeling.

"It's because, um, normally, like in the Night Kingdom, clouds are supposed to hold in accumulated heat throughout the day--water sorta does that, it, like, evens out temperature, which is why where you live you never get any extreme weather. But here there's no moisture to do that, so the temperature drops super fast, and it's kinda all-or-nothing. Isn't that so interesting?" She gives me a little smile.

"Uh, yeah, sure. It's kinda cool, I guess," I shrug, avoiding her eyes.

We walk side by side in silence, for a while.

"Uh. The stars are really pretty, don't you think?" I mutter, glancing up at the glimmer of a galaxy, tracing its way across the sky. It's so weird, how open it is here—the whole sky visible from any vantage point, no trees to block it out. I can't decide how I feel about that.