Wings of Fire; Creature / ✅

CHAPTER THREE

Edited ✅ as of 17/03/23

"That was impressive," Scarlet said after the trial had ended a couple of hours later. "I've never seen a dragon kill someone without even touching them." There was something different about her voice as she spoke. Feeling sick, Gleam suddenly realised that Scarlet had new respect for her, and, masked underneath the respect, was a hint of fear.

Everyone now feared Gleam, almost as much as Peril, which made Gleam feel hurt. She wasn't dangerous, or evil... was she?

What made it worse was that, after the battle, Peril had flown over to her, her eerie blue eyes wide. "Wow! What a performance! Better than me. You'll have to teach me some day," she had joked, then she added something that made the joke worse than it already was, "maybe you should be called Peril."

The thing that was bugging Gleam was how she had killed Tuna. She hadn't even laid a talon on him. Had she killed him with the sheer force of her eyeballs? It didn't seem likely. Those type of powers were only in scrolls... weren't they?

At dusk, Ember brought her food. The dark red dragon watched her thoughtfully as she ate and surveyed her from the tip of her horns to the bottom of her tail.

"What?" Gleam snapped finally, getting annoyed at his obvious staring.

Ember shook his head. "Nothing. There's just something strangely familiar about you." Then he'd left, making Gleam linger on his words. What was familiar about her? Peril, probably, she sighed. 

Her dreams had been haunted by Tuna and his death. In the middle of the dream, dragons from all tribes had circled her, screaming in her ears: "Your a monster! A murderer! You deserve to die! No dragon who can kill without even touching should be let to live! Die!"

Gleam jolted awake miserably, shivering. She laid in the dark for a while, thinking about something totally different, trying to get the remnants of the dream to disappear. She could still taste the disdain of the dragons watching her in the arena, bitterly sour on her tongue. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, but that revived the memory of Tuna writhing pathetically on the sand before her, his limbs jerking, so she snapped them open again.

"You don't need to feel guilty about killing Tuna, you know." Scarlet's voice scared Gleam. She hadn't realised that the SkyWing Queen had been sitting in her throne the whole time. "The entire point of a dragon's existence is to kill and set things on fire or ice."

"I know, but I just can't shake the heavy weight of guilt off my shoulders. Tuna shouldn't have died," Gleam shivered, remembering yet again his thrashing limbs, "It just feels so weird to know that you're the one responsible for someone's death."

"Live with it, then," Scarlet's voice was sharp and unsympathetic. "Deal with it. I'm not having you mope miserably in the cage, in my throne room. A bad mood is contagious. I don't want to catch your ill-attitude disease."

Gleam bristled in anger. "You don't even care about my feelings. You only think about yourself, and then, maybe, think about how other dragons feel."

"Of course not," Scarlet snapped. "I have a whole tribe to think about, Gleam. If I didn't care about anyone but myself, wouldn't I have given up the throne ages ago?"

"No, because you like feeling powerful, and you know you're one of the eight most important dragons in Pyrrhia," Gleam hissed back. "And somehow, if you retired, you'd loose that title, and I know that you wouldn't like that, not one bit." 

"Oh, so suddenly you're a mind-reader?" Scarlet sneered, "knowing exactly how I feel and what I'm thinking?"

Gleam's growl rumbled deep in her chest. Scarlet's yellow eyes glittered in the dark, and Gleam stared right back into them.  An eerie blue glow suddenly shone on the walls that couldn't have come from the moons, since the moons were high above the castle. Gleam looked around in confusion.