Wings of Fire; The Scarlet Sunrise

Chapter 17

Lydia woke up feeling warm, wrapped in soft blankets that felt like clouds pressed up against her scales. She felt pillows laid out around her like a nest, blocking her in on all sides like a newly hatched dragonet who needed a high-walled nest to make sure they didn't roll out of it in their sleep without the watchful eyes of their parents. The air around her was quiet, only soft noises that hardly registered within her tired mind as they went in and out of her ears. The little NightWing's rest had been dreamless, the world seemingly allowing the young princess a nights rest without the repeating nightmares and the visits with Rattlesnake, or just weird dreams that made no sense.

For the first time in days, she felt rested, but yet, she still felt oh so tired. While her mind felt fuzzy, like it was full of cotton or fluffy clouds and cozy, her body felt heavy and drained like she'd been sucked dry by a mosquito from the swamps. The wings resting upon her back felt like weighted blankets, her tail feeling like a log and her arms feeling full of lead.

As she began to wake up more and more with the slowly passing moments, soft voices began to fill her ears. They were quiet, hushed, soft whispers. Lydia could barely hear them, her sleepy, cotton filled mind hardly even registering that those were other dragons speaking and not just her mind trying to lull her back to sleep.

"-bad habit...-"

"I do not....-..."

"You do-...-..abbit of picking up....-..dragonets."

Lydia's closed eyes screwed tightly together, her mind trying to pull her back into the timeless world of dreamless sleep and allow her body to continue its rest. Her arms and wings felt too heavy anyways, the blankets around her warming her scales. But as she tried to allow herself to be pulled back to sleep by the soft feeling all around her, she saw flashes behind her eyes that made her eyes shoot open.

A green shimmering SilkWing with large blue wings and glittering eyes to match, a concentrating look across his face. She felt a wave of fear washing over her, but it wasn't her own. "Morpho," that wasn't her voice, "what have you done?" they sounded horrified, scared. "You went back to the hives, didn't you?"

The other SilkWing, Morpho, looked back with his blue eyes narrowed. He didn't say anything, but his silence spoke louder than his words could ever. "Why would you go back? Morpho, we're safe here, we're FREE here, why-!?"

"Doesn't this seem wrong to you?" the other SilkWing asked, cutting off whoever's eye's Lydia was seeing through. His large blue wings twitched under the moonlight that broke through the lush canopy above them. "These weird dragons who say they're from across the sea? The LeafWing's suddenly coming back from the dead and having us all stay in this jungle that wants to eat us? At least in the hives things were stable, familiar! You knew what to expect! And our queen protected us, kept us safe."
"That HiveWing is not our queen-" Morpho snapped around toward Lydia, his antenne curling threateningly above his head like the barbed tail of a SandWing, he said something, but Lydia couldn't hear it.

Then Lydia saw the sea, stretched out for miles on either side. Huge group of dragons were all flying together, and whoever Lydia was, was flying with them. With Morpho by her side, the green SilkWing stared up ahead with hostile eyes, towards a slender orange dragon who was leading them. Lydia could see her reflection in the water, she was a SilkWing too, one with scales as dark as crushed lavender petals with pickles of dark blues and greens within her wings. This SilkWing, he looked to be close to Morpho's age, if not a little younger.

When she looked back up, her eyes caught something from within Morpho's talons: small berries the colour of the night sky, shades of shimmering purples and blues.

"Farfalla," Morpho's voice brought the purple SilkWing's attention back up towards his face. Morpho was smiling, a soft smile that made their heart swell inside of their chest, torn in two from mixed emotions. "I-"